Neuroscience

Children who are bilingual before the age of 5 are significantly more likely to stutter and to find it harder to lose their impediment compared to children who speak only one language before that age, according to research in Archives of Disease in Childhood.The researchers base their findings on 317 children who were referred for stuttering between the ages of 8 and 10. All the children lived in Greater London, and all had started school in the UK at the age of 4 or 5. The children's parents were asked if they spoke a language other than English exclusively or combined with English at home…

A drug used to increase blood production in both medical treatments and athletic doping scandals seems to also improve memory in those using it. New research published in BMC Biology says that the memory enhancing effects of erythropoietin (EPO) are not related to its effects on blood production but are due to direct influences on neurons in the brain. The findings may prove useful in the treatment of diseases affecting brain function, such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s. Patients given EPO to treat chronic kidney failure had been observed to have improved cognition…

We know what's worse for your health (in case you were wondering: we know cigarettes cause cancer, and there is no reliable link between cell phones and cancer), but what about your sanity: Novelist Jonathan Franzen on cell phones: The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One…

Michael Shermer on why we're not really hard-wired for statistics: Thanks to our confirmation bias, in which we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore or discount contradictory evidence, we will remember only those few astonishing coincidences and forget the vast sea of meaningless data. We can employ a similar back-of-the-envelope calculation to explain death premonition dreams. The average person has about five dreams a night, or 1,825 dreams a year. If we remember only a tenth of our dreams, then we recall 182.5 dreams a year. There are 300 million…

A new study has found that mothers who delivered vaginally compared to caesarean section delivery (CSD) were significantly more responsive to the cry of their own baby, identified through MRI brain scans two to four weeks after delivery. The results of the study in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggest that vaginal delivery (VD) mothers are more sensitive to own baby-cry in the regions of the brain that are believed to regulate emotions, motivation and habitual behaviors. CSD is a surgical procedure, in which delivery occurs via incisions in the abdominal and uterine wall…

Experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices, according to a new brain imaging study. After being interrupted by a word-recognition task, experienced meditators' brains returned faster to their pre-interruption condition, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine found. Giuseppe Pagnoni, PhD, Emory assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and co-workers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in blood flow in the brain when people meditating were interrupted by stimuli designed to mimic the…

Being an athlete or merely a fan improves language skills when it comes to discussing their sport because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language, new research at the University of Chicago shows. The research was conducted on hockey players, fans, and people who'd never seen or played the game. It shows, for the first time, that a region of the brain usually associated with planning and controlling actions is activated when players and fans listen to conversations about their sport. The brain boost helps athletes and fans…

Along with chimps, orangutans, elephants, and dolphins, some birds are smart enough to recognize themselves in the mirror. We're naturally inclined to think of mammals as the creatures most likely to have a developed sense of self, but it turns out that magpies are also quite self-aware. How do you know when an animal recognizes itself in the mirror? You need some way to tell whether an animal thinks a mirror image is another animal, or whether the animal recognizes itself. Researchers get at this problem by marking the animal in some way and watching how it behaves. In this case, a group of…

Researchers conducting a study in mice have discovered that the brain must create new nerve cells for either exercise or antidepressants to reduce depression-like behavior. In addition, the researchers found that antidepressants and exercise use the same biochemical pathway to exert their effects. These results might help explain some unknown mechanisms of antidepressants and provide a new direction for developing drugs to treat depression, said Dr. Luis Parada, chairman of developmental biology and senior author of a study in the Aug. 14 issue of the journal Neuron. In animals, it was…

You may not know "Daredevil" if you are not a comic book guy - the Ben Affleck movie certainly didn't endear him to most of the public. Daredevil lost his sight in an accident but, shortly after that, found his remaining senses had been enhanced. It was common sense, the radiation-boosting aspects notwithstanding, and previous research has confirmed that when vision is lost, a person's senses of touch and hearing become enhanced. But exactly how this happens has been unclear. Now a long-term study from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess…