News tagged with neural circuit

Scientists discover a controller of brain circuitry

By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal's brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Dec 28, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (20) | comments 4

Smelling the light: 'What if we make the nose act like a retina?'

(PhysOrg.com) -- Harvard University neurobiologists have created mice that can "smell" light, providing a potent new tool that could help researchers better understand the neural basis of olfaction.

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Oct 17, 2010 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (15) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

From eye to brain: Researchers map functional connections between retinal neurons at single-cell resolution

By comparing a clearly defined visual input with the electrical output of the retina, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies were able to trace for the first time the neuronal circuitry that ...

Medicine & Health / Medical research

created Oct 06, 2010 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (12) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Organized chaos gets robots going (Update)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Even simple insects can generate quite different movement patterns with their six legs. The animal uses various gaits depending on whether it crawls uphill or downhill, slowly or fast. Scientists ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 17, 2010 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (12) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light

(PhysOrg.com) -- Neuroscientists at MIT have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, these tools could ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Jan 06, 2010 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (12) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Neurobiologists find that weak electrical fields in the brain help neurons fire together

The brain -- awake and sleeping -- is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Feb 02, 2011 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (10) | comments 8 | with audio podcast

Scientists ID gene key to Alzheimer's-like reversal

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team led by researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory has now pinpointed the exact gene responsible for a 2007 breakthrough in which mice with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease regained ...

Medicine & Health / Genetics

created May 06, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (9) | comments 2

Gene therapy may be powerful new treatment for major depression

In a report published in the Oct. 20 issue of Science Translational Medicine, researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center say animal and human data suggest gene therapy to the brain may be abl ...

Medicine & Health / Medical research

created Oct 20, 2010 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (9) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Sleep helps build long-term memories

(PhysOrg.com) -- Experts have long suspected that part of the process of turning fleeting short-term memories into lasting long-term memories occurs during sleep. Now, researchers at the RIKEN-MIT Center for ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Jun 24, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (9) | comments 1

Brain cells determine obesity -- not lack of willpower: study

An international study has discovered the reason why some people who eat a high-fat diet remain slim, yet others pile on the weight.

Medicine & Health / Medical research

created Sep 08, 2010 | popularity 3.9 / 5 (11) | comments 16 | with audio podcast

Web-crawling the brain

The brain is a black box. A complex circuitry of neurons fires information through channels, much like the inner workings of a computer chip. But while computer processors are regimented with the deft economy of an assembly ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Mar 09, 2011 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (9) | comments 4 | with audio podcast

Scientists develop DNA origami nanoscale breadboards for carbon nanotube circuits

In work that someday may lead to the development of novel types of nanoscale electronic devices, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology has combined DNA's talent ...

Nanotechnology / Nanomaterials

created Nov 10, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (7) | comments 0

How You Feel the World Impacts How You See It

In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects -- like rocks -- appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Apr 03, 2009 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 1

Finding fear: Neuroscientists locate where it is stored in the brain

Fear is a powerful emotion and neuroscientists have for the first time located the neurons responsible for fear conditioning in the mammalian brain. Fear conditioning is a form of Pavlovian, or associative, ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Jul 07, 2009 | popularity 4 / 5 (8) | comments 2

Nerve cells live double lives

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (part of the Novartis Research Foundation) have identified a new neural circuit in the retina responsible for the detection ...

Medicine & Health / Neuroscience

created Oct 06, 2009 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (7) | comments 2

Biological neural network

In neuroscience, a neural network describes a population of physically interconnected neurons or a group of disparate neurons whose inputs or signalling targets define a recognizable circuit. Communication between neurons often involves an electrochemical process. The interface through which they interact with surrounding neurons usually consists of several dendrites (input connections), which are connected via synapses to other neurons, and one axon (output connection). If the sum of the input signals surpasses a certain threshold, the neuron sends an action potential (AP) at the axon hillock and transmits this electrical signal along the axon.

In contrast, a neuronal circuit is a functional entity of interconnected neurons that influence each other (similar to a control loop in cybernetics).

For more information about Biological neural network, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.