Neuroscience

In the modern world of long-distance travel, many people have experienced circadian-rhythm disruption, especially after traveling across time zones. The physiology that affects modulating our biological "clocks" to combat jet lag or cope with alternating shifts is complex. A new paper in The Journal of General Physiology says BK ("Big Potassium") channels, which are activated during nerve impulses and can reduce neuronal excitability, affect a variety of physiological functions and that helps explain some of the biophysical processes underlying regulation of circadian rhythms. One of the…

Asparagine, which is found in foods such as meat, eggs, and dairy products, was once considered non-essential because it is also produced naturally by the body. And that is true, for every organ except the brain, where the amino acid is essential for normal brain development.  "The cells of the body can do without it because they use asparagine provided through diet. Asparagine, however, is not well transported to the brain via the blood-brain barrier," said senior co-author of the study Dr. Jacques Michaud, who found that brain cells depend on the local synthesis of asparagine…

There are widespread differences in how genes are expressed in men and women's brains, based on post-mortem adult human brain and spinal cord samples from over 100 individuals analyzed by byscientists at the University College London Institute of Neurology who studied the expression of every gene in 12 brain regions.   Their paper in Nature Communications found that the way that the genes are expressed in the brains of men and women were different in all major brain regions and these differences involved 2.5% of all the genes expressed in the brain. They specifically looked at the…

The connections between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain strengthen in young children while they sleeo, which may help brain functions mature, according to a new paper. Scientists have known that the brain changes drastically during early childhood: New connections are formed, others are removed and a fatty layer called "myelin" forms around nerve fibers in the brain. The growth of myelin strengthens the connections by speeding up the transfer of information. Maturation of nerve fibers leads to improvement in skills such as language, attention and impulse control. But it is…

Do we process language we hear without regard to anything about the speaker? Perhaps or perhaps not. A small psychological experiment using University of Kansas undergraduates who were paid to participate and spoke Spanish found that the sex of a speaker affected how quickly listeners identified words grammatically - evidence that even higher-level processes are affected by the speaker. 14 of the participants were female and 6 were male. Based on the fact that Spanish words have a grammatical gender — words ending in "o" are typically masculine and in "a" are typically feminine — the…

Beginning two decades ago, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses jumped to 11 percent of American children aged 4 to 17 even though neuroscientists still did not know biologically what ADHD is.  And one alarming fix for ADHD was the stimulant methylphenidate, commonly known as Ritalin, Between between 1991 and 1999, Ritalin sales in the United States increased 500 percent and the US still accounts for 85% of the entire world's consumption. All this despite the fact that Ritalin was considered so dangerous by 'speed freaks' in the 1960s that they shunned it. Like…

All musical training has some benefits for brains, but new research shows how brain regions communicate during the creation of music and find that extensive musical training affects the structure and function of different brain regions and even how the brain interprets and integrates sensory information. These insights suggest potential new roles for musical training including fostering plasticity in the brain, an alternative tool in education, and treating a range of learning disabilities. The new findings say that:  Long-term high level musical training has a broader impact than…

What do bullies and sex have in common?   The same part of the brain reacts to both.  In a recent study, researchers found that different types of fear are processed by different groups of neurons in mice, even if the animals act out those fears in the same way - which could have implications for addressing phobias and panic attacks in humans. "We found that there seems to be a circuit for handling fear of predators – which has been described anatomically as a kind of defense circuit – but fear of members of the same species uses the reproductive circuit instead," says Bianca Silva…

Cocaine addicts may become trapped in drug binges not because they are always seeking euphoric highs but rather to avoid emotional lows, says a study in Psychopharmacology. Rutgers neuroscientists Professor Mark West and doctoral student David Barker dispute that drug addiction occurs because users are always going after the 'high'. Their animal studies found that the initial positive feelings of intoxication are short lived and are quickly replaced by negative emotional responses when drug levels begin to fall.  If these animal models are a mirror into human addiction, then addicts…

Researchers writing in  Science Translational Medicine have shown that monkeys can control the movement of both arms of an avatar - using just their brain activity.  To enable the monkeys to control the two virtual arms, researchers recorded nearly 500 neurons from multiple areas in both cerebral hemispheres of the animals' brains, the largest number of neurons recorded and reported to date. Millions of people worldwide suffer from sensory and motor deficits caused by spinal cord injuries. Researchers are working to develop tools to help restore their mobility and sense of touch by…