A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to efficiently adapt to uncertain, changing and open-ended environments. In such environments, efficient adaptive behavior often requires considering multiple alternative behavioral strategies, adjusting them, and possibly inventing new ones. These reasoning, learning and creative abilities involve the frontal lobes, which are especially well developed in humans compared to other primates. However, how the frontal function decides to create new strategies and how multiple strategies can be monitored concurrently remain largely unknown.
genetics
Brain ‘talks over’ boring speech quotes
(Medical Xpress) — Storytelling is a skill not everyone can master, but even the most crashing bore gets help from their audiences brain which talks over their monotonous quotes, according to scientists.
Highly flexible despite hard-wiring — even slight stimuli change the information flow in the brain
One cup or two faces? What we believe we see in one of the most famous optical illusions changes in a split second; and so does the path that the information takes in the brain. In a new theoretical study, scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the Bernstein Center Göttingen and the German Primate Center now show how this is possible without changing the cellular links of the network. The direction of information flow changes, depending on the time pattern of communication between brain areas. This reorganisation can be triggered even by a slight stimulus, such as a scent or sound, at the right time.
Study shines light on brain mechanism that controls reward enjoyment
What characterizes many people with depression, schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses is anhedonia: an inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences.
Eye health is related to brain health
People with mild vascular disease that causes damage to the retina in the eye are more likely to have problems with thinking and memory skills because they may also have vascular disease in the brain, according to a study published in the March 14, 2012, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.