Guessing When to Pay Attention
Razi Berry Fast reactions to future events are crucial. A boxer, for example, needs to respond to her opponent in fractions of a second in order to anticipate and block the next attack. Such rapid responses are based on estimates of whether and when events will occur. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for […]
Muscle Signals are Important to a Healthy Brain
Razi Berry How do different parts of the body communicate? Scientists at St. Jude are studying how signals sent from skeletal muscle affect the brain. The team studied fruit flies and cutting-edge brain cell models called organoids. They focused on the signals muscles send when stressed. The researchers found that stress signals rely on an […]
Is Your Brain Leaking?
Razi Berry As people age, changes in the tiniest blood vessels in the brain, a condition called cerebral small vessel disease, can lead to thinking and memory problems and stroke. These changes can also affect the blood-brain barrier, a layer of cells that protect the brain from toxins circulating in the blood. Now a new […]
How Hypnosis Changes Our Brain’s Processing
Razi Berry During a normal waking state, information is processed and shared by various parts within our brain to enable flexible responses to external stimuli. Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that during hypnosis the brain shifted to a state where individual brain regions acted more independently of each other. “In a normal […]
Reading Skills Help Proficiency in Other Subjects
Razi Berry A University at Buffalo researcher’s recent work on dyslexia has unexpectedly produced a startling discovery which clearly demonstrates how the cooperative areas of the brain responsible for reading skill are also at work during apparently unrelated activities, such as multiplication. Though the division between literacy and math is commonly reflected in the division […]
Sleep Helps Heal Traumatic Brain Injuries
Razi Berry Sound sleep plays a critical role in healing traumatic brain injury, a new study of military veterans suggests. The study, published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, used a new technique involving magnetic resonance imaging developed at Oregon Health & Science University. Researchers used MRI to evaluate the enlargement of perivascular spaces that surround […]
Why Do Smells Make You Remember
Razi Berry A new Northwestern Medicine paper is the first to identify a neural basis for how the brain enables odors to so powerfully elicit those memories. The paper shows unique connectivity between the hippocampus — the seat of memory in the brain — and olfactory areas in humans. This new research suggests a neurobiological […]
Sleep is Crucial to Memory
Razi Berry When you slip into sleep, it’s easy to imagine that your brain shuts down, but University of Michigan research suggests that groups of neurons activated during prior learning keep humming, tattooing memories into your brain. U-M researchers have been studying how memories associated with a specific sensory event are formed and stored in […]
New Brain Model Reveals How Our Eyesight Can ‘Trick’ Us
Razi Berry A computer network closely modelled on part of the human brain is enabling new insights into the way our brains process moving images — and explains some perplexing optical illusions. By using decades’ worth of data from human motion perception studies, researchers have trained an artificial neural network to estimate the speed and […]
A Bad Heart = A Bad Brain
Razi Berry Heart problems cause disturbed gene activity in the brain’s memory center, from which cognitive deficits arise. Researchers at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) and the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) come to this conclusion based on laboratory studies. They consider that they have found […]