Brain

Switzerland has honest students: The vast majority of the students that were questioned were against pharmacological cognitive enhancement. Yet the topic should be addressed more actively by the universities, asks the study that was published in the journal Plos One.

Scientists have developed a device that electronically stimulates tear production, which will offer hope to sufferers of dry eye syndrome, one of the most common eye diseases in the world.

The device, 16 mm long, 3-4 mm wide and 1-2 mm thick, was implanted beneath the inferior lacrimal gland in rabbit eyes. It was activated wirelessly, and shown to increasing the generation of tears by nearly 57%.

The results are published today, Dec. 11, 2015, in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Drinking 2 to 3 units of alcohol every day is linked to a reduced risk of death among people with early stage Alzheimer's disease, finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

Moderate drinking has been associated with a lower risk of developing and dying from heart disease and stroke. But alcohol is known to damage brain cells, and given that dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder, drinking might be harmful in those with the condition.

Many early-onset neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders, are more common in males than females. The origin of this gender bias is not understood, partially due to a major gap in research on sex differences regarding how the brain typically develops. According to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, female infants have larger volumes of gray matter around the temporal-parietal junction of the brain than males at the time of birth.

MADISON, Wis. -- As the drug touted as "the female Viagra" comes to market, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are learning more about how the drug, called flibanserin, affects the brain.

Inhibited sexual desire, known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, affects premenopausal women, but no biological cause is known. In people, it can make physical intimacy difficult or impossible.

Sensation seeking is a personality trait that describes a person's tendency to seek out novel and exciting experiences, and a high level of sensation seeking has been implicated as a risk factor for addiction. According to a report today at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, in Hollywood, Florida, sensation seeking is related to reward sensitivity, which is a trait that characterizes how rewarding a person finds different experiences.

A team of scientists has developed an algorithm that captures our learning abilities, enabling computers to recognize and draw simple visual concepts that are mostly indistinguishable from those created by humans. The work, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Science, marks a significant advance in the field -- one that dramatically shortens the time it takes computers to 'learn' new concepts and broadens their application to more creative tasks.

Researchers have created a computer model that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example. Though the model is only capable of learning handwritten characters from alphabets, the approach underlying it could be broadened to have applications for other symbol-based systems, like gestures, dance moves, and the words of spoken and signed languages.

A computer model that identifies the parts of a person's brain responsible for epileptic seizures could be used to design personalised surgical procedures, researchers say.

Scientists at Newcastle University have used brain scans from patients with the most common type of epilepsy, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and computer modelling techniques to look at the brain as an example of a computer network. By simulating brain activity within this network, they successfully identified regions that were more prone to seizures.

AUSTIN, Texas - Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found that natural selection drives some male prairie voles to be fully monogamous and others to seek more partners. The surprising contrasts in the animals' brains result from differences in their DNA.

The study, published this week in Science, compares faithful males with their less devoted counterparts and finds genetic differences in their brains. Just as people can be introverted or extroverted, prairie voles can be more or less prone to sexual fidelity because of these genetic differences.

LSD is known to cause changes in consciousness, including "ego-dissolution", or a loss of the sense of self.

Brazilian researchers from D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) have demonstrated in laboratory that apigenin, a substance found in parsley, thyme, chamomile and red pepper, improves neuron formation and strengthens the connections between brain cells.

WASHINGTON - Color-image based systems are excellent at locating people in aerial search and rescue operations, but fall short when it comes to discerning between actual human skin and objects with similar hues. To remedy this, researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) have developed a novel two-dimensional feature space which uses the spectral absorption characteristics of melanin, hemoglobin and water to better characterize human skin.

HOUSTON - (Dec. 10, 2015) - Children born with cleft lip or palate and spina bifida are at an increased risk for abuse before the age of 2, according to researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).The results were published in the December issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are to human biology (and the success of potential therapies) has been an open question.