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Memories are strengthened via brainwaves produced during sleep, new study shows: Researchers use medical imaging to map areas involved in recalling learned information while we slumber -- ScienceDaily

The researchers found that during spindles of the learning night, the regions of the brain that were instrumental in processing faces were reactivated. They also observed that the regions in the brain involved in memory -- especially the hippocampus -- were more active during spindles in the subjects who remembered the task better after sleep. This reactivation during sleep spindles of the regions involved in learning and memory "falls in line with the theory that during sleep, you are strengthening memories by transferring information from the hippocampus to the regions of the cortex that are important for the consolidation of that specific type of information," he says.
#synchronize #brain #memory #fMRI #eeg - sciencedaily.com

Neurofeedback gets you back in the zone: New study from biomedical engineers demonstrates that a brain-computer interface can improve your performance -- ScienceDaily

There were three feedback conditions (BCI, sham, and silence) randomly assigned for every new flight attempt. In the BCI condition, subjects heard the sound of a low-rate synthetic heartbeat that was continuously modulated in loudness as a function of the level of inferred task-dependent arousal, as decoded from the EEG. The higher that level of arousal, the louder the feedback and vice versa. Participants' task performance in the BCI condition, measured as time and distance over which the subject can navigate before failure, was increased by around 20 percent. "Simultaneous measurements of pupil dilation and heart rate variability showed that the neurofeedback indeed reduced arousal, causing the subjects to remain calm and fly beyond the point at which they would normally fail," says Josef Faller, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral research scientist in BME. "Our work is the first demonstration of a BCI system that uses online neurofeedback to shift arousal state and improve task performance in accordance with the Yerkes-Dodson law."
#anxiety #eeg #biofeedback - sciencedaily.com

Q&A With 'The Performance Cortex' Author On Neuroscience In Sports

But the problem — and this is what the teams were kind of stuck on — is that it takes 40 minutes or so. That’s a barrier that, at this point, you can’t really get around. If you’re going to actually get anything out of the technology and get any usable information, you need to have this rigorous approach. You can’t just stick a guy in an EEG, have him in front of a laptop and see 10 pitches. You’re not going to get anything out of that. So it takes time. Teams at this point are so afraid of burdening the players with any extracurricular activities. That was an issue. Until the point where the neuroscience technology gets to be so easy to use and relatively [burden]-free where you can wear it while walking around, I think that’s going to be a hard barrier for entry. Or it’s just going to take a team to say we’re willing to have our players sacrifice some time for what we might be able to get out of it.
#sports #eeg - sporttechie.com

Neuroscientists discover a brain signal that indicates whether speech has been understood -- ScienceDaily

To test if human brains actually compute the similarity between words as we listen to speech, the researchers recorded electrical brainwave signals recorded from the human scalp -- a technique known as electroencephalography or EEG -- as participants listened to a number of audiobooks. Then, by analysing their brain activity, they identified a specific brain response that reflected how similar or different a given word was from the words that preceded it in the story. Crucially, this signal disappeared completely when the subjects either could not understand the speech (because it was too noisy), or when they were just not paying attention to it. Thus, this signal represents an extremely sensitive measure of whether or not a person is truly understanding the speech they are hearing, and, as such, it has a number of potential important applications.
#synchronize #words #meaning #eeg - sciencedaily.com

Can Big Data Help Psychiatry Unravel the Complexity of Mental Illness? - Scientific American

Psychiatrist Charles DeBattista of Stanford University and colleagues, compared electroencephalograms (EEGs) collected from depressed patients, with a database of EEGs from over 1,800 patients that included information about response to specific treatments. Using EEG measures to guide decisions about treatment alternatives led to significantly better outcomes than clinical treatment selection.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #paleotherapy #psychiatry #big-data #eeg - scientificamerican.com