There's a new article posted on my website, reviewing the research on the benefits of mental stimulation. I've also uploaded a glossary on brain structures.

An article in New Scientist discusses recent research on our ability to recognize changes in a visual scene (which changes may influence our thinking), even when we don't know exactly what the changes are. The researcher has coined this mode of visual perception "mindsight", which is a cute term, if perhaps more cute than accurate (all sight is mindsight, after all!). The researcher suggests that this ability may lie behind our "sixth sense" (and points out that we can be wrong - sometimes his subjects perceived changes when there were none). The experiment involved vision, but could just as well apply to other senses. An interesting idea.

And another study that reminds us that what we perceive is constructed by our brain - a look at tinnitus (ringing in the ears). Tinnitus, it appears, can follow damage to the nerves in our ear (it may take some months) - it seems that damage to the synaptic endings can be followed by a growing of new synaptic endings, which are, unfortunately, due to the damage to the nerve, inappropriate. Although they don't register sounds from the environment, they are nevertheless tuned in to the auditory system, as it were, and when excited, could give the illusion that sound is being produced. (BioMedNet article - free registration required)