Bad decisions

If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers. But if they were offered 20 candy bars, including a Snickers, the choice became less clear. They would sometimes pick something other than the Snickers, even though it was still their favorite. When Glimcher would remove all the choices except the Snickers and the selected candy, participants would wonder why they hadn’t chosen their favorite.

Turns out that the brain is an expensive thing to run. If you want to dig deeper, here’s your entrance to the rabbit hole: a fascinating article on the Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions.

j j j

June 26th, 2012

Baby’s birth on an MRI movie

The Charite University Hospital in Berlin recently released a video that documents the first birth in an MRI machine. (And it turned out that New Scientists has a video about how the baby got there!)

For the video, go to NewScientist’s webpage.

The video captures the active second stage of labour as the mother expels the fetus. The technique, called cinematic MRI, takes repeated images of the same slice of the body before joining them up to create an ultra-detailed video. It was recently turned on unborn twins for the first time to study a common complication where one fetus receives more of the blood supply and becomes much larger than the other.

By the way, there MRI video about the conception: Human sex from the inside out.

j j j