Neuroscience

You've seen advertisements on television for websites like Lumosity and claims that games that will 'train' your brain to be better. Well, they sort of work, it's not total snake oil, though they work mostly at teaching your brain to solve the puzzles in those websites and games, which is not really improving anything. Elliot T. Berkman, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon and lead author on a new paper, says that training for a particular task does heighten performance, but that advantage doesn't necessarily carry over to other things. So if solving…

When it comes to the brain, there is very little science. fMRI imaging is subjective and pop psychology concepts even more so. Even when it comes to medical conditions, like schizophrenia, little is known. Its causes are unknown, there there is no objective test for it, and its diagnosis is based on an assortment of reported symptoms - and symptom-based diagnosis got replaced in most of medicine by the 1950s. The standard treatment, anti-psychotic medication, works less in less than half of those with a diagnosis and becomes increasingly ineffective over time. What is needed is a…

A new paper studied if the excitability of the motor cortex correlates with working memory performance – and results were positive.  By measuring the motor excitability, conclusions can be drawn as to general cortical excitability – as well as to cognitive performance, say the scholars from the Transfacultary Research Platform at the University of Basel. Working memory allows the temporary storage of information such as memorizing a phone number for a short period of time. Studies in animals have shown that working memory processes among others depend on the excitability of neurons…

Like computers, our brains work on inductance. A switch is open or closed, a signal is passed. Brains follow rules, like computers.  But if the brain is like a computer, why do brains make mistakes that computers don't? Psychologist Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin–Madison says that our brains stumble on even the simplest rule-based calculations because humans get caught up in contextual information, even when the rules are as clear-cut as separating even numbers from odd. Almost all adults understand that it's the last digit — and only the last digit —that determines whether a…

As we age, our brains undergo a major reorganization, a 'pruning' which streamlines the connections in the brain - except the long-distance ones that are crucial for integrating information.  Studying people up to the age of 40, authors of a paper in Cerebral Cortex suspect this newly-discovered selective process might explain why brain function does not deteriorate – and indeed improves –during this pruning of the network. Interestingly, they also found that these changes occurred earlier in females than in males.  The researchers evaluated the scans of 121 healthy participants…

In a Neuron paper, Institute of Science and Technology Austria post-doctoral fellow Alejandro Pernía-Andrade and Professor Peter Jonas outline the synaptic mechanisms underlying oscillations at the dentate gyrus, the main entrance of the hippocampus). Building on that work, the researchers suggest a role for these oscillations in the coding of information by the dentate gyrus principal neurons.  Brain oscillations are rhythmic changes in voltage in the extracellular space, referred to as electrical brain signals associated with the processing of information. These electrical signals…

Patients in a vegetative state are awake, breathe on their own, and seem to go in and out of sleep, but they don't respond to what is happening around them and exhibit no signs of conscious awareness. Do they even know if friends and family are even there? A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has shown that the brains of patients in a vegetative state emotionally react to photographs of people they know personally as though they recognize them. "We showed that patients in a vegetative state can react differently to different stimuli in the environment depending on their…

The stereotype is that athletes are often less smart than their non-athletic peers and a new paper says it may not be that athletes go into more physical pursuits but that the sports themselves may lead to lower test scores. Two groups of Dartmouth athletes were studied: 80 football and ice hockey players in the contact sports group, and 79 athletes drawn from such non-contact sports as track, crew and Nordic skiing. The football and hockey players wore helmets equipped with accelerometers, which enabled the researchers to compile the number and severity of impacts to their heads. Players who…

A new paper in Free Radical Biology and Medicine suggests that a diet low in vitamin D causes damage to the brain. In addition to being essential for maintaining bone health, the new evidence found that vitamin D serves important roles in other organs and tissue, including the brain. The study showed that middle-aged rats that were fed a diet low in vitamin D for several months developed free radical damage to the brain, and many different brain proteins were damaged as identified by redox proteomics. These rats also showed a significant decrease in cognitive performance on tests of…

We've highlighted in the past some interesting activity from DARPA (read more via Neuron News from Dynamic Patterns Research) with its involvement in neurological research and technology developments. With the "Grand Challenge" introduced in April 2013 by the Obama administration called the BRAIN Initiative ("Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies"), we clearly noticed that half of the dedicated $100 million in funds were to be delegated to future work out of DARPA. Now, months later, the military research branch has finally released two open…