#brain activity

[videoreligion]

Zombie Cult Massacre (1998)

[poeticallylazyaf07]

A plant with no stalk or leaf,

A soul that leaves with no one's grief.

A wooden chest with no hidden treasure,

Has life been robbed of all pleasure?

A sea that changes its current to too often,

Even if it wishes, for nobody does it soften.

A singer to whom there is no one to listen,

For whatever future, do we have a vision?

A child left astray in a crowd,

Clouds covering the sky; the storm is too loud.

A therapist with no lending ears

To assure her, "For you, I'm here."

An idol with an unfortunate past,

The ignored member of a movie cast.

A relationship given up too fast,

Perhaps if they tried, for ever could they last.

Things so easily discarded,

Women and men walk back home, broken hearted.

Is this what we call society and home?

Where in a world full of people, you're all alone?

Love,

Anonymous.

[intellectual6666]

OK guys, I just learned a thing. So basically, there's a part of the brain which identifies or easily feels whether the thing near you is an object or a living being. If you're walking down a street, the activation of that part of the brain increases if you feel a living breathing thing near you. And if you look at a non living thing, the activation decreases. NOW HERE COMES THE THING. When a man looks at a woman on the street even with slightest provocative clothes (according to them) or in some specific posture, the activation of that part of the brain DECREASES. And their brain objectifies them. So like, they no longer identify them as a living being and see them as an object. NOW when people are like "oh they objectify women", it's totally TRUE because their brain identifies them as an object rather than a living being with thoughts and emotions.

[cbirt]

The Brain Language Model (BrainLM), a foundation model for brain activity dynamics trained on 6,700 hours of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, was introduced by researchers at Yale University. Through self-supervised masked-prediction training, BrainLM exhibits high performance on zero-shot inference and fine-tuning tasks.

Accurate prediction of future brain states and clinical variables such as age, anxiety, and PTSD are made possible by fine-tuning. Importantly, the BrainLM performance was admirable when applied to completely fresh external cohorts that were not present during training. BrainLM does not require network-based supervision during training to identify intrinsic functional networks straight from raw fMRI data while operating in zero-shot inference mode. 

Additionally, the model produces interpretable latent representations that show connections between patterns of brain activity and states of cognition. BrainLM provides a flexible and understandable framework for clarifying the intricate spatiotemporal dynamics of brain activity in humans. It acts as a potent “lens” that allows large-scale fMRI data banks to be analyzed in novel ways, leading to more efficient interpretation and application. The research shows how foundation models can be used to further computational neuroscience studies.

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[nice-bright-colors]

This morning I dreamt of you. The softness of your hair, the warmth of your smile, and the kindness in your eyes.

I miss you. I miss the generosity of your heart, the joy in your laughter, and the sound of your voice.

Yet we have never met, nor had we spoken before.

[bpod-bpod]

Sign of Activity

A virtual reality-trained deep-learning tool called DELiVR detects cells expressing a protein called c-Fos in cleared mouse brain tissue and maps them to the Allen Brain Atlas. c-Fos-positive cells are taken as a sign of neuronal activity and the team use DELiVR to investigate cancer-related brain activity

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Doris Kaltenecker, Rami Al-Maskari & Moritz Negwer, and colleagues

Institute for Diabetes and Cancer (IDC), Helmholtz Munich, Neuherberg; Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research, Klinikum der Universität München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität LMU, Munich, Germany

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Methods, April 2024

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[error-pg-not-found]

this came to me in a dream. zombie apocalypse but for some reason it's a slapstick comedy

[likenothings]

[wayti-blog]

The art and science of the human brain

Delicate Neural Choreographies: "Self Reflected" by Dr. Greg Dunn and Dr. Brian Edwards

"[...] it is possible to use science or engineering as the starting points to create artworks that are completely based on fantasy. Yet, it is also possible to create pieces that are completely based on science and that look like fascinating works of art. "Self Reflected" (2019-2022) by Dr. Greg Dunn in collaboration with Dr. Brian Edwards is the perfect example."

""Self Reflected" is a visually bright work of elegance and beauty that pulsates with mesmerizing lights and wavelike electrical activity and its merit stands in the fact that it provides us with an immediate picture of the human brain.

The artwork makes it easier to grab the vastness and beautiful organization of the brain and lets us understand the complexity behind it not with difficult scientific explanations, but with immediate and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this piece."

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[atomiccalamari]

sometimes i wonder how many mad scientists had bipolar disorder like maybe frankenstein just needed some more lithium in his bloodstream to not be compelled to manipulate life itself

[videoreligion]

Zombie Cult Massacre (1998)

[slippyjimm]

Rosemary by Deftones pls stimulate brain activity 🙏

[timmurleyart]

Fitbit in yer skull. 💀🧠🤖🕹⚡️

[whats-in-a-sentence]

A different level of brain activity is required for each response: the mammalian fight-or-flight system, which is protective and keeps us from shutting down, and the reptilian brain, which produces the collapse response.

"The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma" - Bessel van der Kolk

[iqmetrics]

Take our free IQ test at IQMetrics.org to uncover your cognitive abilities. Get insights into your intelligence quotient with our accurate and comprehensive IQ assessment. Start your IQ journey now!

[jcmarchi]

Personal interests can influence how children’s brains respond to language

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/personal-interests-can-influence-how-childrens-brains-respond-to-language/

Personal interests can influence how children’s brains respond to language

A recent study from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research shows how interests can modulate language processing in children’s brains and paves the way for personalized brain research.

The paper, which appears in Imaging Neuroscience, was conducted in the lab of MIT professor and McGovern Institute investigator John Gabrieli, and led by senior author Anila D’Mello, a recent McGovern postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Traditional studies give subjects identical stimuli to avoid confounding the results,” says Gabrieli, who is the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “However, our research tailored stimuli to each child’s interest, eliciting stronger — and more consistent — activity patterns in the brain’s language regions across individuals.” 

This work unveils a new paradigm that challenges current methods and shows how personalization can be a powerful strategy in neuroscience. The paper’s co-first authors are Halie Olson, a postdoc at the McGovern Institute, and Kristina Johnson PhD ’21, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and former doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab. “Our research integrates participants’ lived experiences into the study design,” says Johnson. “This approach not only enhances the validity of our findings, but also captures the diversity of individual perspectives, often overlooked in traditional research.”

Taking interest into account

When it comes to language, our interests are like operators behind the switchboard. They guide what we talk about and who we talk to. Research suggests that interests are also potent motivators and can help improve language skills. For instance, children score higher on reading tests when the material covers topics that are interesting to them.

But neuroscience has shied away from using personal interests to study the brain, especially in the realm of language. This is mainly because interests, which vary between people, could throw a wrench into experimental control — a core principle that drives scientists to limit factors that can muddle the results.

Gabrieli, D’Mello, Olson, and Johnson ventured into this unexplored territory. The team wondered if tailoring language stimuli to children’s interests might lead to higher responses in language regions of the brain. “Our study is unique in its approach to control the kind of brain activity our experiments yield, rather than control the stimuli we give subjects,” says D’Mello. “This stands in stark contrast to most neuroimaging studies that control the stimuli but might introduce differences in each subject’s level of interest in the material.”

In their recent study, the authors recruited a cohort of 20 children to investigate how personal interests affected the way the brain processes language. Caregivers described their child’s interests to the researchers, spanning baseball, train lines, “Minecraft,” and musicals. During the study, children listened to audio stories tuned to their unique interests. They were also presented with audio stories about nature (this was not an interest among the children) for comparison. To capture brain activity patterns, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow caused by underlying neural activity.

New insights into the brain

“We found that, when children listened to stories about topics they were really interested in, they showed stronger neural responses in language areas than when they listened to generic stories that weren’t tailored to their interests,” says Olson. “Not only does this tell us how interests affect the brain, but it also shows that personalizing our experimental stimuli can have a profound impact on neuroimaging results.”

The researchers noticed a particularly striking result. “Even though the children listened to completely different stories, their brain activation patterns were more overlapping with their peers when they listened to idiosyncratic stories compared to when they listened to the same generic stories about nature,” says D’Mello. This, she notes, points to how interests can boost both the magnitude and consistency of signals in language regions across subjects without changing how these areas communicate with each other.

Gabrieli noted another finding: “In addition to the stronger engagement of language regions for content of interest, there was also stronger activation in brain regions associated with reward and also with self-reflection.” Personal interests are individually relevant and can be rewarding, potentially driving higher activation in these regions during personalized stories.

These personalized paradigms might be particularly well-suited to studies of the brain in unique or neurodivergent populations. Indeed, the team is already applying these methods to study language in the brains of autistic children.

This study breaks new ground in neuroscience and serves as a prototype for future work that personalizes research to unearth further knowledge of the brain. In doing so, scientists can compile a more complete understanding of the type of information that is processed by specific brain circuits and more fully grasp complex functions such as language.