What you conjured illuminates how our brains work, why it can be so hard to come up with new ideas — and how you can rewire your mind to open up the holy grail of creativity. Recent advances in neuroscience, driven by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that lets scientists watch brain activity as never before, have changed what we know about key attributes of creativity. These advances, for example, have swept away the idea that there is a pleasure center in the brain that somehow acts as an accelerator to the engine of human behavior. Rather, chemicals such as dopamine shuttle between neurons in ways that look remarkably like the calculations modern robots perform.
Creativity and imagination begin with perception. Neuroscientists have come to realize that how you perceive something isn’t simply a product of what your eyes and ears transmit to your brain. It’s a product of your brain itself. And iconoclasts, a class of people I define as those who do something that others say can’t be done — think Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, or Florence Nightingale — see things differently. Literally. Some iconoclasts are born that way, but we all can learn how to see things not for what they are, but for what they might be.
Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.
Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.
WHO Reports 25% Drop in Malaria Deaths in a Decade
Malaria deaths have fallen by more than 25 percent in the last decade, thanks to a coordinated attack on the disease, but that progress remains fragile, the World Health Organization announced this month.
About 655,000 victims — mostly children — died of malaria in 2010, the report estimated. A decade ago, estimates were closer to a million, though the counting was shakier.
The biggest gains were made in Africa, where a vast majority of the deaths occur and where donor dollars have been concentrated since the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the President’s Malaria Initiative were created early in the decade.
However, the report warned, that progress could easily evaporate. Malaria rebounded in the 1970s when mosquitoes became resistant to pesticides and the parasites that cause the disease became resistant to chloroquine. Eradication programs begun in the colonial era fell apart as newly independent countries sank into poverty.
The Global Fund is desperate for money. The $2 billion donors give annually is only about a third of what is needed, the report said.
Although 145 million mosquito nets were delivered to Africa in 2010, they tear easily and the insecticide embedded in them fades within three years.
Resistance to artemisinin, hailed as the new miracle cure, persists in southeast Asia and could spread; 28 small companies, defying the W.H.O., still sell pills containing only artemisinin, which encourages resistance. The agency endorses multidrug cocktails, but they cost more and the partner drugs often taste bitter.
Quora users present: What papers have been most interesting in neuroscience for 2011?
Answers include a gorilla that you didn’t notice, what being happy looks like to your brain, and my personal favorite, reconstructing video images from inside the brain (above).
Great list.
(via Quora)
We’ve lost the banana before. In beginning of the 19th century, an outbreak of Panama disease swept through plantations growing the Gros Michel banana cultivar. By the 1960s, the Gros Michel was all but wiped out as a viable export crop. Luckily, banana scientists (what a job!) had another strain waiting in the wings, and the world quickly shifted to the Cavendish, the variety we eat today.
6 foods we could lose in an outbreak
rtnt:
Read This, Not That: Why Don’t We Believe In Science?
Writing for Mother Jones, Chris Mooney explains why people don’t change their views to fit the evidence, but rather attempt to fit the evidence to their views:
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
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Another study gives some inkling of what may be going through people’s minds when they resist persuasion. Northwestern University sociologist Monica Prasad and her colleagues wanted to test whether they could dislodge the notion that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were secretly collaborating among those most likely to believe it—Republican partisans from highly GOP-friendly counties. So the researchers set up a study in which they discussed the topic with some of these Republicans in person. They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as well as a statement in which George W. Bush himself denied his administration had “said the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda.”
As it turned out, not even Bush’s own words could change the minds of these Bush voters—just 1 of the 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim changed his or her mind. Far more common was resisting the correction in a variety of ways, either by coming up with counterarguments or by simply being unmovable.
Sounds like some of the risks are real, and some of them aren’t. Good ammo for your impending mid-air freakout, all the same.
Edwin W. Teale, Popular Science Monthly
In the 19th and 20th centuries, glowing newspaper and magazine accounts of forensic technologies, real and imaginary, fueled public support for scientific crime detection.
The Hoopoe (Upupa epops) is a colourful bird that is found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive ‘crown’ of feathers. One species, the Giant Hoopoe of Saint Helena, is extinct. Like the Latin name upupa, the English name is an onomatopoetic form which imitates the call of the bird.
The song is a trisyllabic “oop-oop-oop”, which gives rise to its English and scientific names. The Hoopoe is Israel’s national bird.
A video of a Hoopoe’s call below:
