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Study shows how nerve cells in visual cortex adapt to changing images

Neuroscientists studying the mind's ability to process images have completed the first empirical study to demonstrate, using animal models, how populations of nerve cells in visual cortex adapt to changing images.

13 Mar 2008

Different use of brain areas may explain memory problems in schizophrenics

The enduring memory problems that people with schizophrenia experience may be related to differences in how their brains process information, new research has found.

13 Mar 2008

Post brain injury: New nerve cells originate from neural stem cells

Most cells in the human brain are not nerve cells, but supporting cells (glial cells).

12 Mar 2008

Just one hour of exposure to diesel exhaust fumes induces a stress response in brain

If the smell of diesel exhaust isn't enough to make you avoid getting a lungful, new research now shows that even a short exposure to the fumes can affect your brain.

11 Mar 2008

Nanoparticulate matter from exhaust fumes alter the way the brain functions

Dutch researchers say exhaust fumes may give you more than a headache, they could in fact alter the way the brain functions.

11 Mar 2008

Children of alcoholics: different brain regions effect who may or may not develop alcohol problems

Although children of alcoholics (COAs) have a greater risk of developing alcohol-use disorders (AUDs), not all COAs will develop AUDs.

6 Mar 2008

Adolescents at risk of developing a substance-use disorder have deficits in frontal brain activation

Children and adolescents at high risk for developing a substance-use disorder (SUD) tend to show deficits in executive cognitive function (ECF).

6 Mar 2008

New insight into maternal love

The distinctive ability of mothers to identify the cries of their offspring is widely evident in nature, where it is critical to the survival of these offspring.

28 Feb 2008

New view of human brainstem

A team of scientists from Princeton University has devised a new experimental technique that produces some of the best functional images ever taken of the human brainstem, the most primitive area of the brain.

28 Feb 2008

Possible brain basis for parental instinct

Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them which allows our species to survive.

28 Feb 2008

Youngest patient worldwide to have auditory implant in the brain stem

A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodríguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolomé Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves.

27 Feb 2008

Discovery of new receptor complex in brain - better understanding of how hallucinations occur

Mount Sinai researchers have identified a new receptor complex in the brain that responds to several types of antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia and also reacts to hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD.

27 Feb 2008

Insulin administered intranasally may lower food intake in men, improve memory in women

Insulin administered intranasally, acutely decreases food intake in men but not women and in contrast, the compound improves memory function in women but not men according to a new study accepted for publication in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

22 Feb 2008

Newly discovered role of thyroid hormone during pregnancy

Thyroid hormone deficiencies in early pregnancy can cause locomotor underdevelopment in the child, according to research from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet.

21 Feb 2008

Study identifies patterns of brain activation linked to the formation of long-term memories

Researchers at New York University and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have identified patterns of brain activation linked to the formation of long-term memories.

20 Feb 2008

Siblings of schizophrenia patients display subtle shape abnormalities in brain

Subtle malformations in the brains of patients with schizophrenia also tend to occur in their healthy siblings, according to investigators at the Silvio Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Mental Disorders at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Shape abnormalities were found in the brain's thalamus.

20 Feb 2008

Intervention program boosts education of kids at high risk of failure

An eight-week-long intervention program aimed at parents from low socioeconomic backgrounds reaped significant educational benefits in their preschool-aged children, a University of Oregon research fellow reported today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

17 Feb 2008

Understanding how the brain works from computers, and vice versa

Some projects were aimed at understanding how the brain works, using complex computational models. Others were aimed at improving the abilities of computers to perform tasks that our brains do with ease, such as making sense of complex visual images.

17 Feb 2008

Insights into the physics of brain activity

The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain.

17 Feb 2008

Poor recognition of 'self' found in high functioning people with autism

Contrary to popular notions, people at the high end of the autism spectrum disorder continuum suffer most from an inability to model "self" rather than impaired ability to respond to others, said Baylor College of Medicine researchers in a report that appear in the journal Neuron.

7 Feb 2008