Neuroscience

Men and women are different in lots of ways and some contend that women are more emotional and that makes a difference in others areas. A recent large-scale study focused on determining the gender-dependent relationship between emotions, memory performance and brain activity.   The scientists found that women rate emotional images as more emotionally stimulating than men do and are more likely to remember them but there were no gender-related differences in emotional appraisal of neutral images. Earlier studies have shown that emotions influence our memory: the more emotional a…

Autism Spectrum Disorder, a broad range of behavioral and cognitive issues that usually impair learning ability, has been studied for many years but there remain far more questions than answers. Some research into the brain functions of individuals with autism spectrum have found a lack of synchronization ('connectivity') between different parts of the brain that normally work in tandem, while other studies have found the opposite: over-synchronization.  A new paper suggests that conflicting reports of both over- and under-connectivity may reflect a deeper principle of brain function.The…

According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, cocaine is the second most commonly used illegal addictive in Europe, after cannabis.  A discovery related to the mechanism behind a dopamine transporter could help in the development of future medical treatment against cocaine addiction.   Dopamine is a signaling molecule in the brain which is involved in our sensation of reward, motivation and thus, it is assumed, addiction. The dopamine transporter is a protein located in the membrane of dopaminergic neurons. It mediates the re-uptake of released dopamine by…

As has been demonstrated, even after complete spinal paralysis the human spinal cord is able to trigger activity in the leg muscles using electrical pulses from an implanted stimulator. Now a team of researchers has succeeded in identifying the mechanisms the spinal cord uses to control this muscle activity. These mechanisms still work even if the neural pathways from the brain are physically interrupted as the result of a spinal cord injury. It is the first time throughout the world that the spinal-cord activation patterns for walking have been decoded, say the authors of a new paper.…

Within the nervous system there is a structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a site considered as the biological clock in all mammals, including humans. A new study has found that when this nucleus is damaged or destroyed the rhythm of the biological clock is lost. Research by René Drucker and colleagues was performed in rats because they have well-defined activities at night that have little activity during the day. When some of these rats had neuronal alterations affecting their sleep cycle we could graph the amount of activity during the day and the night. So, when there was an…

A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine links circumcision in boys to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The results were drawn from part a cohort of all children born in Denmark between 1994 and 2003. During the study, over 340,000 boys were followed up to the age of nine between 1994 and 2013 and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed. They found that regardless of cultural background circumcised boys may run a greater risk of developing ASD. The researchers also made the observation of an increased risk of hyperactivity disorder among circumcised boys in non-Muslim families…

Noninvasive brain scans, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, have led to basic science discoveries about the human brain and have also been wildly misused, claiming to correlate everything from the biology of voting to ideas like that people with messy offices are racist. Though fMRI-based claims get lots of mainstream media attention, along with most weak observational studies, the actual value for society hasn't been there. But it could be, according to a review of other studies in Neuron. They even believe brain imaging can help predict an individual's future learning,…

Researchers have solved a puzzle in traffic research, namely why so many people 'jerk' the wheel when they steer a car.  The ability to predict what a driver is going to do in the near future has been in the works since 1947, when British researcher Arnold Tustin (1899-1994) produced the first model for how a person steers towards a target. He identified a continuous and linear control behavior. When a car is driven, this corresponds to the driver gently and continuously following the road with the steering wheel.  This behavior, known as tracking within control theory, has been the…

When people spend time interacting with their smartphones, it is changing the way their thumbs and brains work together, according to a report in Current Biology. More touchscreen use in the recent past translates directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched, the study found. And smartphones have become a good way to explore the everyday plasticity of the human brain. Not only are people suddenly using their fingertips, and especially their thumbs, in a new way, but many are doing it an awful lot, day after day. Our phones are also keeping track…

People discriminate between quantities because it is a way to make decisions - armies are less likely to want to attack when the defense outnumbers them - but with animals it is more clear,  lions, chimpanzees and hyenas will not attack at all if they don't have superior numbers. These animals use numerical information to make decisions about their social life.  Testing numerical competence In 2012 Friederike Range and Zsofia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna showed that wolves are capable of discriminating between…