Tag: brain

After 15 trips to the doctor for migraines, Beckie Hiley’s symptoms were still dismissed. The UK 19-year-old spent months dealing with crippling headaches that were completely hindering her from living a normal life—she couldn’t go to work or school, and she could barely keep food down. Despite her debilitating symptoms, doctors told her her pain

Cole Burton, a 21-year-old Auburn University student, has made a miraculous recovery that his doctors say can only be explained by God’s intervention. (WAGA) A 21-year-old Auburn University student who suffered a traumatic brain injury has made a miraculous recovery that medical professionals are crediting to God. "My doctors have told me medical science can't explain my

Neuroscientists at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered a group of cells in the brain that are responsible when a frightening memory re-emerges unexpectedly, like Michael Myers in every “Halloween” movie. The finding could lead to new recommendations about when and how often certain therapies are deployed for the treatment of anxiety, phobias

How to retrain your brain to say ‘no’ to overeating: Scientists discover neurons that make us ‘forget’ we want food More than two thirds of American adults are overweight or obese   Some 45 million people go on a diet every year in the US  But just restricting calories is not enough to keep off weight

Choroid plexus carcinoma (CPC) is a particularly challenging type of brain cancer. The tumor most commonly arises in infants under the age of one—who are too young to undergo radiation treatment. Only 40 percent of children remain alive five years after diagnosis, and those who do survive often suffer devastating long-term damage from the treatment.

What parts of your brain are involved in gauging a friend’s actions and adjusting your own; for example, when you both carry a couch up a flight of stairs? Researchers in Japan have found that part of the right side of the brain, called the temporoparietal junction, is significantly activated when two people cooperate together

Our brains are incredibly good at processing faces, and even have specific regions specialized for this function. But what face dimensions are we observing? Do we observe general properties first, then look at the details? Or are dimensions such as gender or other identity details decoded interdependently? In a study published in Nature Communications, neuroscientists

Anyone who trains for a marathon knows that individual running workouts add up over time to yield a big improvement in physical fitness. So, it should not be surprising that the cognitive benefits from workouts also accumulate to yield long-term cognitive gains. Yet, until now, there was has been little research to describe and support

A team led by Lida Kanari now reports a new system for distinguishing cell types in the brain, an algorithmic classification method that the researchers say will benefit the entire field of neuroscience. Blue Brain founder Professor Henry Markram says, “For nearly 100 years, scientists have been trying to name cells. They have been describing

Patients suffering from severe, treatment-resistant depression can benefit not only acutely but also the long term from deep brain stimulation, as researchers from the Medical Center – University of Freiburg and their colleagues from the University Hospital Bonn demonstrate in a current study. The team used thin electrodes to stimulate a deep seated part of

It’s easy to miss something you’re not looking for. In a famous example, people were asked to closely observe two groups of people—one group clad in black, the other in white—pass a ball among themselves. Viewers were asked to count the number of times the ball passed from black to white. Remarkably, most observers did

An investigation led by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) departments of Neurology, Psychiatry and Radiology has found altered connectivity among brain regions that handle sensorimotor, emotional and cognitive signaling in patients with functional neurological disorder, a common condition involving neurologic symptoms that have no readily apparent physical cause. Their report

Choosing to forget something might take more mental effort than trying to remember it, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin discovered through neuroimaging. These findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that in order to forget an unwanted experience, more attention should be focused on it. This surprising result extends prior research

The inner ear cells are exquisitely arranged to transmit sound to the brain, but just slight defects in these patterns can lead to deafness. Over 100 mutations in proteins involved in this intricate system have been associated with hearing loss. Tobias Bartsch, a postdoctoral associate in A. J. Hudspeth’s lab, and colleagues at Rockefeller University

Researchers at the San Diego branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at University of California San Diego, with colleagues around the country, report that inhibiting activity of a specific protein in glioblastomas (GBM) boosts their sensitivity to radiation, thus improving treatment prospects for one of the most common and aggressive forms of brain

Along with many other harmful health consequences, smoking tobacco causes chemical changes, oxidative stress and inflammation in the brain. Excessive alcohol use can have similar effects. Surprisingly, however, very few studies have examined the combined impact of smoking and alcohol on the brain. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Chemical Neuroscience have shown that in rats,

How are the images cast on the retina reassembled in the brain? Researchers in Munich and Tuebingen find that processing of visual stimuli occurs at the earliest waystation on the way to the visual cortex—but not all inputs are treated equally. In humans, the visual system collects up to 80 percent of all the sensory

A study of the differences between healthy brains and those with Alzheimer’s Disease has produced largest dataset of its type ever. And the data, developed by a team of researchers led by Dr. Richard Unwin at The University of Manchester, is now freely available online for any scientist to use. The team included researchers from

How misguided saturation of the cranial nerves plunge into a crisis The global Obesity crisis today is at a record high, and rising. Research groups are desperately in search of new insights and therapeutic possibilities of intervention, in order to counteract this development. German Researchers have found a type of switch in the brain, the

The first and most distinct consequence of daily mild stress is an increase in rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, a new study in the journal PNAS reports. The research also demonstrated that this increase is associated with genes involved in cell death and survival. REM sleep, also known as paradoxical sleep, is the sleep state during which