Brain Regions, Human Instinct and the Ancient Art of Invention

Instinct.
The brain can detect the likelihood that a person is about to make a mistake. The Anterior Cingulated Cortex (ACC) not only helps us sort through difficult decisions, but actually learns to predict bad consequences. The region has long been known to be a part of the brain's executive control system, helping to mediate between fact-based reasoning and primal emotional responses to love, fear and anticipation.

Deja Vu?
Studies indicate that the brain structures of the Hippocampus and the parahippocampal Cortex play differing roles in this process.

While the Hippocampus enables the subject to remember events consciously, the Parahipppocampal Cortex can distinguish between accustomed and unaccustomed impulses, and do this without even referring to a concrete experience.

Josef Spatt of the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute in Vienna has based his hypothesis on this idea, suggesting that deja vu occurs when the Parahippocampus, without the Hippocampus being involved, emits a signal of being accustomed to, or comfortable with, a sensation.

Mind Games: Durham Center Studies Mental Phenomena
The center concentrates its research on four types of mental phenomena: remote viewing, in which a person can see something happening at the same time somewhere else; telepathy, or the mental connection between two people; pre-cognition, or the ability to see into the future; and mental intention, where a person concentrates on one object and tries to have an effect on it.

What the Ancients Did For Us
"We have a tendency to think of ancient peoples as being stupid because they didn’t have television or mobile phones," says series presenter Adam Hart-Davis. "But of course they were just as intelligent as we are, and they didn’t waste their time watching television or texting each other. So they used their intelligence and invented some wonderful things." posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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