Sophie lives in BK, works, writes, plays music, puts on shows and uses twitter.
A few blogs I run or help run:
flavorpill.tumblr.com
thepermanentwave.tumblr.com
sadjams.tumblr.com
spiralringnotebook.tumblr.com
pseudoprofoundelectronicartists.tumblr.com
silentdraperunners.tumblr.com
Quote reblogged from flavorpill with 102 notes
Well, a flashing neuron is no big deal. That’s what brain cells do. When a brain cell receives signals from other parts of the brain, the energy builds up, almost like a rising tide, and if the pressure gets strong enough, there’s a release, a break, that is literally an electric flash. Neuroscientists call this a “spike” and they can see it (or with a tiny microphone, hear it) in a living brain. That’s what Fried and his colleagues saw at UCLA.
The curious part was that there’s a particular neuron devoted to images of Jennifer Aniston.
Is there a neuron devoted specifically to Jennifer Anniston? (via flavorpill)
I love this shit.
Source: flavorpill
Photo with 17 notes
“Depression can be described as a particularly restrictive state of mind,” Carhart-Harris told Shots. “People are stuck on how terrible they are. This seems to suggest that people can have a lifting of that negative thinking under psychedelics.”
In the second study, 30 volunteers lay in an MRI machine while tripping for science. The brain scans showed less activity in areas of the brain that may act as connectors, or hubs. One of those areas, the posterior cingulate cortex, is thought to figure in consciousness and ego. It’s also hyperactive in people with depression.
The researchers hadn’t expected to find less brain activity with psilocybin. The thought has always been that psychedelic flights of fancy are the result of an overactive brain. The results were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
—From NPR.
Quote with 13 notes
Delgado also makes this argument. In the 1990s he carried out a study that showed that if you take a normal person and deplete them of serotonin, they will not become depressed. He says he feels this demonstrates that low serotonin doesn’t cause depression.
This might not seem a big deal, but it is the first time science has proved what was hitherto mere speculation: that the brain, when dreaming, behaves like the brain when awake. In principle, then, it might be possible to “read” dreams as they are happening, and thus perhaps solve one of the great mysteries of biology: what, exactly, is dreaming for?
Photo reblogged from flavorpill with 575 notes
Scientists ‘See’ YouTube Videos in the Mind
What if what you saw with your eyes could be interpreted in a brain-scanner? Well, that just happened. Check it out:
Gallant’s coauthors acted as study subjects, watching YouTube videos inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine for several hours at a time. The team then used the brain imaging data to develop a computer model that matched features of the videos — like colors, shapes and movements — with patterns of brain activity.
“Once we had this model built, we could read brain activity for that subject and run it backwards through the model to try to uncover what the viewer saw,” said Gallant.
Subtle changes in blood flow to visual areas of the brain, measured by functional MRI, predicted what was on the screen at the time — whether it was Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau or an airplane. The reconstructed videos are blurry because they layer all the YouTube clips that matched the subject’s brain activity pattern. The result is a haunting, almost dream-like version of the video as seen by the mind’s eye.
(via ABC News)
WHAT THE FUCK.
Source: abcnews.go.com
Quote with 4 notes
All of our lives — our cognition, our thoughts, our beliefs — all of these are underpinned by these massive lightning storms of [electrical] activity [in our brains,] and yet we don’t have any awareness of it,” he says. “What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.
When your brain wants you to say a word out loud, it produces two sets of signals. One has to do with moving the muscles controlling the mouth and vocal tract. The second set involves signals in the brain’s auditory system.
But when a person simply thinks of a word instead of saying it, there are no muscle signals — just the activity in the parts of the brain involved in listening.
“That seems to suggest that what imagined speech actually really is, it’s more like internally listening to your own voice,” Schalk says.
Quote with 26 notes
In the second part of the music experiment, volunteers listened to Pink Floyd for about 10 seconds, then the music was interrupted by about a second of complete silence.
The experiment shows that while it may have been silent in the room during the test, it was not silent in the volunteers’ brains.
Schalk’s computer screen shows that even when the music stops, the waveform from the brain continues as if the music were still playing. What we’re seeing is the brain’s attempt to fill in the missing sounds, Schalk says.
“The brain basically tells us a lot of information about the music in the times when there is really no music,” he says.
