Brain

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn't work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. "My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions," she says.

"Our visual system is tuned towards perceiving other people. We spend so much time doing that—seeing who they are, what they are doing, what they intend to do," says psychology professor Nikolaus F. Troje of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

This process is called biological motion perception, and humans are so good at it that even a few dots on a screen representing the major joints of a body are enough to retrieve all the information we need—as long as they move.

Lesions to the brain or spinal cord rarely heal fully, which leads to permanent functional impairment. After injury to the central nervous system (CNS), neurons are lost and largely replaced by a scar often referred to as the glial scar based on its abundance of supporting glial cells. Although this process has been known to science for over a century, the function of the scar tissue has long been disputed. However, there are indications that it stabilizes the tissue and that it inhibits the re-growth of damaged nerve fibres.

LA JOLLA, CA - Researchers at the Salk Institute have been able to genetically incorporate "unnatural" amino acids, such as those emitting green fluorescence, into neural stem cells, which then differentiate into brain neurons with the incandescent "tag" intact.

Researchers have uncovered a new target that could stop the growth of glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer. In the July 8th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, a new study identifies an enzyme found in glioma stem cells that allows them to grow and seed tumors. Importantly, normal stem cells, including those in the brain, don't appear to share that same dependency.

Hamilton, ON (July 7, 2011) – Human stem cells have the ability to become any cell type in the human body, but when it comes to their destination they know where they want to go.

This finding by McMaster University researchers sheds new light on how these regenerative cells turn into more specialized cell types, such as neural or blood cells. Until now, the thought has been that stem cells keep all their options open and have no preference when it comes to becoming more specialized.

University of Florida scientists have discovered a way to separate the neural wheat from the chaff during the process of generating brain cells for potential patient therapies.

The technique, recently detailed in the online journal PLoS ONE, could be applied to long-awaited stem cell treatments for Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries and other brain disorders. It would allow doctors to deliver neurons to patients, without including vast amounts of other types of unnecessary brain cells.

The human brain may simulate physical sensations to prompt introspection, capitalizing on moments of high emotion to promote moral behavior, according to a USC researcher.

A person who drinks too much alcohol may be able to perform complicated tasks, such as dancing, carrying on a conversation or even driving a car, but later have no memory of those escapades. These periods of amnesia, commonly known as "blackouts," can last from a few minutes to several hours.

Chips based on ARM processor technology will be linked together to simulate the highly-complex workings of the brain, whose functionality derives from networks of billions of interacting, highly-connected neurons.

The chips upon which this work critically depends were delivered last month, and have passed their functionality tests with flying colours.

They will form the system architecture for a massive computer, called SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network architecture), which aims to map out the brain's individual functions.

A region at the front of the brain 'lights up' when we experience beauty in a piece of art or a musical excerpt, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study, published today in the open access journal PLoS One, suggests that the one characteristic that all works of art, whatever their nature, have in common is that they lead to activity in that same region of the brain, and goes some way to supporting the views of David Hume and others that beauty lies in the beholder rather than in the object.

When faced with threat, people who grew up poor are more likely to make risky financial choices in search of a quick windfall, according to new research from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.

ITHACA, N.Y. – It's like a Brownie camera for the digital age: The microscopic device fits on the head of a pin, contains no lenses or moving parts, costs pennies to make – and this Cornell-developed camera could revolutionize an array of science from surgery to robotics.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have developed a technique that delivers gene therapy into human brain cancer cells using nanoparticles that can be freeze-dried and stored for up to three months prior to use. The shelf-stable particles may obviate the need for virus-mediated gene therapy, which has been associated with safety concerns. The report appears in the August issue of Biomaterials.

A big part of coping with life is having a flexible reaction to the ups and downs. Now, a study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people choose to respond differently depending on how intense an emotion is. When confronted with high-intensity negative emotions, they tend to choose to turn their attention away, but with something lower-intensity, they tend to think it over and neutralize the feeling that way.