Beaumont Hospital is offering a new online resource with audio tracks to help people relax and reduce stress. The new online Mindfulness and Relaxation Centre is a place to learn about how and why to practice relaxation and mindfulness exercises. Relaxation and mindfulness training are helpful for managing stress as well as helping people cope with physical illness and ongoing medical treatment.
An early childhood surrounded by books and educational toys will leave positive fingerprints on a person’s brain well into their late teens, a two-decade-long research study has shown.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is associated with emotions, movement, and the brain’s pleasure and reward system. In the current issue of Advances in Neuroimmune Biology, investigators provide a broad overview of the direct and indirect role of dopamine in modulating the immune system and discuss how recent research has opened up new possibilities for treating diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis or even the autoimmune disorders.
Studies released this week explore the neurological component of dietary disorders, uncovering evidence that the brain’s biological mechanisms may contribute to significant public health challenges — obesity, diabetes, binge eating, and the allure of the high-calorie meal.
By peering into students’ brains, a recent study, published in the journal NeuroImage, found that learning languages can help bulk up the brain.
Research is helping reveal how human and primate brains process and interpret facial expressions, and the role of facial mimicry in everything from deciphering an unclear smile to establishing relationships of power and status.
Neuroscientists from New York University and the University of California, Irvine have isolated the “when” and “where” of molecular activity that occurs in the formation of short-, intermediate-, and long-term memories. Their findings, which appear in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer new insights into the molecular architecture of memory formation and, with it, a better roadmap for developing therapeutic interventions for related afflictions.
An inexpensive, five-minute eye scan can accurately assess the amount of brain damage in people with the debilitating autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis (MS), and offer clues about how quickly the disease is progressing, according to results of two Johns Hopkins studies.
People unable to speak through paralysis may one day be able to spell out their thoughts with technology being developed by Dutch scientists. The brain-scanner measures different levels of brain activity and associates each level with a letter of the alphabet.
Researchers report new insights into how the brain responds to extreme stress, whether from combat, natural disasters, or repeated violent competition. The insights offer hope for detecting and treating several widespread and debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders, and were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.
Left-leaning: Unlike controls (top), Temple Grandin has lateral ventricles (bottom) that are significantly larger on the left side of her brain than on the right.
This time of year usually sees me travelling to the US for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. This year for the first time in many years I am missing it, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, I am keeping abreast of the proceedings.
A presentation at the meeting in New Orleans this past weekend revealed the first study to take a close look at Temple Grandin, perhaps the world’s most famous person with autism, and one of the first to look at the brains of savants. Grandin, professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, is an outspoken advocate for autism research and awareness. She is known as a ‘savant,’ or a person who shows characteristic social deficits of autism and yet also has some exceptional abilities.
Click here to read Virginia Hughes report for Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative
Neuroscientists have announced a longitudinal research collaboration to investigate the emotional, social and cognitive effects of musical training on childhood brain development. The five-year research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, will offer USC researchers an important opportunity to provide new insights and add rigorous data to an emerging discussion about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function.
UCLA researchers have for the first time measured the activity of a brain region known to be involved in learning, memory and Alzheimer’s disease during sleep. They discovered that this part of the brain behaves as if it’s remembering something, even under anesthesia, a finding that counters conventional theories about memory consolidation during sleep.
New research reveals that stroke may be affecting people at a younger age. The study is published in the October 10, 2012, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Scientists studying a rare genetic disorder have identified a molecular pathway that may play a role in schizophrenia, according to new research in the October 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings may one day guide researchers to new treatment options for people with schizophrenia — a devastating disease that affects approximately 1 percent of the world’s population.
Researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School have for the first time identified the mechanism that protects us from developing uncontrollable fear.
Small amounts of the drug ketamine can immediately relieve the symptoms of chronic depression, as well as those of treatment-resistant patients within a few hours, say Yale scientists.
Scientists find that competition between two brain regions influences the ability to make healthy choices.
A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.
A study in PLOS ONE shows that whether or not you like the person you’re watching can actually have an effect on brain activity related to motor actions and lead to “differential processing” – for example, thinking the person you dislike is moving more slowly than they actually are.
Picture: shelbyasteward, flickr.com
Scientists from Newcastle University have drawn up a league table of the least pleasant sounds we may encounter as part of everyday life – albeit a slightly old-fashioned life as the top five include the rasp of chalk on a blackboard.
Working with 13 volunteers, they tested reactions to 74 different noises both in outward response and more closely via small changes in the brain.
The results are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and show, among other things, that acoustically anything in the frequency range of around 2,000 to 5,000 Hz was found to be unpleasant.
Map designer Aris Venetikidis is fascinated by the maps we draw in our minds as we move around a city — less like street maps, more like schematics or wiring diagrams, abstract images of relationships between places. How can we learn from these mental maps to make better real ones? As a test case, he remakes the notorious Dublin bus map.
(Filmed at TEDxDublin)
An aspirin a day may slow brain decline in elderly women at high risk of cardiovascular disease, research finds.
The hippocampus represents an important brain structure for learning. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich discovered how it filters electrical neuronal signals through an input and output control, thus regulating learning and memory processes.
Scientists performing experimental brain surgery on a man aged 50 have stumbled across a mechanism that could unlock how memory works. The accidental breakthrough came during an experiment originally intended to suppress the obese man’s appetite, using the increasingly successful technique of deep-brain stimulation. Electrodes were pushed into the man’s brain and stimulated with an electric current. Instead of losing appetite, the patient instead had an intense experience of déjà vu. He recalled, in intricate detail, a scene from 30 years earlier. More tests showed his ability to learn was dramatically improved when the current was switched on and his brain stimulated.
Brain metastases are common secondary complications of other types of cancer, particularly lung, breast and skin cancer. The body’s own immune response in the brain is rendered powerless in the fight against these metastases by inflammatory reactions. Researchers in Vienna have now, for the first time, precisely characterised the brain’s immune response to infiltrating metastases. This could pave the way to the development of new, less aggressive treatment options.
Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? In this video, cognitive neuroscientist, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.
