Brain

For Bradley Duchaine, there is definitely more than meets the eye where faces are concerned.

With colleagues at Birkbeck College in the University of London, he is investigating the process of facial recognition, seeking to understand the complexity of what is actually taking place in the brain when one person looks at another.

Finnish scientists have found that a rare dyslexia-linked genetic variant of the ROBO1 gene decreases normal crossing of auditory pathways in the human brain. The weaker the expression of the gene is, the more abnormal is the midline crossing. The results link, for the first time, a dyslexia-susceptibility gene to a specific sensory function of the human brain. This collaborative study between Aalto University and University of Helsinki in Finland and the Karolinska Insitutet in Sweden was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

New findings, led by neuroscientists at the University of Bristol and published this week in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, reveal a novel mechanism through which the brain may become more reluctant to function as we grow older.

If you are a people-pleaser who strives to keep your social relationships smooth and comfortable, you might find yourself overeating in certain social situations like Super Bowl watch parties. A new study from Case Western Reserve University found that, hungry or not, some people eat in an attempt to keep others comfortable.

"They don't want to rock the boat or upset the sense of social harmony," says Julie Exline, a Case Western Reserve psychologist and lead author of the study.

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered that decaffeinated coffee may improve brain energy metabolism associated with type 2 diabetes. This brain dysfunction is a known risk factor for dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease. The research is published online in Nutritional Neuroscience.

Neuroscientists may one day be able to eavesdrop on the constant, internal monologs that run through our minds, or hear the imagined speech of a stroke or a locked-in patient with inability to speak, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The work, conducted in the labs of Robert Knight at Berkeley and Edward Chang at UCSF, is reported Jan 31 in the open-access journal PLoS Biology. The report will be accompanied by an interview with the authors for the PLoS Biology Podcast.

Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

These scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe – the seat of the auditory system – as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – New research from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) might help explain how a gene mutation found in some autistic individuals leads to difficulties in processing auditory cues and paying spatial attention to sound.

Holding information within one's memory for a short while is a seemingly simple and everyday task. We use our short-term memory when remembering a new telephone number if there is nothing to write at hand, or to find the beautiful dress inside the store that we were just admiring in the shopping window. Yet, despite the apparent simplicity of these actions, short-term memory is a complex cognitive act that entails the participation of multiple brain regions. However, whether and how different brain regions cooperate during memory has remained elusive.

New research on autism in adults has shown that adults with a more severe learning disability have a greater likelihood of having autism.

This group, mostly living in private households, was previously 'invisible' in estimates of autism.

Dr Terry Brugha, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leicester, led research on behalf of the University for the report Estimating the Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Conditions in Adults: Extending the 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, which has today been published by the NHS Information Centre.

In the US alone, at least 500,000 people suffer from Parkinson's disease, a neurological disorder that affects a person's ability to control his or her movement. New technology from the University of Bonn in Germany lets researchers observe the development of the brain cells responsible for the disease.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – New research suggests that major growth in the travel, leisure and tourism industry in the coming century may be possible as more people begin to define recreation as a learning and educational opportunity – a way to explore new ideas and cultures, art, science and history.

Some of this is already happening, although the expansion of tourism in much of the 20th century was often focused on amusement parks and tropical resorts – not that there's anything wrong with them.

EVANSTON -- Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.

Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.

The first few weeks of college are a critical time in shaping students' drinking habits. Now Penn State researchers have a tailored approach that may help prevent students from becoming heavy drinkers.