oh my god my dad just went out to walk the dog and he must have got halfway down the street and then he just came back and I was like “what’s the matter” and he just said really quietly “i forgot the dog” and my dog was just siTTING BY THE DOORSTEP WITH HIS LEASH ON LOOKING REALLY SAD kOMFGYOD
sherlock meme
• seven outfits - [3/7] the purple shirt of sex
(Source: andrewsbafta)
Via For the love of god, Montresor!
ABORT ABORT
HIDE EVERYTHING
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
HIDE THE PORN
MAGNETOXCHARLES OTP 5EVER.
I don’t give a fuck.
RUN. HIDE.
hey
(Source: rawrrawrraygor)
How The Brain Turns Reality Into Dreams
Dreams make perfect sense when you’re having them. Yet, they leave you befuddled the next morning, wondering “where did that come from?” The answer may lie in the dreams of people with amnesia, researchers report in an issue of Science.
Much of the fodder for our dreams comes from recent experiences. For this reason, scientists have tentatively supposed that the dreaming brain draws from its “declarative memory” system, which includes newly learned information.
The declarative memory stores information that you can “declare” you know, such as the square root of nine, or the name of your dog. Often, you can even remember when or where you learned something - for example, the day you discovered the harsh truth about Santa Claus. That’s called episodic memory.
People who permanently suffer from amnesia can’t add new declarative or episodic memories. The parts of their brains involved in storing this type of information, primarily a region called the hippocampus, have been damaged. Although amnesiacs can retain new information temporarily, they generally forget it a few minutes later.
If our dreams come from declarative memories, people with amnesia shouldn’t dream at all, or at least dream differently than others do. But new research directed by Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School suggests quite the opposite. Just like people with normal memory, amnesiacs replay recent experiences when they fall asleep, Stickgold’s study shows. The only difference seems to be that the amnesiacs don’t recognize what they’re dreaming about.
Dreaming of Tetris
Every day, the people in the study played several hours of the computer game Tetris, which requires directing falling blocks into the correct positions as they reach the bottom of the screen. At night, the amnesiacs didn’t remember playing the game. But, they did describe seeing falling, rotating blocks while they were falling asleep.
A second group of players with normal memories reported seeing the same images. Therefore, Stickgold’s research team concluded, dreams must come from the types of memory amnesiacs do have, which are called “implicit memories.” These are memories that scientists can measure even when individuals don’t know that they have them.
One class of implicit memories is found in the procedural memory system, which stores information that you use without really being able to say how you know what you’re doing. When you ride a bicycle for the first time in years, or type on a keyboard without looking, you’re relying on procedural memory.
Another type of implicit memory uses “semantic” knowledge, and resides in different parts of the brain, including a region called the neocortex. Semantic knowledge involves general, abstract concepts. Both groups of Tetris players, for example, only described seeing blocks, falling and rotating, and evidently did not see a desk, room, or computer screen, or feel their fingers on the keyboard.
Without help from the hippocampus, new semantic memories are too weak to be intentionally recalled. But they can still affect your behavior - for example, causing you to buy a certain brand of something you saw in an advertisement you don’t remember.
In contrast, the information in episodic memories is associated with specific times, places or events. Without these “anchors” to reality, it’s no wonder that dreams are so illogical and full of discontinuity, the study’s authors say.
Stickgold believes that dreams serve a purpose for the brain, allowing it to make necessary emotional connections among new pieces of information. “Dreams let you consolidate and integrate your experiences, without conflict with other input from real life,” Stickgold said. “Dreaming is like saying, ‘I’m going home, disconnecting the phone, nobody talk to me. I have to do work.’”
Because the hippocampus seems to be inaccessible for this “off-line” memory processing, the brain may use the abstract information in the neocortex instead. According to Stickgold’s theory, dreaming is like choosing an outfit by reaching into bins labeled “shirts,” “pants” and so on. You’ll rummage up something to wear, but it won’t be a perfectly matching ensemble.
In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage had a 3.5-foot, 13 pound tamping iron blown through the front of his skull in a construction accident. Hell of a way to start your Wednesday (yes, I checked). He survived.
The story of Phineas Gage is now the stuff of legend, taught to first-year neuroscience students around the world. How did this man survive a rod through the frontal lobe? Doctors that wrote of him later spoke of extreme behavioral changes, a man who was “. . . fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows”.
Unfortunately, the legend of Phineas Gage’s post-injury brain is largely exaggerated, or at least based on rather thin evidence. But still, he was still a changed man, even if not in the extreme ways his legend suggests.
UCLA’s Jack Van Horn has reconstructed a model of Phineas Gage’s connectome. In the image above, the lower left image shows the “connectogram” of 110 healthy right-handed males, the major highways and byways between brain regions (the brain stem is at 6 o’clock, left and right hemispheres at 9 and 3 o’clock). The lower right image shows the connections that were likely disrupted by the iron spike through Gage’s frontal lobe.
Mo Costandi has a great write-up that you should check out. We now have a map of the damage to Gage’s brain. But do we really know any more about his supposed behavioral changes? Thanks to the exaggerations and sideshow mentality of those who studied hm while alive, likely not.
BONUS: Be sure to check out Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer moderating this debate on how much stock we should put in the connectome.
(via Neurophilosophy blog)
till-the-end-of-my-days-sherlock:
Why is Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle not on this blog yet? What is wrong with me?
As compensation, have TWO pictures of his ‘tache. (All his writing talent comes from there. He uses it to communicate with Watson, like a moustache-radio.)
Moustaches of importance.
He needs to be in every Sherlockian’s blog.
His stache… O_o
Dat ‘stache
Bow down to our real Overlord.
Rule 1 of the Sherlock Fandom: Reblog the creator of Sherlock.
Rule 2: If you don’t reblog the creator, YOU WILL BE BOMBED.
Via You look sad when you think he can't see you.
About me
Just my life, brought to you by yours truly. Warning: Random Ramblings will take place, and some of them are guaranteed to make you say, "tl;dr"
