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Neuroscience news

Neuroscience

Visual experiences unique to early infancy provide building blocks of human vision, study finds

What do infants see? What do they look at? The answers to these questions are very different for the youngest babies than they are for older infants, children and adults. Characterized by a few high-contrast edges in simple ...

Neuroscience

How the brain is flexible enough for a complex world, without being thrown into chaos

Every day our brains strive to optimize a tradeoff: With lots of things happening around us even as we also harbor many internal drives and memories, somehow our thoughts must be flexible yet focused enough to guide everything ...

Neuroscience

'What was that?' How brains convert sounds to actions

You hear a phone ring or a dog bark. Is it yours or someone else's? You hear footsteps in the night—is it your child, or an intruder? Friend or foe? The decision you make will determine what action you take next. Researchers ...

Neuroscience

Flicker stimulation shines in clinical trial for epilepsy

Biomedical engineer Annabelle Singer has spent the past decade developing a noninvasive therapy for Alzheimer's disease that uses flickering lights and rhythmic tones to modulate brain waves. Now she has discovered that the ...

Neuroscience

Human brain map contains never-before-seen details of structure

A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Brain study identifies a cost of caregiving for new fathers

Parenting makes the heart grow fonder, and the brain grow … smaller? Several studies have revealed that the brain loses volume across the transition to parenthood. But researchers like me are still figuring out what these ...

Genetics

New study offers insight into genesis of spina bifida

A group of researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine have led an investigation that offers new insight into the causes of spina bifida, the most common structural disorder of the human nervous ...