http://phys.org/health-news/neuroscience/ en-us Phys.org Phys.Org provides the latest news on neuroscience Researchers in South Africa said Monday they have found a way to measure the brain activity of cyclists at racing speed, breaking new ground in the study of how the brain works during exercise. http://phys.org/news225386027.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-05-23T16:40:01-07:00 Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, is best known for his pioneering work on how the brain generates emotion and how emotion, in turn, helps people make decisions. His books "Descartes' Error" and "Looking for Spinoza" were international bestsellers. His latest work, "Self Comes to Mind," extends his theories and adds new facts to the ever-vexing question of consciousness - what it is, why it evolved and how it contributes to human culture. http://phys.org/news224959463.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-05-18T19:00:03-07:00 Researchers at Brown University have found that specific genetic variations can predict how persistently people will believe advice they are given, even when it is contradicted by experience. http://phys.org/news222452803.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-19T17:26:54-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of scientists has developed a way to predict how much a person can learn, based on studies at UC Santa Barbara's Brain Imaging Center. http://phys.org/news222423642.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-19T09:20:55-07:00 Neurosurgeons at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre, Toronto Western Hospital, have for the first time, initiated the restoration of lost brain tissue through brain bypass surgery in patients where blood flow to the brain is impaired by cerebrovascular disease. The study, which involved 29 patients, was published online in the journal Stroke. http://phys.org/news222338029.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-18T09:34:01-07:00 Epileptic seizures can precede the development of a subsequent brain tumour by many years, suggests research published online in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. http://phys.org/news221369256.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-07T04:27:46-07:00 Scientists have shed new light on how older people may lose their memory with a development that could aid research into treatments for age-related memory disorders. http://phys.org/news221301879.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-06T09:45:01-07:00 Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to new research published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience. http://phys.org/news221245410.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-05T18:03:50-07:00 Drugs like marijuana act on naturally occurring receptors in the brain called cannabinoid receptors. However, the mechanisms by which these drugs produce their sensory and mood altering effects within the brain are largely unknown. Research led by Steven Laviolette at The University of Western Ontario has now identified a critical brain pathway responsible for the effects of cannabinoid drugs on how the brain processes emotional information. The findings, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, also help to explain the possible link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. http://phys.org/news221245375.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-05T18:03:08-07:00 All those salty snacks available at the local tavern might be doing more than increasing your thirst: They could also play a role in suppressing social anxiety. http://phys.org/news221244963.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-05T17:56:26-07:00 Devices which could be used to rehabilitate the arms and hands of people who have experienced a stroke have been developed by researchers at the University of Southampton. http://phys.org/news221222081.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-05T11:35:05-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Veronica Kwok, Li-Hai Tan, and their colleagues at the University of Hong Kong, conclude that the adult human brain is capable of new rapid growth when exposed to stimuli similar to what babies experience as they are learning from their environment. http://phys.org/news221214776.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-05T09:33:37-07:00 Primates, particularly humans, are set apart from other vertebrates by more than a huge expansion of the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain used for thinking. The connection and coordination of the cerebral cortex with other, older parts of the brain also play a significant role, according to findings published recently in Science by a research team from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Wako, Japan. http://phys.org/news221156780.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-04T17:26:40-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University (SBU) have conducted the most comprehensive study to date of how cocaine users respond to drug-related and other emotional stimuli, making use of comparisons with a matched control group and exploring the effects of recent cocaine use and abstinence. The findings appear in a paper published online in the European Journal of Neuroscience. http://phys.org/news221138551.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-04T13:40:01-07:00 As Parkinson's Awareness Month gets underway, a Canadian-led international study is providing important new insight into Parkinson's disease and paving the way for new avenues for clinical trials. The study, led by Dr. Michael Schlossmacher in Ottawa, provides the first link between the most common genetic risk factor for Parkinson's and the hallmark accumulation of a protein called alpha-synuclein within the brains of people with Parkinson's. It is published in the most recent edition of the journal Annals of Neurology. http://phys.org/news221134962.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-04T11:22:51-07:00 Researchers directed by Dr. Laurent Mottron at the University of Montreal's Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders (CETEDUM) have determined that people with autism concentrate more brain resources in the areas associated with visual detection and identification, and conversely, have less activity in the areas used to plan and control thoughts and actions. This might explain their outstanding capacities in visual tasks. The team published their findings in Human Brain Mapping on April 4, 2011. http://phys.org/news221127783.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-04T09:23:15-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the University of Glasgow have shown that when parts of our vision are blocked, the brain steps in to fill in the blanks. http://phys.org/news221118448.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-04T06:48:07-07:00 Adult mice engineered to have more newborn neurons in their brain memory hub excelled at accurately discriminating between similar experiences – an ability that declines with normal aging and in some anxiety disorders. Boosting such neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus also produced antidepressant-like effects when combined with exercise, in the study funded by the National Institutes of Health. http://phys.org/news221055076.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-03T13:11:48-07:00 Patrik Verstreken (VIB/K.U.Leuven, Belgium) has discovered the mechanism that ensures neurons can continue to send the right signals for long consecutive periods - a process that is disrupted in neurological diseases such as Parkinson's. Verstreken and his colleagues discovered that an enzyme called Skywalker controls the subtle balance in communication. http://phys.org/news220874027.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-04-01T10:56:37-07:00 When we suddenly get the answer to a riddle or understand the solution to a problem, we can practically feel the light bulb click on in our head. But what happens after the 'Aha!' moment? Why do the things we learn through sudden insight tend to stick in our memory? http://phys.org/news220785251.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-31T10:50:13-07:00 Most people can read texts reflected in a mirror slowly and with some effort, but a team of scientists from the Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) has shown for the first time that we can mentally turn these images around and understand them automatically and unconsciously, at least for a few instants. http://phys.org/news220785107.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-31T10:11:58-07:00 Understanding functional properties of the brain’s structural units is one of the main aims of brain research. Until now only fragmentary borders of brain areas could be identified in vivo since the resolution in MR images was not high enough. By using a high-field MRI scanner (field strength of 7 Tesla), a team of researchers led by Stefan Geyer and Robert Turner from the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig made borders between some areas of the Brodmann map more clearly visible in a living human brain than ever before. More than a century ago, neuroanatomist Korbinian Brodmann subdivided the human cerebral cortex microscopically into structurally different areas. These “Brodmann maps” are used to this day as a classic structural guide to functional units in the cortex in neuroscientific research. This indirect correlation can be somewhat imprecise, however, as no human brain is like another. The technological breakthrough achieved by the research team from Leipzig moves the concept of an individual brain atlas into the realm of possibility. http://phys.org/news220783201.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-31T09:40:27-07:00 Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have described for the first time how the brain's memory center repairs itself following severe trauma – a process that may explain why it is harder to bounce back after multiple head injuries. http://phys.org/news220782099.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-31T09:21:54-07:00 Everyone would like MDs to have the best education – and to absorb what they are taught. The lead article in the April 4 issue of the journal Academic Medicine* connects research on how the brain learns to how to incorporate this understanding into real world education, particularly the education of doctors. http://phys.org/news220728555.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-30T18:29:33-07:00 If, as Shakespeare's Juliet declared, a rose by any other name smells as sweet – to you and to me and to anyone else who sniffs it – then one might assume that our odor-sensing nerve cells are all wired in the same way. Alas, they are not, according to a new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute. http://phys.org/news220708868.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-30T13:01:23-07:00 Researchers using two brain-imaging technologies have found that apparently normal older individuals with brain deposits of amyloid beta – the primary constituent of the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients – also had changes in brain structure similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients. Results of the study, which has received early online publication in the Annals of Neurology, may help identify individuals who could be candidates for therapies to prevent the development of dementia. http://phys.org/news220702535.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-30T11:17:57-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- In humans, regeneration of the peripheral nervous system after injury remains a hit-or-miss affair, while brain and spinal cord damage usually results in lifelong disabilities. http://phys.org/news220679460.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-30T05:30:01-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers are showing the potential benefit of using the stress hormone Cortisol in addition to exposure therapy to help patients overcome phobias. http://phys.org/news220623033.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-29T14:00:02-07:00 Bariatric surgery may provide an added benefit to severely obese patients besides weight loss: it can also help alleviate the excruciating pain of migraine headaches, according to new research from The Miriam Hospital, published in the March 29, 2011 issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. http://phys.org/news220549097.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-28T16:38:31-07:00 Any possible pain relief that marijuana has for people with multiple sclerosis (MS) may be outweighed by the drug's apparent negative effect on thinking skills, according to research published in the March 29, 2011, print issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. http://phys.org/news220548104.html Medicine & Health - Neuroscience 2011-03-28T16:33:29-07:00