Positive thinking

   Gina Rippon, Aston University Parents and teachers are painfully aware that it’s nearly impossible to get a teenager to focus on what you think is important. Even offering them a bribe or issuing a stern warning will typically fail. There may be many reasons for that, including the teenager’s developing sense of independence and social pressure from friends. Now a new study, published in Nature Communications , shows that this behaviour may actually be down to how the adolescent brain is wired. Adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological changes of puberty and ends when the individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (This definition may leave some readers wistfully pondering the second half of that equation). We now know that it is also a time of tremendous brain reorganisation, which we are only just beginning to understand . At this point, the brain’s grey matter, which has been growing exuberantly sin...

   David A Oakley, UCL and Peter Halligan, Cardiff University Everyone knows what it feels like to have consciousness: it’s that self-evident sense of personal awareness, which gives us a feeling of ownership and control over the thoughts, emotions and experiences that we have every day. Most experts think that consciousness can be divided into two parts: the experience of consciousness (or personal awareness), and the contents of consciousness, which include things such as thoughts, beliefs, sensations, perceptions, intentions, memories and emotions. It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, we argue that this is a mistake. We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of co...

Carl J Hodgetts, Cardiff University Reliving and sharing our personal past is part of what makes us human. It creates a sense of who we are, allows us to plan for the future and helps us form relationships. But we don’t all remember our past in the same way. In fact, the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people. For instance, when asked to remember something about a party, one person might describe vividly their sixth birthday: how the gifts were laid out, the sweet, chocolatey taste of the hedgehog cake and going to bed really late. Another person might not recall this precise detail, but remember that their aunt despised parties and that hedgehog cakes were massive in the 80s . So, our personal memories contain different types of information. Some of this is very specific about when and where things happened – and what it felt like. This collection of personal experiences is known as “episodic memory”. Other bits are general facts about the w...

By   Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office                         Ballyhooed artificial-intelligence technique known as “deep learning” revives 70-year-old idea. In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems — such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator — have resulted from a technique called “deep learning.” Deep learning is in fact a new name for an approach to artificial intelligence called neural networks, which have been going in and out of fashion for more than 70 years. Neural networks were first proposed in 1944 by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, two University of Chicago researchers who moved to MIT in 1952 as founding members of what’s sometimes called the first cognitive science department. Neural nets were a major area of research in ...

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office                          Neuroscientists identify circuits that could play a role in mental illnesses, including depression. Some mental illnesses may stem, in part, from the brain’s inability to correctly assign emotional associations to events. For example, people who are depressed often do not feel happy even when experiencing something that they normally enjoy. A new study from MIT reveals how two populations of neurons in the brain contribute to this process. The researchers found that these neurons, located in an almond-sized region known as the amygdala, form parallel channels that carry information about pleasant or unpleasant events. Learning more about how this information is routed and misrouted could shed light on mental illnesses including depression, addiction, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, says Kay Tye...

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office          New findings challenge standard model of memory consolidation. When we visit a friend or go to the beach, our brain stores a short-term memory of the experience in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Those memories are later “consolidated” — that is, transferred to another part of the brain for longer-term storage. A new MIT study of the neural circuits that underlie this process reveals, for the first time, that memories are actually formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the long-term storage location in the brain’s cortex. However, the long-term memories remain “silent” for about two weeks before reaching a mature state. “This and other findings in this paper provide a comprehensive circuit mechanism for consolidation of memory,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, the director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picow...

Are you lying? Do you have a racial bias? Is your moral compass intact? To find out what you think or feel, we usually have to take your word for it. But questionnaires and other explicit measures to reveal what’s on your mind are imperfect: you may choose to hide your true beliefs or you may not even be aware of them. But now there is a technology that enables us to “read the mind” with growing accuracy: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It measures brain activity indirectly by tracking changes in blood flow – making it possible for neuroscientists to observe the brain in action. Because the technology is safe and effective, fMRI has revolutionised our understanding of the human brain. It has shed light on areas important for speech, movement, memory and many other processes. More recently, researchers have used fMRI for more elaborate purposes. One of the most remarkable studies comes from Jack Gallant’s lab at the University of California. His team showed ...