Rats socially isolated during a critical period in adolescence are more vulnerable to addiction to amphetamine and alcohol, according to a new paper. Amphetamine addiction is also harder to extinguish in the socially isolated rats.

These effects persist even after the rats are reintroduced into the community of other rats.

"Basically the animals become more manipulatable," said Hitoshi Morikawa, associate professor of neurobiology in the College of Natural Sciences. "They're more sensitive to reward, and once conditioned the conditioning takes longer to extinguish. We've been able to observe this at both the behavioral and neuronal level."

Researchers have discovered a way to stimulate the brain's natural defense mechanisms in people with Alzheimer's disease. 

One of the main characteristics of Alzheimer's disease is the production in the brain of the toxic molecule amyloid beta. Microglial cells, the nervous system's defenders, are unable to eliminate this substance, which forms deposits called senile plaques. 

One of the mechanisms involved in hearing is similar to the battery in your car. How do researchers know?  They heard it in a fruit fly love song.

The auditory system of the fruit fly contains a protein that functions as a sodium/potassium pump, often called the sodium pump for short, and is highly expressed in a specialized support cell called the scolopale cell. The scolopale cell is important because it wraps around the sensory endings in the fly's ear and makes a tight extra-cellular cavity or compartment around them called the scolopale space.

A radiotracer has shown that researchers who used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain led to release of an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers.  

In their current study, researcher intravenously administered a radiotracer that reached important brain areas in a patient with trigeminal neuropathic pain (TNP), a type of chronic, severe facial pain. They applied the electrodes and electrically stimulated the skull right above the motor cortex of the patient for 20 minutes during a PET scan (positron emission tomography). The stimulation is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Autistic-like behaviors in
laboratory mice
can be partially remedied by normalizing excessive levels of protein synthesis in the brain, according to a new paper

The researchers focused on the EIF4E gene, whose mutation is associated with autism. The mutation causing autism was proposed to increase levels of the eIF4E, the protein product of EIF4E, and lead to exaggerated protein synthesis. Excessive eIF4E signaling and exaggerated protein synthesis also may play a role in a range of neurological disorders, including fragile X syndrome (FXS).

Two molecules, cholic acid and 24,25-EC, play an important role in the survival and production of nerve cells in the brain, including nerve cells that produce dopamine, according to a new study.  

Receptors known as "liver X receptors", or LXR, are necessary for the production of different types of nerve cells, or neurons, in the developing ventral midbrain. One these types, the midbrain dopamine-producing neurons play an important role in a number of diseases, such as Parkinson's disease.  

Brain imaging shows us what is happening during events and stimuli but it can't tell us much about how or why. Regardless, conclusion are often drawn and the poles of cultural debates are always jumping on the latest study to affirm their beliefs.

No one will be satisfied with a new University of Oxford study which concluded that the pain relief offered by cannabis is all subjective. The researchers found that an oral tablet of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, tended to make the experience of pain more bearable, rather than actually reduce the intensity of the pain. MRI brain imaging showed reduced activity in key areas of the brain that substantiated the pain relief the study participants experienced. 

Our eyes are the window to the world, but making sense of the thousands of images that flood us each day is squarely in the purview of the brain - and now researchers say they have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings.

The result, achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while the subjects watched hours of movie clips, is what researchers call "a continuous semantic space."

Some relationships between categories make sense (humans and animals share the same "semantic neighborhood", for example) while others such hallways and buckets are less obvious. But the researchers found that different people share a similar semantic layout. 

Sliman Bensmaia, PhD, assistant professor of organismal biology aat the University of Chicago, studies the neural basis of tactile perception -  how our hands convey this information to the brain. In a new study, he and colleagues found that the timing and frequency of vibrations produced in the skin when you run your hands along a surface, like searching a wall for a light switch, plays an important role in how we use our sense of touch to gather information about the objects and surfaces around us.

Rather than just a single sense of location, the brain has a number of "modules" dedicated to self-location. Each module contains its own internal GPS-like mapping system that keeps track of movement, and has other characteristics that also distinguishes one from another.

How many different sense of location?  It's unclear.  At least four and perhaps as many as 10, according to  new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  They say this is also the first time that researchers have been able to show that a part of the brain that does not directly respond to sensory input, called the association cortex, is organized into modules. The research was conducted using rats.