Neurology has always been one of my favorite studies, so I figured we could throw together a thread based on the information it provides. Anything related is welcomed, including just opinions/discussion about research. A little music for your reading pleasure : [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7jSFeVz1U&feature=related]Ode to the Brain! by Symphony of Science - YouTube[/ame] And now some research! Scientists now believe they may have found a hormone that is responsible for brain repair. If it turns out correct, this could have implications on mental health disorders and may even be a way to make the average human "smarter": Brain's Ability To Self-Repair Boosted By Natural Protein -----"Researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK have found a protein made by blood vessels in the brain that could be a good candidate for regenerative therapies that stimulate the brain to repair itself after injury or disease. They write about their findings in the 9 January online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Although most nerve cells or neurons in the adult brain are made in the womb and soon after birth, they are still produced later on in life, thanks to neural stem cells or NSCs. NSCs have the potential to specialize into new brain cells, such as in the olfactory bulb, responsible for our sense of smell, and the hippocampus, which plays a key role in forming memories and learning. NSCs inhabit specialized niches in the adult brain of mammals: these include the subventricular zone and the dentate gyrus, which also control how the stem cells behave. These niches also contain other cell types, and along with NSCs they are often found next to blood vessels. The niches generate a range of signals that control how fast the NSCs divide and the types of cell they turn into. Usually these cells become neurons or brain cells that communicate messages, but when the brain suffers an injury like a stroke, more often than not, the NSCs turn into glial cells which become scar tissue. In this study, the MRC researchers studied the interaction between the cells that line the blood vessels (endothelial cells) and the NSCs, and found that a protein called betacellulin (BTC) boosted brain regeneration in mice by stimulating the NSCs to multiply and form new brain cells. The researchers found that BTC, which is produced by cells within the blood vessels in the stem cell niches, signals to both the stem cells and to dividing cells called neuroblasts, triggering their proliferation. When they gave mice more BTC, they noticed a significant increase in both stem cells and neuroblasts, leading to formation of many new neurons in their brains. But when they gave the mice an antibody that blocks BTC, new neuron production stopped. Dr Robin Lovell-Badge from the MRC's National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), led the study. He said in a statement that we don't fully understand the function of these stem cell niches in the brain, but it looks as if lots of things have to work together to control what happens to stem cells in the brain. "We believe these factors are finely balanced to control precisely the numbers of new neurons that are made to match demand in a variety of normal circumstances," said Lovell-Badge. "But in trauma or disease, the stem cells either can't cope with the increased demand, or they prioritise damage control at the expense of long-term repair," he explained. Because BTC leads to the production of new neurons rather than glial cells, the researchers hope their findings could help future therapies that aim to regenerate damaged or diseased parts of the brain, such as following stroke, traumatic brain injury, and possibly even in the case of dementia. However, the work still has a way to go before the learning in the lab translates to therapy in the clinic: more experiments are needed to explain the normal role of BTC, and to explore, with animal studies, what it does on damaged brains, either on its own or together with transplanted NSCs. Written by Catharine Paddock PhD Copyright: Medical News Today"----- Anything Neurology based is welcomed here, so feel free to post any research you find or just personal experience with the field.
Competition between brain cells spurs memory circuit development Their results, published today in Neuron, mark a step forward in the search for the causes of neurological disorders associated with abnormal brain circuits, such as Alzheimer's disease, autism and schizophrenia. "Much of our understanding of the brain's wiring has come from studying our sensory and motor systems, but far less is understood about the mechanisms that organize neural circuits involved in higher brain functions, like learning and memory," says senior author Hisashi Umemori, M.D., Ph.D., assistant research professor at U-M's Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and assistant professor of biological chemistry at the U-M Medical School. Brain cells grow and extend along pathways to link different parts of the brain, Umemori explains. As the brain develops, these connections fine-tune themselves and become more efficient. Problems with this refinement process may be responsible for some neurological disorders. "We wanted to know how brain circuits become more efficient during the brain's development," Umemori adds. "Does the brain choose to keep good connections and get rid of bad ones and, if so, how?" To examine how neural activity organizes memory circuits, researchers used mice that had been genetically modified so that neurons of interest purposefully could be switched off. The scientists focused on an important connection between the hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory, and the cerebral cortex, which is key for perception and awareness. They deactivated about 40 percent of the neurons in the connection and, over a matter of days, watched as the brain eliminated the inactive neural connections and kept only the active ones. A subsequent part of the experiment showed that if all the neurons were deactivated, their connections were not eliminated. "This tells us that the brain has a way of telling among a group of neurons which connections are better than others," Umemori says. "The neurons are in competition with each other. So when they're all equally bad, none can be eliminated." The researchers also looked at a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which is only one of two areas of the brain that continues to generate new neurons throughout life. Here they found a second distinct type of competition: newborn cells were competing with mature cells, rather competition occurring between mature cells. When scientists blocked the dentate gyrus' ability to make new cells, the elimination stopped and the brain kept the existing cells even if they were deactivated. "The better the brain is at eliminating bad connections to keep the circuitry at its most efficient, the more efficient learning and memory will be as well," Umemori explains. He adds, "The better we understand how these mechanisms work, the better we'll be able to understand what's happening when they aren't working." Provided by University of Michigan (news : web)
I found this article pretty interesting... it goes into detail of the neurological function of an athlete (fair warning, it is a little lengthy): Brainy Ballplayers: Elite athletes get their heads in the game -----"Superstar athletes are revered for their physical prowess, not for what goes on between their ears. And most postgame interviews do little to challenge the notion that athletes have more brawn than brains. But brainpower has a vital role in elite sports performance, recent research shows. “Brawn plays a part, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that,” says John Milton, a neuroscientist at the Claremont Colleges in California. Whether on the court, field or course, the body depends on the brain for direction. But the brain is a busy taskmaster, with duties beyond guiding motion, making it difficult to focus on that particular job. Like chess masters and virtuoso musicians, superior athletes are better than novices at turning on just the parts of the brain relevant to the desired task, Milton’s work reveals. “In professionals, the overall brain activation is much lower, but certain connections are enhanced,” he says. In other words, experts employ only the finely tuned neural regions that help enhance performance, without getting bogged down by extraneous information. Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain might even explain their struggle to eloquently describe performance after the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster shields in a battle, professional athletes temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to maximize activity in centers that guide movement. “That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.” It’s not stupidity; it’s selectivity. And in the last few years scientists have been able to visually capture this concentrated, purposeful neural concert that takes place in the expert athlete’s brain. But even these vibrant brain scans reveal only part of the success story. Other recent studies demonstrate how athletes’ brains seamlessly interact with the muscular system to perfect and deploy movements — and how the athletic brain anticipates actions in advance and updates planned responses as needed. By examining how such brain processes lead to excellence in sports, as well as what goes wrong when athletes blow it in the big game, scientists think they can enhance training techniques and improve performance under pressure. In the zone Using functional MRI scans to monitor blood flow in the brain, Milton and his colleagues have identified the regions essential for expert-level motor skill: the superior parietal and premotor areas. These regions, two of the brain’s motor centers, primarily move the body toward a visually perceived goal and direct complex motion. In brain scans of professional golfers planning a shot, these areas showed heightened activity, Milton and colleagues reported in 2007 in NeuroImage. In contrast, the study found that the brains of beginner golfers preparing a swing showed much more dispersed activity — especially pervasive in the basal ganglia and limbic system, regions of the brain that control emotions and make people consciously aware of their movements. Such differences in brain activity reflect the players’ different concerns. “The novices were worried about all kinds of things — wind, water and sand,” Milton says. “The pro golfers just hit the ball.” Yogi Berra once famously quipped that he couldn’t “think and hit at the same time,” and Milton believes that devoting too much conscious attention to swing mechanics could actually hurt performance, even among big leaguers. His research suggests that when professional golfers think too long about their shots, the athletes activate parts of their brains that they haven’t used during golf since first learning the game, throwing finely tuned sensorimotor pathways out of whack. “This is because the expert’s brain has already figured out the optimal solution, and anything they consciously change will disrupt that,” Milton says. The experience of “being in the zone” could simply be what happens when the brain regions making athletes conscious of their movements are finally quieted and motor centers get free rein to guide the players to victory. Such an ability to perform a complex motor task without thinking, also called automaticity, gives an athlete a big advantage in competition. But to access a complex movement subconsciously, the athlete must first rehearse the motion countless times in training, fully developing the nerve connections essential for expert muscle control. “Practice may not make perfect, but it makes permanent,” Milton says. How close an athlete can get to perfection through training may be driven by attributes a person is born with. “It depends on the way the neurons connect to the muscles, and that can’t change,” says Daniel Wolpert of the University of Cambridge in England. The way the nervous system interacts with the musculoskeletal system isn’t flawless. Transmission errors along the way serve as a sort of sensory static, or “noise,” that prevents the muscles from hearing the message the brain is sending. Static can also disrupt messages that sensory organs such as the eyes and skin send to the brain, leaving an athlete with a distorted image of the state of the game. Players with less noise gumming up their sensorimotor systems are predisposed to athletic glory. With fewer disruptions, these athletes are able to elicit strong, fast muscle contractions that are incredibly accurate, cheating what scientists call the speed-accuracy, or energy-accuracy, trade-off. Unlike most people, expert athletes don’t have to slow down to improve their execution. A lucky few are granted this genetic head start, but anyone can “train muscles and refine a way of moving that reduces the bad consequences of the noise that’s already there,” Wolpert says. So training is not only about building bulk to overpower an opponent, but also about teaching more nerve and muscle fibers to work in unison to hone one’s movements. Scientists think brain cells known as mirror neurons may help. The value of reflection When a person watches someone else performing an action, the same neurons that would fire if the observer were replicating that action become active — even if that observer is standing completely still. This neural activity is the brain’s way of simulating the motion being witnessed, and can help an athlete reproduce those movements. Mirror neurons thus provide “a system for matching what you do with what you see others doing,” says Salvatore Aglioti of Sapienza University of Rome. The mirror system may also mediate another important function in the athlete’s brain — anticipation. If mirror neurons are already simulating the motions of an opponent, an observing athlete might use information from those neurons to chart out the full course of the adversary’s motion. In sports where time is of the essence, the ability to predict a movement offers a major leg up. Based on his knowledge of the mirror system, Aglioti hypothesized that athletes focus attention not solely on the ball, for example, but also on their opponents’ bodies to gain clues that will help in deciding whether to expend energy on a certain response. He studied how well expert basketball players, novices and expert watchers including coaches gauged the result of a free throw based solely on time-lapse photographs depicting various stages of another player’s shooting motion, reporting the findings in 2008 in Nature Neuroscience.“Compared to novices and scouts, elite athletes were better at predicting the outcome of a shot after watching the body motion of basketball players,” Aglioti says. Expert cricket batters also appear to gain important information from the physical details of an opponent’s throwing motion, suggests a team of Australian researchers. After showing study participants sequential photographs of a bowler in motion, the scientists found that elite batters’ ability to predict the final location of a ball in flight was impaired when the researchers blocked out the arm or hand of the hurling bowler. Novices were equally bad at predicting where the ball was headed regardless of whether they could see the bowler’s arm or hand. What’s more, anticipation abilities improved among expert batters when they were allowed to fully swing their bat while making a prediction, compared with predicting while standing still or while only completing the lower-body motion of a swing, the Australian team reported last year in Acta Psychologica. Novices’ predictive ability did not improve when they picked up the bat, suggesting that success in sports is partly dependent on how effectively the brain couples the body’s perceptive machinery to its motor processes. Milton has suggested that athletes in all fast-ball sports — including baseball and tennis — anticipate where the ball is headed based on information derived from watching their opponents’ movements. What helps separate elite members of these sports from novices is a superior ability to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant physical cues. Of course, once the brain gets the message, the body still has to react appropriately. A model plan for the future In the heat of the game, athletes have to process the sensory data they’re taking in to automatically deliver the best motor response. To save precious time while performing such calculations, the brain builds a virtual representation of the world so it can predict what might happen next, new research finds. Called “forward models,” these mental maps allow athletes to preplan “what they want to accomplish and how they’re going to accomplish it,” says Emanuel Todorov of the University of Washington in Seattle. The brain readies commonly repeated actions in the motor cortex just like a torpedo is loaded into a firing bay. But the response action can’t fire until the command to act is given by the forward model. If an athlete’s forward model is working well, it determines the best countermove quickly, reducing delays in the body’s movement. Because they provide reference data, previous experiences are essential for crafting forward models. For example, if tennis star Rafael Nadal hits the ball with heavy topspin towards Roger Federer, Federer’s brain computes bounce heights from previous topspin shots to determine how high the ball will bounce, so he can prepare a swing well before the ball rebounds off the ground. Forward models aren’t set entirely in mental stone, however — a good thing, since rarely are multiple scenarios in sport exactly the same. The ball Nadal hits toward Federer might be slightly deflated or could glance off the baseline, causing the topspin shot to bounce lower than Federer would have predicted based solely on previous topspin shots. If Federer’s forward model didn’t make use of current sensory information to adjust predictions built on “priors” — the accumulated knowledge of all the topspin shots he has seen before — he wouldn’t be able to react on the fly when something unexpected happens. The brain’s predictive machinery is constantly being updated with new sensory information as it executes a motion, a feedback loop that helps the body maintain control over its movement, Todorov says. “Given your goal, given where you currently are, the optimal feedback loop posits the best way to get there,” he says. Todorov and other scientists are finding that athletes’ brains calibrate forward models in a manner consistent with Bayesian decision theory, a statistical approach that combines a continual stream of new information with previous beliefs. Because there is a level of uncertainty associated with sensory input, the brain has to decide whether it is going to rely more on the new data (which could be misleading) or on more credible (albeit potentially outdated) priors. Elite athletes, who have acquired more priors through frequent competition and practice and who have less noise in their sensory input and motor output, will have the edge, Todorov suggests. Buckling under pressure Even the best athletes, though, don’t always perform when the pressure is on. “I don’t rattle, kid,” says Paul Newman, as Fast Eddie Felson, to another pool shark in The Hustler. Unfortunately for Eddie, this is true only when he heeds his own mantra and plays “fast and loose.” When he starts to let self-doubt and other concerns slow him down, his pool cue stops feeling like it has nerves in it and the balls stop dropping. Fast Eddie and real-world athletes might choke when it matters most because the stress of the situation or outside life seeps in, Beilock and colleagues reported in May in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The team is investigating what happens in the brains of athletes who fail to perform to their potential when the stakes are highest. “In these stressful situations, athletes become worried about the situation and its consequences, and these worries disrupt ability to allocate attention to where they need it,” says Beilock. Malfunctions of the prefrontal cortex, the center of the brain’s reasoning, emotional control and focusing abilities, are primarily to blame, Beilock says. Stress prompts the prefrontal cortex to try to control information that should be left outside of conscious awareness, causing what she calls “paralysis by analysis.” Like Milton, Beilock studies golfers, and she has found that high levels of stress increase activation in the prefrontal cortex of experts, preventing scratch golfers from keeping their swings on autopilot. Such overanalyzing prevents the successful execution of fluid, habit-filled performances that should run automatically, she says. When athletes think about mechanics too intensely, the pool cue, golf club or tennis racket can start to feel like a foreign and unwieldy instrument. Golfers prompted to weigh in on Tiger Woods’ struggles following his personal problems and hiatus from playing in tournaments seemed to recognize the influence of thinking too much. Bubba Watson publicly suggested that Woods was too mental with his swing, saying Woods should drop his swing coach and “just go out there and play golf.” Though athletes can’t avoid stressful situations altogether, being aware of the effect of stress on brain-body communication and coordination can help enhance training sessions, Beilock suggests. By putting players in high-stress, gamelike scenarios in practice, coaches can help athletes stay cool during competition. And since the brain chemistry elicited by intense competition translates to other stressful situations, Beilock believes choke-prevention techniques derived from her sports research could also give college students an edge at exam time or help postgraduates ace a job interview. Whether competing on the court or in the classroom, recent discoveries suggest that the key to living up to the potential you’re born with is to train your brain well, and keep calm and focused. With such revelations as guidance, the coach of a faltering team might consider playing some En Vogue at halftime to get players in the right frame of mind. The ’90s pop group said it best: “Free your mind, and the rest will follow.” From top: Phil Sandlin/Associated Press; Bob Martin/Getty Images; Boston Globe, Getty Images; Mark Humphrey/AP, Corbis; John Froschauer/AP"-----
Hey DBV, can the brain run out of space for new circuitry? I mean, I've heard Sagan say the brain creates new circuits all the time for remembering things and so forth. Is our memory physically limited?
Yup Sagan was right (of course ). The hippocampus is what is responsible for sorting short and long term memory and is also heavily involved in learning (which means it may be at work as you read this). I imagine it decides by what we most often use, but I'm not exactly sure how that process works, but I know the hippocampus will eliminate neurons to make room for new ones to store new information. So technically it is physically limited, but it's very efficient at always making room for new memorys.
SLEEP is required for the hippocampus to turn short-term memory into long-term memory. Then, the memory is stored in association areas. New circuits can be created by long-term potentiation (LTP) and/or long-term depression (LTD). There is lots more on this topic but I don't feel like digging up my old notes right now.
In theory, no, but in practice, yes it is limited. This may sound vague, so please hear my elaboration. I think our memories are in a perpetual flux, each memory is contingent upon a set of related memories, and each memory decays unless it, or a connected memory, is accessed or employed in thought on some regular basis. Despite this decay, it seems, once a memory is created, something will always remain of it, no matter how long it goes without access. Memories obviously stay fresher when they, or when connected memories, are frequently accessed. This does not explain how new memories enter the picture. New memories can always enter, but only if they resemble existing memories or if they are made very obvious by evidence. That is to say, we will be immediately receptive only to those memories which are either made evident or are obviously coherent with our existing mental schemata. Here's the catch: I don't think we can accommodate new schemata without having to compromise old ones. I think there's a limit to how much one person can store, but that most people don't even come close to this limit in their everyday life. When you dedicate time and practice to some study or some aspect of your life, you have many related thoughts and thus many memories are fresh in your mind. When yo do this, you take time out of your day, and thus have less time to have related thoughts about another subject. This basically means you can only have a finite number of obsessions.
Yup, this sounds correct. I've also read memory is heavily involved with genetic histones and that it requires acetylation of the histones to obtain the information. If I remember correctly, the studies were showing that the amount of acetylation is what the hippocampus uses to determine longterm to short term memory? I could be wrong on the last part though.. it's been a while since I've read the study so some acetylation may have diminished. haha Do you know anything about histonal memory?
The molecular basis of memory encoding is incredibly interesting. There's so many steps; I have to study that another time.
Here's a good start Sheenthesage. This is the research I was talking about above: Regulation of Histone Acetylation during Memory Formation in the Hippocampus After reading it again, it looks like acetylation plays a big part, but there are other factors if you read the article: Here's another good read: Histone Acetylation: Epigenetic Achilles’ Heel of Memory in Aging This link isn't about memory, but I wanted to share it because it touches on the genetic expression of the mind and goes into detail on how the mind evolves during our lifetimes: Epigenetics, Brain, and Behavior
Sorry I don't have time to read your posts right now, but I thought'd I bring up a topic which hasn't been mentioned in this thread yet and which never ceases to amaze me. Neuroplasticity. And an example of how our brains apply it: [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMpswJtCdI]Derren Brown and Daniel Kish - YouTube[/ame] I remember seeing another documentary that featured Daniel Kish (I think it might be the one below). They placed him in an fMRI scanner and I think it was his visual cortex that was firing when they played him pre-recorded clicks. His brain has significantly rewired itself to process audio clicks and turn it into spacial information. It was a while back and I'm not 100% sure of the details. Optical illusions also offer some great insights into neurology. Here's a video that just blows your mind. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL96F37B99A6F33A3F]Try The McGurk Effect! - Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? - BBC Two - YouTube[/ame] The full version of that video is well worth watching if you're interested in neurology. It's entertaining as well. If you can't find it to stream, I think you should still be able to find it on some torrent sites. It's BBC Horizon: Is Seeing Believing? and it was on last year at some point.
Sounds like a good documentary to watch. Thanks for the suggestion! Also, the neurological plasticity sounds a lot like synthesia. Any correlation that you know of?
Neuroplasticity is simply our brain's way of adapting itself and working in ways that it wasn't evolved for. It is particularly prominent in the case of brain injury (trauma or stroke). Certain parts of the brain rewire themselves to take the place of lost of injured parts. It is how people who have had a hemispherectomy (half of their brain removed) can go on to live surprisingly independent, normal lives. Our brains are more plastic when we are younger and become less so the older we get. This is why learning new skills is far easier at a young age and gets progressively harder. As I understand it, synaesthesia is something different. It's where sensory information somehow gets messed up in the brain, you can see sounds, smell feelings, etc. It is not fully understood but is thought to be something like crossed wires in the brain. It can be a lifelong condition or it can be brought on temporarily by seizures or drugs. This video gives some examples: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KApieSGlyBk[/ame] I briefly experienced it years ago on ke...a certain drug that shall remain nameless. The smell of lighter fluid was metallic grey and the smell/taste of my beer was a bright blue, like a swimming pool. To this day, the 2 or 3 minutes that that lasted (and the maybe 25 minutes of the drug) were among the strangest (but not unpleasant) in my life. It was reading up on the experience that lead me to the word synaesthesia. Funnily enough, the BBC documentary from before also deals with it, including interviewing lifelong "sufferers" (it doesn't seem to bother them). There's also the case of the British high functioning autistic savant (another interesting topic for this thread: savantism), Daniel Tammet, who uses his synaesthesia to perform ridiculously quick mental arithmetic. He also learnt Icelandic for a live television appearance, in a week.
Sorry to elaborate even more, but thinking more about that BBC documentary, I remember them talking about the possibility that we are all born with synaesthesia and as we grow our brains adjust and the connections between the various cortices in our brain separate. It is the failure of these connections to break that leads to synaesthesia in some people later in life. Whether or not this is somehow linked with neuroplasticity (or maybe lack thereof), I don't know.
Yeah, I'm not sure either.. I figured since they both involve neurons of the nervous system that they might be related in brain activity, but I really don't know much about neuroplasticity so I'll have to check it out more. It seems they both kind of depend on how you use your senses at a young age while the circuits are just developing.. I've got a torrent of the BBC program dling now so hopefully that can enlighten me. Also, about your experience, it's interesting you bring that up because I've had similar experiences but I never really thought about why at the time.. I bet it is mimicing this neuroplasticity though in some way or another.. I'm pretty excited to read up on this stuff now! Thx Jay!
No problem, thanks for the rep. I'd give you some back, but it seems you've already had some recently. While you're downloading that video, do a search for BBC Horizon, or just BBC in case they're not properly named, and download a load of them. It's a documentary series that has been going for decades and deals mostly with scientific subjects. They don't speak to you like children and don't sensationalise things with flashy lights and music like the American National Geographic and other channels tend to do. No offence to Americans, but they just can't make documentaries like the Brit channels. "What is Reality?" is a must watch if you're interested in Quantumy Cosmology type things. Also, anything with David Attenborough (Planet Earth, Life, etc.) if you like nature. As much as I hate paying for a TV Licence, the BBC do produce good stuff when it comes to information. I'll have a think for other interesting Brain subjects and see if I have anything to post when I get back later.
Yea I've seen "what is reality" and I really enjoyed it! I completely agree about BBC's programs too. If you only knew what our history channel has turned into.. lol. Even the discovery channel is starting to go bad.
Yeah, they've all gone downhill, as have your schools by all accounts but that's another topic. We can't have you watching documentaries with too much information, you might start forming opinions of your own. You need documentaries that begin with the words MEGA-, AWESOME- or AMERICAN- and feature such intellectually stimulating topics as Coca Cola's bottling plants, M1A2 Abrams tanks or Navy Seals recruitment. Did you watch Is Seeing Believing? I wouldn't mind watching it again myself but it's on my dead HDD along with my other 500Gb or so of documentaries.
I've watched the first half so far.. pretty cool stuff in it! Planned on watching the other half tonight. It's weird you say 500gb hd cause that's exactly what I use. haha. I just plug it into my ps3 and it turns the ps3 into a huge multimedia outlet.
I wish it was just 500Gb. It's a full 1.5Tb HDD with about 500Gb taken up by documentaries (some of which I've not seen). I was on a good internet connection a while back and downloaded every documentary I could find a torrent for. One annoying thing about a hard drive failure right now is the price of replacements. Have you tried to buy a hard drive recently? They've doubled in price since the floods in Thailand last summer and the big boys (Seagate and Western Digital) are predictably keeping the prices artificially high. And I want two this time, to mirror them. I don't think we're supposed to talk about piracy on here, but I think of all the things to pirate, documentaries are the most justifiable. The chances of catching repeats of them, IF they are repeated, are slim and why miss out on the extra knowledge?