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Stress in early childhood leads to faster maturation of certain brain regions during adolescence. In contrast, stress experienced later in life leads to slower maturation of the adolescent brain. This is the outcome of a long-term study conducted by researchers of Radboud University in which 37 subjects have been monitored for almost 20 years. The findings will be published in […]
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The early years are when the brain develops the most, forming neural connections that pave the way for how a child—and the eventual adult—will express feelings, embark on a task, and learn new skills and concepts. Scientists have even theorized that the anatomical structure of neural connections forms the basis for how children identify letters and recognize words. In other […]
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People who smoke or have diabetes may be at increased risk of calcifications in a region of the brain crucial to memory, according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. Dementia is a major public health problem that affects tens of millions of people worldwide. One focus of dementia research has been the hippocampus, a brain structure […]
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Until now, it was thought that multiple brain areas were needed to control sleep and wakefulness. Neuroscientists from Bern have now identified one single control center for the sleep-wake cycle in the brain. The findings are of great importance for finding new sleep therapies. Every night we spend several hours asleep and every morning we awaken to go about our […]
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During a depressive episode, the ability of the brain to form new brain cells is reduced. Scientists of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum examined how this affects the memory with a computational model. It was previously known that people in an acute depressive episode were less likely to remember current events. The computational model however suggests that older memories were affected as […]
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Peripersonal space (PPS) is a mental space defined by the brain immediately around body parts used when interacting with people and objects. Recently, researchers have shown that some neurons in the primate brain respond to an infringement of another person’s PPS as if their own space was being encroached upon. To determine how this “PPS remapping” phenomenon affects human behavior, […]
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In contrast to unpaired organs like the heart, liver or appendix, the brain is recognizable as a roughly symmetrical organ. Consciousness is a seemingly unpaired phenomenon created by this paired organ. One way to explore consciousness is to force it to choose between two paired stimuli in a binocular rivalry experiment. In a paper just published in Nature Communications, Christof […]
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Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University believe they have uncovered an “Achilles heel” of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most common and deadly form of brain cancer. Their study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how a mechanism that protects glioma stem cells can potentially be exploited to develop new and more effective treatments for […]
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Understanding how the brain moves—at rest and upon impact—has been crucial to understanding brain disorders, but technology to clearly see these movements has lagged behind. Now, researchers from Stevens Institute of Technology, in collaboration with University of Auckland and Stanford University, have developed an imaging technique that captures and magnifies the brain in motion, in real time, every time the […]
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Millions of neurons in the gastrointestinal tract coordinate their activity to generate the muscle contractions that propel waste through the last leg of the digestive system, according to a study of isolated mouse colons published in JNeurosci. The newly identified neuronal firing pattern may represent an early feature preserved through the evolution of nervous systems. The enteric nervous system (ENS) […]
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