Neuroscience

As you gorge on food this Thanksgiving and throughout the holiday season, you might not want to think about the fat content of all the goodies you've indulged in. Nevertheless, your brain will be keeping tabs directly, suggests a report in the issue of Cell.  Researchers have discovered in studies of rats that one type of lipid produced in the gut rises after eating fatty foods. Those so called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamines or NAPEs enter the bloodstream and go straight to the brain, where they concentrate in a brain region that controls food intake and energy expenditure.  The…

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic studying Parkinson’s disease have made a breakthrough therapy that could slow progression of the disease or even halt its onset. Previous research has discovered that patients with Parkinson’s have an abnormal abundance of alpha-synuclein, a protein, which is believed to be the cause of the disease. Targeting this protein has since taken forefront of their studies and researchers have developed a method to reduce the expression of alpha-synuclein in the brain. Demetrius Maraganore, MD and Matthew Farrer, Ph.D. targeted this protein in their procedure in which…

Were you first in line to buy a new iPhone?   Or are you still using your handy Motorola StarTAC from 1998?    Do you like changing jobs now and again because you get bored? These personality traits may be hard-wired in your brain, according to scientists at the University of Bonn.   They say the neural connection between the ventral striatum and the hippocampus is what makes the difference. Both of them are reward centers in the brain. The reward system which urges us to take action is located in the striatum, whereas the hippocampus is responsible for specific…

Running out of excuses for not hearing the request to take out the trash or do the dishes? Rejoice, you who avoid sharing common household chores - a new excuse has emerged. Avoid drinking any liquid while reading this - I almost spit out my coffee, laughing. For as long as she could remember a 60-year-old British woman, known only as KH, has been unable to recognize voices, not even the voice of her own daughter. Unless she sees the face of the person speaking, she often has no idea who is talking to her. If her daughter calls on the phone, or an unseen colleague from work says…

People who have lost the ability to interpret emotion after a severe brain injury can regain this vital social skill by being re-educated to read body language, facial expressions and voice tone in others, according to a new study. The research, published in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, reveals that appropriate training can result in significant gains in "emotional perception", which is crucial for successful social communication. The study involved 18 participants recruited from an outpatient service at the Liverpool Hospital Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit, in Sydney,…

BEATNIKS   &   DREAMACHINES Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 - 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus: ...Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision…

For those of you who are interested in Brion Gysin's Dreamachine, the following was borrowed from our friends at Wikipedia: In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the…

New research has traced elevated levels of a specific compound in the brain called kynurenic acid to problem-solving deficits in patients with schizophrenia. The finding suggests that drugs used to suppress the compound  might be an important supplement to antipsychotic medicines, as these adjuncts could be used to treat the disorder's most resistant symptoms – cognitive impairments.  Though schizophrenia is commonly characterized by hallucinations and delusions, patients also have problems with what is known as cognitive flexibility or executive decision-making. Many patients can…

150 years ago it was discovered that the speech center is in the left cortex  and since then functional differences between left and right hemisphere have become well known; language is mainly handled by the left hemisphere while spatial recognition is more specialized to the right hemisphere. However, the structural differences of synapses underlying left-right difference of the brain have remained unknown. Now a research team led by Prof Ryuichi Shigemoto at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, and colleagues have found that synaptic size and shape in the center…

A study published today in the online advance edition of The American Journal of Psychiatry for the first time reveals shape differences in the brains of children with ADHD, which could help pinpoint the specific neural circuits involved in the disorder. Researchers from the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Md. and the Johns Hopkins Center for Imaging Science used a new analysis tool, large deformation diffeomorphic mapping (LDDMM), which allowed them to examine the precise shape of the basal ganglia. The study found boys with ADHD had significant shape differences and decreases in…