Mindfulness – a mental training that develops sustained attention that can change the ways people think, act and feel – could reduce symptoms of stress and depression and promote wellbeing among school children, according to a new study published online by the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Brain
DURHAM, N.C. -- Neuroscientists may soon be modern-day harpooners, snaring individual brain-cell signals instead of whales with tiny spears made of carbon nanotubes.
The new brain cell spear is a millimeter long, only a few nanometers wide and harnesses the superior electromechanical properties of carbon nanotubes to capture electrical signals from individual neurons.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Some parents desire for their children to fulfill their own unrealized ambitions, just as psychologists have long theorized, according to a new first-of-its-kind study.
Researchers found the more that parents see their child as part of themselves, the more likely they are to want their child to succeed in achieving their own failed dreams.
PITTSBURGH—For the first time, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have identified which emotion a person is experiencing based on brain activity.
LOS ANGELES (June 19, 2013) – In what is believed to be the largest follow-up record of patients with the most common form of hereditary dystonia – a movement disorder that can cause crippling muscle contractions – experts in deep brain stimulation report good success rates and lasting benefits.
MINNEAPOLIS – People who experience any stroke symptoms—but do not have a stroke—may also be more likely to develop problems with memory and thinking, according to new research published in the June 19, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
EUGENE, Ore. -- (June 19, 2013) – A new study examining the brains of fruit flies reveals a novel stem cell mechanism that may help explain how neurons form in humans. A paper on the study by researchers at the University of Oregon appeared in the online version of the journal Nature in advance of the June 27 publication date.
People can plan strategic movements to several different targets at the same time, even when they see far fewer targets than are actually present, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
A team of researchers at the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario took advantage of a pictorial illusion — known as the "connectedness illusion" — that causes people to underestimate the number of targets they see.
Continuous "machine learning" using artificial neural networks (ANNs) may improve the ability to predict survival in patients with advanced brain cancers.
Dr. Matthew Ewend of University of North Carolina and colleagues evaluated the use of ANNs to predict the chances of survival for patients with brain cancer. Based on the biological functioning of brain cells, ANNs are computer programs designed "to learn patterns within a data set and then apply that learning for recognition and prediction."
A team of New York University biologists has found that a series of genes sequentially expressed in brain stem cells control the generation of neural diversity in visual system of fruit flies. Their results are reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
Kick back and shut your eyes. Now stop thinking.
You have just put your brain into what neuroscientists call its resting state. What the brain is doing when an individual is not focused on the outside world has become the focus of considerable research in recent years. One of the potential benefits of these studies could be definitive diagnoses of mental health disorders ranging from bipolar to post-traumatic stress disorders.
Oscar Wilde called memory "the diary that we all carry about with us." Now a team of scientists has developed a way to see where and how that diary is written.
The team, led by Don Arnold and Richard Roberts of USC, engineered microscopic probes that light up synapses in a living neuron in real time by attaching fluorescent markers onto synaptic proteins – all without affecting the neuron's ability to function.
Diapocynin, a synthetic molecule derived from a naturally occurring compound (apocynin), has been found to protect neurobehavioral function in mice with Parkinson's Disease symptoms by preventing deficits in motor coordination.
The findings are published in the May 28, 2013 edition of Neuroscience Letters.
PHILADELPHIA - The motor neuron disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, progresses in a stepwise, sequential pattern which can be classified into four distinct stages, report pathologists with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Annals of Neurology. This post-mortem staging of ALS brain and spinal cord tissues shows, for the first time, how the fatal degenerative disease may progress from one starting point in the central nervous system to other regions of brain and spinal cord.
PORTLAND, Ore. — For years, Alzheimer's researchers have focused on two proteins that accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer's and may contribute to the disease: plaques made up of the protein amyloid-beta, and tangles of another protein, called tau.