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Posts Tagged ‘Memory’

According to wikipedia, “Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 – May 12, 1985) was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.”  “He coined the term Art Brut (meaning “raw art,” often times referred to as ‘outsider art’) for art produced by non-professionals working outside [...]

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DON’T tell the grant funding agencies, but, in at least one way, the effort to relate genetic variation to individual differences in cognitive function is a totally intractable waste of money. Let’s say we ask a population of folks to perform a task – perhaps a word memory task – and then we use neuroimaging [...]

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Image via Wikipedia In his book, The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner describes the great diversity of finches on the Galapagos Islands – so much diversity – that Darwin himself initially thought the finch variants to be completely different birds (wrens, mockingbirds, blackbirds and “gross-bills”).  It turns out that one of the pivotal events [...]

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Image by jurvetson via Flickr pointer to: Computational Models of Basal Ganglia Function where Kenji Doya provides computational explanations for neuromodulators and their role in reinforcement learning. In his words, “Dopamine encodes the temporal difference error — the reward learning signal. Acetylcholine affects learning rate through memory updates of actions and rewards. Noradrenaline controls width [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Joseph LeDoux‘s book, “Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are” opens with his recounting of an incidental glance at a t-shirt, “I don’t know, so maybe I’m not” (a play on Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum“) that prompted him to explore how our brain encodes memory and how that leads to [...]

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Image by pchow98 via Flickr One of the cool things about the brain & one of the ways in which it differs markedly from our current computer systems is that cells and synapses are living dynamic entities that grow and sprout new connections in response to experience. Since the 1980′s studies using protein synthesis inhibitors [...]

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Image via Wikipedia The mitogenic activities of the vascular endothelial growth factor protein family are well researched. A number of findings have linked this gene to learning and memory and hippocampal-dependent response to antidepressant medication. Indeed, its reasonable to expect that a mitogen such as VEGF would regulate hippocampal cell division and the accompanying benefits [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Indeed, learning how to manage one’s response to the negative emotions of others and stay out of trouble is an important life skill. At some point, most of us learn to just avoid angry, mean or melodramatically negative people and save ourselves the strife. Roy Perlis and colleagues, in their recent paper, [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Dominique JF de Quervain and colleagues provide an elegant example of how genetic differences can relate to complex traits such as the ability to recall emotionally laden experiences. In their recent Nature Neuroscience paper, they looked at a deletion of 3 glutamic acid residues (301–303) in the third intracellular loop of the [...]

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