Researchers find how the brain decides how we listen to our mobile

While it may seem obvious that you hold your phone with your dominant hand, researchers have uncovered the brain processes which lead us to decide which side we listen on.

If you are a left-brain thinker, the chances are you use your right hand to hold your phone up to your right ear, according to the study from the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

The research reveals a strong correlation between brain dominance and the ear used to listen to a phone.

More than 70 per cent of the study’s participants held their phone up to the ear on the same side as their dominant hand, the study found.

Left-brain dominant people - who account for about 95 per cent of the population and have their speech and language centre located on the left side of their brain - are more likely to use their right hand for writing and other everyday tasks.

Likewise, the Henry Ford Hospital study reveals that most left-brain dominant people also hold the phone to their right ear.

Right-brain dominant people are more likely to use their left hand to hold their phone to their left ear.

‘Our findings have several implications, especially for mapping the language centre of the brain,’ said Dr Michael Seidman, of Henry Ford Hospital.

‘By establishing a correlation between cerebral dominance and sidedness of cell phone use, it may be possible to develop a less-invasive, lower-cost option to establish the side of the brain where speech and language occurs rather than the Wada test, a procedure that injects an anaesthetic into the carotid artery to put part of the brain to sleep in order to map activity.’

He notes that the study may also offer additional evidence that mobile phone use and tumours of the brain, head and neck are not linked.

Since nearly 80 per cent of people hold their phone to their right ear, he says if there were a strong connection there would be far more people diagnosed with cancer on the right side of their brain, head and neck, the dominant side for cell phone use.

The study began with the simple observation that most people use their right hand to hold a phone to their right ear.

This practice, Dr Seidman says, is illogical since it is challenging to listen on the phone with the right ear and take notes with the right hand.

To determine if there is an association between sidedness of cell phone use and auditory or language hemispheric dominance, the Henry Ford Hospital team developed an online survey using modifications of the Edinburgh Handedness protocol, a tool used for more than 40 years to assess handedness and predict cerebral dominance.

The survey included questions about which hand was used for tasks such as writing, time spent talking on a phone, whether the right or left ear is used to listen to phone conversations, and if respondents had been diagnosed with a brain or head and neck tumour.

On average, respondents’ phone usage was 540 minutes per month. The majority of respondents, 90 per cent, were right handed, nine per cent were left handed and one per cent was ambidextrous.

Among those who are right handed, 68 per cent reported that they hold the phone to their right ear, while 25 per cent used the left ear and seven per cent used both right and left ears.

For those who are left handed, 72 per cent said they used their left ear for phone conversations, while 23 per cent used their right ear and 5 per cent had no preference.

The study also revealed that having a hearing difference can impact ear preference for phone use.

In all, the study found that there is a correlation between brain dominance and laterality of phone use, and there is a significantly higher probability of using the dominant hand side ear.

Why babies in all countries on earth say mama,papa

No matter which country you are born in,and no matter what your mother tongue is,the way you call your mother is always  similar with “mama”.

"Mama" is a universal word, describing the woman who gave us the most cherished love in our most vulnerable state. Almost every language boasts a recognizable form of it. While it's true that most languages vary when it comes to the formal word mother, the intimate mama stays the same in each language. But "mama" doesn't spring from love. It happens because of two things: Lazy little baby mouths, and boobs.

Research finds that usually they start with the sounds made with closed lips,such as mama,papa. Or "labial sounds" such as /m/ /p/ /b/.

So why do babies gravitate to the "m" sound instead of "p" or "b"? Because of breasts, of course! The "m" sound is the easiest for a baby mouth to make when wrapped around a warm delicious breast. Even as adults, we still associate "mmm" with something being yummy and good. So does your baby.

When we heard the pronunciation  of  “mmmm”,we define it as mother subconsciously.So mama becomes popular with earth humans.

(source:theweek)

A 52-year-old male patient returned to work despite serious memory disorder caused by herpes encephalitis

Most individuals with herpesviral encephalitis show a decrease in their level of consciousness and an altered mental state presenting as confusion, and changes in personality.But there is a  52-year-old male , who had suffered from severe impairment in recent memory due to sequelae of herpes encephalitis, for 20 years. He returned to his highly intellectual work and performed well despite his doctor’s prediction.However, the patient showed consistently poor results on various neuropsychological memory tests, he only demonstrated incredible performance at work. 

This is rare to see. Why happened?Does it related with some kind of brain activity?Recommend an article from Scientific Research Publishing to you . The article studied this phenomenon.

When Do Babies Become Conscious?

For everyone who’s looked into an infant’s sparkling eyes and wondered what goes on in its little fuzzy head, there’s now an answer. New research shows that babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old.

For decades, neuroscientists have been searching for an unmistakable signal of consciousness in electrical brain activity. Such a sign could determine whether minimally conscious or anesthetized adults are aware—and when consciousness begins in babies.

Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity: When your senses detect something, such as a moving object, the vision center of your brain activates, even if the object goes by too fast for you to notice. But if the object remains in your visual field for long enough, the signal travels from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which holds the image in your mind long enough for you to notice. Scientists see a spike in brain activity when the senses pick something up, and another signal, the “late slow wave,” when the prefrontal cortex gets the message. The whole process takes less than one-third of a second.

Researchers in France wondered if such a two-step pattern might be present in infants. The team monitored infants’ brain activity through caps fitted with electrodes. More than 240 babies participated, but two-thirds were too squirmy for the movement-sensitive caps. The remaining 80 (ages 5 months, 12 months, or 15 months) were shown a picture of a face on a screen for a fraction of a second.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of CNRS, the French national research agency, in Paris watched for swings in electrical activity, called event-related potentials (ERPs), in the babies’ brains. In babies who were at least 1 year old, Kouider saw an ERP pattern similar to an adult’s, but it was about three times slower. The team was surprised to see that the 5-month-olds also showed a late slow wave, although it was weaker and more drawn out than in the older babies. Kouider speculates that the late slow wave may be present in babies as young as 2 months.

This late slow wave may indicate conscious thought, Kouider and colleagues report online today in Science. The wave, feedback from the prefrontal cortex, suggests that the image is stored briefly in the baby’s temporary “working memory.” And consciousness, Kouider says, is composed of working memory.

The team displayed remarkable patience to gather data from infants, says cognitive neuroscientist Lawrence Ward of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in Canada, who was not involved in the study. However, the work, although well executed, is not the last word, he says. “I expect we’ll find several different neural activity patterns to be correlated with consciousness.”

Comparing infant brain waves to adult patterns is tricky, says Charles Nelson, a neuropsychologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “ERP components change dramatically over the first few years of life,” he writes in an e-mail. “I would be reluctant to attribute the same mental operation (i.e., consciousness) in infants as in adults simply because of similar patterns of brain activity.”

“He’s right, the ERP components are not exactly the same as in adults,” Kouider responds, but the ERP signature he saw had the same characteristics.

Kouider next hopes to explore how these signals of consciousness connect to learning, especially language development. “We make the assumption that babies are learning very quickly and that they’re fully unconscious of what they learn,” Kouider says. “Maybe that’s not true.”

(via:wired)