Neuroscience

Are you a morning person or a night owl? Is it just a personal preference or is there something to it? It's a complex puzzle with a lot of variables to consider. Literature concerning variation of sensory function according to the circadian cycle is lacking and chronobiological studies have focused on circadian fluctuation in performing simple motor tasks, fine skilled movement, and anaerobic exercise. To try and determine when people at their optimal, researchers observed and compared the circadian fluctuations in tactile sense, joint reposition sense and two-point discrimination in 21…

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder defined by impairments in social interaction and communication and the presence of restrictive and repetitive behaviors. The exact causes are unknown and so a range of genetic and environmental risk factors are associated with it.  A new study  using Swedish national health registers found that children with a brother or sister with autism are 10 times more likely to develop autism; 3 times if they have a half-brother or sister; and 2 if they have a cousin with autism, providing much needed information for parents and…

A good guitar player tunes their guitar by putting a tuning fork in their mouth and matching the vibrations. They made need it when they are older. A new paper in Occupational & Environmental Medicine finds that professional musicians are almost four times as likely to develop noise induced hearing loss as the general public, and they are 57% more likely to develop tinnitus - incessant ringing in the ears - as a result of their job. They base their findings on data from three statutory health insurance providers containing the details of seven million German citizens between 2004 and 2008…

 A new paper suggests that dopamine release is increased in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and may be normalized by the therapeutic application of deep brain stimulation (DBS). The authors of the paper in Biological Psychiatry  characterize dopamine as the 'elixir of pleasure' because so many rewarding stimuli – food, drugs, sex, exercise – are correlated to its release in the brain. Yet research also indicates that when drug use becomes compulsive, the related dopamine release becomes deficient in the striatum, a brain region that is involved in reward and behavioral control…

Do you find yourself finishing the sentences of a speaker you are watching? You are not alone. Our brain activity is similar to speakers we are listening to when we can predict what they are going to say, according to a team of neuroscientists writing in the Journal of Neuroscience.  Traditionally, it was thought that our brains always process the world around us from the "bottom up"—when we hear someone speak, our auditory cortex first processes the sounds, and then other areas in the brain put those sounds together into words and then sentences and larger discourse units. From here, we…

Researchers have transplanted human neural stem cells (hNSCs) into the brains of nonhuman primates and assessed cell survival and differentiation. The results: After 22 and 24 months the neural stem cells had differentiated into neurons and did not cause tumors. The hNSCs were labeled with magnetic nanoparticles to enable them to be followed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They did not use immunosuppressants. According to the researchers, their study is the first to evaluate and show the long-term survival and differentiation of hNSCs without the need for immunosuppression. The…

Myelin, the electrical insulating material long believed to be essential for the fast transmission of impulses along the axons of nerve cells, is not as ubiquitous as thought, according to a new paper that turns 160 years of neuroscience on its head. "Myelin is a relatively recent invention during evolution," says Professor Paola Arlotta of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "It's thought that myelin allowed the brain to communicate really fast to the far reaches of the body, and that it has endowed the brain with the capacity to compute higher level functions." In fact, loss of myelin is a…

Children with Tourette syndrome may unconsciously train their brain to more effectively control their tics. How so? A recent study found that teenagers diagnosed with  Tourette syndrome   were slower than typical peers when asked to perform a task that involved them simply moving their eyes to look at targets but buterr when the task was more demanding and required them to choose between looking at or away from targets. They were as fast as their peers but made fewer eye movements in the wrong direction. Tourette syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder that causes involuntary…

People who are deaf and those with hearing differ in brain anatomy, no surprise in that. But studies of individuals who are deaf and use American Sign Language (ASL) from birth aren't telling the whole science story. 95 percent of the deaf population in America is born to hearing parents and use English or another spoken language as their first language, usually through lip-reading. Since both language and audition are housed in nearby locations in the brain, understanding which differences are attributed to hearing and which to language is critical in understanding the mechanisms by which…

Women who carry a copy of a gene variant called ApoE4 have substantially greater risk for Alzheimer's disease than men,according to an analysis of data on large numbers of older individuals who were tracked over time and noting whether they had progressed from good health to mild cognitive impairment — from which most move on to develop Alzheimer's disease within a few years — or to Alzheimer's disease itself. The finding could help shed light on the underlying causes of Alzheimer's disease, a progressive neurological syndrome that robs its victims of their memory and ability to reason. Its…