Neuroscience

Is the obesity epidemic due to the addictive qualities in food or that a lot more food is cheap and plentiful than ever before in history? A paper presented at the 2013 Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience - Association Canadienne des Neurosciences (CAN-ACN), says the problem is addiction rather than food wealth - the authors claim that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats similar to those produced by drugs of abuse such as cocaine.  It's the "Food Addiction" hypothesis that has recently become popular,…

Do you see music the same way as your neighbor? Apparently so.  U.C. Berkeley psychologists say people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors, suggesting that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers. They suggest that our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel  Using a 37-color palette, they found that people tend to pair faster-paced music in a major key…

When comparing men and women who have dyslexia to non-dyslexic control groups, researchers found significant differences in brain anatomy, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation when it comes to gender. Dyslexia is two to three times more prevalent in males than females and the authors say this is the first study to directly compare brain anatomy of females with and without dyslexia (in children and adults).  Male and female brains are different in general.  The study of 118 participants compared the brain structure of people with dyslexia to…

An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. population has restless legs syndrome, a disruptive, overwhelming nocturnal urge to move the legs even while sleeping, which can lead to many sleepless nights. Why do patients with restless legs syndrome  still have insomnia when the condition is treated successfully with medication? Neurologists have long believed restless legs syndrome is related to a dysfunction in the way the brain uses the neurotransmitter dopamine.  Dopamine is used by brain cells to communicate and produce smooth, purposeful muscle activity and movement and disruption…

Researchers were able to controll seizures in epileptic mice with a one-time transplantation of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells into the hippocampus, which inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits. Cell therapy has become a focus of epilepsy research, in part because current medications, even when effective, only control symptoms and not underlying causes of the disease, according to Scott C. Baraban, PhD of UC San Francisco, who led the new study. In many types of epilepsy, he said, current drugs have no therapeutic value at all. The hippocampus is associated with seizures, as…

The Whale, The Torpedo And Cruelty To Animals Part 3 The Age of Electrophysiology “The history of electrophysiology has been decided by the history of electrical recording instruments”Edgar Douglas Adrianper Stanley Finger Edgar D. Adrian: Coding in the Nervous SystemDOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181821.003.0015 1771 - Luigi Galvani Alessandro Volta Michael Faraday Jacques Arsène d'ArsonvalvisionGabriel Lippman 1887 - Augustus Desiré Waller (18 July 1856 – 11 March 1922) Waller created the first electrocardiogram. He recorded the heart’s electrical activity as a trace. He was not the first to…

The Whale, The Torpedo And Cruelty To Animals,a brief history of the use of electricity in medicine and the development of the pacemaker. Part 2: The Age Of The ElectriciansPart 1, was about early uses of electricity in medicine.  The 'torpedo' of the title was once recommended as a cure for headaches. To reiterate somewhat from part 1, the philosopher Giordano Bruno noted that if some old wives tales were to be believed, such as the notion that pigs might fly, then "there is something wrong with nature."  Etymologists might be interested to note that - to the best of my knowledge…

The Whale, The Torpedo And Cruelty To Animals, A brief history of the use of electricity in medicine and the development of the pacemaker. It has become something of a cliché to compare nerve cells with electrical circuits.  Clichés begin when someone makes an astute observation and then coins a neat turn of phrase.  If the phrase fits a sociolinguistic need then it catches on, or - if I may be forgiven the modern cliche - it goes viral.  Given that it was early experimenters with electricity who discovered the relationship between the operation of nerves and the operation of…

A University of Missouri study found that the testosterone levels of men dropped when they interacted with the wife of a close friend. What does this mean? Testosterone is the chemical of sexual desire and aggression in both men and women. Men's T-levels tend to rise when they're around a potential sex partner -- as well as when they're around the mate of their enemy. Interesting, no? Extrapolating, the researchers think that this mechanism may have evolved to help social cooperation in villages. According to the press release, Lead researcher Mark Flinn says, "… our findings suggest that…

Neuroscientists have long demonstrated that neuronal connections in the brain can be strengthened with neuronal activity in the process known as neuroplasticity, and that brain training can be the ideal remedy to sharpen the human mind and to slow down the progress of neurodegeneration. However, recent studies revealed that too much thinking can actually be detrimental to the brain, causing profound DNA damage often dubbed as the DNA double-stranded breakages (DSBs). DSBs are identified by the accumulation of gH2A.X histone- a recruiter of the DNA-repair machinery- at the site of breakage…