March 2012
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The matter of your brain
16:55 30 March 2012
Sumit Paul-Choudhury, editor
My Soul, 2005, Katharine Dowson (Image: Image courtesy of the artist and GV Art)
LOOKING at your own brain is a humbling and slightly unnerving experience. Mine, depicted in a freshly acquired MRI scan, is startlingly intricate, compact - and baffling. This is as much of a portrait of my own mind as I am ever likely to see. But to my...
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IoP Neuroscientists develop new 'Brain' App
March 30, 2012
A team of neuroscientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London have developed a digital atlas of the human brain for iPad. The ‘Brain’ App is the first of its kind, and is based on cutting edge neuro-imaging research from the NatBrainLab at the IoP.
Image taken from the ‘Brain’ Study Room
Dr. Marco Catani, Head of the NatBrainLab who led...
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Electrocorticographic signals may restore arm...
March 30, 2012
(HealthDay) — Electrocorticography (ECoG) signals from patients with chronic motor dysfunction represent motor information that may be useful for controlling prosthetic arms, according to a study published in the March issue of the Annals of Neurology.
To investigate whether ECoG signals recorded from chronically paralyzed patients and whether those signals can be applied...
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IOM report identifies public health actions for...
March 30, 2012
An estimated 2.2 million people in the United States live with epilepsy, a complex brain disorder characterized by sudden and often unpredictable seizures. The highest rate of onset occurs in children and older adults, and it affects people of all ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds, yet this common disorder is widely misunderstood. Epilepsy refers to a spectrum of disorders...
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Neuroscientists work to helps soldiers break...
March 30, 2012
Researchers want to help the Army better camouflage its soldiers and break the enemy’s efforts to hide.
Researchers Jay Hegde and Xing Chen are using functional MRI to look at the brains of study participants learning how to break camouflage in order to help identify soldiers who will be good at it and identify better ways to teach it. Credit: Phil Jones, GHSU...
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Human Attention to a Particular Portion of an...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2012) — Human attention to a particular portion of an image alters the way the brain processes visual cortex responses to that image.
A schematic diagram of the contrast discrimination task, showing the focal cue trial (top row) and the distributed cue trial (bottom row). The contrast within the top right circle increases from the first interval (second column) to the...
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Once Considered Mainly 'Brain Glue,' Astrocytes'...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2012) — A type of cell plentiful in the brain, long considered mainly the stuff that holds the brain together and oft-overlooked by scientists more interested in flashier cells known as neurons, wields more power in the brain than has been realized, according to new research published March 29 in Science Signaling.
Human astrocytes. (Credit: Image courtesy of University...
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Genes for Learning, Remembering and Forgetting
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2012) — Certain genes and proteins that promote growth and development of embryos also play a surprising role in sending chemical signals that help adults learn, remember, forget and perhaps become addicted, University of Utah biologists have discovered.
This is a microscope image of the roundworm or nematode C. elegans with its nervous system glowing green due to...
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'Impossible' problem solved after non-invasive...
March 29, 2012
(Medical Xpress) — Brain stimulation can markedly improve people’s ability to solve highly complex problems, a recent University of Sydney study suggests.
(L-R) Professor Allan Snyder and Richard Chi found brain stimulation helped people solve a puzzle.
The findings by Professor Allan Snyder and Richard Chi, from the University of Sydney, are published in...
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Atlas shows how genes organize the surface of the...
March 29, 2012
The first atlas of the surface of the human brain based upon genetic information has been produced by a national team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the VA San Diego Healthcare System. The work is published in the March 30 issue of the journal Science.
This is a genetic clustering map of the brain, left lateral...
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Brain wiring a no-brainer? Scans reveal...
March 29, 2012
The brain appears to be wired more like the checkerboard streets of New York City than the curvy lanes of Columbia, Md., suggests a new brain imaging study. The most detailed images, to date, reveal a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Curvature in this DSI image of a whole human brain turns out to be...
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Inside the brains of jurors: Neuroscientists...
March 28, 2012 By Kimm Fesenmaier
(Medical Xpress) — When jurors sentencing convicted criminals are instructed to weigh not only facts but also tricky emotional factors, they rely on parts of the brain associated with sympathy and making moral judgments, according to a new paper by a team of neuroscientists. Using brain-imaging techniques, the researchers, including Caltech’s Colin...
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Take your time: Neurobiology sheds light on the...
March 28, 2012 by Stuart Mason Dambrot
(Medical Xpress) — College and cramming – often where’s there’s one, the other is not far behind. That said, however, it has been recognized since the late 1800s that repeated periodic exposure to the same material leads to better retention than does a single en masse session. Nevertheless, the phenomenon’s neurobiological processes have remained...
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Treatments to reduce anesthesia-induced injury in...
March 28, 2012
Recent clinical studies have shown that general anesthesia can be harmful to infants, presenting a dilemma for both doctors and parents. But new research at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center may point the way to treatment options that protect very young children against the adverse effects of anesthesia.
As detailed in a study published in the March 23 online edition of the...
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Coffee, other stimulant drugs may cause high...
March 28, 2012
(Medical Xpress) — While stimulants may improve unengaged workers’ performance, a new University of British Columbia study suggests that for others, caffeine and amphetamines can have the opposite effect, causing workers with higher motivation levels to slack off.
The study – published online today by Nature’s Neuropsychopharmacology – explored the impacts of stimulants on...
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Blocking 'Oh-Glick-Nack' May Improve Long-Term...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — Just as the familiar sugar in food can be bad for the teeth and waistline, another sugar has been implicated as a health menace and blocking its action may have benefits that include improving long-term memory in older people and treating cancer.
Blocking the action of a sugar could boost memory and even fight cancer. The neuron on the left has CREB with O-GlcNAc...
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Creativity and human reasoning during...
March 27, 2012
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to efficiently adapt to uncertain, changing and open-ended environments. In such environments, efficient adaptive behavior often requires considering multiple alternative behavioral strategies, adjusting them, and possibly inventing new ones. These reasoning, learning and creative abilities involve the frontal lobes, which are...
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Use It or Lose It: Mind Games Help Healthy Older...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — Cognitive training including puzzles, handicrafts and life skills are known to reduce the risk, and help slow down the progress, of dementia amongst the elderly. A new study published in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Medicine showed that cognitive training was able to improve reasoning, memory, language and hand eye co-ordination of healthy, older...
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Genetic Risk and Stressful Early Infancy Join to...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Working with genetically engineered mice and the genomes of thousands of people with schizophrenia, researchers at Johns Hopkins say they now better understand how both nature and nurture can affect one’s risks for schizophrenia and abnormal brain development in general.
The green neurons have reduced DISC1 protein. Red neurons have less effective GABA....
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Chronic Stress Spawns Protein Aggregates Linked to...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Repeated stress triggers the production and accumulation of insoluble tau protein aggregates inside the brain cells of mice, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in a new study published in the March 26 Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Exposing mice to 14 days of repeated stress...
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Does the Brain 'Remember' Antidepressants? More...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) often undergo multiple courses of antidepressant treatment during their lives. This is because the disorder can recur despite treatment and because finding the right medication for a specific individual can take time.
While the relationship between prior treatment and the brain’s response to subsequent treatment...
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Smokers Could Be More Prone to Schizophrenia
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Smoking alters the impact of a schizophrenia risk gene. Scientists from the universities of Zurich and Cologne demonstrate that healthy people who carry this risk gene and smoke process acoustic stimuli in a similarly deficient way as patients with schizophrenia. Furthermore, the impact is all the stronger the more the person smokes.
Schizophrenia has long been...
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'Could My Child Have Autism? ' Ten Signs of...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Though autism is often not diagnosed until the age of three, some children begin to show signs of developmental delay before they turn a year old. While not all infants and toddlers with delays will develop autism spectrum disorders (ASD), experts point to early detection of these signs as key to capitalizing on early diagnosis and intervention, which is believed to...
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Study examines link between blood biomarkers and...
March 26, 2012
A meta-analysis of previously published studies found that the ratio of blood plasma amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides Aβ42:Aβ40 was significantly associated with development of Alzheimer disease and dementia, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Neurology.
“Plasma levels of amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides have been a principal focus of the growing literature on...
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Neuroscience and the pursuit of justice
March 26, 2012
Dr. Judith Edersheim, co-founder and co-director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, explores how neuroscience can enhance the pursuit of justice.
Dr. Judith Edersheim of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior delivered the 13th annual Francine and Michael Saferstein Memorial Lecture in Forensic Science on Tuesday. Photo by Dominick...
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Skaters' Brains: Specialized Training of Complex...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — A new study, using brain imaging technology, reveals structural adaptations in short-track speed skaters’ brains which are likely to explain their extraordinary balance and co-ordination skills.
Short track speed skaters. (Credit: © sarah besson / Fotolia)
The work by Im Joo Rhyu from the Korea University College of Medicine, and colleagues, is published...
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Increased production of neurons in hypothalamus...
March 26, 2012 by Bob Yirka
(Medical Xpress) — A research team made up of people from a wide variety of biological sciences has found that mice fed a diet high in fat tend to see an increase in the number of neurons created in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain associated with regulating energy use in the body. The team, as they describe in their paper published in Nature Neuroscience,...
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The innate ability to learn language
March 26, 2012 By Angela Herring
All human languages contain two levels of structure, said Iris Berent, a psychology professor in Northeastern’s College of Science. One is syntax, or the ordering of words in a sentence. The other is phonology, or the sound structure of individual words.
Berent — whose research focuses on the phonological structure of language — examines the nature of...
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Brain 'talks over' boring speech quotes
March 26, 2012
(Medical Xpress) — Storytelling is a skill not everyone can master, but even the most crashing bore gets help from their audience’s brain which ‘talks over’ their monotonous quotes, according to scientists.
Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology investigated the ‘voice-selective’ areas of the brain and revealed that when...
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Transneuronal spread model fits neurodegenerative...
March 24, 2012
(HealthDay) — Neurodegenerative diseases may be characterized by specific regions of the brain that are critical network epicenters, with disease-related vulnerability associated with shorter paths to the epicenter and greater total connectional flow, according to a study published in the March 22 issue of Neuron.
Neurodegenerative diseases may be characterized by specific...
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Brain Size May Determine Whether You Are Good at...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 24, 2012) — Researchers are suggesting that there is a link between the number of friends you have and the size of the region of the brain — known as the orbital prefrontal cortex — that is found just above the eyes. A new study shows that this brain region is bigger in people who have a larger number of friendships.
Friends. Researchers are suggesting that there...
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Learning Best When You Rest: Sleeping After...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2012) — Nodding off in class may not be such a bad idea after all. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is most beneficial for recall.
New research shows that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is most beneficial for recall. (Credit: © Claudia Nagel / Fotolia)
Notre Dame psychologist...
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Researchers show that memories reside in specific...
March 23, 2012 by Cathryn Delude
Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams.
But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new...
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Brain Insulin Resistance Contributes to Cognitive...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2012) — Insulin resistance in the brain precedes and contributes to cognitive decline above and beyond other known causes of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Insulin is an important hormone in many bodily functions, including the health of brain cells. The team...
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Highly flexible despite hard-wiring -- even slight...
March 23, 2012
One cup or two faces? What we believe we see in one of the most famous optical illusions changes in a split second; and so does the path that the information takes in the brain. In a new theoretical study, scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the Bernstein Center Göttingen and the German Primate Center now show how this is possible without...
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Anxiety Boosts Sense of Smell
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2012) — Anxious people have a heightened sense of smell when it comes to sniffing out a threat, according to a new study by Elizabeth Krusemark and Wen Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
In animals, the sense of smell is an essential tool to detect, locate and identify predators in the surrounding environment. In fact, the olfactory-mediated defense...
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Research wrests partial control of a memory
March 22, 2012
Scripps Research Institute scientists and their colleagues have successfully harnessed neurons in mouse brains, allowing them to at least partially control a specific memory. Though just an initial step, the researchers hope such work will eventually lead to better understanding of how memories form in the brain, and possibly even to ways to weaken harmful thoughts for those with...
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Differences in Brain Function for Children With...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2012) — Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time how brain function differs in people who have math anxiety from those who don’t.
A series of scans conducted while second- and third-grade students did addition and subtraction revealed that those who feel panicky about doing math had increased activity in brain regions...
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Autism Risk Gene Linked to Differences in Brain...
ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2012) — Healthy individuals who carry a gene variation linked to an increased risk of autism have structural differences in their brains that may help explain how the gene affects brain function and increases vulnerability for autism. The results of this innovative brain imaging study are described in an article in the groundbreaking neuroscience journal Brain Connectivity,...
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Age-Old Anesthesia Question Awakened
ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2012) — Why does inhaling anesthetics cause unconsciousness? New insights into this century-and-a-half-old question may spring from research performed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Scientists from NIST and the National Institutes of Health have found hints that anesthesia may affect the organization of fat molecules, or lipids, in a...
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Seeing movement: Why the world in our head stays...
March 21, 2012
Scientists from Germany discovered new functions of brain regions that are responsible for seeing movement.
When observing a fly buzzing around the room, we should have the impression that it is not the fly, but rather the space that lies behind it that is moving. After all, the fly is always fixed in our central point of view. But how does the brain convey the impression of a fly...
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Listen to neurons in your own backyard with the...
March 21, 2012
Amateurs have a new tool for conducting simple neuroscience experiments in their own garage: the SpikerBox.
As reported in the Mar. 21 issue of the open access journal PLoS ONE, the SpikerBox lets users amplify and listen to neurons’ electrical activity – like those in a cockroach leg or cricket torso – and is appropriate for use in middle or high school educational...
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Study shows vision is necessary for spatial...
March 21, 2012
(Medical Xpress) — People who lose their sight at a later stage in life have a greater spatial awareness than if they were born blind, according to scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.
The study, published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, examined research which looked at the spatial skills of sighted and blind people and found that some...
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Unexpected discovery reveals a new mechanism for...
March 21, 2012
Research at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) has demonstrated the novel expression of an ion channel in Purkinje cells – specialized neurons in the cerebellum, the area of the brain responsible for movement. Ray W. Turner, PhD, Professor in the Department of Cell Biology & Anatomy and PhD student Jordan Engbers and colleagues published this...
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Computer model of spread of dementia can predict...
March 21, 2012
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have developed a computer program that has tracked the manner in which different forms of dementia spread within a human brain. They say their mathematic model can be used to predict where and approximately when an individual patient’s brain will suffer from the spread, neuron to neuron, of “prion-like” toxic proteins...
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Alzheimer's disease spreads through linked nerve...
March 21, 2012
Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia may spread within nerve networks in the brain by moving directly between connected neurons, instead of in other ways proposed by scientists, such as by propagating in all directions, according to researchers who report the finding in the March 22 edition of the journal Neuron.
Led by neurologist and MacArthur Foundation...
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Study shines light on brain mechanism that...
March 21, 2012
What characterizes many people with depression, schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses is anhedonia: an inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences.
This image shows VTA dopamine neurons (in red) and VTA GABA fibers (in green). Credit: Stuber Lab, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Exactly why this happens is unclear. But new research led by neuroscientists at the...
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Researchers discover drug target for stimulating...
March 21, 2012
Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that removing a matched set of molecules that typically help to regulate the brain’s capacity for forming and eliminating connections between nerve cells could substantially aid recovery from stroke even days after the event. In experiments with mice, the scientists demonstrated that when these molecules...
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Friendly to a fault, yet tense: Personality traits...
March 20, 2012
A personality profile marked by overly gregarious yet anxious behavior is rooted in abnormal development of a circuit hub buried deep in the front center of the brain, say scientists at the National Institutes of Health. They used three different types of brain imaging to pinpoint the suspect brain area in people with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder characterized by...
