This week's resource is a very powerful talk by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is a neuroanatomist who specialises in the post-mortem analysis of human brain tissue. In this video, she talks about her personal experience of having a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.

Perception: Scientists Create Touch Illusion Students who will be studying perception for AQA-A Unit 4 might be interested in this new illusion  by MIT researchers, which uses touch instead of vision to create the illusion.

Born to be Kind - Is Empathy Hard-wired in the Brain? Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children.

John Bowlby claimed that attachment serves an adaptive purpose: to keep parents and caregivers close to ensure the child's survival. In the early stages of attachment, babies use social releasers, such as crying, grasping, smiling and gazing, to elicit adults' caregiving; Bowlby believed that adults are innately programmed to respond to these signals. Now research using event-related fMRI ,a technique that shows which parts of the brain are activated in response to specific events, has shown that the reward centres of mothers' brains are activated by their own child's smile, but not by the smiles of other children. The report by Baylor College of Medicine researchers appears in the journal Pediatrics today.