Neuroscience

Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, assistant professor of organismal biology aat the University of Chicago, studies the neural basis of tactile perception -  how our hands convey this information to the brain. In a new study, he and colleagues found that the timing and frequency of vibrations produced in the skin when you run your hands along a surface, like searching a wall for a light switch, plays an important role in how we use our sense of touch to gather information about the objects and surfaces around us. Vibrations?  A lot like hearing, they say. Our sense of touch is traditionally…

Rather than just a single sense of location, the brain has a number of "modules" dedicated to self-location. Each module contains its own internal GPS-like mapping system that keeps track of movement, and has other characteristics that also distinguishes one from another. How many different sense of location?  It's unclear.  At least four and perhaps as many as 10, according to  new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  They say this is also the first time that researchers have been able to show…

If you want to go on a quest for solving the mysteries of deafness, discovering the genetic machinery in the inner ear that responds to sound waves and converts them into electrical impulses, the language of the brain, is your holy grail. Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) say have identified just such a chalice; a critical component of this ear-to-brain conversion is the protein called TMHS. This protein is a component of the mechanotransduction channels in the ear, which convert the signals from mechanical sound waves into electrical impulses transmitted to the nervous…

Testosterone has control over the gender-specific absence or presence of mammary gland nerves that sense the amount of milk available in breast milk ducts, according to a new paper which says that the hormones do the job by altering the availability of a nerve growth factor, called BDNF for short.  For their experiments with sex-specific neural wiring, Yin Liu, a student in Ginty's laboratory, studied nerves in mice that monitor the fullness of milk ducts in females. If the milk supply is low, the nerves are believed to report this to the brain to stimulate milk production, Ginty says.…

Scientists trying to investigate mechanisms at work in Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases have a new tool. A transgenic variety of zebrafish, which is transparent in the early stages of its life, called the "MitoFish" enables them to see how brain diseases disturb the transport of mitochondria, the power plants of the cell -  within individual neurons of living animals. Neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and MS (multiple sclerosis) are  different in their effects on patients' cognitive and motor functions, behavior, and prognosis - but on the…

Inside the brains of mice and men alike, a relatively big football-shaped region called the thalamus acts like a switchboard, providing the prefrontal cortex, the part that does abstract thinking and decision-making, with most of its information. The thalamus's responsibility even includes helping the prefrontal cortex to maintain consciousness and arousal. Essential as this "thalamocortical" partnership is, neuroscientists have understood very little about the connections coming from a matrix of cells in the so-called "nonspecific thalamus," where information other than from the senses is…

Women suffering from sleep apnea have a higher degree of brain damage than men with the disorder, according to a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Nursing.   Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious disorder that occurs when a person's breathing is repeatedly interrupted during sleep, sometimes hundreds of times. Each time, the oxygen level in the blood drops, eventually resulting in damage to many cells in the body. If left untreated, it can lead to high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, diabetes, depression and other serious health problems. 10 years ago, this UCLA…

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have shown that synchronization emerges between brains when making music together, and even when musicians play different voices. This synchronization is used by tutors such as takelessons to help their students learn how to play. Johanna Sänger and her team used electrodes to record the brain waves of guitarists while they played different voices of the same duet. They say the results point to brain synchronicity that cannot be explained away by similitudes in external stimulation but can be attributed to a more…

When it comes to the number of pieces of information the mind can cope with before confusion sets in, the "magic" number is seven, psychologists have long said.  But did phone companies pick that because of the claim or did folk wisdom say it must be seven because that is what phone companies used? In 1956, American psychologist George Miller published a paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", in Psychological Review, arguing the mind could cope with seven chunks of information. 7 plus or minus two felt like pretty…

You can see the color white and you can hear white noise but you can also smell a white odor, says new research.  When we see white, we are seeing a mixture of light waves of different wavelengths. The hum we call white noise is a combination of assorted sound frequencies but in both cases a stimulus must meet two conditions: The mix that produces them must span the range of our perception and each component must be present at the exact same intensity. Both of these conditions can be met with odors, so as to produce a white smell - it just involves technical difficulties, like getting…