Social Sciences
Prof. Yadin Dudai, Head of the Weizmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department, and his colleagues recently discovered that the process of storing long-term memories is much more dynamic than previously thought, involving a miniature molecular machine that must run constantly to keep memories going. They also found that jamming the machine briefly can erase long-term memories. Their findings may pave the way to future treatments for memory problems.
Dudai and research student Reut Shema, together with Todd Sacktor of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center, trained rats to avoid certain tastes. They…
Brain imaging has revealed a breakdown in normal patterns of emotional processing that impairs the ability of people with clinical depression to suppress negative emotional states. Efforts by depressed patients to suppress their feelings when viewing emotionally negative images enhanced activity in several brain areas, including the amygdala, known to play a role in generating emotion.
“Identifying areas in the nervous system that correlate to pathological mood states is one of the pressing questions in mental illness today,” says Carol Tamminga, MD, of the University of Texas Southwest…
Painful, emotional memories that people would most like to forget may be the toughest to leave behind, especially when memories are created through visual cues, according to a new study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“When you’re watching the news on television and see footage of wounded soldiers in Iraq or ongoing coverage of national tragedies, it may stick with you more than a newspaper headline,” said the study’s lead author, Keith Payne, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
It is adaptive to be able to intentionally forget neutral…
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that brains of people with clinical depression react very differently than those of healthy people when trying to cope with negative situations.
According to the World Health Organization, clinical depression is one of the leading causes of disability and lost productivity in the world. Understanding the root cause of depression, however, has proved difficult.
"It's normal for people to have negative emotions in certain circumstances," says lead study author Tom Johnstone. "One of the features of major depression is not that people…
Columbia University Medical Center researchers have demonstrated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), that brain activity was increased in stroke and traumatic brain injury survivors who underwent Vision Restoration Therapy (VRT), a rehabilitative treatment that helps these patients recover lost vision.
Researchers, led by Randolph S. Marshall, M.D., M.S., associate professor of clinical neurology at Columbia University, examined the fMRIs of six patients aged 35-77 with vision loss on the same side of both eyes (called homonymous hemianopia) caused by stroke or traumatic…
The unusual case of a woman who heard voices with her own speech impairments in her head after a bicycle accident is examined in a Case Report in this week’s edition of The Lancet. The woman was treated by Dr Daniela Hubl, University Hospital of Psychiatry, Bern, Switzerland, and colleagues, who authored the Case Report.
It was in August 2006 that the 63-year-old woman, with no previous medical history, was brought to the hospital after falling from her bicycle and hitting her head and having a brain bleed, causing her to lose consciousness. Tests showed she had brain damage covering several…
Which brain processes enable humans to rapidly access their personal knowledge? What happens if humans perceive either familiar or unfamiliar objects?
The answer to these questions may lie in the direction of information flow transmitted between specialized brain areas that together establish a dynamic cortical network.
Fruit or vegetable, insect or bird, familiar or unfamiliar – humans are used to classify objects in the world around them and group them into categories that have been formed and shaped constantly through every day's experience. Categorization during visual perception is…
For every man with a migraine, three women are struck by the severe headaches that often come with nausea, sensitivity to light and sound, and aura. That means a staggering 18 to 25 percent of women suffer from migraines, making it one of the most common disabling conditions faced by women around the globe.
This 3-to-1 ratio raises the obvious question: Why? The reason, suggest researchers at UCLA, is that women may have a faster trigger than men for activating the waves of brain activity thought to underlie migraines. If the theory is correct, this triggering mechanism may be a new target…
The discovery of a novel molecular switch that powerfully modulates nerve cell activity offers the potential for new mood disorder and epilepsy treatments, University of California, Irvine researchers report.
The researchers looked at the role of the natural substance cholecystokinin (CCK) in modulating communication between cells in the brain. CCK, originally isolated from the digestive tract, is one of the most abundant small proteins, or peptides, in the brain, and it is linked to psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia.
Using sophisticated…
One of the unique characteristics of humans that distinguish us from the animal kingdom is the ability to represent others’ beliefs in our own minds. This sort of intuitive mind-reading, according to experts, lays the cognitive foundations of interpersonal understanding and communication.
Despite its importance, scientists have yet to reach a consensus on how this psychological function develops. Some argue that this complex and flexible ability is acquired at the age of 3-4 years and only after prerequisites such as language grammar are fulfilled. Others suggest specialized developmental…