Brain

When it comes to mental illness, women are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression while men tend toward substance abuse or antisocial disorders, according to a new study.

Published in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the study looked at the prevalence by gender of different types of common mental illnesses. The researchers also found that women with anxiety disorders are more likely to internalize emotions, which typically results in withdrawal, loneliness and depression.

Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now, in one of the first studies of its kind, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are beginning to unravel the process by which the brain makes these everyday prognostications.

Researchers at Rhode Island Hospital’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders Center have found positive associations between fish oil supplements and cognitive functioning as well as differences in brain structure between users and non-users of fish oil supplements. The findings suggest possible benefits of fish oil supplements on brain health and aging. The results were reported at the recent International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease, in Paris, France.

Like far away galaxies, powerful tools are required to bring the minute inner workings of neurons into focus. A team of neurobiologists, psychiatrists, and advanced imaging specialists from Switzerland’s EPLF and CHUV report in The Journal of Neuroscience how Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM) can now be used to observe neuronal activity in real-time and in three dimensions—with up to 50 times greater resolution than ever before.

Neuroscientists have identified a natural protection mechanism in some of the brain's nerve cells during the onset of stroke. The findings, published Aug. 17 in the Journal of Neuroscience, could be used to develop treatments to protect other nerve cell types responsible for speech and movement.

What areas of the brain are involved in the linguistic processes underlying speech and listening? Are there large differences between them? Neuroscientists from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen are the first to have successfully investigated this question using fMRI and have established that there is a large degree of overlap between the areas involved.

Rats exposed to stress during early development inherit the effects of that stress to their offspring, largely expressed in behavior impairments but also characteristics of resilience, shows a new study from the University of Haifa, published in Developmental Psychobiology.

Word recognition behavior can be fine-tuned by experience and practice, according to a new study by Ian Hargreaves and colleagues from the University of Calgary in Canada. Their work shows, for the first time, that it is possible to develop visual word recognition ability in adulthood, beyond what researchers thought was achievable. Competitive Scrabble players provide the proof. The study is published in Memory & Cognition.

Researchers think that brains are sensitive to the quality of child care, according to a study using ten year old children whose mothers exhibited symptoms of depression throughout their lives, and discovered that the children’s amygdala, a part of the brain linked to emotional responses, was enlarged.

Whether you are swimming in the Olympics or saving for a vacation, being able to see progress toward your goal will help you reach it.

"The easier a goal is to see, the closer it seems," said Rajesh Bagchi, assistant professor of marketing in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.

Young people with autism may have difficulty multitasking because they stick rigidly to tasks in the order they are given to them, according to new research using pupils with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD.

The study also found that difficulty with 'prospective memory' - remembering to carry out their intentions - may contribute to the challenges children with autism face.

University of Iowa scientists have discovered a new role for a protein that is mutated in Usher syndrome, one of the most common forms of deaf-blindness in humans. The findings in Nature Neuroscience may help explain why this mutation causes the most severe form of the condition.

The study suggests that the protein called harmonin, which is known to be involved in sound sensing in the inner ear, may also play a role in the transmission of sound information to the brain.

The question of sleep in patients with seriously altered states of consciousness has rarely been studied. Do ‘vegetative’ patients (now also called patients in a state of unresponsive wakefulness) or minimally conscious state patients experience normal sleep? Up until now the distinction between the two patient populations had not been taken into account by electrophysiological studies.

Jerusalem, August 14, 2011 -- GPS technology can make our travels easier and more efficient. But for many animals, the ability to successfully navigate a landscape is not just a matter of convenience – their very survival depends on it.

Egyptian fruit bats, for instance, fly dozens of kilometers each night to feed on specific fruit trees, making the return trip the same night. To understand how the bats locate individual trees night after night, scientists attached tiny GPS devices to the bats in the first-ever comprehensive GPS-based field study of mammal navigation.

Hearing Beethoven while reciting Shakespeare can suppress even a King's stutter, as recently illustrated in the movie "The King's Speech". New research has shown that in adults who have stuttered since childhood the processes of auditory-motor integration are indeed located in a different part of the brain to those in adults who do not stutter.