Highly intelligent people are more sensitive to their environment than the rest of the population. Their elevated brain and body sensitivity allows them to perceive, process, evaluate and respond quicker and in a more efficient manner to the environment. This hypersensitivity, however, comes at a cost; people with high IQ possess a general over-excitability in multiple domains that may put them at risk
Summary: A new study reports transcranial alternating current stimulation could help treat chronic back pain. Researchers report tACs enhances alpha oscillations in the somatosensory cortex, reducing pain significantly. Read the full summary of this insightful article here
Are you a Doer or a Procrastinator? Scientists at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum in Germany examined the brains of 264 healthy volunteers who were also asked to complete a survey assessing their ability for initiating actions and action control. The data analysis revealed that the size of one’s amygdala and the strength of its connectivity with the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex
Hamish loves playing the video game Fortnite, but does his brain show signs of addiction? He and his brother Noah had their brains scanned while playing…. Here is the link to the BBC News report
USA scientists who analyzed over 3000 MRI brain scans from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, a NIMH IRP sample, and the Human Connectome Project found that larger brains were not just an up-scaled version of the smaller brains but were organised differently; with increasing brain size, certain brain areas became enlarged, better connected and metabolically more expensive, but others remained unchanged in size and resource
Jaideep Bains, PhD, and his team at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) in the Cumming School of Medicine have discovered that stress transmitted from others can change the brain in the same way as a real stress does. Read more about their study here.
Scientists from the Department of Psychology at the Uskudar University and the National Brain Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey were able to classify with higher precision patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia and patients with a late-onset bipolar disorder based on their electrophysiological and neural brain profiles. Both conditions share common cognitive and behavioural symptoms, which is a common reason for misdiagnosis. The qEEG
May we all experience another 365 fulfilled, meaningful and exciting days, in which we all share more gratitude, love and kindness! May our curiosity and thirst to learn grow even greater and may our willingness to help, contribute and create beauty in our imperfect world increase, as our planet completes its next rotation around the sun! The Bright Brain Centre
To better understand the brain and to develop potential therapies, neuroscientists from Brown University have been investigating the role of beta frequency brainwaves in attending to and detecting sensory stimuli. In a study involving both rodent and human participants, the scientists looked into the impact of the pre-stimulus beta waves generated in the sensorimotor cortex, on the perception of the
17 minutes of quality time with this talk. The brain as embodied predictive mechanism; tireless interpreter, incorporating interoceptive signals into expectations to guide perception and to create and sustain illusion of agency and reality…with the ultimate goal of facilitating survival. Here is the link.