Tags: fMRI

Sometimes the meaning is in what you don’t say rather than in what you do say. For example, unlike English, many East Asian languages, as well as European languages including Spanish and Italian, don’t always use pronouns, such as I, he, she, it, him, or her. In English the answer to the question, “Did John see Mary?” is “He saw Mary.” But in Chinese the answer can simply be “Saw Mary.” A team led by University of Georgia researchers has been…

Whether it’s sarcasm, a punchline or a comical accident, humor is ubiquitous around the world. No matter the culture or language, humor involves substantial high-level mental processing. A new meta-analysis by University of Georgia psychology researchers shows humor also exhibits a surprising amount of brain activity associated with emotional processes – findings that suggest humor provides its own kind of reward. While a great…

Researchers in the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center have used an imaging method normally reserved for humans to analyze brain activity in live agricultural swine models, and they have discovered that pig brains are even better platforms than previously thought for the study of human neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s: By using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), the researchers…