Brain

Young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people's thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another's perspective than other children of the same age.

That's what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new longitudinal study published in the journal Child Development.

School absenteeism is a significant problem, and students who are frequently absent from school more often have symptoms of psychiatric disorders. A new longitudinal study of more than 17,000 youths has found that frequently missing school is associated with a higher prevalence of mental health problems later on in adolescence, and that mental health problems during one year also predict missing additional school days in the following year for students in middle and high school.

Listeners can learn new vocabulary through hip-hop music, even though the lyrics may be difficult to understand, according to a study published in the Dec. 21 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE. The author, Paula Chesley of the University of Alberta, found that the number of hip-hop artists that a participant listened to was predictive of the participant's knowledge of words and phrases used in hip-hop songs that are not considered to be mainstream, like "road dog" (friend) and "guap" (lots of money).

ST. PAUL, Minn. – New research suggests that, in people who don't currently have memory problems, those with smaller regions of the brain's cortex may be more likely to develop symptoms consistent with very early Alzheimer's disease. The study is published in the December 21, 2011, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

People resist medical screening, or don't call back for the results, because they don't want to know they're sick or at risk for a disease. But many illnesses, such as HIV/AIDS and cancer, have a far a better prognosis if they're caught early. How can health care providers break down that resistance?

At UCLA's Laboratory of Integrative Neuroimaging Technology, researchers use functional MRI brain scans to observe brain signal changes that take place during mental activity. They then employ computerized machine learning (ML) methods to study these patterns and identify the cognitive state — or sometimes the thought process — of human subjects. The technique is called "brain reading" or "brain decoding."

The hippocampus is an important brain structure for recollection memory, the type of memory we use for detailed reliving of past events. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the December 22 issue of the journal Neuron reveals characteristics of the human hippocampus that allow scientists to use anatomical brain scans to form predictions about an individual's recollection ability. The new research helps to explain why this relationship has been hard to find in the past and provides evidence for a possible underlying mechanism.

We know a lot about the links between a pregnant mother's health, behavior, and moods and her baby's cognitive and psychological development once it is born. But how does pregnancy change a mother's brain? "Pregnancy is a critical period for central nervous system development in mothers," says psychologist Laura M. Glynn of Chapman University. "Yet we know virtually nothing about it." Glynn and her colleague Curt A. Sandman, of University of the California Irvine, are doing something about that.

Recently, the accuracy of current methods of pain assessment in babies have been called into question. New research from London-area hospitals and the University of Oxford measures brain activity in infants to better understand their pain response.

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, December 20, 2011—An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can beidentified by simply "looking" at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is.

Every cloud has a silver lining: weather forecasting models could predict brain tumor growth

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 -- When accidents that involve traumatic brain injuries occur, a speedy diagnosis followed by the proper treatment can mean the difference between life and death. A research team, led by Jason D. Riley in the Section on Analytical and Functional Biophotonics at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has created a handheld device capable of quickly detecting brain injuries such as hematomas, which occur when blood vessels become damaged and blood seeps out into surrounding tissues where it can cause significant and dangerous swelling.

Anxious people have long been classified as "hypersensitive" – they're thought to be more fearful and feel threatened more easily than their counterparts. But new research from Tel Aviv University shows that the anxious may not be hypersensitive at all – in fact, they may not be sensitive enough.

Scientists studying a unique collection of human skulls have shown that changes to the skull shape thought to have occurred independently through separate evolutionary events may have actually precipitated each other.

Researchers at the Universities of Manchester and Barcelona examined 390 skulls from the Austrian town of Hallstatt and found evidence that the human skull is highly integrated, meaning variation in one part of the skull is linked to changes throughout the skull.

Irvine, Calif., and Arlington, Texas -- Researchers at UC Irvine and The University of Texas at Arlington have discovered how spinning microparticles can direct the growth of nerve fiber, a discovery that could allow for directed growth of neuronal networks on a chip and improve methods for treating spinal or brain injuries.