Neuroscience

President Obama’s recently announced effort to map the human brain and existing European efforts like the Human Brain Project are taking direct aim at neurological disorders and diseases.  Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, post-traumatic stress disorders, and epilepsy are all, at their worst, debilitating brain malfunctions; the hope is that new money injected into basic research on brain function will improve treatment and recognition. The ultimate goal may be drug development, drug delivery, novel treatments and even cures. But a first step is carrying out the basic…

A technique reported in Nature Biotechnology directly converts skin cells to the type of brain cells destroyed in patients with multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other so-called myelin disorders.   Myelinating cells provide a vital sheath of insulation that protects neurons and enables the delivery of brain impulses to the rest of the body. In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), cerebral palsy (CP), and rare genetic disorders called leukodystrophies, myelinating cells are destroyed and cannot be replaced. The new technique involves directly converting fibroblasts - an abundant…

Brain studies are a mass of contradictions. When you leave your job and your home and your technology behind for a vacation, you 'disconnect' some claim. "Actually, you've just given your brain a whole new challenge," says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. "You may think you're resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving? The dilemma is that our brains can…

New research has questioned the reliability of neuroscience studies, concluding that most had an average power of around 20 percent – a finding which means the chance of the average study discovering the effect being investigated is only one in five.  The conclusions neuroscience papers drew could be wrong due to small sample sizes, the authors say. A team of academics reviewed 48 articles on neuroscience meta-analysis which were published in 2011 and determined that small, low-powered studies are 'endemic' in neuroscience, producing unreliable research which is inefficient and wasteful…

Building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000, which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations), a new paper in Brain outlines  case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations. While ffytche believes that hallucinations of musical notation are rarer than some other types of visual hallucination, Professor Oliver Sacks M.D. details eight examples of…

The Mind Research Network in Albuquerque says that brain scans can predict the likelihood of whether a criminal will re-offend following release from prison. They studied impulsive and antisocial behavior and centered on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain linked to regulating behavior and impulsivity.  The study looked at 96 adult male criminal offenders aged 20-52 who volunteered to participate in research studies. They used a  mobile magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system to collect neuroimaging data as the inmate volunteers completed a series of…

fMRI has always been a little misused, to people who know what they are talking about. 20 years after it was first done, the promise seems to have been overrun by agenda-based cultural mapping. Despite a rash of media articles that claim to show the reaction of the brain when something is seen or done, and questionable concepts designed to exploit it - goofy nonsense like that Republicans brains are better than Democrats because they are more rational or that we can read minds - researchers who aren't selling 21st century paranormal books know there has to be a lot of caution in making fMRI…

It is well established that the hippocampus is central for learning and memory, encoding mnemonic data about past experiences and connections. However, the role of the hippocampus in emotional processes is less clear, although there have been inklings of evidence in the past suggesting that the hippocampus does indeed play a role in fear and anxiety. Perhaps the link between the hippocampus and anxiety can be best seen in human cases of trauma, where previous traumatic experiences are encoded in memory (likely in the hippocampus). This memory can contribute to an individual’s tendency to…

The term 'elites' gets a bad rap in modern culture, mostly because political pundits use it to mean 'me and people I like' - elitism - rather than understanding what elite means. Yet in sports we still recognize that there are elites. Don't like Usain Bolt's politics?  Beat him in a race.  Some new research says that, as much as it might bother us, some elites are elite in many ways. Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example, perform better than the rest of us in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information, even if they are Republicans and social psychologists…

 Schizophrenia is thought to have a substantial genetic background which is also, to some extent, population-specific. Genome-wide searches have revealed many numerous genomic variants with weak effects, but the remaining 'missing heritability' is unknown. Scientists hypothesize that it may be partly explained by rare variants with large effect.   Since the 1960s, biologists have been hunting for substances made by the body that might accumulate in abnormally high levels to produce the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. In particular, there was a search for chemicals that might…