Unconscious Brain Still Registers Pain

jerry submitted, created time 2 months 3 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Most of the time, doctors have a simple way to determine if a patient needs pain medication: They ask. But when a brain injury renders someone unable to respond to questions, the right course of action becomes murkier. Now a study finds that the brains of some patients with brain injuries respond to an unpleasant electrical shock much as do the brains of healthy people, suggesting that these patients may feel pain even though they're unable to show it

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Runner's high proved non-mythical via PET scan

Darkfrog submitted, created time 9 months 1 week (www.nytimes.com)

Sit up, couch potatoes: the runner's high is real. Proving the yea or nea of the marathoner's mescalin has been difficult because, as one researcher put it, it's not such a good idea to give someone a spinal tap and then send 'em right off to run a 10K. Recently, someone came up with the bright idea of using PET scans (they copied off the dudes doing pain research).

This article is interesting more for the way in which the researchers applied existing technology to solve a problem than for the subject they're studying

3 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: exercise running athletes sports drugs euphoria illegal drugs illicit drugs PET scans PET cognition perception

Brain waves reveal intensity of pain

yangjane submitted, created time 1 year 1 month (www.nature.com)

Recordings from electrodes in the human brain may offer the first objective way to measure the intensity of pain.Researchers have found a neural signal that correlates with the amount of pain that an individual feels. The signal could be used to refine pain-relief techniques that involve stimulating the brain with electricity.
In the article, researchers tonud the relationship between pain and brain waves: The more pain that is experienced, the longer the waves last. Will the research reduce pain of patients?

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Musical intervals in speech

addict submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.pnas.org)

Throughout history and across cultures, humans have created music using pitch intervals that divide octaves into the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Why these specific intervals in music are preferred, however, is not known. In the present study, we analyzed a database of individually spoken English vowel phones to examine the hypothesis that musical intervals arise from the relationships of the formants in speech spectra that determine the perceptions of distinct vowels.

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: language music formants scales perception