The nervous system takes a decision ten seconds before the individual is conscious of it: a German study calls into question the concept of free will! The human brain takes a decision almost ten seconds before the person is aware: the claim comes from researchers of Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, led by neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes. With this claim, the German scientist are taking into question the principle of "free will" during the decision-making process. The researchers asked 14 volunteers to undergo brain imaging during the course of a task: the experiment was to take a decision: in this case pressing between two buttons, with the right hand or with the left at the choice of the subject. At the same time, on a screen it was shown a stream of letters, at a rate of one every half second, and volunteers had to report the letter on the screen at the time of their decision.

In these monkeys 80 per cent of the neuron cell cortex is multisensory phonetic and also responds to visual stimuli. Thus, all the information is integrated It is known for some time that monkeys are able to integrate information in various ways to recognize monkeys in the group and their intentions, just like us and like many other other animals. What we did not know until today was how our "cousins" could associate verses and faces, optimising thus the process of individual recognition. The experiment helps to clarify that which was published in Journal of Neuroscience and was conducted by Aif Ghazanfar and collaborators at Princeton (USA) on a kind of macaco. The researchers found that, in these monkeys, many neurons are in fact multi-sensorial and respond differently depending on whether the hearing and visual stimuli are at the same time or not. For monkeys, which live in social groups and must manage complex relationships - conflicting and friendly - it is crucial to combine auditory stimuli (leading information-type sound, as a sound threat) and images (which provide summary information, such as the color of skin or facial features). The group Ghazanfar could shed light on the mechanism of integration of different stimuli by measuring the activity of visual and auditory cortex areas of the brain, respectively, for image and sound. Measurements were made under different conditions: in one case the animals could both see fellow companions in the group, listen to their sounds, while in other cases the animals could alternatively listen to the auditory component only or see the companions (only visual component).

Recognizing the native language of a person after the electrical waves in the brain! By analyzing brain waves we can reveal the identity of an individual's language. Someone can involuntarily, because of a temporary amnesia or silence, or voluntarily, to try to avoid providing information on their origins. The discovery was made by Italian researchers and published on Biological Psychology. The study, coordinated by Alice Mado Proverb Electrophysiology Laboratory of the Department of cognitive psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, in collaboration with Roberta Adorni, and Alberto Zani, a researcher of the Institute of Physiology and Molecular Bioimaging of Cnr-Segrate in Milan , shows that there is a region of the brain, called "area for the visual form of words", which is located in the so-called fusiform cortex in the left occipital / temporal region of the brain. This automatically recognizes the shape of the letters and words, and it is very sensitive to levels of familiarity.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have been able to associate a brain activation pattern to the memory of an image. According to a study in Nature. Reading the thoughts of other people is not yet possible, but scientists are working on it. One tool developed by Jack L. Gallant and collaborators at the University of Berkeley (California) is able to recognize an image that a person has just seen through his brain activity. Two of the authors of the study published in Nature - Kendrick Kay and Thomas Naselaris - were submitted in person by observing the experiment at random photographs from a group of 120 during brain scans using functional magnetic resonance (fMri). The results of fMri, combined with a mathematical model, have served to associate the images neuronal activity that a person has just had before our eyes.