Tag: brain

Practice makes perfect?

By Edward Willett in Blog
December 20, 2006
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Nope. Turns out: “The main reason you can’t move the same way each and every time, such as swinging a golf club, is that your brain can’t plan the swing the same way each time,” says electrical engineering Assistant Professor Krishna Shenoy, whose research includes study of the neural basis of sensorimotor integration and movement …

Ho, ho, ho and the world ho, ho, hos with you

By Edward Willett in Blog, Science Columns
December 19, 2006
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‘Tis the season to start columns with the phrase ’tis the season…and, if you’re fortunate, to laugh a lot, at parties, at kids, at TV Christmas specials–or just because other people are laughing. Why is laughter contagious? A new study, just published in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides a hint. Researchers at University College London …

Shakespeare doth prod the brain most wonderously

By Edward Willett in Blog
December 19, 2006
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Of course, Shakespeare would have said it better than that. Here’s the gist of this new study: Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands …

It’s déjà vu all over again

By Edward Willett in Blog, Science Columns
November 28, 2006
4 mins to read
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It’s the strangest mental phenomena most of us ever experience: the feeling that we’ve already done or seen something that we’re really doing or seeing for the first time. This week an interesting new aspect of the phenomenon came to light: for the first time, researchers have reported a case of a blind person experiencing …

The aging brain

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
August 26, 2005
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Despite the fact I am still an astonishingly young man, I do find that I occasionally have more trouble remembering things than I did twenty years ago (when, as a precocious six-year-old, I was news editor of the Weyburn Review). It is, alas, an indisputable fact that our brains change as we age. However, as …

The changing brain

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 7, 2005
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We’re all getting older. (As the saying goes, it’s better than the alternative.) And as we age, we can’t help noticing that our brains don’t work quite the same way as they did when we were younger. Researchers have certainly noted this, and whether it’s because the average age of the population is going up …

Brain fingerprinting

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 22, 2004
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It sounds like science fiction: strap a few electrodes onto someone’s head and determine whether his or her brain contains certain information. But in fact “brain fingerprinting” is here today. Brain fingerprinting is based on the “ah-ha” response, an involuntary response by the brain to information it has been exposed to before. Dr. Lawrence Farwell, …

Making sleep optional

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
November 18, 2003
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It’s a safe bet that there have been a lot of bleary-eyed people around Regina this week, following last week’s Grey Cup revelry. But then, there are a lot of bleary-eyed people around all the time, since very few of us ever get as much sleep as we really need. That being the case, wouldn’t …

Musical preferences

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
July 22, 2003
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You would think, music being so much a part of almost everyone’s life, that there would be a lot of scientific research on why we choose to listen to the music we do–but you would be wrong. Of the nearly 11,000 articles published between 1965 and 2002 in the leading social and personality scientific journals, …

Happiness

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 24, 2003
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“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights, according to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but pursuing happiness isn’t the same thing as actually catching it, alas. However, new research is indicating ways we can increase our happiness quotient scientifically. Until recently the only way to measure an emotion scientifically was to focus …

Making miksates…um, mistakes

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
January 5, 2003
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The holidays are supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation, but if you’re like me, after several nights of parties, you feel pretty much as sleep-deprived as you did before the holidays, if not more so. Also if you’re like me, when you get tired you begin to make more miksates–er, mistakes, ranging …

Tinnitus

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
March 26, 2002
4 mins to read
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There are millions of people for whom absolute silence does not exist. When the world grows silent, they still hear a ringing, hissing, roaring, whistling, chirping or clicking. They suffer from tinnitus. I’m one of them. Most of the time it doesn’t bother me, but if I listen, I can always hear a high-pitched …