Brain

Washington (Thursday, February 17) — According to University of Toronto speech-language pathologist Luc De Nil, the beat could be revealing such things as how children master one of the most complex tasks of all – speech.

"The rapid and precise muscle movements of speech must be the most intricate, yet poorly understood, of all the sensory-motor skills," says De Nil.

SAN DIEGO, CA - Surgical treatment using microfracture for pediatric knee injury repair may improve activity outcomes, according to research presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's Specialty Day in San Diego (February 19). The study shows patients are able to regain function and return to a normal activity level following surgery and rehabilitation.

The most widely prescribed antidepressants – medicines such as Prozac, Lexapro and Paxil – work by blocking the serotonin transporter, a brain protein that normally clears away the mood-regulating chemical serotonin. Or so the current thinking goes.

That theory about how selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) work can now be put to the test with a new mouse model developed by neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University.

In 2006 a teenager played Space Invaders with the help of an electrocorticography (ECoG) grid that used signals from the area of his motor cortex that normally controlled his right hand and his tongue to move the cursor left and right.

(Photo Credit: Eric Leuthardt and Daniel Moran)

Scientists have discovered the first evidence linking brain function variations between the left and right sides of the brain to size at birth and the weight of the placenta. The finding could shed new light on the causes of mental health problems in later life.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Unlike alcohol abuse problems and antisocial behavior, depression doesn't decline with age in addiction-prone women in their 30s and 40s – it continues to increase, a new study led by University of Michigan Health System researchers found.

The longitudinal analysis examined the influences of the women's histories, family life and neighborhood instability on their alcohol abuse, antisocial behavior and depression over a 12-year period covering the earlier years of marriage and motherhood.

A study by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) has carried out the first Spanish study into the emotional differences between the sexes and generations in terms of forgiveness. According to the study, parents forgive more than children, while women are better at forgiving than men.

"This study has great application for teaching values, because it shows us what reasons people have for forgiving men and women, and the popular conception of forgiveness", Maite Garaigordobil, co-author of the study and a senior professor at the Psychology Faculty of the UPV, tells SINC.

Once likened to a confusing tower of Babel, speaking more than one language can actually bolster brain function by serving as a mental gymnasium, according to researchers.

Recent research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals--people who speak only one language--in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information, said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Penn State. These skills make bilinguals better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time.

Sonja Kotz leads the Minerva research group "Neurocognition of Rhythm in Communication" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She will present evidence from neuroimaging on the impact of cognitive functions on bilingual processing at the AAAS symposium "Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Mind and Brain".

Infants raised in households where Spanish and Catalan are spoken can discriminate between English and French just by watching people speak, even though they have never been exposed to these new languages before, according to University of British Columbia psychologist Janet Werker.

Presented today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, Werker's latest findings provide further evidence that exposure to two native languages contributes to the development of perceptual sensitivity that extends beyond their mother tongues.

In her search to understand one of the most basic human senses – touch – Mitra Hartmann turns to what is becoming one of the best studied model systems in neuroscience: the whiskers of a rat. In her research, Hartmann, associate professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, uses the rat whisker system as a model to understand how the brain seamlessly integrates the sense of touch with movement.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When obsessive-compulsive disorder is of crippling severity and drugs and behavior therapy can't help, there has been for just over a year a thread — or rather a wire — of hope. By inserting a thin electrode deep into the brain, doctors can precisely deliver an electrical current to a cord of the brain's wiring and soften the severity of the symptoms. "Deep brain stimulation" therapy for OCD won Food and Drug Administration approval in 2009 for extreme cases under its humanitarian device exemption.

Neurons are complicated, but the basic functional concept is that synapses transmit electrical signals to the dendrites and cell body (input), and axons carry signals away (output). In one of many surprise findings, Northwestern University scientists have discovered that axons can operate in reverse: they can send signals to the cell body, too.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with multiple sclerosis (MS) may find it harder to learn, remember or process information on warmer days of the year, according to new research released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 63rd Annual Meeting in Honolulu April 9 to April 16, 2011.

Legal systems are necessary in any functioning society. Centuries ago, people realized that the only way to maintain a peaceful community was to develop a firm set of rules—laws—to punish transgressors. As laws have continued to evolve in societies around the world, psychological scientists have begun to investigate the psychological basis of many aspects of legal systems. A new special issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, presents the current state of research on psychology and law.