Erotic and Violent Images Cloud Vision, Study Finds/more

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Erotic and Violent Images Cloud Vision, Study Finds

By LiveScience Staffposted: 11 August 200512:17 pm EThttp://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050811_attention_problem.html

 

 

 

 

 

When people see violent or erotic images, they fail to process whatever they see next, according to new research.

Scientists are calling the effect "attentional rubbernecking."

“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images,” said Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald.

The effect is akin to rubbernecking on the highway, Zald and his colleagues say. Your brain might suggest you watch the road ahead, but your emotions force you to look at the accident on the side of the road.

Research subjects were handed a stack of pictures that included pleasant landscapes and architectural photos. They were told to search for a particular image. Negative images were placed anywhere from two to eight spots before the search target.

The closer the negative image was to the target picture, the more frequently people failed to spot the target.

In a follow-up study, negative images were replaced by erotic shots. The effect was the same.

"This suggests that emotionally arousing images impact attention in similar ways whether they are perceived as positive or negative," said colleague Steven Most of Yale University.

The researchers suspect we can't control the effect.

"We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald said.

As for rubbernecking on the road, Zald has a caution:

"If you are simply driving down the road and you see something that is sexually explicit on a billboard, the odds are that it is going to capture your attention and – for a fraction of a second afterwards – you will be less able to pay attention to other information in your environment," he said.

The initial study is detailed in the August issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. The follow-up research has not been published.

 

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Look and Listen: Brain Struggles to do Both

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050621_look_listen.html

 

By LiveScience Staffposted: 21 June 200502:52 pm EThttp://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/041101_False_memory.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

The human brain struggles to simultaneuosly look and listen, a new study suggests.

The parts of the brain that handle visual input are less effective when the mind is also processing audio input, and vice versa.

"Our research helps explain why talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance, even when the driver is using a hands-free device," said Steven Yantis, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist. "Directing attention to listening effectively 'turns down the volume' on input to the visual parts of the brain."

In the study, people aged 19 to 35 watched a rapidly changing display of letters and numbers while listening to three voices speak other letters and numbers. If that sounds like the sort of clutter in your life, that was the researchers goal.

The scientists recorded brain activity. When the test subjects paid attention to the screen, activity decreased in the parts of their brain responsible for listening.

The research yielded a surprise:

When a subject was told to shift attention from vision to hearing, the brain's parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex produced a burst of activity. The scientists assume it was a signal to initiate the shift of attention. Experts had previously thought those parts of the brain were only involved in processing visual information.

"By advancing our understanding of the connection between mind, brain and behavior, this research may help in the design of complex devices – such as airliner cockpits – and may help in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders such as ADHD or schizophrenia," Yantis said.

The study, first published last year in the journal Neuroscience, was announced today.

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http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/041104_Hearing_Protein.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

How We Hear: Mystery Unraveled

By Sarah DavidsonLiveScience Staff Writerposted: 04 November, 20047:30 a.m. ET

 

 

 

 

 

Scientists have figured out how trap doors and tunnels in your ears translate sound and movement into hearing and balance. The finding could one day help reverse genetic deafness and restore hearing lost by construction workers and concert-goers.

A protein from a gene called TRPA1 turns mechanical sound into electrical information for the brain, the study found.

"This could allow for the development of new gene therapies for deafness and balance disorders in the next five to ten years," said neuroscientist Jeffrey Holt of the University of Virginia, who led the research.

Here's how hearing works, Holt's team found: Inside the cell membrane of the hairs of the inner ear the protein forms a channel like a donut.

"When sound strikes the protein the hole pops open like a trap door, an electrical signal is generated which is relayed to the brain for interpretation," Holt explained.

Different structures are responsible for hearing and balance in the ear, but they both depend on the tiny hairs where the proteins reside to interpret stimulus. According to Holt the inner ear is a good candidate for gene therapy since it is isolated -- scientists would not have to introduce changes to the entire body.

The protein has both the donut structure and a spring portion that enables the hair cells to be "sensitive to movement as small as the diameter of a gold atom," Holt told LiveScience.

Cochlear amplification, the process that allows the ear to be sensitive to soft tones and specific frequencies, might also result from the TRPA1 protein. The amplification could result from the channels of the protein opening and closing in unison. It's like a child on a swing set, Holt said. When a child pumps her legs alone she go to a certain height, but when she pumps in concert with someone pushing her, she can go much higher.

Using mouse embryos as models, researchers were able to isolate the stage of development when the inner ear hairs were formed. That led to the isolation of the TRPA1 protein.

The discovery was detailed in the Oct. 13 online edition of the journal Nature.

( I read that ginko (kola?) can improve hearing by helping nerves in the ear which responds to sound. N)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Imagination! How Memory Fails Us

By Sarah DavidsonLive Science Staff Writerposted: 01 November, 20047:00 a.m. ET

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing on the imagination, scientists have found it's pretty easy to make people remember things that never happened.

The parts of the brain that form, store and then retrieve memories must all work together to accurately recall events, so scientists have long been skeptical of what people remember.

A new study was designed to "bring people into the laboratory and set up a circumstance in which they would remember something that did not happen," said Kenneth Paller of Northwestern University. Researchers monitored the subjects' brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to track the false memories.

They showed the participants pictures and asked them to imagine other images. Later, investigators asked whether certain objects were seen or imagined. Often, imagined images were recalled as real.

"We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap," Paller said. "Thus, a vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that's very similar to that of an experienced event. When memories are stored for perceived or imagined objects, some of the same brain areas are involved."

The study, published recently in the journal Psychological Science, showed that certain parts of the brain were involved in forming false memories, and different parts of the brain were responsible for creating true memories.

The key to remembering that something was imagined when we recall it is the context surrounding a memory, the research showed. If you remember who told you to imagine something, where it was, what was going on around you, the separation between what really happened and what you imagined becomes more distinct.

When a person makes these external connections to the memory, he engages the parts of the brain that lead to true memories.

False memories are only one part of studying how memory occurs, but researchers say they are excited about the prospects of connecting what they have learned in the laboratory to the real world.

"What we learn could be useful for people who make decisions outside [the lab] based on the memory of others," Paller told LiveScience.