Whenever you recognize someone or something–your mother, the Space Needle, an iguana–it’s because certain neurons in your brain light up with activity almost exclusively in response to that one thing. You may pretend you don’t know who Heidi Montag is, but somewhere in your gray matter, your brain cells are proving you wrong. Researchers at CalTech used this principle to create a spooky game in which subjects manipulated a computer screen with their minds.
The research, l ...read more
Step 1: Put study subject in MRI machine. Step 2: Show subject video of a huge, hairy tarantula creeping toward their toes. Step 3: Watch panic light up in the brain.
For a study out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dean Mobbs and colleagues put their subjects through this fright fest to sort out how the brain responds to different parts of a threat. It’s not all about the presence of a creepy crawler, Mobbs found—it’s whether that creepy cr ...read more
