Neuroscience

A sense of pleasure generated by the brain’s hedonic neural systems is fundamental to daily life and it's been essential for evolution and the survival of humans and most animals, say Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge, editors of a new book to be p ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 22 2009 - 9:31pm

Not Just Circadian Rhythm- The Red Light Link To Nighttime Awareness

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles in various biological processes like core body temperature, melatonin synthesis and sleep–wake behavior. They are synchronized most strongly by the light–dark cycle in the environment. Bright light is known to increas ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 26 2009 - 3:10pm

Oxytocin Linked To Attachment Style

One of the cool things about neuroscience is that its validating some theories of psychology and even psychoanalysis. When I wrote The Chemistry of Connection in 2007 and 2008, I made some leaps, tying together psychology and sociology, which are based on ...

Article - Susan Kuchinskas - Aug 27 2009 - 7:08pm

Organization: What Cities And Brains Have In Common

You may recall the “China Brain” thought experiment about consciousness, which goes something like this: if each person in China were to mimic the activity of a neuron using cell phones to communicate with one another, would this China-sized brain like Chi ...

Article - Mark Changizi - Aug 27 2009 - 8:53pm

MRI: Brain Imaging Gets More Functional

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a technique widely used tdoay in studying the human brain but its actual value in correlation is unclear. No one knows exactly how fMRI signals are generated at brain cell level but it is crucially importan ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2009 - 12:10pm

Play Tetris, Get Smarter (Reading Science Helps Too)

The magic of brain imaging has allowed researchers to correlate a thicker cortex in Tetris players with increased brain efficiency due to... playing Tetris. The researchers from Mind Research Network in Albuquerque writing in BMC Research Notes used brai ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 1 2009 - 5:45pm

Fantastic Voyage Here We Come- Nanoscale Imaging Of The Living Brain

Once again neuroscientists and physicists have teamed up to take brain imaging to a new level-- Supraresolution imaging. This has the making of a great SciFi movie-- A team of researchers at Harvard University, led by Dr Bernardo Sabatini, combine laser ...

Article - Kathy Murphy - Sep 9 2009 - 8:47pm

News Flash: Squid Aren't Mammals

May not sound like news, but for the last 70 years, we've been making assumptions about human neurons based on measurements from squid neurons. That's not quite as ludicrous as it sounds--squid axons are enormous, and so for a long time, they wer ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Sep 13 2009 - 1:56am

AP2gamma- New Key Gene In Nerve Regeneration

A new gene called AP2gamma has been discovered to be crucial for the neural development of the visual cortex in a discovery that can have implications for the therapeutics of neural regeneration as well as provide new clues about how the brain evolved into ...

Article - Catarina Amorim - Sep 28 2009 - 2:39pm

Mind Reading Gets A Step Closer Using Functional Imaging

Patterns of brain activity allow researchers to know what number a person has just seen or how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published in Current Biology. The findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the b ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2009 - 12:29pm