Interesting article about architecture, design and the brain.
The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:
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| A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects–sofas, watches, etc.–subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. |
| A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we’re more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. |
| High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail. |
| clutter increases the “memorability” of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place. |
Nothing is going to have a greater impact on the fabric of society and our understanding of human identity more than a reliable tool of editing, erasing and amplifying memories. If not the first, this is one of the holy grails of brain research nd technology. The ethical and other philosophical implications are profound. Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit. |
Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills. |
| The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. |
The brain appears to retain a memory by growing thicker, or more efficient, communication lines between these cells. The billion-dollar question is how? Read more at www.nytimes.com |
| “This possibility of memory editing has enormous possibilities and raises huge ethical issues,” |
| Yet as scientists begin to climb out of the dark foothills and into the dim light, they are now poised to alter the understanding of human nature in ways artists and writers have not. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Interesting research. A point not mentioned in the article is that near misses represent a bias towards ‘analog perception’ over ‘discrete perception’. In many cases we process discrete information as if it is analog, as it is apparent from this research, even if we are fully aware that the relevant outcomes depend only on discrete values such as win no-win. | very casino game is a game of odds, but not always in the way you think. Work published this month in the journal Neuron shows that almost winning actually increases the odds - that we’ll keep playing. |
Gambling is a widespread cultural phenomena that has spanned thousands of years and almost every civilization that’s appeared on the face of the planet. And as long as gambling has been around the odds have always favored the house to win. Logically it has to be this way; otherwise casinos would have gone out of business millennia ago. But with the odds stacked against us and our rational brain aware of this, why do we bother to gamble at all? |
In the current study, researchers from Cambridge examined the brains of 15 people with a fMRI machine while they gambled on a slot machine. What they found was that brain activity for winning spins was greatly increased in the ventral striatum and anterior insula; part of a neuronal circuit that is well known as the reward system. |
In a nutshell the way our brain processes our feelings of reward and success at a job well done is: trigger > reward > reinforcement. In gambling the trigger is of course money, and this fires up the reward systems in your brain, which are largely governed by release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This feels great, you are rewarded and you want to do it again and the trigger is reinforced as something that’s good. |
This process isn’t limited to gambling or money of course; it’s also the same thing that happens when you eat delicious chocolate, or why I turn into a slobbering canine when I smell bacon. You might also have guessed that this is part of the mechanism behind addiction to heroin and other drugs of abuse, which we can define as uncontrolled reward and reinforcement. |
Close enough is good enough |
That gambling activates the reward system isn’t a surprise. But the astonishing observation from this study comes when we look at brain activity when the subjects “almost win”.
In this case “almost wining” was when the slot machine dials stopped tumbling and 2 out of the three symbols lined up on the payout line and the third matching symbol appeared just above the “win line”. When this happened, the pattern of activity was in the same brain areas as when they actually won. |
It seems that a near-miss is enough to trigger the reward > reinforcement cascade, and is effectively encouraging us to continue gambling. |
As if to drive the point home the brain pattern of near-miss activity was also very different from the patterns observed when the slot machine spin was still a losing spin but where none of the symbols were anywhere near close to matching - despite the economic result being the same: zero dollars won. |
While it wasn’t previously clear how it worked, the near-miss phenomena has been known for some time. What is perhaps more insidious though is that the optimum rate of near-misses to keep people gambling has been calculated at 30% and subsequently implemented into the programming of many slot machines.*** Read more at veryevolved.com |
| For an all-natural brain boost, skip the pills and hit the colors.
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| In the latest and most authoritative study on color’s cognitive effects, test subjects given attention-demanding tasks did best when primed with the color red. Asked to be creative, they responded best to blue. |
| “Color enhances performance,” said study co-author Juliet Zhu, a University of British Columbia psychologist. |
| “Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances,” said Zhu. “People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks.” |
| “Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety,” she said. “When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.” |
| “Colors are everywhere in our lives,” said Meier. “We should use them more carefully in all settings.” |
| The colors appeared to enhance performance, but not to impair it. |
| For those of you perplexed by love’s elusiveness, take heart: Science is on the case. But even if researchers can turn love into peer-reviewed literature, they might not be able to bottle it. |
| “People think we’re going to get a love potion, and that’s nonsense,” said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University evolutionary anthropologist. “I don’t think they understand how complex the brain is, and what a powerful role experience plays.” |
| Fisher’s comments were prompted by an essay, entitled “Love: Neuroscience reveals all” and published Wednesday in Nature |
| This research shows how a “biochemical chain of events,” |
| produces neurological patterns associated with subjective experiences described as love. |
| Studies on the more-or-less monogamous prairie vole, for example, suggest that a neurotransmitter called oxytocin is important to mate bonding |
A vast increase in brain research in recent years is giving us a much improved picture of what’s going on in our white and grey matter. |
In case you hadn’t noticed, NewScientist.com is now making the last 12 months’ of articles free for everyone to read. Here we round up the top 10 in-depth articles on the brain from 2008 |
| Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. |
| However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. |
| What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new? |
| Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. |
We believe that memory provides us with a faithful record of past events. But in fact, it is well established that memory is reconstructive, and not reproductive, in nature. In retrieval, a memory is pieced together from fragments, but during the reconstruction errors creep in due to our own biases and expectations. |
Generally, these errors are small, so despite not being completely accurate, our memories are usually reliable. Occasionally, there are too many errors, and the memory becomes unreliable. In extreme cases, memories can be completely false. |
False memory, or confabulation, is completely unintentional, and can occur spontaneously due, for example, to the suggestive power of a leading question or a doctored photograph. It can also following frontal lobe damage due to tumours, head injuries, or ruptured arteries. |
| Studies of confabulation have providing confusing results, mainly because they have implicated several different regions of the frontal lobes.See more at scienceblogs.com |
| Bevil Conway, an artist turned neuroscientist |
| If you ask why an artist would delve into the labyrinthine, and largely unknown, workings of the brain, the look of satisfaction on Conway’s face as he leaned back in his chair said it all |
| Conway, 34, a native of Zimbabwe who is an assistant professor at Wellesley College and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School, started out as a visual artist. |
| By studying the behavior of Castor and Pollux, his two monkeys, he’s made an argument that color, which is accessible only through vision, is encoded into the brain. |
| He’s found that not only are certain cells designated to respond to certain colors, but that those cells usually form in clusters. Within that, he’s found that the cell population is biased - the largest population cares about red, followed by green then blue.See more at www.boston.com |
| Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. |
| With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices. |
| In their Science article “‘Who’ is Saying ‘What’? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech,” the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique ‘neural fingerprint’ in the listener’s brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition. |
| Just like real fingerprints, these neural patterns are both unique and specific: the neural fingerprint of a speech sound does not change if uttered by somebody else and a speaker’s fingerprint remains the same, even if this person says something different.See more at www.sciencedaily.com |
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