Right Brain vs Left Brain

Left brain people: process info in a linear manner, identify important details, are analytical, move in a sequential order, and use logic to solve problems.

Right brain people: process info holistically, see end results with clarity, are creative, move randomly form task to task, and use intuition to solve problems.

Why the Left-Brain Right-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die?

The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

We all enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

It’s in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

Episodic Memory and Appetite Regulation in Humans

Psychological and neurobiological evidence implicates hippocampal-dependent memory processes in the control of hunger and food intake. In humans, these have been revealed in the hyperphagia that is associated with amnesia. However, it remains unclear whether ‘memory for recent eating’ plays a significant role in neurologically intact humans. In this study we isolated the extent to which memory for a recently consumed meal influences hunger and fullness over a three-hour period. Before lunch, half of our volunteers were shown 300 ml of soup and half were shown 500 ml. Orthogonal to this, half consumed 300 ml and half consumed 500 ml. This process yielded four separate groups (25 volunteers in each). Independent manipulation of the ‘actual’ and ‘perceived’ soup portion was achieved using a computer-controlled peristaltic pump. This was designed to either refill or draw soup from a soup bowl in a covert manner. Immediately after lunch, self-reported hunger was influenced by the actual and not the perceived amount of soup consumed. However, two and three hours after meal termination this pattern was reversed - hunger was predicted by the perceived amount and not the actual amount. Participants who thought they had consumed the larger 500-ml portion reported significantly less hunger. This was also associated with an increase in the ‘expected satiation’ of the soup 24-hours later. For the first time, this manipulation exposes the independent and important contribution of memory processes to satiety. Opportunities exist to capitalise on this finding to reduce energy intake in humans.

The Meaning of Pupil Dilation

For more than a century, scientists have known that our pupils respond to more than changes in light. They also betray mental and emotional commotion within. In fact, pupil dilation correlates with arousal so consistently that researchers use pupil size, or pupillometry, to investigate a wide range of psychological phenomena. And they do this without knowing exactly why our eyes behave this way. “Nobody really knows for sure what these changes do,” said Stuart Steinhauer, who directs the Biometrics Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

While the visual cortex in the back of the brain assembles the images we see, a different, older part of our nervous system manages the continuous tuning of our pupil size, alongside other functions—like heart rate and perspiration—that operate mostly outside our conscious control. This autonomic nervous system dictates the movement of the iris, like the lens of a camera, to regulate the amount of light that enters the pupil.

The iris is made of two types of muscle: in a brightly lit environment, a ring of sphincter muscles that encircle and constrict the pupil down to as little as a couple of millimeters across; in the dark, a set of dilator muscles laid out like bicycle spokes, which can expand the pupil up to 8 millimeters—approximately the diameter of a chickpea.

Cognitive and emotional events can also dictate pupil constriction and expansion, though such events occur on a smaller scale than the light reflex, causing changes generally less than half a millimeter. But that’s enough. By recording subjects’ eyes with infrared cameras and controlling for other factors that might affect pupil size, like brightness, color, and distance, scientists can use pupil movements as a proxy for other processes, like mental strain.

Are You Smarter Than Your Grandfather? Probably Not.

In the mid-1980s, James Flynn made a groundbreaking discovery in human intelligence. The political scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand found that over the last century, in every nation in the developing world where intelligence-test results are on record, IQ test scores had significantly risen from one generation to the next.

“Psychologists faced a paradox: either the people of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, IQ tests were not good measures of intelligence,” writes Flynn.  

Now, in a new book, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, Flynn unpacks his original finding, explaining the causes for this widespread increase in IQ scores, and reveals some new ones, regarding teenagers’ vocabularies and the mental decline of the extremely bright in old age. Ultimately, Flynn concludes that human beings are not smarter—just more modern.

Malcolm Gladwell explains why the “Flynn effect,” as the trend is now called, is so surprising. “If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teenager of today, with an IQ of 100, would have grandparents with average IQs of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school,” he wrote in a New Yorker article in 2007. “And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average IQs of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.”

Infants learn to look and look to learn

Researchers at the University of Iowa have documented an activity by infants that begins nearly from birth: They learn by taking inventory of the things they see.

In a new paper, the psychologists contend that infants create knowledge by looking at and learning about their surroundings. The activities should be viewed as intertwined, rather than considered separately, to fully appreciate how infants gain knowledge and how that knowledge is seared into memory.

“The link between looking and learning is much more intricate than what people have assumed,” says John Spencer, a psychology professor at the UI and a co-author on the paper published in the journal Cognitive Science.

The researchers created a mathematical model that mimics, in real time and through months of child development, how infants use looking to understand their environment. Such a model is important because it validates the importance of looking to learning and to forming memories. It also can be adapted by child development specialists to help special-needs children and infants born prematurely to combine looking and learning more effectively.

“The model can look, like infants, at a world that includes dynamic, stimulating events that influence where it looks. We contend (the model) provides a critical link to studying how social partners influence how infants distribute their looks, learn, and develop,” the authors write.

Learning to control brain activity improves visual sensitivity

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL used non-invasive, real-time brain imaging that enabled participants to watch their own brain activity on a screen, a technique known as neurofeedback. During the training phase, they were asked to try to increase activity in the area of the brain that processes visual information, the visual cortex, by imagining images and observing how their brains responded.

After the training phase, the participants’ visual perception was tested using a new task that required them to detect very subtle changes in the contrast of an image. When they were asked to repeat this task while clamping brain activity in the visual cortex at high levels, those who had successfully learned to control their brain activity could improve their ability to detect even very small changes in contrast.

This improved performance was only observed when participants were exercising control over their brain activity.

Lead author Dr Frank Scharnowski, who is now based at the University of Geneva, explains: “We’ve shown that we can train people to manipulate their own brain activity and improve their visual sensitivity, without surgery and without drugs.”

In the past, researchers have used recordings of electrical activity in the brain to train people on various tasks, including cutting their reaction times, altering their emotional responses and even improving their musical performance. In this study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to provide the volunteers with real-time feedback on brain activity. The advantage of this technique is that you can see exactly where in the brain the training is having an effect, so you can target the training to particular brain areas that are responsible for specific tasks.

"The next step is to test this approach in the clinic to see whether we can offer any benefit to patients, for example to stroke patients who may have problems with perception, even though there is no damage to their vision," adds Dr Scharnowski.