Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Some kind of explosion in that area today.
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Exploring how storytelling strategies shape memories
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1101559

This study suggests that how people hear about an event shapes the way their brain makes a memory of that experience...

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Like radar, a brain wave sweeps a cortical region to read out information held in working memory
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1102040

It shows that waves impact performance as they sweep across the surface of the cortex. This raises the possibility that traveling waves are organizing or even performing neural computation...

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How people process mental images versus real-life visuals
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1101562

While visual perception relied on posterior brain regions, mental imagery relied more on frontal areas. Thus, there may be distinct mechanisms for spatial attention depending on whether people are imagining or seeing visuals...

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How do people learn new facts?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1101545

These findings suggest that the mechanism for learning new facts about the world is partially distinct from the previously well-characterized brain mechanisms for remembering things that happen in our lives, which depends on different structures...

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Do animals fall for optical illusions? What fish and birds can teach us about perception
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1101783

The study reminds us that variation within a species can be as revealing as differences between species. The doves’ mixed responses suggest that individual experience or innate bias can strongly shape how an animal interprets illusions. Just like in humans, where some people are strongly fooled by illusions and others hardly at all, animal perception is not uniform. By comparing species as different as fish and birds, we get a glimpse of the extraordinary diversity of perceptual worlds...

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When is the brain like a subway station? When it’s processing many words at once
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1102471

We found that the brain juggles competing demands by moving information to different parts of the brain over time. This means that multiple sources of information can be processed at the same time, without them interfering with each other. This is similar to a subway system: by the time the next train arrives at the station, the previous train has moved along to the next stop.

The brain’s coding system elegantly balances the preservation of information over time with minimizing overlap among different words and sounds. This system provides a clear view of how the brain may organize and interpret rapidly unfolding speech in real time, linking the processing of language to their neurological foundations.

The "mind’s eye" doesn’t focus like our vision, even for people who have one
https://www.iflscience.com/the-minds-eye...-one-81261

INTRO: People recalling a familiar image use different brain mechanisms to focus on a component than those who are viewing the situation live, a new study indicates. The reasons why the brain has evolved a different process for this task are not known, but might hold the key to understanding why some people have this capacity and others do not.

A few years ago, many frequent Internet users were astonished to discover that some people have no “mind’s eye”, the capacity to visualize things that they cannot see at the time, also known as aphantasia. A smaller group were at least as amazed to learn that other people can, and that references to such capacities were not merely metaphorical.

Possibly influenced by these exchanges, research into the working of the mind’s eye, where it exists, has picked up, for example finding that psychedelics may switch it on. The most recent example investigated how the brain responds when challenged to focus on part of a remembered map, in contrast to a scene laid out before it, revealing crucial differences... (MORE - details)