Brain studies are a mass of contradictions. When you leave your job and your home and your technology behind for a vacation, you 'disconnect' some claim.

"Actually, you've just given your brain a whole new challenge," says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. "You may think you're resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving?

New research has questioned the reliability of neuroscience studies, concluding that most had an average power of around 20 percent – a finding which means the chance of the average study discovering the effect being investigated is only one in five. 

The conclusions neuroscience papers drew could be wrong due to small sample sizes, the authors say.

Building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000, which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations), a new paper in Brain outlines  case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations.

While ffytche believes that hallucinations of musical notation are rarer than some other types of visual hallucination, Professor Oliver Sacks M.D. details eight examples of people who have reported experiencing hallucinations of musical notation, including:

The Mind Research Network in Albuquerque says that brain scans can predict the likelihood of whether a criminal will re-offend following release from prison.

It is well established that the hippocampus is central for learning and memory, encoding mnemonic data about past experiences and connections. However, the role of the hippocampus in emotional processes is less clear, although there have been inklings of evidence in the past suggesting that the hippocampus does indeed play a role in fear and anxiety.

The term 'elites' gets a bad rap in modern culture, mostly because political pundits use it to mean 'me and people I like' - elitism - rather than understanding what elite means.

Yet in sports we still recognize that there are elites. Don't like Usain Bolt's politics?  Beat him in a race. 

Some new research says that, as much as it might bother us, some elites are elite in many ways. Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example, perform better than the rest of us in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information, even if they are Republicans and social psychologists insist their brains are inferior.

 Schizophrenia is thought to have a substantial genetic background which is also, to some extent, population-specific. Genome-wide searches have revealed many numerous genomic variants with weak effects, but the remaining 'missing heritability' is unknown. Scientists hypothesize that it may be partly explained by rare variants with large effect.  

Since the 1960s, biologists have been hunting for substances made by the body that might accumulate in abnormally high levels to produce the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. In particular, there was a search for chemicals that might be related to the hallucinogens phencyclidine (PCP) or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), which could explain the emergence of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia.

Doctors have used drugs to induce general anesthesia in patients undergoing surgery since a medical doctor became a legitimate profession in the mid-1800s.  But little has been known about how these drugs create such a profound loss of consciousness. We don't understand why aspirin works either, but it does.  Yet the search for answers about the brain is ongoing. 

In President Obama's most recent State of the Union address, he mentioned neuroscience three times. One was a stated commitment to ensure top-quality mental healthcare for returning soldiers. One was the reference to the effect of early education on child learning and performance (I know it's a stretch, but I'm counting it. They aren't learning with their livers.) And third was a reference to brain mapping that could "unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s". A short time later, the President proposed a new, ambitious federal Brain Activity Map project. You may question many of the President's positions, but he's clearly pro-brain, and that's good.