Man posts interactive browser for his own brain (via BoingBoing)
Experts Warn Over Health Check Brain Scans In UK
A new study has voiced concern about the growing market for brain screening tests, which people can buy as part of a general health check-up in the United Kingdom.
Researchers warn that paid-for brain scans – increasingly popular with healthy people who want to allay fears about undiagnosed brain cancer and stroke – may do more harm than good.
They reach their conclusion having analysed the results of almost 20,000 brain scans from people who undertook the tests for a variety of reasons, such as general health check-ups or volunteering for medical research. None of them had any symptoms suggesting that they had an underlying brain condition.
The researchers found that almost three per cent of healthy people had an abnormality on a brain MRI scan and warn that even when an incidental abnormality – such as a weakened blood vessel in the brain or a benign tumour – is discovered, there is no clear medical evidence that treatment would do more good than harm.
The experts say this lack of evidence can create anxiety, with many patients feeling that a tough choice has to be made between risky, potentially unnecessary surgery or leaving their condition untreated…. (continues @ ScienceDaily)
Guitarists' Brains Swing Together
When musicians play along together it isn’t just their instruments that are in time – their brain waves are too. New research shows how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do.
In a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain’s axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain’s wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.
Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of “insulation” that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.
