omnia mea mecum fero

One of the greatest effects of the Internet is its ability to capture our attention only to scatter it, ultimately producing a generation whose brains are being better hardwired to scan, skim and multitask, causing a weakening in our ability to read and think deeply in a concentrated manner.

If there’s ever excuse to publish an optical illusion as cool as the “Rotating Snakes,” I’ll take it. This illusion was invented in 2003 by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, and ever since, Kitaoka and other scientists have been trying to figure out why it works. A new paper by Stephen Macknik at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix may have the answer.

In making the case for the raw aesthetic appeal of neuroscience data, I focus on the powerful ideas that have given us this striking visual vocabulary.

Articles about NEUROSCIENCE: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=neuroscience

For most of us, it's tricky enough to remember what we were doing this time last week, let alone on some random day years ago. But for a blind 20-year-old man referred to by researchers as HK, every day of his life since the age of about eleven is recorded in his memory in detail. HK has a rare condition known as hyperthymesia and his is only the second case ever documented in the scientific literature (the first, a woman known as AJ, was reported in 2006.

MEMORY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=memory

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.

By developing computer simulations of neural networks that evolved over 50,000 generations, scientists at Trinity University have concluded that intelligence is an evolutionary byproduct of social teamwork.