Neuroscience
To read media accounts and claims by lawyers, everyone in the NFL except kickers is suffering some sort of brain damage. It was only a matter of time before those same claims were being made about pee-wee league football also/
While there are obviously cases in which that has happened, in-depth neurological examinations of 45 retired NFL players, ranging in age from 30-to 60-years old, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) along with comprehensive neuropsychological and neurological examinations, interviews, blood tests…
Mental fitness tools are all the rage. Companies are pushing out various brain games that claim they can boost cognitive powers. Do they work? Most studies say no but a new paper finds that playing a puzzle game like Cut the Rope for as little as an hour a day led to improved executive functions.
Executive functions in the brain are important for making decisions in everyday life when you have to deal with sudden changes in your environment – better known as thinking on your feet. An example would be when the traffic light turns amber and a driver has to decide in an instant if he will be…
Lavado cocoa is primarily composed of polyphenols, antioxidants also found in fruits and vegetables. Some studies have suggested that they prevent degenerative diseases of the brain and a new study
in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that a specific preparation of Lavado may reduce damage to nerve pathways seen in Alzheimer's disease patients' brains long before they develop symptoms.
The researchers used mice genetically engineered to mimic Alzheimer's disease and it was found that the Lavado cocoa extract prevents the protein β-amyloid- (Aβ) from gradually forming sticky…
Anesthesia works, we know that. Properly done, patients can be temporarily rendered completely unresponsive during surgery and then wake up again, with their memories and skills intact. Improperly done, of course, can be very bad.
But little is understood about the processes used by structurally normal brains to navigate from unconsciousness back to consciousness. Anesthesia leads the world in retracted papers.
Previous research has shown that the anesthetized brain is not "silent" under surgical levels of anesthesia but experiences certain patterns of activity, and it spontaneously…
How do some people know the words to thousands and thousand of songs?
A new study has found that the hippocampus, a brain structure crucial for creating long-lasting memories, is more active in response to recurring musical phrases while listening to music. That means hippocampal involvement in long-term memory may be less specific than previously thought and that short and long-term memory processes may depend on each other after all.
A fundamental highlight of the study
by the University of Jyväskylä and the AMI Center of Aalto University
is the use of a setting that is more natural…
A controlled study using functional MRI brain imaging reveals a possible biological link between early musical training and improved executive functioning in both children and adults, adjusting for socioeconomic factors.
Executive functions are the high-level cognitive processes that enable people to quickly process and retain information, regulate their behaviors, make good choices, solve problems, plan and adjust to changing mental demands.
While it's already clear that musical training relates to cognitive abilities, few previous studies have looked at its effects on executive functions…
Decreased cognitive ability and autistic-like behaviors have been linked to disruption of the function of the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) gene by Tufts researchers who deleted the gene from select neurons in the developing mouse brain.
The mice showed reduced social behavior, increased repetitive behavior, and impaired learning and memory formation, similar to behaviors seen in individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities. The authors say this study is the first to evaluate how the loss of APC from nerve cells in the forebrain affects brain development, learning, and behavior.…
There is a common perception is that if you are sick, you sleep more, and some people do - but a new study found that sickness induced insomnia is quite common.
Fighting off illness – rather than the illness itself – causes sleep deprivation and affects memory, says University of Leicester biologist Dr. Eamonn Mallo.
Psychoneuroimmunology studies the number of connections between neurobiology, immunology and behavior. The researchers used the Geneswitch system to upregulate peptidoglycan receptor protein (PGRP) expression, thereby stimulating the immune system in the absence of infection, in…
A recent study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis makes a bold conjecture; that our ability to make choices — and sometimes mistakes — might arise from random fluctuations in the brain's background electrical noise.
The brain has a normal level of 'background noise', says Jesse Bengson, a postdoctoral researcher at the center and first author on the paper.
As electrical activity patterns fluctuate across the brain, decisions can be predicted based on the pattern of brain activity immediately before a decision was made.
Bengson sat volunteers in front of…
Antidepressant drugs are common in the developed world and are among the most prescribed medications in North America. Though antidepressants are effective for some, there is a lot of variability in how individuals respond to antidepressant treatment.
A recent study found that levels of a small molecule found only in primates are lower in the brains of depressed individuals, a discovery that may hold a key to improving treatment options for those who suffer from depression.
Depression is a common cause of disability, and while viable medications exist to treat it, finding the right…