Tag: brain

How much we value an item is often related to what other people have. You might want the newest fashion, but not once everybody has it. Or, winning a free lunch at your favorite restaurant might not seem as great if the other person won a million dollars. Now, researchers in Japan have discovered a

Each day, humans and animals rely on habits to complete routine tasks such as eating and sleeping. As new habits are formed, this enables us to do things automatically without thinking. As the brain starts to develop a new habit, in as little as a half a second, one region of the brain, the dorsolateral

The human-made chemicals that make our kitchen pans stick-free, our athletic wear water-repellent and firefighting chemicals more efficient do their jobs incredibly well, but it’s at the expense of lingering in the body and environment for what is believed to be forever. These forever chemicals, perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoic acid, more commonly known as PFOS

(HealthDay)—Many mothers-to-be feel overwhelmed by stress, and it might have implications for their babies’ brain development in the womb, a new study suggests. The researchers found that even in a group of highly educated, healthy pregnant women, stress and anxiety were common. More than one-quarter reported higher-than-average levels of “perceived stress,” while a similar number

Baby born with a tiny head and part of his BRAIN sticking out from his misshapen skull defies slim chance of survival to reach his first birthday Ozzie Gordon’s birth defect causes his brain and skull to form incorrectly  His brain bulged outside of his skull, which was later fixed with surgery  Parents Omobola and

Brain imaging may one day be used to help diagnose mental health disorders—including depression and anxiety—with greater accuracy, according to a new study conducted in a large sample of youth at the University of Pennsylvania and led by Antonia Kaczkurkin, Ph.D. and Theodore Satterthwaite, MD. And knowing more about the neurobiology behind psychiatric disorders could

Zika virus infection can stunt neonatal brain development, a condition known as microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. To determine how best to prevent and treat the viral infection, scientists first need to understand how the pathogen gets inside brain cells. Employing different approaches to answer different questions, two research teams

English and Italian speakers with dementia-related language impairment experience distinct kinds of speech and reading difficulties based on features of their native languages, according to new research by scientists at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center and colleagues at the Neuroimaging Research Unit and Neurology Unit at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in

Scientists at Rutgers University-Newark have discovered that when a key protein needed to generate new brain cells during prenatal and early childhood development is missing, part of the brain goes haywire—causing an imbalance in its circuitry that can lead to long-term cognitive and movement behaviors characteristic of autism spectrum disorder. “During brain development, there is

The top number on a blood pressure test is widely viewed as the best gauge of a person’s overall risk for heart disease. But the bottom number could be important when it comes to evaluating the chance of a person having scars on their brain that could be an indicator for dementia, stroke or falls.

For boxers and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters, is there a safe level of exposure to head trauma? A new study shows different effects in the brain for younger, current fighters compared to older, retired fighters. The study is published in the December 23, 2019, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American

An article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describes a new pathway in the central nervous system to expel waste substances from the brain through the creation of corpora amylacea (CA), aggregates formed by glucose polymers amassing waste products. The study, which opens new views on the clinical practice regarding neurodegenerative

The brain mechanism that enables us to maintain a constant body temperature may also be the key to rapid weight loss, a new study finds. In experiments involving mice that were given a calorie-restricted diet, scientists at Scripps Research discovered that blocking a brain receptor that normally regulates body heat resulted in significant weight reductions.

Researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at NUS, led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from NUS Psychology, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme at NUS Engineering, have discovered that a population of neurons in the brain’s frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity. This

Here’s something new to consider being thankful for at the dinner table: the long evolutionary journey that gave you your big brain and your long life. Courtesy of our primate ancestors that invented cooking over a million years ago, you are a member of the one species able to afford so many cortical neurons in

A shift in surgical practice over the last decade towards the earlier removal of a type of slow-growing but ultimately fatal brain tumor has led to dramatic improvements in survival and seizure control for patients, a study at UCLH and UCL has found. Patients with low-grade gliomas (LGGs) had a 50 percent chance of dying

Researchers from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and University of Salento, both in Lecce, Italy, and Harvard Medical School in Boston have developed a new light-based method to capture and pinpoint the epicenter of neural activity in the brain. The approach, described in Nature Methods, lays the foundation for novel ways to map connections across

Contrary to the previous data, a Finnish study clarifies that smoking and high blood pressure do not protect from death in patients suffering from subarachnoid hemorrhage, the most lethal stroke subtype. In fact, subarachnoid hemorrhage kills smokers and hypertensive individuals even before they reach hospitals, and therefore, previous studies that did not include these deaths

Kessler Foundation researchers conducted a pilot study to determine ways to assess social communication difficulties in children with impaired social functioning caused by moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The article, “The relationship between social communication and social functioning in pediatric TBI: A pilot study” was epublished on August 14, 2019 by Frontiers in Neurology. The

A global research team led by scientists from Singapore and the United States has discovered new evidence that there is an underlying link between degeneration of the eye and brain. They found that genetic variation at a beta-amyloid gene was significantly associated with increased risk of Primary Open Angle Glaucoma (POAG), the most common form