Inattentional blindness: Moon-walking Gorilla in the Brain

Have you ever wondered why you usually miss glaring bloopers in major motion pictures? If you are like most people, you probably believe that just because your eyes are open, you are seeing. So why do we sometimes fail to see things that are right in front of our eyes?

The reality is that attention plays a major role in visual perception. One of the primary reasons why you fail to notice these mistakes in films and television programs is a psychological phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. When your attention is focused on one demanding task, such as paying attention to the main character in a movie, you might not notice unexpected things entering your visual field.

Facebook and Students’ Brains — by Betsy Hill

The “left – right brain” Myth

We wrote about the 10% brain myth last month and subsequently we wondered about how these types of myths and rumors come into being.    Myths about the brain typically arise in this fashion: An intriguing experimental result generates a plausible if speculative interpretation (a small part of the lobe seems sufficient) that is later overextended or distorted (we use only 10 percent of our brain). The caricature ultimately infiltrates pop culture and takes on a life of its own, quite independent from the facts that spawned it.

Another such myth is the idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are fundamentally different. Are you a creative and emotional person? Maybe an artist or a musician? Then you are probably right-brained. No? Perhaps you are a rational, analytical and logical thinker? Maybe a mathematician or an engineer? Then you are most likely left-brained. Who does not know that creativity and emotion are located in the right half of the brain, while rationality and logic are situated in the left half of the brain? Everyone has come across this popular notion of left or right brain dominance, which determines a person’s way of thinking and his/her personality. This notion, however, is a widely held misconception.

Scientists at the University of Utah have debunked the myth with an analysis of more than 1,000 brains. They found no evidence that people preferentially use their left or right brain. All of the study participants — and no doubt the scientists — were using their entire brain equally, throughout the course of the experiment. A paper describing this study appeared in August 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Book Review)

Gladwell’s talent is for weaving together scientific research findings from fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, criminology and marketing with an anecdotal style to create new ways of looking at things for the popular reader.

Blink, Gladwell’s follow-up bestseller to The Tipping Point, is a more purely psychological work, leaning on the research of Timothy Wilson, a professor at the University of Virgininia who has written about the ‘adaptive unconscious’, that part of our minds which can lead us to good decisions even though we don’t know how we make them; and Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist who is an expert on how people arrive at decisions under pressure.

Blink is an attempt to bring to the public’s eye this emerging area of psychology, rapid cognition, that has received little popular attention.

The “10% brain” Myth

Let me state this very clearly:

There is no scientific evidence to suggest that we use only 10% of our brains.

It is quite remarkable that a handful of ideas from the field of neuroscience spread like wildfire through the popular media, thereby becoming part of our culture and worldview, while other ideas remain neglected, known only to a small group of experts. Since I was little, I always heard that humans use only 10% of their brains. To me, this idea agreed with the age-old notion that we as humans have great potential. Years later, I learned the 10% myth most likely arose from a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of neurological research in the late 19th century or early 20th century.

The popular notion that large parts of the brain remain unused, and could subsequently be “activated”, is not based on scientific theory. Several books, films, and short stories have been written closely related to this myth. They include the novel “The Dark Fields”, and its film adaptation “Limitless” (claiming 20% rather than the typical 10%), as well as the 2014 film “Lucy”, all of which operate under the notion that the rest of the brain could be accessed through use of a drug. Lucy, in particular, depicts a character who gains increasingly godlike abilities once she surpasses 10%.

Technology that Helps Quadriplegic Move Hand With His Mind

For the first time ever, a quadriplegic man has moved his hand using his own thoughts.

Ian Burkhart, a 23-year-old who became paralyzed after a diving accident four years ago, is the first patient to try out Neurobridge, which reroutes brain signals. Neurobridge works as a kind of neural “bypass,” taking signals from the brain, rerouting them around the damaged spinal cord and sending them directly to the muscles, according to its developers, including doctors at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and researchers from Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio.

Obedience to Authority (Review of Psychology Classics)

Book Title:  Obedience to Authority (1974)  by Stanley Milgram

In 1961 and 1962, a series of experiments were carried out at Yale University. Volunteers were paid a small sum to participate in what they understood would be ‘a study of memory and learning’.

In most of the experiments, a white-coated experimenter took charge of two of the volunteers, one of which was given the role of ‘teacher’ and the other ‘learner’. The learner was told he had to remember lists of word pairs, and if he couldn’t recall them, the teacher was asked to give the person, who was strapped into a chair, a small electric shock. With each incorrect answer, the voltage rose, and the teacher was forced to watch as the learner moved from small grunts of discomfort to screams of agony.

What the teacher didn’t know was that there was actually no current running between his control box and the learner’s chair, and that the volunteer was in fact an actor who is only pretending to get painful shocks. The real focus of the experiment was not the ‘victim’, but the reactions of the teacher pressing the buttons. How would they cope with administering greater and greater pain to a defenseless human being?

The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous in psychology. Here we take a look at what actually happened and why the results are important.

Expectations and reality

If you are like most people, you would expect that at the first sign of genuine pain on the part of the person being shocked, you would want the experiment halted. After all, it is only an experiment. This is the response Milgram got when, separate to the actual experiments, he surveyed a range of people (psychiatrists, graduate students, psychology academics, middle-class adults) on how they believed the subjects would react in these circumstances. Most predicted that the subjects would not give shocks beyond the point where the other subject asked to be freed. These expectations were entirely in line with Milgram’s own. But what actually happened?

Most subjects were very stressed by the experiment, and protested to the experimenter that the person in the chair should not have to take any more. The logical next step would be then demand that the experiment be terminated.

In reality, this rarely happened.

Despite their reservations, most people continued to follow the orders of the experimenter and inflict progressively greater shocks. Indeed, as Milgram notes, “…a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator”. This is even when they could hear the cries of the other subject, and even when that person pleaded to be let out of the experiment.

Hacking The Brain With Electricity — Don’t Try This At Home

by Amy Standen (Re-post from NPR)

It’s the latest craze for people who want to improve their mental performance — zapping the brain with electricity to make it sharper and more focused. It’s called “brain hacking,” and some people are experimenting with it at home.

The idea’s not completely crazy. Small jolts of electricity targeted at specific areas of the brain are used to treat diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

an Interactive Map of Our Brain

How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up. As CEO of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Allan Jones leads an ambitious project to build an open, online, interactive atlas of the human brain.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science — based in Seattle, kickstarted by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — has a mission to fuel discoveries about the human brain by building tools the entire scientific community can use. As CEO, one of Allan Jones’ first projects was to lead the drive to create a comprehensive atlas of the brain of a mouse. Flash forward to April 2011, when the Allen Institute announced the first milestone in its online interactive atlas of the human brain, showing the activity of the more than 20,000 human genes it contains. It’s based on a composite of 15 brains, since every human brain is unique.

The mystery of teenage brain in 14 minutes

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies the social brain — the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people — and how it develops in adolescents.