Brain

Brain networks may avoid traffic jams at their busiest intersections by communicating on different frequencies, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University Medical Center at Hamburg-Eppendorf and the University of Tübingen have learned.

When your dog gazes up at you adoringly, what does it see? A best friend? A pack leader? A can opener?

Many dog lovers make all kinds of inferences about how their pets feel about them, but no one has captured images of actual canine thought processes – until now.

Emory University researchers have developed a new methodology to scan the brains of alert dogs and explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species. The technique uses harmless functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain.

Researchers in Spain have found that many of the individuals claiming to see the aura of people –traditionally called "healers" or "quacks"– actually present the neuropsychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia" (specifically, "emotional synesthesia"). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged "virtue". In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected. This way, synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people with a particular color.

Treatment guidelines updated for aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage

Patients who are diagnosed in the emergency room with a specific type of brain bleed should be considered for immediate transfer to a hospital that treats at least 35 cases a year, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.

The Guidelines for the Management of Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (aSAH) is published online in Stroke, an American Heart Association Journal. It updates guidelines issued in 2009.

PITTSBURGH—A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips and a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or leaning forward are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University.

UCSF scientists have identified patterns of brain activity in the rat brain that play a role in the formation and recall of memories and decision-making. The discovery, which builds on the team's previous findings, offers a path for studying learning, decision-making and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Awake mental replay of past experiences is essential for making informed choices, suggests a study in rats. Without it, the animals’ memory-based decision-making faltered, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers blocked learning from, and acting on, past experience by selectively suppressing replay – encoded as split-second bursts of neuronal activity in the memory hubs of rats performing a maze task.

A Queen's University researcher has created a Star Trek-like human-scale 3D videoconferencing pod that allows people in different locations to video conference as if they are standing in front of each other. "Why Skype when you can talk to a life-size 3D holographic image of another person?" says professor Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab.

A partial, duplicate copy of a gene appears to be responsible for the critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin. The momentous gene duplication event occurred about two or three million years ago, at a critical transition in the evolution of the human lineage, according to a pair of studies published early online in the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, on May 3rd.

Under some conditions, the brains of embryonic chicks appear to be awake well before those chicks are ready to hatch out of their eggs. That's according to an imaging study published online on May 3 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, in which researchers woke chick embryos inside their eggs by playing loud, meaningful sounds to them. Playing meaningless sounds to the embryos wasn't enough to rouse their brains.

LA JOLLA, CA – May 3, 2012 - What genetic changes account for the vast behavioral differences between humans and other primates? Researchers so far have catalogued only a few, but now it seems that they can add a big one to the list. A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has shown that an extra copy of a brain-development gene, which appeared in our ancestors' genomes about 2.4 million years ago, allowed maturing neurons to migrate farther and develop more connections.

Following are highlights of presentations that will be given by researchers from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center at the upcoming American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual meeting in Philadelphia (May 5-9, 2012).

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the Lawrence C. Kolb Professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia and director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, will be officially installed as APA president-elect at the meeting.

May 3, 2012 - The traditional Southern belief that men must defend their honor is alive and well but not just among men. A new study finds that both men and women in the Southern United States believe in responding aggressively – and sometimes in the extreme – to attacks on the nation.

The smoking cessation drug varenicline significantly reduced alcohol consumption in a group of heavy-drinking smokers, in a study carried out by researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco.

"Alcohol abuse is a huge problem, and this is a big step forward in identifying a potential new treatment," said senior author Howard L. Fields, MD, PhD, professor of neurology and director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction at UCSF.

BEER-SHEVA, May 3, 2012 – People who experience Childhood Emotional Maltreatment (CEM) are more likely to have troubled romantic relationships in adult years, according to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers.