Brain

Fish that have symmetric brains show defects in processing information about sights and smells, according to the results of a new study into how asymmetry in the brain affects processing of sensory information.

It's widely believed that the left and right sides of the brain have slightly different roles in cognition and in regulating behaviour. However, scientists don't know whether these asymmetries actually matter for the efficient functioning of the brain.

Safeguarding the healthy development of the next generation is vital for the long term success of the United Nation's Millennium Development goals. New research in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences highlights the need to integrate global strategies aimed at tackling nutrition and cognitive development within the first thousand days of childhood.

Female mice prefer songs of mice that are different from their parents when selecting a mate, according to a study published February 5, 2014 in PLOS ONE by Akari Asaba from the Azabu University, Japan, and colleagues. Furthermore, these preferences may be shaped by early social experiences with their fathers.

Will your child be a slim adult? A novel new study published in PLOS ONE asked 532 international English speaking adults to submit or "crowd-source" predictors of whether a child is going to be an overweight or a slim adult. Each participant offered what they believed to be the best predictor of what a child would weigh as an adult and submitted it in the form of a question. Questions were related to factors of participants' childhood experience including home environment, psychosocial well-being, lifestyle, built environment, and family history.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Monkeys that ate a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids had brains with highly connected and well organized neural networks — in some ways akin to the neural networks in healthy humans — while monkeys that ate a diet deficient in the fatty acids had much more limited brain networking, according to an Oregon Health & Science University study.

We tend to be creatures of habit. In fact, the human brain has a learning system that is devoted to guiding us through routine, or habitual, behaviors. At the same time, the brain has a separate goal-directed system for the actions we undertake only after careful consideration of the consequences. We switch between the two systems as needed. But how does the brain know which system to give control to at any given moment? Enter The Arbitrator.

Call it the Ray Charles Effect: a young child who is blind develops a keen ability to hear things that others cannot. Researchers have long known that very young brains are malleable enough to re-wire some circuits that process sensory information. Now researchers at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University have overturned conventional wisdom, showing the brains of adult mice can also be re-wired to compensate for a temporary vision loss by improving their hearing.

Minimizing a person's sight for as little as a week may help improve the brain's ability to process hearing, neuroscientists have found.

Hey-Kyoung Lee, an associate professor of neuroscience and researcher at the Mind/Brain Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, along with biologist Patrick Kanold at the University of Maryland, College Park, are co- authors on a paper in the journal Neuron, which examines the relationship between vision and hearing in the brain.

New Rochelle, NY, February 5, 2014–Human behaviors such as violence depend on interactions in the brain between genetic and environmental factors. An individual may be more vulnerable to developing violent behaviors if they have predisposing factors and are then exposed to stress, abuse, or other triggers, especially early in life. The latest research on how differences between the male and female brain contribute to sex differences in violence is explored in Violence and Gender, a new peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Women living in rural communities are less likely than urban-dwelling women to receive sufficient mental health care, in large part due to limited access to services and societal stigma, according to medicine and public health researchers.

Some reports indicate that rural women are more likely than urban women to have depressive mood and anxiety symptoms. However rural women do not have adequate access to mental health care, compared with city women. Rural women who do seek mental health help are more likely to receive care from their primary physician than are urban women.

This news release is available in German.

Justice blindly trusts human memory. Every year throughout the world hundreds of thousands of court cases are heard based solely on the testimony of somebody who swears that they are reproducing exactly an event that they witnessed in a more or less not too distant past. Nevertheless, various recent studies in cognitive neuroscience indicate both the strengths and weaknesses in this ability of recall of the human brain.

Following another's gaze or looking in the direction someone is pointing, two examples of receptive joint attention, is significantly heritable according to new study results from researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University. Determining such communicative cues are significantly heritable means variation in this ability has a genetic basis, which led the researchers to the vasopressin receptor gene, known for its role in social bonding.

A new drug treatment has been found to be effective against chronic pain caused by nerve damage, also known as neuropathic pain, in patients who have had shingles.

The researchers hope that the drug might also be effective against other causes of chronic neuropathic pain, such as diabetes, HIV, nerve injury and cancer chemotherapy, as it targets a mechanism that is not targeted by any existing therapies and has fewer side effects.

Drugs available now have limited success at treating neuropathic pain and often have unpleasant or disabling side effects.

Charles and Barry Pless argue that, with a quarter of crashes in the United States now attributed to mobile phone use, "we can't wait for perfect evidence before acting.

Although there is still some uncertainty about the association between mobile phone use and risk of crashes, given the proliferation of mobile phones, the prevalence of distracted driving is undoubtedly increasing, they write.