Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know

Haskins Laboratories
An M.R.I. of a brain highlighting areas used during reading.

"Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read?"

Click the title bar to read about this fascinating study

How your brain remembers the future

"IT'S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. "The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK."

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CBS News | Retraining The Brain

"It is hard to tell by watching her, but 4-year old Harper Thomas is participating in what may be a medical revolution. So are Betty and Ernie Radez, aged 87 and 85, respectively.

All three are using cutting edge therapies to rewire their brains. Treating serious medical conditions with neither drugs nor surgery.

'Everybody thinks that the answers to the ills of humankind lie with pharmacology, gene therapy or stem cells, right?' asks neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich.

'That's where the answers are, but another set of answers is coming from a surprising source; right? It's the use, it's the understanding of the process of the brain,' Merzenich tells CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.

Merzenich is a leading developer of therapies based on what's called brain plasticity, which he defines as, 'the capacity of the brain to change itself. It actually changes physically, functionally, in ways that you can measure.' "

Brain areas disconnect during deep sleep - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

"Your brain never stops working. But it does cease talking to itself when you lose consciousness, a new study shows.

Scientists have long wondered what the brain does and doesn't do during deep sleep. It remains active, they know. So what's the difference between consciousness and the lack of it?

When we're awake, different parts of the brain use chemicals and nerve cells to communicate constantly across the entire network, similar to the perpetual flow of data between all the different computers, routers and servers that make up the Internet.

In the deepest part of sleep, however, the various nodes of your cranial Internet all lose their connections.

"The brain breaks down into little islands that can't talk to one another," said study leader Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison."

BBC NEWS | Liars 'possess more white matter'

... on the *other* hand....

"A University of Southern California team studied 49 people and found those known to be pathological liars had up to 26% more white matter than others.

White matter is the brain's thinking part - grey matter the wiring - and may provide the capacity to lie, it said. "

Bigger Brains Make Smarter People

....on the other hand.....

"For more than a century some of the biggest minds in science have debated whether brain size has anything to do with intelligence. A new study suggests it does.

Bigger brains make for smarter people, says Michael McDaniel, an industrial and organizational psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University.
'For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related,' McDaniel said."

Big Brains Not Always Better

"Nearly three million years ago, our ancestors had brains about as big as modern chimps. Since then the brain that would become human grew steadily, tripling in size. But this extra cranium capacity may not have resulted in smarter hominids.

As far as tool-making is concerned, there is little evidence of improvement over much of the period that the brain was growing.
'Archaeology has found that brain size grew gradually, but cleverness took steps,' said William Calvin, a neurobiologist from the University of Washington."

Brain areas disconnect during deep sleep - LiveScience - MSNBC.com

"Your brain never stops working. But it does cease talking to itself when you lose consciousness, a new study shows.

Scientists have long wondered what the brain does and doesn't do during deep sleep. It remains active, they know. So what's the difference between consciousness and the lack of it?"

Can't Lie To An MRI

"A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors.

The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90 percent accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences.

That compares with polygraphs that range from 80 percent to 'no better than chance' at finding the truth, George said.

His results are to be published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry. "

Genes Show Signs Brain Still Evolving

"The human brain may still be evolving. So suggests new research that tracked changes in two genes thought to help regulate brain growth, changes that appeared well after the rise of modern humans 200,000 years ago.

That the defining feature of humans - our large brains - continued to evolve as recently as 5,800 years ago, and may be doing so today, promises to surprise the average person, if not biologists.

'We, including scientists, have considered ourselves as sort of the pinnacle of evolution,' noted lead researcher Bruce Lahn, a University of Chicago geneticist whose studies appear in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
'There's a sense we as humans have kind of peaked,' agreed Greg Wray, director of Duke University's Center for Evolutionary Genomics. 'A different way to look at is it's almost impossible for evolution not to happen.'"