Digg.com lead me to sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392782 sciencentral.com/articles/view....le_id=218392782
researchers can now see what your brain is doing just by shining beams of light into your head. This ScienCentral News video explains.
Seeing Our Thoughts?
It kind of looks like a motorcycle helmet from the future; divided into sections with colored stripes, drilled full of holes, and stuck full of fiber optic cables. But don't be fooled -- it's actually a new brain imaging technique. Cognitive neuroscientists at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Gabriele Gratton and Monica Fabiani call it EROS and explain that it works by using harmless beams of light.
EROS stands for event related optical signal. It's optical because it uses light reflections and it's event-related because the signals it produces mirror events in the brain.
So just like pressing a red laser pointer against your finger makes it glow red, shining light on your scalp also makes your brain give off faint reflections. As reported in "Scientific American Mind" magazine, EROS catches these reflections to create a picture of the activity in brain cells, or neurons.
Age
sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392783]http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view....le_id=218392783
Scientists have found that as we age, our brains start to pay too much attention to things that might not be important. As this ScienCentral News video explains, this hyper-attention can actually make us more distractible
Fabiani and her team measured brain activity in sixteen young and sixteen older volunteers who read a book of their choice while distracting tones played in the background. They adjusted the volume of the tones so that all the volunteers heard them at the same level, irrelevant of the quality their hearing.
"The tones come in trains of fives, so that you have basically beep beep beep beep beep and then there is a pause," explains Fabiani.
The researchers took two different measurements of brain activity -- both EROS and a measurement of electrical activity in the brain. Both techniques produced similar brain activity patterns -- volunteers in their twenties only responded to the first tone in each sequence and then ignored the rest, but the older adults' brains responded to all five of the tones. "And so presumably that might have an influence on their reading, and on their performance of their main task," Fabiani says.
Edited by treonsverdery, 02 November 2006 - 05:32 AM.
