BASF - Frontiers for Young Minds Live Review

How the brain allows us to mentally wander off to another time and place.
Author: Julia Kam
Abstract: We spend a lot of our time mind wandering, a period of time when our thoughts drift away from the task-at-hand. How does our brain help us accomplish that?  This paper will shown that our brain dampens our processing of information from the world around us when we are mind wandering in order to maintain a train of thought.
Bio: I am intrigued by our tendency to disengage from the world around us to wander off into our own musings. I want to understand how our brains support these internally oriented thoughts, which changes the way we think and feel about ourselves and others around us. When I’m not studying mind wandering, I either let my mind wander off to beautiful places and times, or I physically wander off to extraordinary places around the world.

Authors: Bhargavi Ram and Randolph Helfrich

Abstract: We experience the world around us as continuous. But how does our brain achieve that? Here we suggest that the brain samples our environment in discrete snapshots. We demonstrate that brain waves work just like a flip-book, where the rapid stream of related pictures creates the illusion of a continuous movie.

Bio: I am 17 years old and a senior in high school. I love to read , listen to music, watch basketball (GO WARRIORS!!), and I have a passion for Bharathanatyam â€" an ancient classical dance. I From a young age, my ambition has been to become an accomplished pediatric neurosurgeon, hence my interest in neuroscience and the brain. I also have a secret ambition (not so secret I guess) of becoming a TV anchor too. Basically, I want to make a lasting impact on the world.

Bhargavi is our first Young Mind to move from valued young reviewer to a co-author of a paper. We are sure she won’t be the last. This years review has the added tension that her younger brother Krishna is a reviewer and will be grilling her on her first. Talk about sibling rivalry!

Authors: Arjen Stolk

Abstract: Social interaction is a complex activity to investigate and we know very little about how we enable our communication with others. This study uses an interaction game that isolates this crucial social behavior and found that the prefrontal cortex, a brain region right above our eyes, is necessary for fine-tuning communication with our social partners.”

Bio: We communicate our thoughts and ideas to others all day every day but we do not understand how. A language certainly helps. However, language is not necessary for successful communication as illustrated by social interactions with infants and tourists. My research focuses on our ability to understand one another in interactive game settings, independent from the complexities introduced by linguistic processing. These novel settings therefore provide a privileged window into the principles and brain mechanisms underlying human social interaction. Besides science I enjoy motorcycles, nature and wild life.”

Using phylogeny, fossils and geographic distributions to understand evolution in plant lineages.

Authors: Valerie Lavenberg, Riva Bruenn, Shayla Salzman

Abstract: How do we study evolution and the diversity of life? What can evolutionary biology tell us about how species are formed and how new shapes and colors evolve? This paper will discuss the processes used to study evolution, using the plant family Costaceae â€" the spiral gingers â€" as a test case. We will show how we know which species are most closely related, and how different forms have evolved to interact with pollinators (birds and bees) in tropical forests around the world.