Neuroscience

Retired Football Player Brain Scans Show Profound Abnormalities

Worrisome news for retired American football players.  Though former players in a new preliminary study were not diagnosed with any neurological condition, brain imaging tests revealed unusual activity that correlated with how many times they had left the ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2013 - 9:35am

Brains Flush Out Toxins During Sleep?

A study in mice has found that the space between brain cells may increase during sleep, allowing the brain to flush out toxins that build up during waking hours.  Get a good night's sleep- it may literally clear your mind. For centuries, scientists a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2013 - 4:33pm

Brain Areas That Process Spoken Language Impacted By Learning Dialects

Reading this article while someone else read a piece in People means your brain has already been shaped differently than that of the other person. Each experience sends us off on divergent branches, so imaging of brain areas used for understanding languag ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2013 - 10:49am

3K3A-APC: In Animal Model, Experimental Drug Reduces Brain Damage From Stroke

3K3A-APC, an experimental drug, appears to reduce brain damage and eliminate brain hemorrhaging in older stroke-afflicted mice and stroke-afflicted rats with co-morbid conditions such as hypertension, according to a new study. The paper finds that 3K3A-AP ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 25 2013 - 10:59am

11 New Genes Proposed For Alzheimer's Drug Discovery

The largest international genetics collaboration focusing on Alzheimer's has identified 11 new regions of the genome that contribute to late-onset of the disease, doubling the number of potential genetics-based therapeutic targets to investigate.   ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 27 2013 - 1:49pm

Babies Learn Songs In The Womb

A brain imaging study says that babies can learn lullabies while still in utero. The paper focused on 24 women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half of the women played the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their babies five days a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 31 2013 - 9:52am

Aerobic Exercise Benefits Memory In Persons With Multiple Sclerosis

A research study headed by Victoria Leavitt, Ph.D. and James Sumowski, Ph.D., of Kessler Foundation, provides the first evidence for beneficial effects of aerobic exercise. Hippocampal atrophy seen in MS is linked to the memory deficits that affect approx ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2013 - 7:30am

Mechanisms Of Cognitive Fatigue In Multiple Sclerosis

Cognitive fatigue- fatigue resulting from mental work rather than from physical labor- occurs in patients suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) also.  A recent study investigated the neural correlates of cognitive fatigue in multiple sclerosis utilizing ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 3 2013 - 10:55am

Early Musical Training Benefits The Brain All Life Long

Older adults who took music lessons as children but hadn't actively played an instrument in decades have faster brain responses to sounds than those who never played an instrument, according to a study appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience.  As pe ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 5 2013 - 6:14pm

Monkeys Control Virtual Arms Using Just Their Brains

Researchers writing in  Science Translational Medicine have shown that monkeys can control the movement of both arms of an avatar- using just their brain activity.  To enable the monkeys to control the two virtual arms, researchers recorded nearly 500 neu ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 6 2013 - 4:00pm