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Byte Sized Letter Fourteen
Byte Sized Letter Fourteen
On This Week's Newsletter - Tuesday, 01/28 to Monday, 02/03
On This Week's Newsletter - Tuesday, 01/28 to Monday, 02/03
Click on any of the titles to read the full piece!
A recent Quanta article dove into concept cells, neurons in the hippocampus meant to represent concepts, which include people. The most famous examples are Jennifer Aniston cells, which fire when you see an image of the Friends star. This shows hyper-specificity in the brain, but it is untrue that you have a single neuron for every concept. Instead, you have cells representing the concepts that play a role in your life, which you consistently return to.
An extension of the concept of cell theory is that these cells are the building blocks of memories. When you read a sentence or watch a video, cells that correspond to the concepts you see light up, allowing the brain a shortcut into encoding what you consumed. This also helps with retrieval.
This Penn State study examined how subjects’ mental fatigue is affected during typical concussion testing procedures. Healthy, athletic participants underwent controlled concussion tests and had their fatigue levels quantified at the start, middle, and end of the test. Researchers used EEGs and self-reporting to assess mental fatigue. Results indicated that concussion testing, which tests for mental fatigue, itself causes a significant amount of mental fatigue, which may interfere with the results.
This Jiangxi University of Technology study had participants simulate driving and record their brain waves using an EEG. Researchers collected baseline and fatigued EEG data, self-reports, and eye-tracking data. They implemented an ultra-unique ‘entropy fusion’ technique, combining various complex data manipulations to create insightful features. Through this, the researchers achieved 98% accuracy, despite only using four channels.
This Utrecht University study investigated how our brain manages visual working memory by tracking attention patterns using visually evoked stimuli. Participants had to remember the appearance of one or two visual patterns while researchers monitored where their attention was focused. The findings showed that our brain focuses on remembered items' locations, even when location isn't important. Additionally, people who were better at shifting attention away from distracting information performed tasks more quickly.
This Colorado College study investigated how different types of meditation affect our perception of time. Researchers compared two types of meditation: Open Monitoring (OM), where practitioners observe thoughts freely, and Focused Attention (FA), which involves concentrating on a specific point, such as a mantra. Experienced meditators performed timing tasks during both meditation styles and while listening to audiobooks. Results showed that people tended to underestimate time durations during OM meditation, while FA meditation had no significant effect.
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