Neuroscience and the undecided voter

As we enter the final week of a seemingly endless election campaign, opinion polls continue to identify a substantial fraction of voters who consider themselves “undecided.” Although their numbers are dwindling, they could still determine the outcome of the race in some states. Comedians and other commentators have portrayed these people as fools, unable to choose even when confronted with the starkest of contrasts.

Recent research in neuroscience and psychology, however, suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think. They’re not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates. They may be more willing than others to take their time — or else just unaware that they have essentially already made a choice.

Your Brain's Secret Ballot (New York Times, 27 October 2008)

Making GPS irrelevant

[Researchers] used magnetic scanners to explore the brain activity of taxi drivers as they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London's streets.

Different brain regions were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks or thought about their customers.

[...]

Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus - a region of the brain that plays an important role in navigation.

Their brains even "grow on the job" as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets - information famously referred to as "The Knowledge".

"We were keen to go beyond brain structure - and see what activity is going on inside the brains of taxi drivers while they are doing their job," said Dr Hugo Spiers from University College London.

[London] Taxi drivers 'have brain satnav' (BBC News, 13 Sept 2008)

Oh, just a sudden impulse, I guess

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat (New Scientist, 12 March 2008)

And here's the demo:

H/t: Marc Andreesen

This is your brain on jazz

It would come as no surprise to the late saxophonist and improvisational master John Coltrane, but when accomplished jazz musicians play free-form, their brain activity suggests a release of self-expression from conscious monitoring and self-censorship.

Such neural activity may lie at the heart of musical improvisation and perhaps other improvisational feats, propose auditory scientist Charles J. Limb of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and neurologist Allen R. Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md.

"What we think is happening is that when you're telling your own musical story, you're shutting down neural impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas," says Limb, himself a trained jazz saxophonist.

Riff Riders: Brain scans tune in to jazz improvisers (Science News, 8 March 2008)

Fascinating article. They had to design a foldable, nonmetallic keyboard that would fit into an MRI machine, and then they did live brainscans of musicians as they played improvisationally:

The part of the frontal brain that has been linked to planning and self-censorship saw a marked decline in activity. At the same time, activity spiked in a small frontal structure that has been linked to being able to tell a story about oneself.