Brain

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Franz Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or director David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions. The researchers' findings appear in an article published in the journal Psychological Science.

Cognitive testing by telephone in elderly individuals is generally as effective as in-person testing, according to a new study by Effie M. Mitsis, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and part of Mount Sinai's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. The study will appear in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University's Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases.

In her new study, Prof. Hendler found that the simple act of voluntarily closing one's eyes -- instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark -- can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself. This finding may have therapeutic value in treating people with brain disorders. Her research was published in PLoS One.

PROVIDENCE, RI – A difference in brain activity patterns may explain why some people are able to maintain a significant weight loss while others regain the weight, according to a new study by researchers with The Miriam Hospital.

The investigators report that when individuals who have kept the weight off for several years were shown pictures of food, they were more likely to engage the areas of the brain associated with behavioral control and visual attention, compared to obese and normal weight participants.

As children head back to school and attention turns to strategies for boosting reading and math achievement for low-income youth, a new study says the quality of early child care may play a role.

The study, by researchers at Boston College, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Samford University, is published in the September/October 2009 issue of Child Development.

Research has shown that children who were breast fed as infants have superior cognitive skills compared to those fed infant formula, and it's thought that this is due to an essential fatty acid in breast milk called docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Now a new study has found that babies fed formula supplemented with DHA have higher cognitive skills than babies fed regular formula.

As children go back to school this fall, a new cross-cultural study finds that for both Chinese and American middle schoolers, students who feel supported by their teachers tend to have higher self-esteem, and those who don't feel supported by fellow students are more likely to be depressed.

Is it better to treat someone with kid gloves or to treat them carefully? Researchers in Italy have investigated how the brain recognizes that the first phrase means the same as the second. Publishing in the journal BMC Neuroscience, the researchers suggest that we use both hemispheres to understand idioms.

A substantial percentage of children who get CT scans after apparently minor head trauma do not need them, and as a result are put at increased risk of cancer due to radiation exposure. After analyzing more than 42,000 children with head trauma, a national research team led by two UC Davis emergency department physicians has developed guidelines for doctors who care for children with head trauma aimed at reducing those risks.

A tiny neuron's complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, and deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action.

A new Northwestern University study provides evidence that supports a "two-layer integration model," one of several competing models attempting to explain how neurons integrate synaptic inputs. The findings are published in the journal Neuron.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new guideline from the American Academy of Neurology, developed in full collaboration with the Child Neurology Society, finds that children with microcephaly that is, children whose head size is smaller than that of 97 percent of childrenare at risk of neurologic and cognitive problems and should be screened for these problems. The guideline is published in the September 15, 2009, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University of Buffalo who has conducted extensive studies in animal cognition, says there is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

Smith makes this conclusion in an article published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. He reviews this new and rapidly developing area of comparative inquiry, describing its milestones and its prospects for continued progress.

Jerusalem, Sept. 14, 2009 -- A new understanding of how anesthesia and anesthesia-like states are controlled in the brain opens the door to possible new future treatments of various states of loss of consciousness, such as reversible coma, according to Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that fake video evidence can dramatically alter people's perceptions of events, even convincing them to testify as an eyewitness to an event that never happened.

Associate Professor Dr Kimberley Wade from the Department of Psychology led an experiment to see whether exposure to fabricated footage of an event could induce individuals to accuse another person of doing something they never did.

Depression can affect a cancer patient's likelihood of survival. That is the finding of an analysis published in the November 15, 2009 issue of Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The results highlight the need for systematic screening of psychological distress and subsequent treatments.