All Blog Posts Tagged 'Neuroscience' (6)

New Center of Excellence for Neurosciences in Malaysia

High-tech vouchers

By KOI KYE LEE

PUTRAJAYA

kklee@nst.com.my | 0 comments

A million higher education students to receive them from next month

A TOTAL of 1.3 million…

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Added by Professor Jafri Malin Abdullah on January 7, 2012 at 12:05am — No Comments

Brain,Mind and Neurosciences in Malaysia:how do we move forward?

Since the Decade of the Mind started in 2010,Malaysia has a lot to do to catch up scientifically and acdemically.It takes a group od hard working workers to make this a success.
I get ideas reading a very interesting book titled:Mind and Brain Sciences in the 21st century bu Robert L.Solso (MIT Press)
Any comments and any scientist to improve neuroscience in Malaysia will be appreciated....

Added by Professor Jafri Malin Abdullah on July 2, 2010 at 10:42pm — 1 Comment

The somniloquy hypothesis: How the immature brain learns facts

A while back I wrote about the possible adaptive function of somnambulism or sleep-walking. Well...I've come up with yet another hypothesis addressing an "abnormal" behavior falling under parasomnias.

Somniloquy or sleep-talking can happen during stages of REM or NREM sleep (I'm speaking to the latter). This seemingly bizarre behavior typically occurs in childhood and is outgrown by puberty. Presentation can vary from rhythmic nonsense words to long coherent speeches. No… Continue

Added by William Lu on November 17, 2009 at 2:30pm — No Comments

Why primates prefer the color black

A recent study by Yeh, Xing, and Shapley over at The Center for Neural Science, New York University made a fascinating discovery about the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey and it's preference for black over white stimuli similar to that of humans. Here's a snippet from their abstract.

From recordings of single-cell activity in the macaque monkey's primary visual cortex (V1), we found that black-dominant neurons substantially outnumbered white-dominant neurons… Continue

Added by William Lu on September 28, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Erasing phobias early in life

The model of fear extinction originated from the Pavlovian classical conditioning paradigm in the early 1900s. Defined as a reduction in a conditioned fear response following a non reinforced exposure to a feared conditioned stimulus, fear extinction is known to involve the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). It's also a frequently striven-for goal in cognitive behavioral therapy during the treatment of various phobias including arachibutyrophobia; the fear of peanut butter… Continue

Added by William Lu on September 10, 2009 at 4:00pm — No Comments

Is inhibition a measure of free will?

Reading Alwyn Scott's "Stairway to the Mind" I came across an interesting tidbit of information pointing out that human's have a greater percentage of inhibitory neurons compared to other animals (human 75% rabbit 31%). For some unknown reason this made me think about the tricky construct of free will and the question of whether free will could be better measured not by what we chose to do, but by what we chose not to do. In other words, could free will be measured by a capacity to… Continue

Added by William Lu on September 9, 2009 at 10:00pm — No Comments