Brain

CHICAGO --- Your memory is a wily time traveler, plucking fragments of the present and inserting them into the past, reports a new Northwestern Medicine® study. In terms of accuracy, it's no video camera.

Rather, the memory rewrites the past with current information, updating your recollections with new experiences.

Love at first sight, for example, is more likely a trick of your memory than a Hollywood-worthy moment.

A new study correlating brain activity with how people make decisions suggests that when individuals engage in risky behavior, such as drunk driving or unsafe sex, it's probably not because their brains' desire systems are too active, but because their self-control systems are not active enough.

This might have implications for how health experts treat mental illness and addiction or how the legal system assesses a criminal's likelihood of committing another crime.

New research on the ability of honeybees to taste with claws on their forelegs reveals details on how this information is processed, according to a study published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Do you believe in your own ability to succeed, or do you believe life events are largely beyond your control?

Think carefully about your answer — it could affect your risk of mortality.

People who feel in control and believe they can achieve goals despite hardships are more likely to live longer and healthier lives, especially among those with less education, according to a new study by Brandeis University and University of Rochester. The study was published online in the journal of Health Psychology.

That fruit fly joining you just moments after you poured that first glass of cabernet, has just used its poppy-seed-sized brain to conduct a finely-choreographed search, one that's been described for the first time by researchers at the University of Washington. The search mission is another example of fruit flies executing complex behaviors with very little "computational" power, their brains having 100,000 neurons compared to house flies with 300,000 neurons and humans with 100 billion.

Understanding and properly studying fear is partly a matter of correctly defining fear itself, New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux writes in a new essay published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His analysis points to ways research can be better geared to address a range of fear-related afflictions, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and commonly experienced phobias.

Amsterdam, NL, February 4, 2014 – Using auditory or tactile stimulation, Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) provide representations of visual information and can help the blind "see" colors and shapes. SSDs scan images and transform the information into audio or touch signals that users are trained to understand, enabling them to recognize the image without seeing it.

With nearly one-third of Americans suffering from chronic pain, prescription opioid painkillers have become the leading form of treatment for this debilitating condition. Unfortunately, misuse of prescription opioids can lead to serious side effects—including death by overdose. A new treatment developed by University of Utah researcher Eric Garland has shown to not only lower pain but also decrease prescription opioid misuse among chronic pain patients.

When putting together a team of scientists to work on a problem, it makes sense to bring together the best and brightest in the field, right?

Well, maybe not.

In a newly published paper, a team of researchers from institutions across the country, including Michigan State University, outline not only why it's important to pursue science collaboratively, but how to create and maintain science teams to get better research results.

A new Dartmouth study provides the first evidence that people use the same brain circuitry to figure out space, time and social distances.

The findings, which help reveal how our brains organize information and create our perspective of the world, appear in the Journal of Neuroscience. A PDF of the study is available on request.

Great eyes, full lips and harmonious features: actress Angelina Jolie is in possession of all of these. That she is regarded as the epitome of female attractiveness doesn't come as a surprise for Dr. Holger Wiese of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany). "Her features combine many factors which contribute to the attractiveness of a face," the psychologist says. In his research, he mostly deals with the perception of faces. "On the one hand we find very symmetrical and rather average faces appealing," he explains.

Philadelphia, PA, February 4, 2014 – From birth, infants naturally show a preference for human contact and interaction, including faces and voices. These basic predispositions to social stimuli are altered in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

A new study published in Biological Psychiatry this week, from researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine, now reports that 6-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism divert their gaze from facial features when that face is speaking.

The capacity of our working memory is better explained by the quality of memories we can store than by their number, a team of psychology researchers has concluded.

LINCOLN, Neb., Feb. 3, 2014 – In the idyllic town of Lake Wobegon, all the children are above average.

And, judging by a new study by University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers, none are obese.

Even though childhood obesity rates in the U.S. have tripled during the past 30 years, more than half of parents do not recognize that their child is overweight, according to a meta-analysis study conducted by UNL graduate student Alyssa Lundahl and her adviser, Timothy Nelson, an assistant professor of psychology.

Charlottesville, VA (February 4, 2014). Using susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI), researchers have identified microstructural changes in the brains of male and female college-level ice hockey players that could be due to concussive or subconcussive trauma. Until now, SWI has been used to detect signs of more severe cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI). This is the first time SWI has been used to detect signs of concussion (or mild TBI), and the first time it has been used to detect changes in the brain prospectively over an entire sports season in athletes of both sexes.