Brain

The traditional view is that learning is based on the strengthening or weakening of the contacts between the nerve cells in the brain. However, this has been challenged by new research findings from Lund University in Sweden. These indicate that there is also a third mechanism – a kind of clock function that gives individual nerve cells the ability to time their reactions.

Since the start of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 300,000 soldiers have returned to the United States with traumatic brain injury caused by exposure to bomb blasts — and in particular, exposure to improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Symptoms of traumatic brain injury can range from the mild, such as lingering headaches and nausea, to more severe impairments in memory and cognition.

Women who accept and tolerate their imperfections appear to have a more positive body image despite their body mass index (BMI) and are better able to handle personal disappointments and setbacks in their daily lives.

Research out of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo found that this self-compassion might be an important means to increase positive body image and protect girls and young women against unhealthy weight-control practices and eating disorders.

Gourmet pizza in school? According to a new Food and Brand Lab pilot study, published in Appetite, chef-made meals can increase participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) by 9% and overall selection and consumption of vegetables by 16%!

Chefs Move to Schools (CMTS), an initiative of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, pairs chefs with schools in order to provide nutrition instruction to students and culinary advice to interested school food service workers.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every day, organ transplant patients around the world take a drug called rapamycin to keep their immune systems from rejecting their new kidneys and hearts. New research suggests that the same drug could help brain tumor patients by boosting the effect of new immune-based therapies.

In experiments in animals, researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School showed that adding rapamycin to an immunotherapy approach strengthened the immune response against brain tumor cells.

Researchers record no brain activity when a baby rat vigorously moves its left hindlimb while awake.

(Photo Credit: Video courtesy of Mark Blumberg)

While the left hindlimb of a sleeping baby rat twitches, researchers record the extensive activity in the area of the rat's brain that is sensitive to twitches of that limb.

The protein alpha-synuclein is a well-known player in Parkinson's disease and other related neurological conditions, such as dementia with Lewy bodies. Its normal functions, however, have long remained unknown. An enticing mystery, say researchers, who contend that understanding the normal is critical in resolving the abnormal.

LOS ANGELES – (Sept. 29, 2014) –MPS IIIB is a devastating and currently untreatable disease that causes progressive damage to the brain, leading to profound intellectual disability, dementia and death -- often before reaching adulthood.

(Boston) – A review article published online in Behavioral Brain Research provides novel insight into changes that happen in the brain as a result of chronic alcohol exposure that can lead to disruptions in the sleep cycle.

Clinical assessments and research indicate that individuals with alcohol use disorders frequently suffer from severely disrupted sleep. This can occur when people are actively drinking, when they are going through withdrawal or when they are abstaining.

BOSTON – Over the past several decades, brain stimulation has become an increasingly important treatment option for a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions.

LA JOLLA, CA—September 29, 2014—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered that a gene mutation linked to hereditary spastic paraplegia, a disabling neurological disorder, interferes with the normal breakdown of triglyceride fat molecules in the brain. The TSRI researchers found large droplets of triglycerides within the neurons of mice modeling the disease.

The idea of mapping the brain is not new. Researchers have known for years that the key to treating, curing, and even preventing brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury, is to understand how the brain records, processes, stores, and retrieves information.

DARIEN, IL – Public health and safety are threatened by the increasing prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea, which now afflicts at least 25 million adults in the U.S., according to the National Healthy Sleep Awareness Project. Several new studies highlight the destructive nature of obstructive sleep apnea, a chronic disease that increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and depression.

A recent study based on a Chinese sample gives an answer to this question. The research shows that in Chinese culture, emotion- expressive suppression is not only able to dampen negative emotion effectively, but also dampen negative emotion faster than Cognitive reappraisal. This sheds much light on how to quickly regulate negative emotion in urgent situations, particularly when people from East-Asian cultures are concerned.

You're waiting at a bus stop, expecting the bus to arrive any time. You watch the road. Nothing yet. A little later you start to pace. More time passes. "Maybe there is some problem", you think. Finally, you give up and raise your arm and hail a taxi. Just as you pull away, you glimpse the bus gliding up. Did you have a choice to wait a bit longer? Or was giving up too soon the inevitable and predictable result of a chain of neural events?