It seems easy to figure out what data visualization charts are bad. They’re the ones crammed with too much text, unnecessary ornamentation, garish colors, and cheap clip art. Edward Tufte, the noted design expert, derided such decorations as redundant at best, useless at worst. He called them “chart junk.” But the debate still goes on between…
Category: Neuroscience
Grey And White Matter Abnormalities In Children Who Stutter
Children who stutter have less grey matter in key regions of the brain responsible for speech production than children who do not stutter, according to a new study by a University of Alberta researcher. The findings augment our understanding of how the brain is built for speech production and why people stutter. They also affirm…
Do Negative Emotions Make Stronger Memories?
Bad feelings, like anger or fear, can enhance your memory for places, a new study verifies. Oliver Baumann from the Queensland Brain Institute found that associating negative imagery with specific locations activates a part of the brain responsible for forming memory of places during navigation, the parahippocampal cortex: “This heightened recall occurs automatically, without people…
What Keeping A Good Beat Has To Do With Learning To Read
A study from Northwestern University shows a relationship between neural response consistency and ability to keep a beat. The study is the first to give biological evidence linking the ability to keep a beat to the neural encoding of speech sounds, and has noteworthy implications for reading. Previous research found a link between reading ability…
How Brain Synapses Get Organized Early in Life
As newborns, our brains aren’t awfully organized. But as we grow and learn, things get a bit more steady. The brain pathways that will serve us our whole lives start to organize, and less active, inefficient synapses are shut down. But why and how does this happen? And just what happens when it doesn’t go…
Visual Misperception Called Boundary Extension Fills In Blanks
Researchers at University of Georgia are closer to understanding why people experience a phenomenon known as boundary extension. Boundary extension occurs when a person takes a look at a scene, looks away and then remembers seeing a more wide-angle view than was actually present. In a few seconds, the brain helps most people extend the…
Our Brain Sees the Personal Space of Other People Just like Our Own
Our brains interpret the space near other people just as if this was the space near ourselves, according to research from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The study gives a new approach to a question that psychologists and neuroscientists have long had concerning how the brain represents other people and the events that happen to those…
The Brain Circuitry That Mutes Perception Of Your Own Voice
Researchers at Duke University have drawn the first wiring diagram of the brain system which enables the intricate interaction between the motor system and the auditory system to happen. In normal conversations, the brain is continuously adjusting the volume to soften the sound of your own voice and increase the voices of others in the…
fMRI Study Deciphers Insomnia’s Wandering Mind
It’s well known that people with insomnia can have trouble concentrating during the day. A new brain imaging study may help explain why. “We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off ‘mind-wandering’ brain regions irrelevant to the task,” said Sean…