Brain

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Anyone with an MP3 device -- just about every man, woman and child on the planet today, it seems -- has a notion of the majesty of music, of the primal place it holds in the human imagination.

But musical training should not be seen simply as stuff of the soul -- a frill that has to go when school budgets dry up, according to a new Northwestern University study.

NEW YORK – Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center's Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a protein that activates brain stem cells to make new neurons – but that may be hijacked later in life to cause brain cancer in humans. The protein called Huwe1 normally functions to eliminate other unnecessary proteins and was found to act as a tumor suppressor in brain cancer.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2009 — You've heard of Louis Pasteur and George Washington Carver, no doubt. And probably Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry. Names like Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton, and Amadeo Avogadro may even bring a twinkle of recognition to the eye for their famous roles in establishing chemistry as a modern science.

But what about Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi ("Rhazes")? Or Jabir ibn Hayyan ("Geber")? Or Abu Jusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi. Huh?

Westchester, Ill. – A study in the Aug. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows that the use of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is an effective treatment for older patients with osteoarthritis and comorbid insomnia.

MAYWOOD, Ill. – An initiative is underway to improve emergency medical care for Illinois' youngest patients. Loyola University Health System (LUHS), in collaboration with the Illinois Department of Public Health and other area hospitals, has established a process to support facilities in managing critically ill and injured children across Illinois. This process is outlined in the latest issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Researchers at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have now developed a mathematical model which could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language. In the future, this kind of algorithms which imitate brain mechanisms could help machines to perceive the world around them.

New evidence that early modern humans used fire in southern Africa in a controlled way to increase the quality and efficiency of stone tools is changing how researchers understand the evolution of human behavior, and in particular, the evolution of human brain power.

GALVESTON, Texas — Imagine that you're working on your back porch, hammering in a nail. Suddenly you slip and hit your thumb instead — hard. The pain is incredibly intense, but it only lasts a moment. After a few seconds (and a few unprintable words) you're ready to start hammering again.

How can such severe pain vanish so quickly? And why is it that other kinds of equally terrible pain refuse to go away, and instead torment their victims for years?

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- What do flocks of birds have in common with trust, monogamy, and even breast milk? According to a new report in the journal Science, they are regulated by virtually identical neurochemicals in the brain, known as oxytocin in mammals and mesotocin in birds.

This release is available in http://chinese..org/zh/emb_releases/2009-08/cp-fes081109.php">Chinese.

For unknown reasons, the human brain distinctly separates the handling of images of living things from images of non-living things, processing each image type in a different area of the brain. For years, many scientists have assumed the brain segregated visual information in this manner to optimize processing the images themselves, but new research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth the brain still separates the concepts of living and non-living objects.

DALLAS – Aug. 13, 2009 – Sleep patterns can help predict which adolescents might be at greatest risk for developing depression, a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center has found in a five-year study.

Sleep is a biological factor known to be associated with adult depression. Depressed adults experience rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep earlier in the sleep cycle than people who are not depressed. Until this study, available online and in the July edition of Neuropsychopharmacology, it had been unclear whether this relationship held true in adolescents.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Scientists have discovered that even in adults born with extremely impaired sight, the brain can rewire itself to recognize sections of the retina that have been restored by gene therapy.

The discovery of the brain's surprising adaptability comes a year after three blind volunteers received doses of corrective genes to selected areas of their retinas at Shands at the University of Florida medical center.

ST. PAUL, Minn. –Children who have normal IQs before they experience a first seizure may also have problems with language, memory, learning and other cognitive skills, according to a study published in the August 12, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- You're meeting a friend in a crowded cafeteria. Do your eyes scan the room like a roving spotlight, moving from face to face, or do you take in the whole scene, hoping that your friend's face will pop out at you? And what, for that matter, determines how fast you can scan the room?