Brain

When rats rest, their brains simulate journeys to a desired future such as a tasty treat, finds new UCL research funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society.

The researchers monitored brain activity in rats, first as the animals viewed food in a location they could not reach, then as they rested in a separate chamber, and finally as they were allowed to walk to the food. The activity of specialised brain cells involved in navigation suggested that during the rest the rats simulated walking to and from food that they had been unable to reach.

Sleep seems simple enough, a state of rest and restoration that almost every vertebrate creature must enter regularly in order to survive. But the brain responds differently to stimuli when asleep than when awake, and it is not clear what brain changes happen during sleep. "It is the same brain, same neurons and similar requirements for oxygen and so on, so what is the difference between these two states?" asks Rodolfo Llinás, a professor of neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine and a Whitman Center Investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole.

Our brain recognizes objects within milliseconds, even if it only receives rudimentary visual information. Researchers believe that reliable and fast recognition works because the brain is constantly making predictions about objects in the field of view and is comparing these with incoming information. Only if mismatches occur in this process do higher areas of the brain have to be notified of the error in order to make active corrections to the predictions. Now scientists at the Goethe University have confirmed this hypothesis.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can change the brain function of people with Tourette syndrome. This is what is revealed in a study by researchers at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal (CIUSSS de l'Est-de-l'Île-de-Montréal) and the University of Montreal, the results of which will be presented at the First World Congress on Tourette Syndrome and Tic Disorders, to be held in London from June 24 to 26.

Well-practiced motor skills like riding a bike are extremely stable memories that can be effortlessly recalled after years or decades. In contrast, a new study publishing in PLOS Computational Biology shows that changes to motor skill memories occurring over the course of a single practice session are not immediately stable, according to researchers Andrew Brennan and Maurice Smith of Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Science and Center for Brain Science.

The thickness of the brain's cerebral cortex could be a key to unlocking answers about intellectual development in youth with Down Syndrome. It could also provide new insights to why individuals with this genetic neurodevelopmental disorder are highly susceptible to early onset Alzheimer's Disease later in life.

Psychiatric disorders can be difficult to diagnose because clinicians must rely upon interpreted clues, such as a patient's behaviors and feelings. For the first time, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report identifying a biological marker: the over-production of specific genes that could be a diagnostic indicator of mental illness in female psychiatric patients.

The study was published this week in the journal EBioMedicine.

Three years after they treated patients with spinal cord injury in a randomized clinical trial with transplanted cells from the patients' olfactory mucosa (nasal cavities) to build a 'bridge' to span the gap between the damaged ends of the spinal cord, researchers found that some recipients had experienced a range of modest improvements and determined that the use of olfactory mucosa lamina propria (OLP) transplants was 'promising and safe.'

Researchers at Monash University have found physical differences in the brains of people who respond emotionally to others' feelings, compared to those who respond more rationally, in a study published in the journal NeuroImage.

The work, led by Robert Eres from the University's School of Psychological Sciences, pinpointed correlations between grey matter density and cognitive and affective empathy. The study looked at whether people who have more brain cells in certain areas of the brain are better at different types of empathy.

Jessie is a five-year-old girl who doesn't like foods with much texture or flavor. She prefers to eat foods that don't require lots of chewing, like soup, pasta, or oatmeal. Jessie has difficulty eating a range of foods and her mother struggles daily with getting her to consume the nutrients she needs to grow and thrive. Jessie is the smallest child in her class and has been severely underweight for two years.

A team of scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has identified the first sensor of the Earth's magnetic field in an animal, finding in the brain of a tiny worm a big clue to a long-held mystery about how animals' internal compasses work.

In a new study, older women who lived in places with higher air pollution had significantly reduced white matter in the brain. For the study, a research team took brain MRIs of 1403 women who were 71 to 89 years old and used residential histories and air monitoring data to estimate their exposure to air pollution in the previous 6 to 7 years.

The findings suggest that ambient particulate air pollutants may have a deleterious effect on brain aging.

The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals.

A new comparative study of social and solitary wasp species suggests that as social behavior evolved, the brain regions for central cognitive processing in social insect species shrank. This is the opposite of the pattern of brain increases with sociality that has been documented for several kinds of vertebrate animals including mammals, birds and fish.

New, ultra-high-field magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago provide the most detailed images to date to show that while the brain shrinks with age, brain cell density remains constant.

The study, of cognitively normal young and old adults, was published in the journal NMR in Biomedicine.

Gaze following to distant space has been documented in many species such as primates, domesticated goats, several bird species, dolphins, fur seals, the red-footed tortoise and wolves. Gaze following is therefore a basic response found in many taxa. Dogs may present a special case as we find evidence that they are able to follow human gaze to objects such as food or toys, but not for the comparatively simpler task of following gaze into distant space.