Brain

Harboring a mistakenly inflated belief that we can easily meet challenges or win conflicts is actually good for us, a new study suggests.

NEW YORK, September 14, 2011—In a new study NYU School of Medicine researchers report that they have found several chemical compounds, including an antidepressant, that have powerful effects against brain-destroying prion infections in mice, opening the door to potential treatments for human prion diseases.

A new study, conducted by Amy Nathanson and Eric Rasmussen from Ohio State University, focused on 'maternal responsiveness' to reveal differences in the way mothers communicate with their children while engaged with books, toys, and TV. They found that watching TV can lead to less interaction between parents and children, with a detrimental impact on literacy and language skills.

NEW YORK, September 14, 2011—In a new study NYU School of Medicine researchers report that they have found several chemical compounds, including an antidepressant, that have powerful effects against brain-destroying prion infections in mice, opening the door to potential treatments for human prion diseases. The drugs trimipramine and fluphenazine used to treat antidepressants are already in clinical use and doctors can test them in human patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the most common human prion disease.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A small clinical trial suggests that cognitive bias modification (CBM), a potential anxiety therapy that is delivered entirely on a computer, may be about as effective as in-person therapy or drugs for treating social anxiety disorder. The Brown University-led research also found that participants believed the therapy to be credible and acceptable.

UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particlular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and "mastery," the belief that one has control over one's own life — three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression.

"I have been looking for this gene for a few years, and it is not the gene I expected," said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research. "I knew there had to be a gene for these psychological resources."

Results from a project run in 129 primary schools in Scotland, the largest ever trial of peer tutoring, show that children as young as seven to eight years old can benefit from a tutoring session as short as twenty minutes per week.

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have taken a first step toward developing a diagnostic tool that could eliminate a major hurdle in pain medicine — the dependency on self-reporting to measure the presence or absence of pain. The new tool would use patterns of brain activity to give an objective physiologic assessment of whether someone is in pain.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Cornell University researchers may have solved a 100-year puzzle: How to safely open and close the blood-brain barrier so that therapies to treat Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and cancers of the central nervous system might effectively be delivered. (Journal of Neuroscience, Sept. 14, 2011.)

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. (September 2011) – Research conducted by Boston College neuroscientist Sean MacEvoy and colleague Russell Epstein of the University of Pennsylvania finds evidence of a new way of considering how the brain processes and recognizes a person's surroundings, according to a paper published in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience.

For the first time, scientists at USC have unlocked a mechanism behind the way short- and long-term motor memory work together and compete against one another.

The research — from a team led by Nicolas Schweighofer of the Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at USC — could potentially pave the way to more effective rehabilitation for stroke patients.

It turns out that the phenomenon of motor memory is actually the product of two processes: short-term and long-term memory.

Psychotherapy has come a long way since the days of Freudian psychoanalysis – today, rigorous scientific studies are providing evidence for the kinds of psychotherapies that effectively treat various psychiatric disorders. But Alan Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University, believes that we must acknowledge a basic truth – all of our progress and development in evidence-based psychotherapy has failed to solve the rather serious problem of mental illness in the United States.

A study by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB in Spanish) and Ramón Llull University have researched the relationship between the sleeping habits, hours slept, and academic performance of children aged between six and seven years of age. Experts have found that sleeping less than nine hours, going to bed late and no bedtime routine generally affects children's academic skills.

Neurons in the brain play a role as an electric wire conveying an electrical signal. Because this electric wire is connected with various joints (synapse), various brain functions can occur. A neuron which has dendritic trees on it, receives the signals with many synapses located on those dendritic trees, and carries out functions by combining the received signals.

A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians.

While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians, this is the first study to examine hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians across the age spectrum – from 18 to 91 years of age.