Brain

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 20, 2015 -- Try to remember a phone number, and you're using what's called your sequential memory. This kind of memory, in which your mind processes a sequence of numbers, events, or ideas, underlies how people think, perceive, and interact as social beings.

"In our life, all of our behaviors and our process of thinking is sequential in time," said Mikhail Rabinovich, a physicist and neurocognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

ITHACA, N.Y. - When all else is equal between highly qualified candidates for entry-level faculty positions, professors in academic science overwhelmingly prefer women over men, Cornell researchers previously found in national experiments. But would this pro-female bias be strong enough to elevate slightly less impressive women above more accomplished male candidates?

Researchers from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital have - in collaboration with international researchers - found a cause for why contracting herpes virus ends up being fatal for some people. While most people simply find that the virus causes an annoying cold sore, in Denmark it annually leads to inflammation of the brain for 25-30 people. Just under a third of these patients die despite treatment.

Images related to pleasure or winning attract attention from demanding tasks, while equally intense but negative images and those associated with losing can be fully ignored, finds a new UCL study.

51 volunteers completed attention tasks involving search for 'target' items. They were found to be highly distracted by emotional images, whether positive or negative, when the search was easy. However when the search was harder and demanded high focus of attention people were able to completely ignore the negative images, while the positive images continued to be highly distracting.

Despite concerns about bisphenol A (BPA), academic and regulatory scientists have yet to reach a consensus on BPA's safety.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Toxicology Program (NTP), the Food and Drug Administration and independent university researchers are working together to change that.

Scientists from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute have shown that a mouse strain with a mutation that leads to dysfunction of mitochondria--the "powerhouses" that provide energy to cells--spontaneously undergo periodic episodes of depression-like behavior that resemble those in human. Through this research, published in Molecular Psychiatry, the scientists uncovered a link between depression and the paraventricular thalamus, a region of the brain not previously tied to depression.

Warning: Stereotypes may be harmful to patients' health.

A newly-developed mathematical method can detect geometric structure in neural activity in the brain. "Previously, in order to understand this structure, scientists needed to relate neural activity to some specific external stimulus," said Vladimir Itskov, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State University. "Our method is the first to be able to reveal this structure without our knowing an external stimulus ahead of time. We've now shown that our new method will allow us to explore the organizational structure of neurons without knowing their function in advance."

Researchers at King's College London have identified a new gene linked to nerve function, which could provide a treatment target for 'switching off' the gene in people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease affects approximately 7-10 million people worldwide and is characterised by progressive loss of motor function, psychiatric symptoms and cognitive impairment.

NEW YORK, NY -- A new and comprehensive study by investigators at the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University Medical Center has found that celiac patients are at no increased risk for dementia before or after their diagnosis of celiac disease.

Neuroscientists have mapped how the human brain experiences gratitude with help from an unexpected resource: Holocaust survivors' testimonies.

"In the midst of this awful tragedy, there were many acts of bravery and life-saving aid," said lead author Glenn Fox, a post-doctoral researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC who led the study. "With the Holocaust, we only typically associate the awful things. But when you listen to the survivors, you also hear stories of incredible virtue, and gratitude for the help they received."

MONTRÉAL (October 19, 2015)- Researchers from Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, formed a multidisciplinary sepsis and shock response team (SSRT) to help alert emergency department providers when these disorders are suspected. An automated electronic sepsis alarm for early recognition, followed by standardized multidisciplinary management of patients with suspected sepsis or shock with SSRT, improved the compliance with standard care measures and overall mortality.

It's no surprise that people enjoy warm places like Hawaii but may suffer in hostile locales such as Antarctica. A tumor suppressor gene called PTEN is similar in that it is affected by the microenvironments of certain bodily organs to which it travels.

Scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have found that PTEN is regulated by different organs. For patients with brain metastases, this is not good, as PTEN in cells is shut off in the brain. Surprisingly, PTEN is restored once cells migrate to other organs.

New insight into a vital cerebral pathway has explained how some patients in a vegetative state are aware despite appearing to be unconscious and being behaviourally unresponsive.

The findings, published in JAMA Neurology, identify structural damage between the thalamus and primary motor cortex as the obstacle between covert awareness and intentional movement.

The team of researchers hope that their study, the first to understand the phenomenon, will pave the way for the development of restorative therapies for thousands of patients.

We depend on electrical waves to regulate the rhythm of our heartbeat. When those signals go awry, the result is a potentially fatal arrhythmia. Now, a team of researchers from Oxford and Stony Brook universities has found a way to precisely control these waves - using light. Their results are published in the journal Nature Photonics on 19 October.