Today is the German national day against stroke. Stroke is caused by a disruption of the blood flow in the brain and can lead to serious impairments of movement, speech and other functions, or even to death.

 How do factors like hypertension, obesity or smoking increase the risk? What symptoms signal the onset of a stroke? And what can be done to help rehabilitation? Arno Villringer, director of the Department of Neurology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences and coordinator of the german Competence Network Stroke, talks about these questions on Deutsche Welle TV.

Find additional information at:

Competence Network Stroke

http://www.kompetenznetz-schlaganfall.de/89.0.html

Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

http://www.cbs.mpg.de/depts/n-3

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By Peter Zekert.

In a widely noticed study, developmental psychologists reported that 14-month-old infants imitate an unusual action if it was chosen deliberately by the person they observed, but not if it could be attributed to external constraints. This selective imitation was put forth as evidence for an early understanding of rational action and action goals. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig now present a much simpler explanation for the finding. A replication study revealed that the observed differences in imitation were likely caused by a distraction during the experiments. The study „Rethinking ‘Rational Imitation’ in 14-Month-Old Infants: A Perceptual Distraction Approach“ has been published at PLoS ONE.  (More)

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by Burak Yildiz, Research Group Modelling of dynamic perception and action.

Do you enjoy waking up on a Sunday morning with sunshine, blue sky, and joyful bird chirps on your window? Have you ever wondered how one of the most complex vocalizations in nature is produced by tiny little songbirds? Well... Researchers have tried to understand the fundamentals of song production, recognition and learning in birds for more than 50 years. Many believe that the answer will also give us hints about how humans learn, produce and also understand speech.

Female zebra finch (photo: Stefan Leitner, MPI for Ornithology)

Songbirds, similar to humans, gain their vocal abilities early in life by listening to adults, memorizing, and practicing their songs [1]. In most species, usually the males sing and females listen. Female birds choose their mates by listening to the songs that carry information about the strength, learning capabilities and origins of the male. Similarly, male birds distinguish the songs of their neighbors from the songs of strangers to protect their territories [2]. But how do their brains do all this? (More)

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Can you hear your own brain? Of course, you cannot. I nevertheless find myself returning to this fascinating play of thought. We often talk of “brain waves”. This is most likely inspired by the old images of electroencephalographs (“EEG”) that recorded electrical voltage changes straight from a participant’s scalp and scribbled them onto meter-long papers. Here is a picture from Berger’s famous first publications in the late 1920s:

This simple observation holds of course various truths about the brain. First, the brain looks messy when you try and plot its ”output” without further analysis or decomposition techniques at hand. Second, it does look like waves. There seem to be inherent waxing and waning, a rhythm, or as physicists (I am not one, in case you wondered) call it, “oscillations”.  (More)

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