Exercise After Stroke Could Help Improve Memory: Study. Here's even more evidence that physical fitness can help your brain: Canadian researchers have found that stroke survivors experience better memory , thinking and language skills with six months of exercise. Who’s conscious? A recent meeting of neuroscientists tried to define a set of criteria for that murky phenomenon called “consciousness”.
I don’t know how successful they were; they’ve come out with a declaration on consciousness that isn’t exactly crystal clear. It seems to involve the existence of neural circuitry that exhibits specific states that modulate behavior. Rat Study Shows Early Mental Training May Aid Later Brain Function. By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M.
Grohol, Psy.D. on August 23, 2012 A new study suggests that preemptive cognitive training — an early intervention to address neuropsychiatric deficiencies — can help the brain function normally later in life. The findings appear in the journal Neuron, and may result in a new method to address a range of brain impairments in humans, including schizophrenia. Historically, researchers have aimed to address human neuropsychiatric impairments, such as schizophrenia, through mental training. Training sessions often include executive function exercises that teach patients to focus their attention and selectively recall important information.
Neurons Produced Via Adult Cells - Health News. October 5, 2012 [ Watch the Video: New Human Neurons from Adult Cells Right There in the Brain ] Connie K.
Brain Damaged ‘Patient R’ Challenges Theories of Self Awareness. According to some theories on how self-awareness arises in the brain, Patient R, a man who suffered a severe brain injury about 30 years ago, should not possess this aspect of consciousness.
Simple mathematical computations underlie brain circuits. (Medical Xpress) -- The brain has billions of neurons, arranged in complex circuits that allow us to perceive the world, control our movements and make decisions.
Deciphering those circuits is critical to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. MIT neuroscientists have now taken a major step toward that goal. In a new paper appearing in the Aug. 9 issue of Nature, they report that two major classes of brain cells repress neural activity in specific mathematical ways: One type subtracts from overall activation, while the other divides it. "These are very simple but profound computations," says Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. Newton Professor of Neuroscience and senior author of the Nature paper.
The findings could help scientists learn more about diseases thought to be caused by imbalances in brain inhibition and excitation, including autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Mice Study Suggests Brain Switch Implicated in PTSD. By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M.
Grohol, Psy.D. on October 8, 2012 UK researchers report the discovery of a neural mechanism that protects individuals from stress and trauma turning into post-traumatic stress disorder. Investigators from the University of Exeter Medical School began with the knowledge of the brain’s “plasticity,” its unique capability to adapt to changing environments. Studying mice, they found that stressful events reprogram certain receptors in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional nexus. These receptors then determine how the brain reacts to the next traumatic event. Brain imaging can predict how intelligent you are, study finds. (Medical Xpress) -- When it comes to intelligence, what factors distinguish the brains of exceptionally smart humans from those of average humans?
As science has long suspected, overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence. More recent research has pinpointed the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the forehead, as a critical hub for high-level mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5 percent of variation in individual intelligence.
How will we build an artificial human brain? Scientists use light to control brain with flick of a switch. How Do You Assemble a Brain? Randomly. It is a puzzlement: How do you assemble and wire an information processing device as complex as the mammalian brain?
There are roughly 86 billion neurons in a human brain, forming about a quadrillion synapses. A rat’s brain is just one thousandth that size, but still pretty complex, with 56 million neurons and 500 billion synapses. Paralyzed Rats Learn to Walk Again. Paralyzed rats learned to walk again after a combination of electro-chemical stimulation to their injured spines and intensive rehabilitation therapy.
Researchers say the treatment “woke up” dormant or sleeping neurons in their spinal cords, and formed new connections to the brain. Scientists hope the treatment might someday help paralyzed humans. Researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, injected a mixture of chemicals to stimulate the rats' spinal nerve cells, which communicate with the brain. Ten minutes later, they used electrodes just below the cord injury to "wake up" the otherwise healthy nerve cells involved in walking, but which had became inactive following the injury to the spine.
Learning. Mice have different neural subsystem associated with instinctually important smells. A new study finds that mice have a distinct neural subsystem that links the nose to the brain and is associated with instinctually important smells such as those emitted by predators.
That insight, published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, prompts the question whether mice and other mammals have specially hardwired neural circuitry to trigger instinctive behavior in response to certain smells. In the series of experiments and observations described in the paper, the authors found that nerve cells in the nose that express members of the gene family of trace amine-associated receptors (TAAR) have several key biological differences from the much more common and diverse neurons that express members of the olfactory receptor gene family.
Those other nerve cells detect a much broader range of smells, said corresponding author Gilad Barnea, the Robert and Nancy Carney Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Brown University. Different circuits and genes. The language of neural cells. Imagine if we could understand the language two neurons use to communicate. We might learn something about how thoughts and consciousness are formed.
At the very least, our improved understanding of neuron communication would help biologists study the brain with more precision than ever before. Heather Clark, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University, has received a $300,000 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore neural cell communication using her expertise in nanosensors. "We were interested in looking into neural cells because of the need to measure chemicals in the brain," she explained.
In separate work, Clark had already been developing nanosensors to measure the biochemical environment inside a single neuron. The other DARPA project, she noted, enabled the team to incorporate enzymes into their sensor format.
To Your Brain, the World Is 2D. Scientists Successfully ‘Hack’ Brain To Obtain Private Data. By Peter V. Milo August 25, 2012 1:56 AM News Get Breaking News First Receive News, Politics, and Entertainment Headlines Each Morning. Sign Up BERKELEY, Calif. Biggest Scientific Breakthroughs of 2011.