How hypnosis affect your brain

Though many people associate hypnotism with second-rate magicians, the practice is in fact supported by a large number of clinicians and neuroscientists who see it as a powerful tool to hack the minds of patients suffering from psychological and psychosomatic disorders. Yet in order to get the best results out of this strange yet apparently effective trick, it’s vital to know exactly how it effects the brain, which is why a team of researchers from Stanford University has conducted a new study looking at which brain regions are most altered by hypnosis, publishing their findings in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Researchers Can Now Implant False Memories Into People's Brains

Japanese researchers have developed a trick to implant false visions into people’s brains, altering the way they experience the world and potentially even the way they think. Describing the new technique in the journal Current Biology, the scientists reveal how they were able to achieve this effect without actively engaging with their subjects’ thoughts, instead prompting them to unwittingly warp their own sense of perception.
Speaking to Stat, lead researcher Takeo Watanabe explained that this simple brainwashing exercise could one day lead to new treatments for cognitive disorders such as depression and autism. By provoking people to rewire their own brains, he hopes to help patients strengthen certain healthy connections and erase other less desirable ones.

Use your brain deal with exam stress.

Stress is part of life. Too much stress, over a sustained period, is clearly damaging, but normally we can deal effectively with short bouts. In fact, while stress may be uncomfortable, it can actually be a key motivator and the right amount of it can help to boost our performance.

But there is a limit. Too much stress and the opposite tends to happen, leading our confidence and

Can You Find The "T" In This Image?

Mastering the art of ignoring is very useful, especially when it comes to visually searching for things, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University.

It's obvious that clues and information on what you're searching for can make the task of finding something a lot easier. However, a team of psychologists wanted to prove that hints on what not to look for can be just as helpful in visually taxing tasks.

Scientists have found a method to decode what a person is perceiving

Neuroscientists have developed a new technique that enables them to decode what people are perceiving just by looking at a readout of their brain signals. This ability to spontaneously decipher human consciousness in real-time could have wide-ranging implications, potentially leading to novel treatments for brain injuries or helping people with locked-in syndrome to communicate.
The researchers collaborated with seven epilepsy patients at a hospital in Seattle, who had a number of electrodes called electrocorticographic (ECoG) arrays implanted into their brains. These targeted the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain's cortex, concerned with hearing and vision, respectively.
Patients were each shown a series of grayscale images of faces and houses, which flashed up on a screen in a random order for 400 milliseconds each. Using a novel framework for interpreting subjects’ brain activity data, the researchers were able to tell exactly when each patient had seen an image, and what that image contained. A report of this process has been published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Lead researcher Kai Miller told IFLScience that “there have been other studies where scientists have been able to tell when a patient is looking at one type of an image or another, but the timing of this stimulus had always been known ahead of time.
“However, we were able to decode spontaneously from the signal, so we were able to look at the brain signal and say at this point in time they saw this particular type of image.” To achieve this, the team focused on two types of brain signals: event-related potentials (ERPs) and broadband.

^{Electrodes were implanted into the temporal and occipital lobes of epilepsy patients, and used to measure their brain activity when viewing a series of images. Kai Miller, Stanford University}

Scintists Discover "Intelligence" Genes That Code For Cognitive Ability

Cognitive ability, such as decision-making skills, varies wildly from person to person, and although it is acknowledged that both genes and the environment play a role in this variation, linking specific genes to healthy cognitive abilities has proven incredibly difficult. However, a new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience reveals that a genetic network within part of the brain may indeed be the genes researchers have been looking for.

10 Mindblowing Optical Illusions

by theRichest

Can you find the answers to these 12 riddles?

1. What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment and never in a thousand years?
2. What has 4 fingers and a thumb but is not living?
3. Which word in the dictionary is spelled incorrectly?
4. We hurt without moving. We poison without touching. We bear the truth and the lies.
    We are not to be judged by our size. What are we?
5. Give me food, and I will live. Give me water, and I will die. What am I?
6. What flies when it's born, lies when it's alive and run when it's dead?
7. What gets wet when drying?
8. I am always there, some distance away, somewhere between land or sea and sky I lay, you move towards me, yet distant I'll stay.
9. I am a mother and a father, but have never given birth. I'm rarely still but I never wander.What am I?
10. I have keys but no locks. I have space but no room. You can enter, but can't go outside.What am I?
11. I can only live when there is light, but I die if the light shines on me. What am I?
12. Every night I am told what to do, and each morning I do what I am told. But still I don't escape your scold.


Source: www.dose.com

Nerdy jokes. Do you get it?

The impact of smartphone thumbing on your brain

Almost like a new drug, our addiction to using our smartphones is having a profound effect on our brains. Whether we’re texting, posting on Facebook, or playing Angry Birds, the way we’re repetitively using our fingers and thumbs on the smooth surface of a touch screen is causing certain areas of our brains to become bigger. In other words, we’re experiencing heightened brain activity that rewires sensory processing when our fingertips and thumbs are touched, a phenomenon known as “brain plasticity” in which the brain adapts to learning new things.

Why do songs get stuck in our heads?

Why some tunes lodge in our brain isn't so clear. Anyway there are a few theories.

Can't get a new song out of your head? You've probably got an earworm, which tends to be this little fragment of the song, often the chorus that keeps playing and replaying like it's stuck on the loop of your head. The phenomenon is quite common. A recent study shows that 91% of the people reported having an earworm once a week, while about a quarter of them more than once a day.

Earworms are involuntary and tend to occur in eight seconds but the reason why and what triggers them remain still a mystery. Music cognition research suggests that earworms have something to do with how music affects the brain's motor cortex. When people are listening to music there is a lot of activity in the motor planning  area. People are participating even if they are still. Researchers believe an earworm is your brain "singing" and that actually it turns to be that most people find them somewhat enjoyable.

Once an earworm lodges in your psyche, how do you get rid of it? The best method is for people to distract themselves by listening to other music or something that involves language, tackling a crossword perhaps or having a conversation. A second technique is listening to the earworm song itself repeatedly until the earworm is exhausted.

How are memories stored in the brain.