Hitachi Hard Drive with Half a Brain

I am so old that I can remember when PC’s boasted having one kilobyte (1kb) of storage and I can still recall placing a special order, and waiting weeks for 1Mb hard disc drive, which I was convinced that I could never fill in my lifetime… So it is with a world-weary shrug that I learn than Hitachi is planning to market a 5 terabyte hard drive, probably within the next 18 months.

What makes this particularly interesting, not to say a bit spooky, is that Hitachi’s Dr Yoshihiro Shiroishi reckons that just two of them will be need to match the storage capacity of the human brain, which he estimates around 10Gb. Frankly I find that hard to believe; a lifetime of memories in a mere 10Tb, when a 2–hour movie swallows up 5 gigabytes? There must be some pretty impressive compression involved… Read More »

Sleep Respiratory Disorder Linked to Memory Loss

Sleep apnea is a respiratory disorder manifested during sleep that involves episodes in which a person misses one or more breath at a time. The disorder is usually experienced in several episodes during the night and triggers fatigue and sleepiness during the day. Snoring and restless sleep are also symptoms associated with sleep apnea. According to a new study carried out at the University of California, five or more episodes per hour may have serious consequences on the brain tissue and can lead to problems related to memory recognition.

High-resolution images made through a magnetic resonance imaging process on about forty patients revealed that parts of the brain known as the mammillary bodies, that are located in the anterior end of the archer of the fornix and are responsible for processing memories, are about 20 percent smaller than those of people that don’t have sleep apnea. Read More »

Why Drunk People Show No Fear

It is clear that alcohol consumption can turn a gentleman into a rude beast. For the first time, a new research study published in The Journal of Neuroscience explains why. Social drinkers intoxicated with alcohol have lowered sensitivity in brain nuclei controlling threat detection, while displaying higher activity in brain nuclei connected to reward.

“The key finding of this study is that after alcohol exposure, threat-detecting brain circuits can’t tell the difference between a threatening and non-threatening social stimulus. At one end of the spectrum, less anxiety might enable us to approach a new person at a party. But at the other end of the spectrum, we may fail to avoid an argument or a fight”, said Dr. Marina Wolf, at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. Read More »

Addiction to Video Games Is Just Like Drug Addiction

Being addicted to love can be extremely real. In fact, many obsessions such as the one some people have for sex, food or video games act just like drug addictions. You may have noticed some similarities between them, but the reactions taking place in the brain of the people addicted to gambling or video games are similar to those encountered in the brains of the alcoholics and cannabis addicted people.

Parents may helplessly witness how their children change habits becoming, from a normal kid, a miserable, withdrawn person, skipping school, being always angry when confronted, and stealing from family and friends to fuel their obsessions. And this personality and behavioral change can last for years. Any difference from a cocaine addict? Read More »

8 Amazing Facts about Dolphins

1.The first cetacean was Pakicetus, which lived 55 million years ago. It was a shore animal with well-developed four limbs. The first dolphins (and toothed whales) are considered the Squalodontidae, which lived 33 to 15 MA years ago. They were 3 m (10 ft) long and had large teeth. Read More »

What Makes Us Optimistic

Being a shiny happy person has to do with something in your brain. More specifically, with the centers that have just been discovered by a team at the New York University. Generally, humans have great expectations from the future: overcoming the average level of success, living longer and being more successful and healthier, tending to shadow negative thoughts like getting a divorce, having a professional or financial failure, or developing cancer.

The same brain areas impaired in depression have been found to be linked to the boost of optimism. This was determined through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects were analyzing possible future life events (like “winning an award” or “the end of a romantic relationship”).

“When participants imagined positive future events relative to negative ones, enhanced activation was detected in the rostral anterior cingulate and amygdala, which are the same brain areas that seem to malfunction in depression. Read More »

Sleep Loss Turns You Insane

No sleep is really bad for your body, the effects ranging from lowered immune system (meaning vulnerability to infections) to memory and cognitive impairment and weight gain.

“Almost all psychiatric disorders show some problems with sleep. But scientists previously believed the psychiatric problems triggered the sleep issues.” said psychologist Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley. His team, collaborating with a Harvard Medical School team, has now found the opposite: sleep loss can induce psychologicalimpairments.

26 healthy subjects aged 24 to 31 were investigated after either an all-nighter or a full night’s sleep. Read More »

Human Brain and Sex

No matter to which culture human beings belong, they tend to react similarly to many things. Most people hate spiders and snakes, and consider some other beings sexy, feminine or masculine, and totally dislike certain smells. All these are an inheritance we got from our remote past.

Everything that’s ‘rotten’ disgusts us because we have learned to generate negative reactions to everything that would be harmful for our own survival. Rotten food can cause diseases, and by giving us nausea, we diminish the risks. But for a cockroach, the rottenness is attractive, as these insects eat rotten stuff. The repulsive smell does not belong to the molecules per se, but it is generated in our brain.

Another instinct inherited from our ancestors seems to be our ability to feel by smell the compatible partners. Experiments proved that females prefer men with a genetic pool as differently as possible from their own, thus they are attracted by these men. Read More »