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Larval zebrafish on the brink of eat a paramecium. Credit score: G. Goodhill/Queensland Mind Institute It is stated to be a "lightbulb" second -- when an thought pops into your head. The grownup human mind usually shows this sort of spontaneous exercise -- and College of Queensland specialists have uncovered how totally different experiences early in life would possibly have an effect on the character of that exercise and, in flip, alter a person's behaviour. Research chief Professor Geoffrey Goodhill , from the Queensland Mind Institute and the Faculty of Arithmetic and Physics, used zebrafish as a mannequin to analyze the origins of spontaneous neural exercise -- within the type of new ideas. "We needed to look at the fishes' spontaneous mind patterns to see if their setting had an influence on the way in which their brains wired up." The researchers discovered that spontaneous exercise within the a part of the mind that p...

"We believe that, over lengthy time scales, some aspects of the brain must have changed to better accommodate the learning parameters required by various cultural activities," said Prof. Arnon Lotem, of TAU's Department of Zoology, who led the research for the study. "The effect of culture on cognitive evolution is captured through small modifications of evolving learning and data acquisition mechanisms. Their coordinated action improves the brain network's ability to support learning processes involved in such cultural phenomena as language or tool-making." Prof. Lotem developed the new learning model in collaboration with Prof. Joseph Halpern and Prof. Shimon Edelman, both of Cornell University, and Dr. Oren Kolodny of Stanford University (formerly a PhD student at TAU). The research was recently published in  PNAS . "Our new computational approach to studying human and animal cognition may explain how human culture shaped the evolution of human...

Thanks to advances in brain sciences, it is possible to decode one's brain network by measuring functional MRI ( fMRI ) activity just for five minutes. Since the brain network is formed by genetics and experiences, it is possible to predict one's age, personality, or performance in cognitive functions from functional connectivity patterns in their brain network. In psychiatric disorders, functional connectivity, which is measured by temporal correlations between some brain regions, is too much increased or decreased compared to healthy control. It has been suggested that these abnormal connections cause the decrement of cognitive function. However, treatments of psychiatric disorders (e.g., drugs and cognitive behavior therapy) could not increase or decrease a specific connectivity between two regions, because these methods give broad effects on the global network. Therefore, the method, which can induce the both direction of change (i.e., an increase or a decrease) in a spe...