Brain

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA - The Zika virus may be associated with an autoimmune disorder that attacks the brain's myelin similar to multiple sclerosis, according to a small study that is being released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Rapidly advancing technology has created ever more realistic video games. Images are sharp, settings have depth and detail, and the audio is crisp and authentic. At a glance, it appears real. So real, that research has consistently found that gamers feel guilty committing unjustified acts of violence within the game.

Now, a new University at Buffalo-led study suggests that the moral response produced by the initial exposure to a video game decreases as experience with the game develops.

It's been known for more than a century that acetaminophen is an effective painkiller, but according to a new U of T study it could also be impeding error-detection in the brain.

The research, authored by a team including postdoctoral fellow Dan Randles and researchers from the University of British Columbia, is the first neurological study to look at how acetaminophen could be inhibiting the brain response associated with making errors.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - People with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) fare better and are less likely to relapse when treated with medication on a long-term basis, according to researchers at Rhode Island Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.

PHILADELPHIA -How the human brain processes the words we hear and constructs complex concepts is still somewhat of a mystery to the neuroscience community. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can alter our language processing, allowing for faster comprehension of meaningful word combinations, according to new research from the department of Neurology the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The work is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Our current understanding of how the brain works is very poor. The electrical signals travel around the brain and throughout the body, and the electrical properties of the biological tissues are studied using electrophysiology. For acquiring a large amplitude and a high quality of neuronal signals, intracellular recording is a powerful methodology compared to extracellular recording to measure the voltage or current across the cell membranes.

Fingers are a human's most important tactile sensors, but they do not always sense accurately and can even be deceived. Researchers at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) of Bielefeld University demonstrated this in a new study in which they 'outwit' human perception. Test subjects placed their index finger in an apparatus and touched an object whose softness changed at random without the person noticing. While touching the object, the test subjects were under the illusion that it was the position of their finger that changed, not the softness of the object.

(Boston)--Researchers have identified a new set of genes that may be responsible for the two most common and disabling neurological conditions, stroke and dementia.

The study, which appears in the journal Lancet Neurology, may help researchers better understand, treat and prevent ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, and perhaps Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

The fluctuations of your heartbeat may affect your wisdom, according to new research from the University of Waterloo.

The study suggests that heart rate variation and thinking process work together to enable wise reasoning about complex social issues. The work by Igor Grossmann, professor of psychology at Waterloo, and colleagues based at the Australian Catholic University, appears in the online journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Money could buy happiness if your purchases fit your personality, according to a new study that examines nearly 77,000 actual UK bank spending transactions.

The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, revealed that people who spent more money on purchases that aligned with their personality traits reported greater life satisfaction. Spending-personality fit was more strongly associated with life satisfaction than were either total income or total spending.

For decades, it was thought that scar-forming cells called astrocytes were responsible for blocking neuronal regrowth across the level of spinal cord injury, but recent findings challenge this idea. According to a new mouse study, astrocyte scars may actually be required for repair and regrowth following spinal cord injury. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and published in Nature.

Based on functional magnetic resonance imaging of a person's brain when that individual is resting, a new model reported in this study is able to predict how that individual's brain will look during a range of active tasks. Such a tool, if applicable beyond the healthy population upon which this model is based, could be used to investigate functional brain regions in people who cannot perform tasks, such as paralyzed patients or infants, authors of this study say.

A group of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has identified key underlying biological processes that involve some of the hundreds of genes known to contribute to the risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Several separate analyses converged on a key molecular process - the overlap of two major signaling pathways - as well as on several groups of genes that participate in that process and contribute to other conditions.

Irvine, Calif., April 7, 2016 -- While stem cells have shown promise for treating brain regions damaged by cancer radiation treatments, University of California, Irvine researchers have found that microscopic vesicles isolated from these cells provide similar benefits without some of the risks associated with stem cells.

Would you kill one innocent person to save five?

Choose your answer wisely: your popularity may depend on it. New research from Oxford and Cornell Universities shows people gauge others' trustworthiness based on their moral judgments. The findings can help explain why snap judgements about morality tend to be based on a set of absolute moral rules (such as "don't kill innocent people"), even if we might make different decisions when given more time.