Neuroscience
kjmtchl |
The criteria used to assign patients to specific psychiatric disease categories are set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. (There is also a World Health Organisation equivalent, the International Classification of Disease). Every so often, these criteria are revised to reflect new research and changing concepts of disease. The APA has just released a draft of preliminary revisions to the current diagnostic criteria (available at http://www.dsm5.org/) as part of the preparations for the fifth release (DSM-5), due…
There's a reason attractive human faces are used to market just about everything consumers purchase today – when people see pretty faces, their brains begin computing how much the experience is worth. New brain-imaging research shows it's even possible to predict how much people might be willing to pay to see a particular face. Scientists say the findings may allow them to predict future purchases of different market segments.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that as participants were watching a sequence of faces, their brains were simultaneously evaluating those faces in…
Researchers have isolated an independent processing channel of synapses inside the brain's auditory cortex that deals specifically with shutting off sound processing at appropriate times. The discovery, detailed this week in Neuron, challenges a long-held assumption that the signaling of a sound's appearance and its subsequent disappearance are both handled by the same pathway.
The new finding could lead to new, distinctly targeted therapies such as improved hearing devices, said Michael Wehr, a professor of psychology and member of the University of Oregon Institute of Neuroscience.…
Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, information on the causative link between brain activity and spirituality is lacking. Neuroimaging studies have associated activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but researchers have been unable to establish a causative relationship between such a network and spirituality.
In order to establish that relationship, researchers studied the personality trait self-transcendence (ST),…
A study of the phenomenon known as loss aversion in two patients with lesions to the amygdala, a region deep within the brain involved in emotions and decision-making, may help explain how we make decisions and what makes us dislike the thought of losing money.
Loss aversion describes the avoidance of choices which can lead to losses, even when accompanied by equal or much larger gains . Examples in the everyday life include how we make a decision on whether to proceed with an operation: the more serious the potential complications from the operation – even if the risk is low compared…
Research conducted by scientists at the Weizmann Institute and the University of Maryland reveals that bats, which 'see' with beams of sound waves, skew their beams off-center when they want to locate an object. The research, which recently appeared in Science, shows that this strategy is the most efficient for locating objects.
"We think that this tradeoff between detecting a object and determining its location is fundamental to any process that involves tracking an object whether done by a bat, a dog or a human, and whether accomplished through hearing, smell or sight," said co-author…
drarturo |
IS IT TRUE WHAT WE PERCEIVE? REMEMBERING THE CONCEPT OF SENSORY UNIVERSE
Two weeks ago I started to experience a compression of the maxillary branch of the left trigeminal nerve. Let me tell you that my dental and maxillary troubles have become from long ago. But this time I felt something quite different; the sensation of a foreign body at intermittent periods over my left ear and the external auditory conduct of the same side. Fortunately because I`m a Medical Doctor, Ophthalmic Surgeon, Professor of Neurosciences at the Medical school and also because I have very good communication…
Scientists at the University of California San Francisco say a majority of published studies analyzing the relationship between Alzheimer's disease and smoking indicates that the habit is a significant risk factor for the disease. Researchers also found that studies funded by the tobacco industry tended to conclude that smoking protects against the development of AD, while independent studies showed that smoking increased the risk of developing the disease. The findings were published online today in the January issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
The UCSF team reviewed 43 published…
Through the use of sophisticated brain-imaging techniques, researchers at UCLA say they have been able to predict a brain's progression to Alzheimer's by measuring subtle changes in brain structure over time, changes that occur long before symptoms can be seen. The research appears in two separate papers published in Human Brain Mapping and Neurobiology of Aging.
In the first study, researchers tracked 169 people over three years who had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition that causes memory problems greater than those expected for an individual's age — but not…
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry have obtained 3-D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons. The effort was made possible a novel technique in electron microscopy, which cools cells so quickly that their biological structures can be frozen while fully active.
"We used electron cryotomography, a new technique in microscopy based on ultra-fast freezing of cells, in order to study and obtain three-dimensional images of synapsis, the cellular structure in which the communication between neurons takes place in the brains of…