Brain

Some brain tumors are notoriously difficult to treat. Whether surgically removed, zapped by radiation or infiltrated by chemotherapy drugs, they find a way to return.

The ability of many brain tumors to regenerate can be traced to cancer stem cells that evade treatment and spur the growth of new tumor cells.

A new study demonstrates that the atypical trajectory of cortical/brain development in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) extends well beyond young childhood and into late adolescence and young adulthood.

Real-time brain scans coupled with a machine-learning algorithm can reveal whether a person has memory of a particular subject - but with a little bit of concentration, people can easily hide their memories from the computer.

Computer programs that can read a person's brain scan data and surmise, with a high degree of certainty, whether that person is experiencing a memory, hold great promise to influence a number of fields, including marketing, medicine and evaluation of eyewitness testimony.

Extremely poor vision can be caused by strabismus in early childhood or by a displaced optical axis.

Amblyopia is caused not by organic damage to the eyes but by the brain incorrectly fitting together the images the eyes provide. As a result, the ability to see an object in sharp focus is severely limited. This occurs in more than one in 20 of the German population, as Heike M. Elflein et al. show in a recent original article in Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2015; 112(19): 338-44).

Having a stroke ages a person's brain function by almost eight years, new research finds - robbing them of memory and thinking speed as measured on cognitive tests.

In both black and white patients, having had a stroke meant that their score on a 27-item test of memory and thinking speed had dropped as much as it would have if they had aged 7.9 years overnight.

You might not need to remember those complicated e-mail and bank account passwords for much longer. According to a new study, the way your brain responds to certain words could be used to replace passwords.

A new study shows that social and sensory overstimulation drives autistic behaviors. The study, conducted on rats exposed to a known risk factor in humans, supports the unconventional view of the autistic brain as hyper-functional, and offers new hope with therapeutic emphasis on paced and non-surprising environments tailored to the individual's sensitivity.

Beatles versus Rolling Stones. Ironman versus the Incredible Hulk. Deep dish versus thin crust. Such differences of opinion among family and friends rarely end in serious squabbles. Let the conversation turn to political parties, however, and lively disagreements can become downright ugly.

Why is it that even among the people we care about most, differences in political affiliation often result in awkwardness and discomfort, and pushed far enough, can feel like a threat to the entire relationship?

Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

A risk gene for dyslexia is associated with impairments in visual motion detection, according to a study published May 27 in The Journal of Neuroscience. Mutations in the gene DCDC2 have previously been associated with dyslexia, and this study found that dyslexics with an altered copy of the gene are unable to detect certain types of visual motion.

Giant strides have been taken in the early care of very premature infants in postnatal intensive care units during the past two decades. Doctors can now support the function of especially the lungs, heart and the circulatory system so as to guarantee the survival of most of even extremely premature infants.

Certain blind individuals have the ability to use echoes from tongue or finger clicks to recognize objects in the distance. In a way they use such echolocation as a 'replacement' for vision.

Recent research showed that echolocation in blind individuals is a full form of sensory substitution, and that blind echolocation experts recruit regions of the brain normally associated with visual perception when making echo-based assessments of objects.

A study by researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has shown that mood instability occurs in a wide range of mental disorders and is not exclusive to affective conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder.

The research, published today in BMJ Open, also found that mood instability was associated with poorer clinical outcomes.

Scientists have for the first time shown how the disruption of a key gene involved in mental illness impacts on the brain. The discovery could be used in the future to help develop psychiatric drugs.

The DISC1 gene is a risk factor for a number of major mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder.

Neurons in pink and blue. Credit: Dawson original

In a new study led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, researchers report that people can be conditioned to associate images with particular pain responses - such as improved tolerance to pain - even when they are not consciously aware of the images. The findings are being published in the journal PNAS.