Brain

Motorcycle helmets, while protecting bikers' brains, may also be contributing to hearing loss. Scientists mapped the airflow and noise patterns to find out why.

When people recognize voices, part of what helps make voice recognition accurate is noticing how people pronounce words differently. But individuals with dyslexia don't experience this familiar language advantage, say researchers.

The likely reason: "phonological impairment."

Tyler Perrachione with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains, "Even though all people who speak a language use the same words, they say those words just a little bit differently from one another--what is called 'phonetics' in linguistics."

Irvine, Calif., July 28, 2011 — The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the way Americans travel and view the world. They may also have made us sicker and more likely to access healthcare services, according to a new UC Irvine study.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Practicing positive activities may serve as an effective, low-cost treatment for people suffering from depression, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Duke University Medical Center.

New research focusing on high-frequency oscillations, termed ripples and fast ripples, recorded by intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), may provide an important marker for the localization of the brain region responsible for seizure activity. According to the study now available in Epilepsia, a journal of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), the resection of brain regions containing fast ripples, along with the visually-identified seizure-onset zone, may achieve a good seizure outcome in pediatric epilepsy.

German researchers have used drivers' brain signals, for the first time, to assist in braking, providing much quicker reaction times and a potential solution to the thousands of car accidents that are caused by human error.

Using electroencephalography (EEG) – a technique that attaches electrodes to the scalp –, the researchers demonstrated that the mind-reading system, accompanied with modern traffic sensors, could detect a driver's intention to break 130 milliseconds faster than a normal brake pedal response.

A new epilepsy gene, LGI2, has been found in the Lagotto Romagnolo dogs, known from their gift for truffle hunting. The gene discovery made by Professor Hannes Lohi and his research group at the University of Helsinki and the Folkhälsan Research Center offers a new candidate gene for human benign childhood epilepsies characterized by seizure remission. The research will be published in the prestigious scientific journal PLoS Genetics on July 28.

If you suffer traumatic brain injury, your risk of having a stroke within three months may increase tenfold, according to a new study reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.

A scientist at the Gladstone Institutes has discovered a novel way to convert human skin cells into brain cells, advancing medicine and human health by offering new hope for regenerative medicine and personalized drug discovery and development.

NIH-funded scientists have developed a strain of mice with a built-in off switch that can selectively shut down the animals' serotonin-producing cells, which make up a brain network controlling breathing, temperature regulation, and mood. The switch controls only the serotonin-producing cells, and does not affect any other cells in the animal's brains or bodies.

"The problem the bat is facing is that it's flying around in this really complicated environment. It's getting all these echoes back [from the sonar broadcasts it emits], and the echoes are all arriving at almost the same time," said Bates, lead author on the Science paper. "And they have no trouble at all dealing with that. We're trying to figure out perceptually how these bats distinguish an echo from a nearby target from all the background echoes that are arriving within a similar time window."

Boston, MA (July 28, 2011) — Researchers have developed a toolkit that enables them to turn off targeted cell populations while leaving others unaffected.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Escape responses are some of the most studied behaviors by neurobiologists who want to understand how the brain processes sensory information. The ability to evade predators plays a vital role in the process of natural selection. Animals explore their environment to find food, find mates and locate new habitats, and have developed distinct escape responses to avoid predators, thereby increasing their chances for survival. Yet there are few examples that illustrate a complete understanding of the basic biological mechanisms of behavior with its ecological relevance.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but clueless copycatting comes at a cost.

As anyone who has been subjected to the mocking playground game knows, parroting can be annoying. Yet gentle mimicry can act as a kind of "social glue" in human relationships. It fosters rapport and trust. It signals cohesion. Two people who like each other will often unconsciously mirror each other's mannerisms in subtle ways – leaning forward in close synchrony, for example – and that strengthens their bond.