E-Learning-Inclusivo (Mashup)

The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to learn information about that topic.

From Learning & The Brain Society:

Curiosity changes the brain to enhance learning

Medical News Today

New research published online in the Cell Press journal Neuron provides insights into what happens in our brains when curiosity is piqued. Investigators discovered that curiosity motivated learning, and increased activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that is important for forming new memories, as well as increased interactions between the hippocampus and the reward circuit. "So curiosity recruits the reward system, and interactions between the reward system and the hippocampus seem to put the brain in a state in which you are more likely to learn and retain information, even if that information is not of particular interest or importance," explains principal investigator Dr. Charan Ranganath.

Example of a dendrite of a principal neuron (white) and synaptic contacts (yellow arrowheads) from SOM1 interneurons. Credit Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research.

Researchers discover learning processes in the brain are dynamically regulated by various types of interneurons.

Learning can only occur if certain neuronal “brakes” are released. As the group led by Andreas Lüthi at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research has now discovered, learning processes in the brain are dynamically regulated by various types of interneurons. The new connections essential for learning can only be established if inhibitory inputs from interneurons are reduced at the right moment. These findings have now been published in Nature.

Recently Stephen Hawking apparently said "I think the brain is like a programme in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.”...

Scientific American Mind reflects on the major discoveries of the past decade that have transformed how we think about the brain

Image FROM “BIOIMAGING: WATCHING THE BRAIN AT WORK,” BY ROBERT J. COOPER, IN NATURE PHOTONICS, VOL. 8; JUNE 2014

Step aside, huge magnets and radioactive tracers—soon some brain activity will be revealed by simply training dozens of red lights on the scalp. A new study in Nature Photonics finds this optical technique can replicate functional MRI experiments, and it is more comfortable, more portable and less expensive.

The method is an enhancement of diffuse optical tomography (DOT), in which a device shines tiny points of red light at a subject's scalp and analyzes the light that bounces back. The red light reflects off red hemoglobin in the blood but does not interact as much with tissues of other colors, which allows researchers to recover an fMRI-like image of changing blood flow in the brain at work. For years researchers attempting to use DOT have been limited by the difficulty of packing many heavy light sources and detectors into the small area around the head. They also needed better techniques for analyzing the flood of data that the detectors collected.

Now researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Birmingham in England report they have solved those problems and made the first high-density DOT (HD-DOT) brain scans.