Neuroscience

Can Humans Hear Distance?

Because light travels far faster than sound, we see distant events before we hear them. Perhaps as a child you learned to count the seconds between a lightning flash and the sound of thunder to estimate its distance.  A new paper says that our brains can ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2015 - 7:00am

Early Life Stress, Adolescent Depression And Impaired Reward Circuits

Early life stress is a major risk factor for later episodes of depression. In fact, adults who are abused or neglected as children are almost twice as likely to experience depression.  Scientific research into this link has revealed that the increased ris ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2015 - 10:21am

Apathetic? It May Be Your Brain Structure

If you are apathetic, it would be a surprise to know your brain is making more effort, but a new study finds that some people traditionally perceived as lazy have a biology problem and not an attitude one. Forty healthy volunteers completed a questionnair ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 13 2015 - 6:47am

Emotional Response To Sounds Shows Up In Brain Scans

Noisy gymnasiums, restaurants where conversations are nearly impossible, and concert halls less than perfect for the music are all engineering problems. What does that have to do with emotions? Perhaps a lot. Penn State acoustical engineers are using func ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 16 2015 - 2:30pm

Neurogastronomy: How Brains Perceive Flavor

The upside to modern cancer treatment, like chemotherapy, is obvious; people are living more, and living longer. The downside is that some food tastes terrible.  Chemotherapy, by design, kills all fast-growing cells in the body. As cancer cells die, so do ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 19 2015 - 2:29pm

Lactate For Brain Cells Boosts Brain Energy Metabolism

In comparison to other organs, the human brain has the highest energy requirements. Nerve cells cover their high energy demand with glucose and lactate and a new report shows for the first time in the intact mouse brain evidence for an exchange of lactate ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 24 2015 - 12:36pm

A New Target For Machado Joseph Disease Treatment

Machado-Josephdisease (MJD) is a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder that destroys the brainareas involved in muscle control. Although the disease is clearly caused by a mutationin the ATXN3 gene- resulting in an abnormal ataxin-3 protein that forms toxi ...

Article - Catarina Amorim - Dec 1 2015 - 6:18pm

Direct Evidence For Synaptic Plasticity In Fruit Fly Brains

Scientists believe they have resolved a decades-long debate about how the brain is modified when an animal learns. Using newly developed tools for manipulating specific populations of neurons, the researchers have for the first time observed direct eviden ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 2 2015 - 8:40pm

Transient Schizophrenia: Cannabis Increases The Noise In Your Brain

Several studies have demonstrated that the primary active constituent of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol induces transient psychosis-like effects in healthy subjects similar to those observed in schizophrenia. However, the mechanisms underlying the ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2015 - 7:58am

Neuroscientists Can Now Read Minds

Neuroscientists have developed a new tool that lights up active conversations between neurons during a behavior or sensory experience, such as smelling a banana. The scientists accomplished their feat by focusing on three of the sensory systems in  Drosop ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 4 2015 - 10:26am