Neuroscience

Researchers have found an odd statistic; people with speech and language disorders are about 3.5 times more likely to be teachers than patients with Alzheimer's dementia.  Speech and language disorders are typically characterized by people losing their ability to communicate; they can't find words to use in sentences, or they'll speak around a word, and they may also have trouble producing the correct sounds and articulating properly. Speech and language disorders are not the same as Alzheimer's dementia, which is characterized by the loss of memory. Progressive speech and language…

The brain may have its own way of easing social pain, according to a recent paper, and it involves the brain's natural painkiller system.  Combining brain scans with questionnaire results, they determined that people who score high on a personality trait called resilience – the ability to adjust to environmental change – had the highest amount of natural painkiller activation.  The team focused on the mu-opioid receptor system in the brain – the same system that the team has studied for years in relation to response to physical pain. Over more than a decade, U-M work has shown that…

Normally muscles contract in order to support the body, but in a rare condition known as cataplexy the body's muscles "fall asleep" and become involuntarily paralyzed. Cataplexy is incapacitating because it leaves the affected individual awake, but either fully or partially paralyzed. It is one of the bizarre symptoms of the sleep disorder called narcolepsy. "Cataplexy is characterized by muscle paralysis during cognitive awareness, but we didn't understand how this happened until now, said John Peever of the University of Toronto's Department of Cell&Systems Biology. "We have shown that…

Children who stutter have less grey matter in key regions of the brain responsible for speech production than children who do not stutter, according to brain scans of 28 children ranging from five to 12 years old. Half the children were diagnosed with stuttering; the other half served as a control.  Results showed that the inferior frontal gyrus region of the brain develops abnormally in children who stutter. This is important because that part of the brain is thought to control articulatory coding—taking information our brain understands about language and sounds and coding it into…

If you talk to social scientists, egoism and narcissism appear are on the rise while empathy is on the decline. In recent years, the ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes has been deemed extremely important for our coexistence - nuclear bombs will do that to a society -  but our own feelings can distort our capacity for empathy, according to a new paper. Emotionally driven egocentricity is recognized and corrected by the brain, they say, but when the right supramarginal gyrus doesn't function properly or when we have to make particularly quick decisions, our empathy is…

A new study says it has confirmed for the first time that the smell of stress sweat does  significantly alter how women are perceived by both males and females. Research has shown the ability of human body odor to communicate information between individuals. Not only have body odor signals been shown to convey messages about genetic connection, dating and general health, but body odors produced from individuals in specific emotional states have been shown to affect both the neural and behavioral states of the receiver, whether or not they are consciously aware of the source of the body…

A group at the University of Exeter used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology on the brains of 13 volunteers, all faculty members and graduate students in English at the school, to see how they respond to poetry and prose - and then declared that "scientists prove" poetry is like music to the mind. The upcoming results in the Journal of Consciousness Studies found a "reading network" of brain areas was activated in response to any written material and also that more emotionally charged writing aroused several of the regions in the brain which respond to music.  When…

You've seen advertisements for brain training games, apps, and websites that promise to give your mental abilities a boost - even "Baby Einstein" videos for infants make the claim that they will lead to higher intelligence. A new paper finds that brain training programs might strengthen the ability to hold information but they won't bring any benefits to intelligence, like helping you reason and solve problems. The cognitive boost claims are based on correlations between working memory capacity (WMC), our ability to keep information either in mind or quickly retrievable, particularly in the…

The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain were unusually well connected to each other, according to a paper, which then determines that may have contributed to his brilliance. The study says it is the first to detail Einstein's corpus callosum, the brain's largest bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication.  Lead author Weiwei Men of East China Normal University's Department of Physics measured and color-coded the varying thicknesses of subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves cross…

Nocturnal animals use their noses to stay alive. Mice, among others, depend on their impressive olfactory powers to sniff out food or avoid danger in the dark, using a streamlined system that sends the sensory cue to neural centers in the brain that need only a few synapses to rapidly initiate instinctive fleeing behavior.  In mice, social behaviors are also driven by these pheromones. Scientists have observed differences in how mice interact with adult, juvenile or newborn mice, but they have not known which sensory cues allow mice to discriminate by age. While looking for novel…