NightBlogger

NewScientist
People have long envisaged the brain as being like a computer on standby, lying dormant until called upon to do a task, such as solving a Sudoku, reading a newspaper, or looking for a face in a crowd. Sokoloff’s experiment provided the first glimpse of a different truth: that the brain enjoys a rich private life. This amazing organ, which accounts for only 2 per cent of our body mass but devours 20 per cent of the calories we eat, fritters away much of that energy doing, as far as we can tell, absolutely nothing.

“There is a huge amount of activity in the [resting] brain that has been largely unaccounted for,” says Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St Louis. “The brain is a very expensive organ, but nobody had asked deeply what this cost is all about.”

Daydreaming may sound like a mental luxury, but its purpose is deadly serious: Buckner and his Harvard colleague Daniel Gilbert see it as the ultimate tool for incorporating lessons learned in the past into our plans for the future. So important is this exercise, it seems, that the brain engages in it whenever possible, breaking off only when it has to divert its limited supply of blood, oxygen and glucose to a more urgent task. But people are starting to suspect that the default network does more than just daydream. More

Photo Gaetan Lee

Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. It turns out…that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time…: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy.”
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Image source: Reality Carnival

“The cell image is micrometers wide. The image of the universe is billions of light years across. The cell image shows neurons in a mouse brain. The other is a simulated image of the universe. Together the images suggest the surprisingly similar patterns found in vastly different natural phenomena.”—David Constantine.

Photo courtesy of unusualimage

Brain scan studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status, according to researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. They found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order - or simply views perceived social superiors or inferiors. An impending social shift produced similar changes to winning money in the brain’s “value centre”. A fall in status activated circuitry known to process emotional pain and frustration. Read more

Photo courtesy of rightee

Telegraph: The psychological toll of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has touched one in five servicemen and its consequences will be long-lasting…. The Rand Corporation, a leading research operation, said that 320,000 soldiers suffered brain injuries on the battlefield, while more than 300,000 suffered mental disorders on returning home. The report said that US veterans are incurring “invisible wounds” of war, most notably traumatic brain injury.
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In this Ted Talk Video, Neuroanatomist Jill Taylor, speaks of her fascinating and spiritual journey through a stroke. “She felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment.” She discusses the difference between the functions of left and right brain hemispheres, displays an actual brain and spinal cord, and explains what is was like to be disconnected from her “brain chatter” as he puts it, when her left brain hemorrhaged. (Thanks to Phil)