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source : blogger

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The human brain is a highly complex organ, made of countless neurons and fibers; white matter and gray matter; lobes and glands. These structural components give the brain its form, but the way they connect with eachother give the brain its function.

Until recently, scientists could only really study one aspect (structure or function) of the brain at a time. But now, scientists from several disciplines have worked together to study brain structure and function simultaneously and offer a new atlas for studying the whole brain at once.

A new study published in Scientific Reports combines the best of several disciplines: neuroscience, image processing, and network theory. Researchers evaluated the brains of healthy adults to analyze the brain's structural components and its functional activities. Diffusion images provided information about structural connections and functional magnetic resonance images provided information about resting state functions. The data was combined to develop a brain atlas that reveals structural and functional organization and emphasizes the importance of the connections between anatomy and function.

This new atlas will be particularly useful in studying disorders of the central nervous system. Many disorders, including head injuries and neurodegenerative diseases, are structural in origin (i.e. an actual loss of fibers), but the structural changes can lead to functional changes. Other disorders such as headache or epilepsy are functional in origin, but these functional alterations can lead to structural loss over time. Ultimately, structure-function information will support earlier diagnoses of neurological disorders.

Humans use an estimated 20% of their energy to establish and maintain connections in the brain that allow it to function properly and complete everything from basic metabolic functions to complex cognitive tasks, so it is critical for us to understand the nuances of they way that form affects function and function affects form. The new structure-function atlas is paving the way for more studies of aging or unhealthy brains that will allow us to do just that.
References
Dickie DA, Job DE, Gonzalez DR, Shenkin SD, & Wardlaw JM (2015). Use of brain MRI atlases to determine boundaries of age-related pathology: the importance of statistical method. PloS one, 10 (5) PMID: 26023913

Diez I, Bonifazi P, Escudero I, Mateos B, Muñoz MA, Stramaglia S, & Cortes JM (2015). A novel brain partition highlights the modular skeleton shared by structure and function. Scientific reports, 5 PMID: 26037235

Hu X, Song X, Li E, Liu J, Yuan Y, Liu W, & Liu Y (2015). Altered Resting-State Brain Activity and Connectivity in Depressed Parkinson's Disease. PloS one, 10 (7) PMID: 26147571

Moreno-Dominguez D, Anwander A, & Knösche TR (2014). A hierarchical method for whole-brain connectivity-based parcellation. Human brain mapping, 35 (10), 5000-25 PMID: 24740833

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Form and Function - The Brain at its Best

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The human brain is a highly complex organ, made of countless neurons and fibers; white matter and gray matter; lobes and glands. These structural components give the brain its form, but the way they connect with eachother give the brain its function.

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source : google

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Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same criticisms in their time.

Purported negative effects such as addiction, increased aggression, and various health consequences such as obesity and repetitive strain injuries tend to get far more media coverage than the positives. I know from my own research examining both sides that my papers on video game addiction receive far more publicity than my research into the social benefits of, for example, playing online role-playing games.

However there is now a wealth of research which shows that video games can be put to educational and therapeutic uses, as well as many studies which reveal how playing video games can improve reaction times and hand-eye co-ordination. For example, research has shown that spatial visualisation ability, such as mentally rotating and manipulating two- and three-dimensional objects, improves with video game playing.

To add to this long line of studies demonstrating the more positive effects of video games is a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Vikranth Bejjanki and colleagues. Their newly published paper demonstrates that the playing of action video games - the sort of fast-paced, 3D shoot-em-up beloved of doomsayers in the media - confirms what other studies have revealed, that players show improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition.

In a series of experiments on small numbers of gamers (10 to 14 people in each study), the researchers reported that gamers with previous experience of playing such action video games were better at perceptual tasks such as pattern discrimination than gamers with less experience.

In another experiment, they trained gamers that had little previous experience of playing action games, giving them 50 hours practice. It was showed that these gamers performed much better on perceptual tasks than they had prior to their training. The paper concludes:

The enhanced learning of the regularity and structure of environments may act as a core mechanism by which action video game play influences performance in perception, attention, and cognition.

In my own papers, I have pointed out many features and qualities that make video games potentially useful. For instance, in an educational context, video games can be fun and stimulating, which means it's easier to maintain a pupil's undivided attention for longer. Because of the excitement, video games may also be a more appealing way of learning than traditional methods for some.

Video games have an appeal that crosses many demographic boundaries, such as age, gender, ethnicity, or educational attainment. They can be used to help set goals and rehearse working towards them, provide feedback, reinforcement, self-esteem, and maintain a record of behavioural change.

Their interactivity can stimulate learning, allowing individuals to experience novelty, curiosity and challenge that stimulates learning. There is the opportunity to develop transferable skills, or practice challenging or extraordinary activities, such as flight simulators, or simulated operations.

Because video games can be so engaging, they can also be used therapeutically. For instance, they can be used as a form of physiotherapy as well as in more innovative contexts. A number of studies have shown that when children play video games following chemotherapy they need fewer painkillers than others.

Video games have great educational potential in addition to their entertainment value. Games specifically designed to address a specific problem or teach a specific skill have been very successful, precisely because they are motivating, engaging, interactive, and provide rewards and reinforcement to improve.

But the transferability of skills outside the game-playing context is an important factor. What's also clear from the scientific literature is that the negative consequences of playing almost always involve people that are excessive video game players. There is little evidence of serious acute adverse effects on health from moderate play.
Dr. Mark Griffiths has received research funding from a wide range of organizations including the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the Responsibility in Gambling Trust. He has also carried out consultancy for numerous gaming companies in the area of social responsibility and responsible gaming.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Playing Video Games Is Good For Your Brain - Here's How

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Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same criticisms in their time.

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10 ways to get smarter

source : google

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It's true that as you get older, your brain's processing speed begins to slow, and your memory may occasionally short out, says Margaret Gatz, PhD, professor of psychology, gerontology, and preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. But researchers have recently made some surprising discoveries about what's really happening in our heads as we age: "We are identifying ways in which older minds hold their own against younger ones and even surpass them," Gatz says. Here, 10 ways you get smarter as you go.

1. Your hemispheres sync up.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres, with each side specializing in different operations. Brain scans show that while young people often use only one side for a specific task, middle-aged and older adults are more likely to activate both hemispheres at once-a pattern known as bilateralization. By involving both sides, older people bring the full spectrum of the brain's power to bear, allowing them to make more fruitful connections among the disparate parts of a problem or situation.

2. Your brain never stops growing.
Scientists once believed that some of our brain cells died off when we got older. But it's now clear that we not only hang on to our neurons-we grow new ones, too. Throughout a person's lifetime, the brain is continually reshaping itself in response to what it learns. Even something as silly as a clown trick can alter its structure: In a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, German researcher Janina Boyke and her colleagues taught 60-year-old adults how to juggle. Afterward, scans of the subjects' brains showed growth in a gray-matter region that processes complex visual information. In another experiment, Swiss neuroscientist Lutz Jäncke studied people who were learning to play a musical instrument. After they had been practicing for five months, Jäncke noted significant changes in the regions of the brain that control hearing, memory, and hand movements, even in participants who were 65 or older.

3. Your reasoning and problem-solving skills get sharper.
This is evident not only in laboratory studies but also in examinations of choices made in real life. For example, according to a study prepared for the Brookings Institute by Sumit Agarwal, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the middle-aged make smarter money decisions than their younger counterparts. In particular, they are better at financial transactions like managing their credit card balance and avoiding excess interest rate and fee payments-with the best performance notched by those in their early 50s.

4. You can focus on the upside.
Our outlook grows rosier as we get older, as demonstrated by a study published last year in the journal Psychology and Aging. Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, asked a group of subjects ages 18 to 94 to record their emotional states at five randomly chosen times each day for a one-week period. She repeated the procedure with the same participants five years later, and then again five years after that. With the passage of time, the study subjects reported more positive well-being and greater emotional stability. That may have been partly due to changes in how the brain-in particular, the emotion-processing center known as the amydgala-responds to positive and negative events. In a 2004 study, Carstensen scanned the brains of younger and older volunteers as they looked at cheerful, distressing, and neutral photographs. The amygdalae of younger subjects (ages 18 to 29) were activated equally by both the cheerful and distressing images, while the brains of the older subjects (between 70 and 90 years old) reacted much more strongly to the positive pictures.

5. Your people skills are constantly improving.
Mature adults understand themselves well-and they also understand other people, research shows. In a study published in the Journal of Gerontology in 2007, older and younger adults were presented with a series of hypothetical everyday problems (say, for example, an emotionally needy relative calls to talk just as you're leaving to meet up with friends, or you've won a free vacation, but the travel dates would mean missing a long-planned family party). The older adults were especially good at solving such interpersonal dilemmas -often by choosing a path that skirted direct conflict. "As we get older, our social intelligence keeps expanding," explains Gatz. "We get better at sizing up people, at understanding how relationships work-and at not getting into an argument unless we mean to."

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10 Ways You Get Smarter as You Get Older

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It's true that as you get older, your brain's processing speed begins to slow, and your memory may occasionally short out, says Margaret Gatz, PhD, professor of psychology, gerontology, and preventive medicine at the University of Southern California.

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source : youtube

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Brain Tricks - This Is How Your Brain Works