Brain

Media and marketing experts have long sought a reliable method of forecasting responses from the general population to future products and messages. According to a study conducted at the City College of New York (CCNY) in partnership with Georgia Tech, it appears that the brain responses of just a few individuals are a remarkably strong predictor.

If you've ever ordered the wrong food at a restaurant, don't blame yourself; blame the menu. What you order may have less to do with what you want and more to do with a menu's layout and descriptions.

After analyzing 217 menus and the selections of over 300 diners, the Cornell study published this month in the International Journal of Hospitality Management showed that when it comes to what you order for dinner, two things matter most: what you see on the menu and how you imagine it will taste.

The brains of children with autism are relatively inflexible at switching from rest to task performance, according to a new brain-imaging study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Instead of changing to accommodate a job, connectivity in key brain networks of autistic children looks similar to connectivity in the resting brain. And the greater this inflexibility, the more severe the child's manifestations of repetitive and restrictive behaviors that characterize autism, the study found.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — By studying the injuries and aptitudes of Vietnam War veterans who suffered penetrating head wounds during the war, scientists are tackling -- and beginning to answer -- longstanding questions about how the brain works.

The researchers found that brain regions that contribute to optimal social functioning also are vital to general intelligence and to emotional intelligence. This finding bolsters the view that general intelligence emerges from the emotional and social context of one's life.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Some people can handle stressful situations better than others, and it's not all in their genes: Even identical twins show differences in how they respond.

Researchers have identified a specific electrical pattern in the brains of genetically identical mice that predicts how well individual animals will fare in stressful situations.

A groundbreaking study from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) has found that African-American students in first grade experience smaller gains in reading when they attend segregated schools—but the students' backgrounds likely are not the cause of the differences.

There's some good news for parents of preterm babies – latest research from the University of Adelaide shows that by the time they become teenagers, the brains of many preterm children can perform almost as well as those born at term.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important regulatory role in the self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells. Dr. Defeng Zou and co-workers from the First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, China focuses on the effect of miRNA overexpression on the differentiation of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells into neurons. In the study released on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 12, 2014), researchers used GeneChip technology to analyze the expression of miRNAs in bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells, neural stem cells and neurons.

Previous studies have shown that, anode block electrical stimulation of the sacral nerve root can produce physiological urination and reconstruct urinary bladder function in rabbits. However, whether long-term anode block electrical stimulation causes damage to the sacral nerve root remains unclear, and needs further investigation. In a recent study reported on the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 12, 2014), Dr.

People who are blind can now read more than just words, such as graphs and graphics, following the development of an affordable digital reading system by Curtin University researchers.

Opening up new career paths and educational opportunities for people with vision impairment, the system combines a number of pattern recognition technologies into a single platform and, for the first time, allows mathematics and graphical material to be extracted and described without sighted intervention.

A new study from UC San Francisco is the first to show that while the impact of life's stressors accumulate overtime and accelerate cellular aging, these negative effects may be reduced by maintaining a healthy diet, exercising and sleeping well.

LA JOLLA—When you're expecting something—like the meal you've ordered at a restaurant—or when something captures your interest, unique electrical rhythms sweep through your brain.

These waves are called gamma oscillations and they reflect a symphony of cells—both excitatory and inhibitory—playing together in an orchestrated way. Though their role has been debated, gamma waves have been associated with higher-level brain function, and disturbances in the patterns have been tied to schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, autism, epilepsy and other disorders.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Babies can learn what to fear in the first days of life just by smelling the odor of their distressed mothers, new research suggests. And not just "natural" fears: If a mother experienced something before pregnancy that made her fear something specific, her baby will quickly learn to fear it too -- through the odor she gives off when she feels fear.

An evolutionarily ancient and tiny part of the brain tracks expectations about nasty events, finds new UCL research.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates for the first time that the human habenula, half the size of a pea, tracks predictions about negative events, like painful electric shocks, suggesting a role in learning from bad experiences.

A new study by researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of York shows that it is possible to accurately predict first impressions using measurements of physical features in everyday images of faces, such as those found on social media.