Neuroscience

Coming to get you. Credit: D Simmonds, CC BY-SA By Mark Blumberg, University of Iowa; Alexandre Tiriac, University of Iowa, and Carlos del Rio Bermudez, University of Iowa In recent years scientists have discovered the many ways that the brain is activated during sleep. But we’re also beginning to see ways in which the body is activated during sleep, especially during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and especially when we are young. Twitching – the thousands of jerky movements that baby mammals, including humans, dogs, cats, and rats, make each day – is one such behavior. Twitching happens in…

Fibromyalgia is a symptom-based disorder that manifests itself as chronic pain. Its underlying causes are unknown. The results of a new study compares brain activity in individuals with and without fibromyalgia and indicate that decreased connectivity between pain-related and sensorimotor brain areas could contribute to deficient pain regulation in fibromyalgia, according to an article published in Brain Connectivity. In the new study by Pär Flodin and coauthors from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, they add on to previous findings from other fibromyalgia papers that used brain imaging and…

How many freebies can you carry? Credit: Nottingham Trent University, CC BY-NC-ND By Kira Shaw, University of Sheffield Over the next few weeks there will be many nervous people across the country ready to embark upon a new chapter in life: university. For many young people going to university means moving away from home for the first time. Relinquishing the comfort blanket of the friendship group you’ve formed throughout your school years and heading out into the big bad world on your own. I remember my first day moving into student halls of residence. I had a fleeting moment as the door…

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can treat symptoms of depression in humans by placing a relatively small device on a person's scalp and stimulating brain circuits, yet little is known about how TMS produces these beneficial effects. Some studies have suggested that TMS may modulate atypical interactions between two large-scale neuronal networks, the frontoparietal central executive network (CEN) and the medial prefrontal-medial parietal default mode network (DMN). These two functional networks play important roles in emotion regulation and…

Tourette syndrome is a developmental disorder characterized by involuntary, repetitive, and stereotyped movements or utterances. New evidence explains how those with Tourette syndrome in childhood often manage to gain control over those tics. In individuals with the condition, a portion of the brain involved in planning and executing movements shows an unusual increase compared to the average brain in the production of a primary inhibitory neurotransmitter known as GABA.  The paradoxical findings—that the brains of people with Tourette syndrome produce more GABA than usual, not less—…

Neurons programmed to fire at specific faces, such as the famously reported "Jennifer Aniston neuron", may be more in line with the conscious recognition of faces than the actual images seen. In an experiment, subjects presented with a blended face, such as an amalgamation of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, had significantly more firing of such face-specific neurons when they recognized the blended or morphed face as one person or the other.  Some neurons in the region of the brain known as the medial temporal lobe are observed to be extremely selective in the stimuli to which they…

Many of the choices we make are informed by experiences we've had in the past but we know that sometimes it is better to throw all that out and take a risk on something new. Scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus have shown that the brain can temporarily disconnect information about past experience from decision-making circuits, thereby triggering random behavior.  In the study, rats playing a game for a food reward usually acted strategically, but switched to random behavior when they confronted a particularly unpredictable and hard-to-beat…

People who practice yoga and meditation long term can learn to control a computer with their minds faster and better than people with little or no yoga or meditation experience, find biomedical engineers at the University of Minnesota writing in TECHNOLOGY. In the study, researchers involved a total of 36 participants. One group of 12 had at least one year of experience in yoga or meditation at least two times per week for one hour. The second group included 24 healthy participants who had little or no yoga or meditation experience. Both groups were new to systems using the brain to…

Does simultaneously using a mobile phone, a laptop and other media devices change the structure of our brains? Sure, so did reading that sentence. We all have different experiences and therefore different brains. The downside to brain imaging is that neuroscience and psychology tend to make something from nothing.  And a new paper finding that multi-taskers have lower grey-matter density in one particular region of the brain compared to those who use just one device occasionally will get lots of mainstream media attention even though it tells us nothing. Nonetheless, neuroscientists…

The first animal model for ALS dementia, a form of ALS that also damages the brain, has been developed. This advance will allow researchers to directly see the brains of living mice, under anesthesia, at the microscopic level and will allow direct monitoring of test drugs to determine if they work.  The researcher from Northwestern Medicine® scientists comes at a go time. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has heightened interest in the disease and the need for expanded research and funding. ALS affects an estimated 350,000 people worldwide, with an average survival of three years. In…