Brain

If you want to learn how something works, one strategy is to take it apart and put it back together again. For 10 years, a global initiative called the Blue Brain Project--hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)--has been attempting to do this digitally with a section of juvenile rat brain. The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells, and 207 different neuron subtypes, on October 8 in Cell.

The cognitive skills used to learn how to ride a bike may be the key to a more accurate understanding of developmental dyslexia. And, they may lead to improved interventions.

This news release is available in French.

The results surprised Amy Brunell, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield.

"I thought that narcissists, given that they are impulsive and have high opinions of themselves, would take bigger risks. That's what other research would have suggested," Brunell said.

"But any association between narcissism and risk-taking that we found was very small and essentially meaningless."

MIT researchers are developing a computer system that uses genetic, demographic, and clinical data to help predict the effects of disease on brain anatomy.

In experiments, they trained a machine-learning system on MRI data from patients with neurodegenerative diseases and found that supplementing that training with other patient information improved the system's predictions. In the cases of patients with drastic changes in brain anatomy, the additional data cut the predictions' error rate in half, from 20 percent to 10 percent.

TORONTO, Oct. 7, 2015 - More than half of workers who reported symptoms of depression did not perceive a need for treatment, according to a study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.

Head injury patients do not benefit from a therapy that involves cooling their bodies to reduce brain swelling, research has found.

Lowering body temperature - a therapy known as induced hypothermia - did not improve patients' chances of recovery, the study showed.

Doctors say the therapy may increase patients' risk of death and disability and should not be used to treat traumatic brain injuries.

Cooling the brain helps to reduce the build-up of pressure inside the head, which is strongly linked to long-term disability and death following head injury.

Detecting how changes in one spot on Earth - in temperature, rain, wind - are linked to changes in another, far away area is key to assessing climate risks. Scientists now developed a new technique of finding out if one change can cause another change or not, and which regions are important gateways for such teleconnections. They use advanced mathematical tools for an unprecedented analysis of data from thousands of air pressure measurements.

The way our brain responds to others' good fortune is linked to how empathetic people report themselves to be, according to new UCL-led research.

The study, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience and funded by the Medical Research Council, shows that a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) seems particularly attuned to other people's good news, but how it responds varies substantially depending on our levels of empathy.

In a study exploring racial bias and how people use their mind's-eye image of an imagined person's size to represent someone as either threatening or high-status, UCLA researchers found that people envisioned men with stereotypically black names as bigger and more violent.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - The results of a five-year trial from faculty at the University of Michigan Injury Center found giving youth in the emergency department a short intervention during their visit decreased their alcohol consumption and problems related to drinking over the following year.

Early interventions are needed to reduce underage drinking and associated injury. Although the emergency department has long been seen as an important location to reach youth with risky drinking, how to do this practically has been a challenge.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- Responding appropriately to the smell of food or the scent of danger can mean life or death to a fruit fly, and dedicated circuits in the insect's brain are in place to make sure the fly gets it right.

How does the brain determine which direction to let its thoughts fly? Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive control of thought, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, University of California and United States Army Research Laboratory have used brain scans to shed new light on this question.

West Orange, NJ. October 5, 2015. Scientists found that individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) who had a history of neuro-ophthalmic syndromes performed poorly on visual neuropsychological tasks. The article, "Neuro-ophthalmic syndromes and processing speed in multiple sclerosis," (doi: 10.1097/WNO.0000000000000272)) was published in the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology. The authors are Silvana Costa, PhD, of the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, and Kessler Foundation, Dr.

October 5, 2015 CHAPEL HILL, NC - Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine found that people with anorexia nervosa have very different microbial communities residing inside their guts compared to healthy individuals and that this bacterial imbalance is associated with some of the psychological symptoms related to the eating disorder.