Brain

SAN ANTONIO (April 27, 2016) -- It's an unsettling thought: You could be walking around for 20 years developing Parkinson's disease and not even know it.

And once symptoms appear, it's too late for a cure.

What if a therapy that treats the root causes of Parkinson's, not just the symptoms, could be started earlier?

Specific regions of the brain are specialized in recognizing bodies of animals and human beings. By measuring the electrical activity per cell, scientists from KU Leuven, Belgium, and the University of Glasgow have shown that the individual brain cells in these areas do different things. Their response to specific contours or body shapes is very selective.

People with more friends have higher pain tolerance, Oxford University researchers have found.

Katerina Johnson, a doctoral student in the University's Department of Experimental Psychology, was studying whether differences in our neurobiology may help explain why some of us have larger social networks than others.

LA JOLLA--(April 28, 2016) A microscope about the size of a penny is giving scientists a new window into the everyday activity of cells within the spinal cord. The innovative technology revealed that astrocytes--cells in the nervous system that do not conduct electrical signals and were traditionally viewed as merely supportive--unexpectedly react to intense sensation.

Serotonin, a neurotransmitter in the brain, shortens periods of apnoea (temporary cessation of breathing) and promotes inspiration, according to a study published today in Experimental Physiology.

The researchers found that when injected into a specific part of the brain (the brain stem) serotonin shortens apnoeic events by interacting with a specific serotonin receptor, the 5-HT3 receptor, which, in healthy babies, is highly expressed in a region of the brainstem associated with the control of apnoeas and regular breathing.

MINNEAPOLIS - People who have had a traumatic brain injury (TBI) may still have sleep problems a year and a half after being injured, according to a study published in the April 27, 2016, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In addition, people with TBI may also be unaware of just how much their sleep is disturbed.

Every year in the United States, 1.7 million people experience a TBI and there is evidence that the rate of TBI is rising worldwide.

Rio is a California sea lion who can solve IQ tests that many people have trouble passing. In fact, she is so smart that scientists at the Long Marine Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz designed a series of tests that prove she is the first animal besides humans that can use basic logic (If A=B and B=C then A=C).

MADISON, Wis. -- A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who studies the most common genetic intellectual disability has used an experimental drug to reverse -- in mice -- damage from the mutation that causes the syndrome.

The condition, called fragile X, has devastating effects on intellectual abilities.

An experimental cancer drug can improve learning and memory in mice with fragile X syndrome, according to a new study. Unlike other potential treatments for this disorder that target neurons, the cancer drug coaxes neural stem cells to generate neurons potentially critical to cognitive function. The findings offer new hope to patients with fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder, which currently lacks an effective treatment.

Mental agility can be boosted by even a short period of learning a language, a study suggests.

Tests carried out on students of all ages suggest that acquiring a new language improves a person's attention, after only a week of study.

Researchers also found that these benefits could be maintained with regular practice.

A team from the University of Edinburgh assessed different aspects of mental alertness in a group of 33 students aged 18 to 78 who had taken part in a one-week Scottish Gaelic course.

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people's inner thoughts?

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have taken a step in that direction by building a "semantic atlas" that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

Scientists have been studying how visual space is mapped in the cerebral cortex for many decades under the assumption that the map is equal for lights and darks. Surprisingly, recent work demonstrates that visual brain maps are dark-centric and that, just as stars rotate around black holes in the Universe, lights rotate around darks in the brain representation of visual space.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Call it personalized medicine for depression -- but the prescription in this case is exercise, which University of Florida Health researchers have found helps people with certain genetic traits.

Imagine a teaching tool so effective that students look forward to using it in class and continue to seek out new information with it after the school day ends. New research offers powerful evidence that Twitter, if used properly, can produce these outcomes among middle school students and enhance the way children learn in the 21st century.

The ability of children to speak any two dialects - two closely related varieties of the same language -- may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).

The new findings on bi-dialectalism are published in the journal Cognition, following a study undertaken by researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Cyprus, and the Cyprus University of Technology.