Neuroscience

Learning 'Greases' Connections Between Brain Regions

Brain activity considered to be  spontaneous 'white noise' changes after a person learns a new task, according to researchers, and the degree of change reflects how well subjects have learned to perform the task. The suggestion is that this learn ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2009 - 4:26pm

5-month Old Infants Can Discern Difference Between Human And Monkey Speech

Infants can correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls even when they are as young as five months old, says a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study.   While young children know tha ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2009 - 5:47pm

Gender Differences, Even In The Prenatal Brain

Prenatal sex-based biological differences extend to genetic expression in cerebral cortices and the differences in question are probably associated with later divergences in how our brains develop, according to a new study by Uppsala University researchers ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 23 2009 - 12:51pm

Neurocomplexity: A Challenge For Science Bloggers

John Evans, a mathematician friend of mine in Cambridge England, came up with a formula that specifically allows one to estimate the relative complexity of nervous systems in the animal kingdom, from C. elegans to the human brain. It takes into account no ...

Article - Dave Deamer - Nov 2 2009 - 1:23pm

Calculating Animal Intelligence

    In a column posted a few days ago (November 1) I mentioned that my friend John Evans, a Cambridge (England) mathematician, has developed a general formula for estimating biocomplexity. It is quite simple, using only two variables: the number of units ...

Article - Dave Deamer - Nov 8 2009 - 1:48am

Is It Possible To Make Bad Memories Disappear?

Everybody has memories they'd like to forget forever. Now, thanks to research conducted by scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, there might be a pill for that. According to their study recently published in Science, ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 9 2009 - 1:20pm

What Dieters And Drug Addicts Have In Common

Boston University Researchers have shown that intermittent access to fatty and sugary foods induces changes in the brain that are comparable to those observed in drug dependence. The findings, reported in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 9 2009 - 7:09pm

Emotions Alter Our Response To Physical Pain, Study Shows

If you're sore from a strenuous workout or your thumb is pulsating because you hit it with a hammer, look at a pretty picture or listen to your favorite song. It just might help you cope with whatever unpleasant feeling you're experiencing. That& ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2009 - 6:59pm

Link Between Dopamine And Expectation Of Pleasure Confirmed

Enhancing the effects of dopamine influences how people make life choices by affecting expectations of pleasure, according to new research from the UCL Institute of Neurology.  Published today in Current Biology, the study confirms an important role for do ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 12 2009 - 2:55pm

Mice Cheer Up After Knockout

Mice who had the PKCI/HINT1 gene removed had an anti-depressant-like and anxiolytic-like effect, say esearchers writing in BMC Neuroscience who applied a battery of behavioral tests to the PKCI/HINT1 knockout animals, concluding that the deleted gene may h ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 13 2009 - 11:03am