The latest news:

BM-Science wishes to all its partners and collaborators a prosperous New Year of 2010 with plenty of valuable professional achievements.

BM-Science participates in a Multi-disciplinary Research Workshop addressing the underlying mechanisms of advancement in cognitive processes. Our researchers presented a talk on theme “BRAIN AND MIND: A Unified Metastable Continuum” where they outline the key aspects of both architectures of the phenomenal consciousness and operational brain functioning and shown the isomorphism relation between them through the shared notion of operation. Brothers Fingelkurts re-stated their work theory that brain operational architectonics and mind phenomenal architecture are the complementary aspects of the same metastable continuum.

The journal “Brain and Language“chooses the article “Cortical operational synchrony during audio-visual speech integration” published in Volume 85, Issue 2, May 2003, Pages 297-312 as A KEY ARTICLE REFLECTING THE JOURNAL'S NEW DIRECTION .

The Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis awards Dr(s). Fingelkurts with the Henry Guze Award for the article “Cortex functional connectivity as a neurophysiological correlate of hypnosis: an EEG case study” published in Neuropsychologia, 2007, V. 45. No 7. P. 1452-1462. The article was selected as the BEST RESEARCH PAPER

Researcher Alexander Fingelkurts (Ph.D.) holds the speech “EEG Temporal and Spatial Microstructure” at the 14th World Congress of Psychophysiology, St Petersburg, 2008.
http://www.world-psychophysiology.org/iop2008/ .

Researchers of BM-Science participate in the “Dream Catcher” experiment held within the scope of the international collaboration project “Other minds: The Neurophilosophy and Neuroethics of Intersubjectivity.”
By analyzing brain based data collected during sleep, the researchers try to reveal whether the subject was dreaming and what was the subject dreaming of. If the results are positive or passed better than chance, then the data (and the analysis result) must reflect “the phenomenal level” of brain organization.

BM-Science and the Italian research network “Mind, Consciousness and Language” have agreed to carry out a joint research project aiming to investigate brain operations underlying the production and comprehension of the meanings of words.
The results of this project are supposed to bring researchers closer in bridging the fundamental gap between brain and reflective mind, thus opening the road to important future technological applications in areas of human language and mind reading.

BM-Science Lab is closed between July 7th and July 21st.
We will resume our activity on Tuesday 22nd of July
We wish you a warm and pleasant summer!

The second volume of Finnish business magazine Yrittäjä-lehti publishes an interview with the BM-Science co-heads of research.
The interview can be found here in page 60.

Researches of BM-Science have held several courses for the public and specifically for child and primary school educators, paediatricians, and paediatric psychologists on "Educating a child – From the moment of conception to adolescence. What science and psychophysiology – in particular – can tell you and help you with this delicate task".

The course gives an overview over the development of the brain in the pre-natal phase and after birth as a basis for the emergence of cognitive functions. The development of the different psychological functions is analyzed in detail: perception, attention, memory, thinking, emotions, speech, psychological defense and temperament. The course also includes practical recommendations, while understanding these basic processes, to help parents and educators. Special attention was dedicated to the particular role of the phenomena of music and musical behaviour in education.

BM-Science would like to thank the participants for their interested and enthusiastic participation.

BM-Science wishes to all its collaborators and partners health, prosperity and professional and personal achievements in the coming year of 2008! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Researchers of BM-Science participate in the organization of the symposium “Differentiation of Mentally-specific and Non-specific Brain Activations: Temporal and Spatial Scales” in the frame of the 14th World Congress of Psychophysiology which will be held in September 08-13, 2008 in S. Petersburg, Russia. http://www.world-psychophysiology.org/iop2008/ .

Due to a very low awareness and lack of valid knowledge by the general public concerning brain and mind scientific research and in order to dismiss myths that exist in society in the field of neuroscience, BM-Science establishes an educational program that includes public lectures, courses, seminars and publications accessible to the general public.

The first public course takes place in Moscow during the current month of June. The courses focus the psychophysiology of children and children education.

BM-SCIENCE advanced EEG analyses reveal an important finding in psychopharmacology (in press in International Journal of Psychophysiology). It was shown that methadone restores not only the composition of EEG oscillations and their percentage ration in the overall EEG but it also restores the temporal structure of the EEG signal. This latter aspect is of particular interest:

It was recently suggested that a pathological process is a process where there is a change in the temporal dynamics from what is normal, rather than in the regularity or irregularity of those dynamics.

More and more research (see review Fingelkurts et al., 2005) emphasize that the majority of brain and psychiatric/mental problems are accompanied by a disruption in the temporal structure of brain activity, i.e. the temporal reorganization in the brain dynamics was indeed observed in opioid addiction. It was suggested that this type of temporal reorganization is a contributing factor to the disorganization syndrome in drug addiction and reward regulation (Fingelkurts et al., 2006).

Therefore, psychotropic drugs, which can restore the normal temporal structure of brain activity, are of particular interest. To our knowledge, this is the first study where the capability of methadone to restore the normal temporal structure of the brain’s activity was explicitly demonstrated.

BM-SCIENCE starts its participation in a Consortium for the Study of Consciousness. A multidisciplinary network will apply a number of methods in the study of consciousness, including philosophical argumentation, behavioral measurements, anesthesia, PET, TMS, and EEG measures in an attempt to reveal the neural basis of consciousness.

An overall of 16 experiments will be run in this project. The results are expected to reveal the neural mechanisms of consciousness in unprecedented ways, constituting empirical tests of current neural theories and models of consciousness. The studies applying anesthetic agents may furthermore lead to practical applications involving objective physiological indices of anesthetic depth and new findings concerning the mechanisms inducing unconsciousness during anesthesia. At the philosophical level, the results can be seen as testing the viability of biological naturalism in the neuroscientific study of consciousness. The philosophical implications will be evaluated separately in theoretical/philosophical papers and the project will arrange a neurophilosophical symposium to encourage interaction between neuroscience and philosophy in Finland, and to promote the open discussion of the philosophical problems shared by neuroscientists.

Neuroscience has lacked consistent theories and methods for understanding the mechanisms through which the brain orchestrates the symphony of perceptions, thoughts, and actions.

The recently published work covers the issue and introduces "The Operational Architectonics Theory of Brain and Mind Functioning" which consists of a framework for mapping and understanding important mechanisms of cognition and eventually consciousness.

For more, please read the full copy of the book chapter available online here.

(This log has started in April-2005)