#precuneus

#precuneus

Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.

Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.

They created an artificial 'mental map', with pleasantness along one axis and bodily reactions along the other, and charted how the brain responded while watching clips from films. The results revealed clear groupings in the way that our brains represent emotion - with guilt, anger and disgust in one corner and happiness, satisfaction and pride in the other.

Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller's artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers' visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses.

Minutes into teaching my business school class, I asked what seemed like an innocent question: What is one word that describes how you feel about AI right now? One word. That's it. My students looked up, looked down, looked anywhere to avoid eye contact. Silence. "I promise," I said, "this is a safe space." Something I'd repeat throughout the course-and I meant it. Then the answers came quickly, and the energy in the room shifted as they arrived. You could feel the sheen of performance

Decades of research show that people who have more years of education, more cognitively demanding jobs or more mentally stimulating hobbies all tend to have a reduced risk of cognitive impairment as they get older. Experts think this is partly thanks to cognitive reserve: Basically, the more brain power you've built up over the years, the more you can stand to lose before you experience impairment.

According to University of Michigan neuroscientists, not only can their AI vision language model diagnose neurological disorders from MRI scans with high performance accuracy, but it also has foundation model capabilities, making it a flexible, general-purpose solution that can be tailored for a wide variety of medical imaging. "These results demonstrate that Prima has foundation model properties, and reported performance will continue to improve with additional health system training data and larger compute budgets," wrote the study's authors in the preprint.

Studies show that people with high fluid intelligence can process multiple "what if" scenarios concurrently, helping them see ahead, identify concealed dangers, and plan their actions. This mode of thinking requires a lot of working memory because the brain isn't looping idly; it's stress-testing every single possibility that comes to mind. This might be why these people seem to be frequently lost in their thoughts, even when they're alone.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

Rumination activates the default mode network (DMN) - the brain's self-referential processing system. This is the neural circuitry that fires when you're thinking about yourself in relation to others: your identity, your social standing, your mistakes. It's the brain asking, over and over, What does this say about me?

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).

At the Winter Olympics, skiers, bobsledders, speedskaters, and many other athletes all have to master one critical moment: when to start. That split second is paramount during competition because when everyone is strong and skilled, a moment of hesitation can separate gold from silver. A competitor who hesitates too much will be left behind -but moving too early will get them disqualified.

There are lots of reasons why relationships fall apart; all kinds of incompatibilities can doom romance. Some are trivial, but occasionally there might be something more profound at the root of an estrangement. Recently, the concept of the "frontal lobe breakup" appeared in popular culture. The idea is that the final stage of development in the executive regions of the brain-the frontal lobes-changes someone's perspective about their relationship. The onset of advanced cognitive skills in one partner creates a gap in maturity too big to bridge.

The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

Close your eyes and picture an apple. Most people see something-a faint, slightly blurry image, less vivid than a real apple. A few, however, will see it as clearly as if it were sitting right in front of them. This ability is called hyperphantasia. Hyperphantasia, literally meaning "beyond imagination," refers to exceptionally vivid mental imagery. It is often described as the opposite of aphantasia, a condition in which people report little or no ability to form mental images.

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.

Real estate with ocean views, stunning mountain vistas, and wide-open green spaces sell at premium prices because humans find those settings pleasing [1-5]. Certain color combinations in fashion-such as brown and forest green-blend harmoniously, while others, such as hot pink and orange, clash. And our eyes like certain proportions in visual objects (like buildings and human faces) but not others.

Did someone with spatial-sequence synaesthesia design the calendar app on mobile phones? Because that's how time and dates look in my brain. If you say a date to me, that day appears in a grid diagram in my head, and it shows if that box is already imprinted with a holiday, event or someone's birthday. Public holidays and special events like Christmas and Easter are already imprinted for the year, and the diagram goes backwards to about 100,000BC

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.