June 06, 2012, 1:24am 2 notes
Paul Zak tells us about oxytocin, a chemical messenger that accounts for why some people are generous, trustworthy, and faithful and others aren’t.
His book The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity looks at decades of research on what oxytocin is and how it works.
Bit simplistic. But - level of oxytocin, and then general level of trust held among the members of a society - and how that might be related with their economic performance.
Fairly linear. But very interesting :) I wish I had time to transcribe some really interesting parts of this show.
May 14, 2012, 1:15pm 1 note
I wonder why. I can only think that our brains have such a structural deficiency.
But then if it’s our fate - it’s our fate.
Still, it’s possible to reason framing this conflict - problem only as “Israeli-Palestinian/Arab” conflict - is antisemitic.
It’s aiding antisemitism. Real original perpetrator - East and Western Europe - got off the hook.
How are these might be occurring through the same circuit or different circuit -
Both appears to do become - a habit, an addiction - for a person.
Again this just gets to the vague guess that racism and other similar ‘rank and draw the line’ functions and/or capacities we humans have - might based on something close to reward circuit (*Is there any research on how ‘inferiority complex’ operating - through brain scans?)
Or is political partisanship and sectarianism - its behavior and thought pattern - just being a subset of basic racism capacity our brain has?
Like (though it’s just another pop behaviorism science piece - )
Empathy Doesn’t Extend Across the Political Aisle
Can be political affiliation - or - race - ethnicity. Or those ‘degrees’ thing - relatives, kins, and like - [why your mother in-law (your partner’s mother) - can be the worst menace and enemy - and if this so common, what’s going on in the brains of mother in-laws? But it’s not like only very special kind of women can become mother-in-laws etc …]
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[*And then - also necessary researches are on remorse, regret, feelings of guilt, doing/committed unjust acts etc etc - and how humans are weak, vulnerable on them.]
The team focused on an area of the brain called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG.
This broad region is not just part of the hearing apparatus but one of the “higher-order” brain regions that help us make linguistic sense of the sounds we hear.
The team monitored the STG brain waves of 15 patients who were undergoing surgery for epilepsy or tumours, while playing audio of a number of different speakers reciting words and sentences.
The trick is disentangling the chaos of electrical signals that the audio brought about in the patients’ STG regions.
To do that, the team employed a computer model that helped map out which parts of the brain were firing at what rate, when different frequencies of sound were played.
With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen.
They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant.
“There’s a two-pronged nature of this work - one is the basic science of how the brain does things,” said Robert Knight of UC Berkeley, senior author of the study.
February 01, 2012, 2:14am 17 notes
Vesicles of The Neuron
A colorized scanning EM of a nerve broken open to reveal the vesicles containing the neurotransmitters.
Image Credit: NIH, via Curiosity/Discovery, via Sloth Unleashed
Too true!
