nerve cells in the brain

A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience.

Scientists at University College Cork (UCC) have come up with an innovative strategy to deliver a therapy into the brain to treat the neurogenerative disease, Huntington’s disease (HD). The strategy, which involves using modified sugars to carry gene therapies into the brain, is being hailed as an exciting development which could be applied to many brain disorders, especially those with a genetic basis.

Researchers have used brain imaging technology to show that young people with a known genetic risk of bipolar but no clinical signs of the condition have clear and quantifiable differences in brain activity when compared to controls.

Scientists have identified a previously unknown group of nerve cells in the brain. The nerve cells regulate cardiovascular functions such as heart rhythm and blood pressure. It is hoped that the discovery, which is published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, will be significant in the long term in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases in humans.

Scientists say they have found a way to distinguish between different types of dementia without the need for invasive tests, like a lumbar puncture.

Scientists at the University of Western Ontario have discovered that perhaps IQ is not the best measure of cognitive performance. Instead, they found that verbal language, short-term memory, and logical reasoning were the most important predictors of cognitive performance.

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The formation of new memories and the retrieval of older memories are both evidenced in the hippocampus region of the brain

The hippocampus is a brain structure that plays a major role in the process of memory formation. It is not entirely clear how the hippocampus manages to string together events that are part of the same experience but are separated by “empty” periods of time. Now, new research published in the latest issue of the journal Neuron finds that there are neurons in the hippocampus that encode every sequential moment in a series of events that compose a discrete experience.

Sad people are apparently better than happy people at face recognition, an upside to being down in the dumps that is yielding insights into how mood can affect the brain. The findings, based on experiments involving college students, could help lead to better treatments for depression, psychologists say.

Our memories work better when our brains are prepared to absorb new information, according to a new study by MIT researchers.

A fundamental new discovery about how nerve cells in the brain store and release tiny sacs filled with chemicals may radically alter the way scientists think about neurotransmission – the electrical signaling in the brain that enables everything from the way we move, to how we remember and sense the world.