Brain

Generations of school students have gone to bed the night before a maths exam or a vocabulary test with their algebra book or vocabulary notes tucked under their pillow in the hope that the knowledge would somehow be magically transferred into their brains while they slept. That they were not completely taken in by a superstitious belief has now been demonstrated by a team of neuropsychologists at Saarland University, who have shown that even a brief sleep can significantly improve retention of learned material in memory.

The functional differences between autistic and non-autistic brains have been isolated for the first time, following the development of a new methodology for analyzing MRI scans.

Our eyes are drawn to several dimensions of an object--such as color, texture, and luminance--even when we need to focus on only one of them, researchers at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania have found. The study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, points to the ability of our visual system to integrate multiple components of an item while underscoring the difficulty we have in focusing on a particular aspect of it.

Modern life, with its preponderance of inadequate exposure to natural light during the day and overexposure to artificial light at night, is not conducive to the body's natural sleep/wake cycle.

It's an emerging topic in health, one that UConn Health (University of Connecticut, Farmington, Conn.) cancer epidemiologist Richard Stevens has been studying for three decades.

Research suggests that the ratio of the lengths of the index finger and the ring finger in males may be predictive of a variety of disorders related to disturbed hormonal balance. When the index finger is shorter than the ring finger, this results in a small 2D:4D ratio, pointing to a high exposure to testosterone in the uterus.

Female mice are attracted more strongly to the odour of healthy males than unhealthy males. This had already been shown in an earlier study by researchers from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology at the Vetmeduni Vienna. Now the team of behavioural scientists went one step further - and tested a common assumption that more attractive males have better mating success than other males.

Females also mate with unhealthy males

A team of researchers from the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam and the Charité University Hospital in Berlin have revealed how taste is encoded in patterns of neural activity in the human brain. Kathrin Ohla, the lead researcher on the team, said: "The ability to taste is crucial for food choice and the formation of food preferences. Impairments in taste perception or hedonic experience of taste can cause deviant eating behavior, and may lead to mal- or supernutrition. Our research aims to extend the understanding of the neuronal mechanisms of taste perception and valuation.

Teens who were heavy marijuana users - smoking it daily for about three years -- had an abnormally shaped hippocampus and performed poorly on long-term memory tasks, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

The hippocampus is important to long-term memory (also known as episodic memory), which is the ability to remember autobiographical or life events.

The brain abnormalities and memory problems were observed during the individuals' early twenties, two years after they stopped smoking marijuana.

Mutations in the presenilin-1 gene are the most common cause of inherited, early-onset forms of Alzheimer's disease. In a new study, published in Neuron, scientists replaced the normal mouse presenilin-1 gene with Alzheimer's-causing forms of the human gene to discover how these genetic changes may lead to the disorder. Their surprising results may transform the way scientists design drugs that target these mutations to treat inherited or familial Alzheimer's, a rare form of the disease that affects approximately 1 percent of people with the disorder.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University's Brain Mechanisms for Behaviour Unit have found a surprise upon mapping the precise connectivity inside a brain structure called the neostriatum. The cell groups here do not seem to be talking to each other, and are less interdependent in their functioning than previously suspected. Their findings were published in Brain Structure and Function.

A history of psychedelic drug use is associated with less psychological distress and fewer suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts, according to new research from Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

A recent study shows differences in brain structure according to how trusting people are of others.

The psychologists used two measures to determine the trust levels of 82 study participants. Participants filled out a self-reported questionnaire about their tendency to trust others. They also were shown pictures of faces with neutral facial expressions and asked to evaluate how trustworthy they found each person in the picture. This gave researchers a metric, on a spectrum, of how trusting each participant was of others.

Thousands of genetic "dimmer" switches, regions of DNA known as regulatory elements, were turned up high during human evolution in the developing cerebral cortex, according to new research from the Yale School of Medicine.

People with anorexia nervosa and with body dysmorphic disorder have similar abnormalities in their brains that affect their ability to process visual information, according to a new study.

People with anorexia have an intense fear of gaining weight and can starve themselves even when they are dangerously thin. Body dysmorphic disorder is a psychiatric condition characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with a perceived flaw in physical appearance.

In the absence of food, neurons that normally control appetite initiate complex, repetitive behaviors seen in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and anorexia nervosa, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers.

The findings are published in the March 5 online issue of the journal Cell.