Brain

Statins, a popular class of cholesterol drugs, reverse the learning deficits caused by a mutation linked to a common genetic cause of learning disabilities, according to a paper in Nature Neuroscience using mice genetically engineered to develop the disease, called Noonan syndrome.

The disorder can disrupt a child's development in many ways, often causing unusual facial features, short stature, heart defects and developmental delays. No treatment is currently available.

A new study shows for the first time that playing action video games improves not just the skills taught in the game, but learning capabilities more generally.

"Prior research by our group and others has shown that action gamers excel at many tasks. In this new study, we show they excel because they are better learners," explained Daphne Bavelier, a research professor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "And they become better learners," she said, "by playing the fast-paced action games."

PITTSBURGH--The rise of social media has seemed like a bonanza for behavioral scientists, who have eagerly tapped the social nets to quickly and cheaply gather huge amounts of data about what people are thinking and doing. But computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University warn that those massive datasets may be misleading.

A growing number of academic researchers are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behavior. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market.

But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets, according to computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

People affected by a common inherited form of autism could be helped by a drug that is being tested as a treatment for cancer.

Researchers who have identified a chemical pathway that goes awry in the brains of Fragile X patients say the drug could reverse their behavioural symptoms.

The scientists have found that a known naturally occurring chemical called cercosporamide can block the pathway and improve sociability in mice with the condition.

Researchers have discovered a mechanism linked to the brain damage often suffered by stroke victims--and are now searching for drugs to block it.

Strokes happen when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off but much of the harm to survivors' memory and other cognitive function is often actually caused by "oxidative stress" in the hours and days after the blood supply resumes.

Drinking 3-5 cups of coffee per day may help to protect against Alzheimer's Disease, according to research highlighted in an Alzheimer Europe session report published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), a not-for-profit organisation devoted to the study and disclosure of science related to coffee and health.

Using world-leading research methods, the team of Dr David Wright and Prof Paul Holmes, working with Dr Jacqueline Williams from the Victoria University in Melbourne, studied activity in an area of the brain responsible for controlling movements when healthy participants observed a video showing simple hand movements and simultaneously imagined that they were performing the observed movement.

TORONTO, Nov. 26, 2014 - Ontario students between Grades 9 and 12 who said they had a traumatic brain injury in their lifetime, also reported drug use rates two to four times higher than peers with no history of TBI, according to research published today in The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation.

Some people say that reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" taught them the importance of friends, or that easy decisions are seldom right. Carnegie Mellon University scientists used a chapter of that book to learn a different lesson: identifying what different regions of the brain are doing when people read.

In recent years it has been established that copper plays an essential role in the health of the human brain. Improper copper oxidation has been linked to several neurological disorders including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Menkes' and Wilson's. Copper has also been identified as a critical ingredient in the enzymes that activate the brain's neurotransmitters in response to stimuli. Now a new study by researchers with the U.S.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A new study led by Brown University reports that older learners retained the mental flexibility needed to learn a visual perception task but were not as good as younger people at filtering out irrelevant information.

When people hear another person talking to them, they respond not only to what is being said--those consonants and vowels strung together into words and sentences--but also to other features of that speech--the emotional tone and the speaker's gender, for instance. Now, a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 26 provides some of the first evidence of how dogs also differentiate and process those various components of human speech.

Older people can actually take in and learn from visual information more readily than younger people do, according to new evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 26. This surprising discovery is explained by an apparent decline with age in the ability to filter out irrelevant information.

"It is quite counterintuitive that there is a case in which older individuals learn more than younger individuals," says Takeo Watanabe of Brown University.

This news release is available in German.