harvestheart:

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Story of Phineas Gage - HISTORIC PHOTOGRAPHY - Estimated Date 1855

A daguerreotype image believed to be of railway worker Phineas Gage holding a tamping iron that went through his head during an explosion on a worksite in 1848. Phineas P. Gage (July 9?, 1823 – May 21, 1860)was a railroad construction foreman now remembered for his incredible survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying one or both of his brain’s frontal lobes, and for that injury’s reported effects on his personality and behavior—effects so profound that friends saw him as “no longer Gage.” Gage recovered from the accident and retained full possession of his reason, but his wife and other people close to him soon began to notice dramatic changes in his personality. Phineas Gage’s brain was not subjected to any medical examination at that time, but seven years later his body was exhumed so his skull could be studied. Today Gage’s skull is on permanent display at Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/07/22/science/wilgus_gage_hs.jpg

psydoctor8:

“A slow mind may nurture more creative ideas The ability to show the quality of connections within the brain is leading to better understanding of creativity, intelligence and mental illness – and some spectacular pictures to boot.

Above, White Matter.
Having recruited a group of healthy twins from 20 to 30 years old, Paul Thompson of the University of California, Los Angeles, made these pictures of their brains’ white matter. This is largely composed of the fatty myelin sheaths around neurons and so reveals the brain’s connections. Thompson used diffusion imaging, which measures the direction in which water diffuses through white matter, to show the speed of the connections.

This is the white matter across a whole brain. In this picture, the colours don’t indicate connection speed – they merely allow the connections to be distinguished from each other. The bundle sticking out on the right are the optical tracts, leading to the eyes.”

(Image: David Shattuck, Arthur Toga, Paul Thompson/UCLA Lab of Neuro Imaging)

Como se forma a memória (via thiagolyra)

brynlutes:

smarterplanet:

emergentfutures:

Brain scan reveals who will keep their promises

New-found patterns in brain activity can reveal whether someone intends to keep their word.

The finding raises the possibility of using brain scans to determine the true intentions of criminals who are up for early release on parole, according to Thomas Baumgartner of the University of Zurich in Switzerland.