Brain

Male Holocaust survivors have a longer life expectancy compared to those who didn't experience the Holocaust, according to a recent study conducted at the University of Haifa jointly with Leiden University. The results have just been published in PLOS ONE. This is the first study to examine data on the entire Jewish Polish population that immigrated to Israel before and after World War II, using the population-wide official database of the National Insurance Institute of Israel.

According to some neuroscientists the linguistic and the motor systems are strictly "tied up". That is to say, for instance, that to understand the word "drinking" our brain sets in motion the same cerebral structures used to perform the action of drinking. This assumption is connected to the theories of embodied cognition, according to which the nature of the human mind in the final analysis is modeled upon the body, its shape, the way it interacts with the world, and so on.

Autism is marked by several core features — impairments in social functioning, difficulty communicating, and a restriction of interests. Though researchers have attempted to pinpoint factors that might account for all three of these characteristics, the underlying causes are still unclear.

Now, a new study suggests that two key attentional abilities — moving attention fluidly and orienting to social information — can be checked off the list, as neither seems to account for the diversity of symptoms we find in people with autism.

Raising fish in tanks that contain hiding places and other obstacles can make the fish both smarter and improve their chances of survival when they are released into the wild, according to an international team of researchers.

"It's a key problem in that we are very good at rearing fish, but we're really not very good at releasing those animals in the wild such that they survive," said Victoria Braithwaite, professor of fisheries and biology, Penn State. "There's a mismatch between the way we raise them and the real world."

Researchers from the Center for Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland, show that people can be "tricked" into feeling that an image of a human figure -- an "avatar" -- is their own body. The study is published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

College Park, Md. –New research out of the University of Maryland School of Public Health shows that exercise may improve cognitive function in those at risk for Alzheimer's by increasing the efficiency of brain activity associated with memory. Memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease is one of the greatest fears among older Americans. While some memory loss is normal and to be expected as we age, a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, signals more substantial memory loss and a greater risk for Alzheimer's, for which there currently is no cure.

Whenever we have to acquire new knowledge under stress, the brain deploys unconscious rather than conscious learning processes. Neuroscientists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have discovered that this switch from conscious to unconscious learning systems is triggered by the intact function of mineralocorticoid receptors. These receptors are activated by hormones released in response to stress by the adrenal cortex.

TORONTO, July 30, 2013-About nine months after suffering a stroke, the patient noticed that words written in a certain shade of blue evoked a strong feeling of disgust. Yellow was only slightly better. Raspberries, which he never used to eat very often, now tasted like blue – and blue tasted like raspberries.

7/30/13, New Orleans, LA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, found that aging elicits changes in taste preferences and that such changes appear to be independent of taste nerve activity.

7/30/13, New Orleans, LA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that feeding behavior and preferences may be shaped very early during development, even during fetal life.

7/30/13, New Orleans, LA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, shows that eating a junk-food diet during pregnancy changes the development of the opioid signalling pathway in the baby's brain and permanently alters the way this system operates after birth.

Help your teenager stay engaged in school and he or she will be less likely to drop out. That's the conclusion of a new longitudinal study that found that teens who were less engaged in school tended to engage in more delinquency and substance use over time, and that lower levels of engagement and greater problem behaviors in turn predicted a higher likelihood of dropping out of school.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Children with disabilities receive harsher punishment across the developing world, according to a new study based on interviews with nearly 46,000 caregivers in 17 low- to middle-income countries.

The study found that disabled children were more likely to be severely punished by being hit on the head or beaten with an object such as a stick or belt, said Jennifer Lansford, a research professor with the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy. The work appears July 30 in Child Development.

DURHAM, N.C. – Children who grow up in poverty are more likely than wealthier children to smoke cigarettes, but they are less likely to binge drink and are no more prone to use marijuana, according to researchers at Duke Medicine.

The researchers also found that economic strains in early life – including family worries about paying bills or needing to sell possessions for cash – independently erode a child's self-control, regardless of strong parenting in adolescence. Lack of self-control often leads to substance use.

Some studies of at-risk populations suggest that up to half of the people tested for HIV never return to the doctor's office to find out their test results. While many of these people may simply forget to return or deem the results unimportant, it is likely that a portion of people don't return because they don't want to know the results.