Social Sciences

Compared to people with normal vision, those who were blind at birth tend to have excellent memories. A new study shows that blind individuals are particular whizzes when it comes to remembering things in the right order. The findings are a good example of the familiar adage that “practice makes perfect” and reveal that mental capabilities may be refined or adjusted in order to compensate for the lack of a sensory input, according to researchers Noa Raz and Ehud Zohary of Hebrew University. “Our opinion is that the superior serial memory of the blind is most likely a result of practice,”…

A particular resonance pattern in the brain’s auditory processing region appears to be key to its ability to discriminate speech, researchers have found. They found that the inherent rhythm of neural activity called “theta band” specifically reacts to spoken sentences by changing its phase. The researchers also noted that the natural oscillation of this frequency provides further evidence that the brain samples speech segments about the length of a syllable. The findings represent the first time that such a broad neural response has been identified as central to perceiving the highly complex…

Researchers have discovered a sophisticated neural computer, buried deep in the cerebellum, that performs inertial navigation calculations to figure out a person’s movement through space. These calculations are no mean feat, emphasized the researchers. The vestibular system in the inner ear provides the primary source of input to the brain about the body’s movement and orientation in space. However, the vestibular sensors in the inner ear yield information about head position only. Also, the vestibular system’s detection of head acceleration cannot distinguish between the effect of movement…

25 million people are living with schizophrenia in low and middle income countries and over two-thirds of them are not receiving any treatment. Dr Vikram Patel discusses the crucial role that community health workers can play. Dr Saaed Farooq argues that the huge burden of untreated schizophrenia could be tackled by providing free antipsychotic medications and supervising patients while they take their treatment (akin to the way in which patients with TB are supervised when they take their antituberculous medications). Dr R Thara discusses the crucial importance of tackling the stigma of…

Parkinson disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease characterized by the selective loss of midbrain dopaminergic neurons. Although the cause of PD is unknown, pathological analyses have suggested the involvement of oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction. Recently, an inherited form of early-onset PD has been linked to mutations in both copies of the gene encoding the mitochondrial protein PINK1. Furthermore, increasing evidence indicates that single-copy mutations in PINK1 are a significant risk factor in the development of later-onset PD. In a study published this week,…

Some advice my dad gave me: "If your wife says she never dreams about sex with another man, she's lying. If she says she never dreams about sex with another woman, she's lying then too." He may have been on to something. It turns out everyone, men and women alike, dream about sex. In a detailed study that served to investigate the actual nature and content of sexual dreams across a large sample of dream reports from men and women, approximately eight percent of everyday dream reports from both genders contain some form of sexual-related activity. The percentage of women that reported such…

The long supposed connection between mind and music has been further demonstrated by an international collaboration of physicists led by Simone Bianco and Paolo Grigolini at the Center for Nonlinear Science at the University of North Texas. A statistical analysis reveals a remarkable similarity between the distributions produced by music compositions and brain activity. Brain activity was monitored through an electroencephalograph (EEG), which records electrical signals on the surface of the brain. The musical compositions were analyzed based on the melody, harmony, rhythm, pitch, and timber…

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today. These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale. Photo of a new dopamine neuron after injection. The red is a progeny of the human stem cell. Credit…

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale. “Not only are stem cells a potential source of…

The vocal learning process in the zebra finch offers a model system to study the neural and behavioral mechanisms by which humans learn to produce sounds. Songbirds such as zebra finches have specialized areas of their brains devoted to communication. That is why they have been used as animal models to study speech disorders, such as stuttering. It is estimated that more than 3 million Americans stutter. Researchers at the Methodist Neurological Institute (NI) in Houston and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City used functional MRI to determine that songbirds have a pronounced right…