Phone Fears And Dolphin Directions: The Week ’s Best Psychology Links

We reported earlier this week on the similarities between dolphin and human personalities — but do dolphins also have “handedness” like humans? Past work had suggested that the aquatic mammals showed behavioural asymmetries in their movements, preferring to spin rightward. But a new study casts doubt on those findings, writes researcher Kelly Jaakkola at Scientific American. “Mini-brains” — brain organoids grown from stem cells in the lab — are used to study the development of the human brain, though they are far more primitive than real brains. But researchers have reported a surprising finding: after around 9 months, even these basic organoids show changes in gene expression similar to that in human babies after birth. The results suggest that mini-brains may be useful for studying disorders that emerge after birth, rather than just prenatally, reports Kelly Servick at Science. A lot of human neuroscience is about finding a signal in all of the background noise — identifying which regions are more active during a certain task, say, while ignoring the other activity that is going on in the brain. But what if there is useful information in all of that noise? At Wired, Elizabeth Landau reports on studies that have linked patterns of white noise within EEG data to aspects of behaviour and cognition. Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Weekly links Source Type: blogs