Brain

Australian researchers have discovered for the first time that reduced heart rate variability – or changes in heart beat timing – best predicts cognitive disturbances, such as concentration difficulties commonly reported by people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). This adds to the growing body of evidence linking autonomic nervous system imbalance to symptoms of this poorly understood disorder.

The findings are reported in the journal PLOS ONE.

Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are "freestyling" – spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time.

In an editorial accompanying an ebook titled "Beyond open access: visions for open evaluation of scientific papers by post-publication peer review," Nikolaus Kriegeskorte argues that scientists, not publishers, are in the best position to develop a fair evaluation process for scientific papers.

Wondering if your caged hamster gets bored? It's highly likely if the critter has nothing to do all day.

Those are the findings of University of Guelph researchers in the first research study to empirically demonstrate boredom in confined animals. The study appears today in PLOS ONE, published by the Public Library of Science.

The study's authors hope the results encourage the development of better housing systems for captive animals.

Scientists have combined and translated two kinds of brain wave recordings into music, transforming one recording (EEG) to create the pitch and duration of a note, and the other (fMRI) to control the intensity of the music. The research, published November 14 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Jing Lu and colleagues from the University of Electronic Science and Technology, China, reveals an improved method to reflect the physiological processes of the scale-free brain in music.

The ability to correctly identify signs of depression depends on the gender of both the identifier and the person with depression, as well as individual psychological differences, according to research published November 14 by Viren Swami from the University of Westminster, UK.

Relatively small levels of exposure to alcohol while in the womb can influence a child's IQ, according to a new study led by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Oxford using data from over 4,000 mothers and their children in the Children of the 90s study (ALSPAC) and published today in PLOS ONE.

Your emotions can certainly impact your decisions, but you might be surprised by the extent to which your emotions affect your pocketbook. New research from psychological scientist Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and colleagues Yi Le and Elke U. Weber of Columbia University explores how impatience brought on by sadness can in turn produce substantial financial loss. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

For most of history, humans rose with the sun and slept when it set. Enter Thomas Edison, and with a flick of a switch, night became day, enabling us to work, play and post cat and kid photos on Facebook into the wee hours.

Naturally, our brain activity waxes and wanes. When listening, this oscillation synchronizes to the sounds we are hearing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have found that this influences the way we listen. Hearing abilities also oscillate and depend on the exact timing of one's brain rhythms. This discovery that sound, brain, and behaviour are so intimately coupled will help us to learn more about listening abilities in hearing loss.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico are comparing supercomputer simulations of blast waves on the brain with clinical studies of veterans suffering from mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) to help improve helmet designs.

Paul Taylor and John Ludwigsen of Sandia's Terminal Ballistics Technology Department and Corey Ford, a neurologist at UNM's Health Sciences Center, are in the final year of a four-year study of mild TBI funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Neuroscientists studying the link between poor sleep and schizophrenia have found that irregular sleep patterns and desynchronised brain activity during sleep could trigger some of the disease's symptoms. The findings, published in the journal Neuron, suggest that these prolonged disturbances might be a cause and not just a consequence of the disorder's debilitating effects.

University of Cincinnati research is examining the effectiveness of a relationship education program that was created to specifically address the needs of male same-sex couples.Details on the program and the study, led by Sarah Whitton, a UC assistant professor of psychology, will be presented Nov. 17, at the 46th annual convention of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) in National Harbor, Md.

Although many people look forward to getting away on vacation or just putting their feet up at home, there are others who can get as anxious about taking time to relax as they would if they were delivering a national address. Christina Luberto, a doctoral student in the University of Cincinnati's Department of Psychology, has now developed a questionnaire, the Relaxation Sensitivity Index (RSI), to examine the phenomenon.

Headshaking syndrome is when a horse shakes or jerks its head uncontrollably for no apparent reason. There are striking clinical similarities between facial pain syndromes in people, most notably trigeminal neuralgia, and headshaking in horses. Although some progress has been made towards both diagnosing and treating the condition in horses, the pathology of the disease remains unknown and further research is needed.