Neuroscience

Other Race Effect- Biological Clues To Why They All Look Alike

We've all had an Asian person say, 'All you Americans look alike'- but they aren't being racist, there may be some biology at work. The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one's own race, according to ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 1 2011 - 9:45am

Binge Drinking And The Biology Of Blackouts

Sometimes a person who gets drunk can perform functions their friends might regard as ordinary, like carrying on a conversation or driving a car- but the drunkard might have no memory of those things and those periods of amnesia, commonly known as "b ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2011 - 11:07pm

(Squid) Brains Are Actually Not Computers

New neurological research, using, of course, the ever-popular giant axon of squid, shows that neurons are pretty darn clever at picking signal out of noise. And what's more, they're sensitive to context: Neurons are often compared to transistors ...

Blog Post - Danna Staaf - Jul 12 2011 - 2:09pm

Decapitation And The Wave Of Death

A perhaps somewhat lugubrious study, published in PLoS ONE, set out to investigate whether decapitation is a humane method of euthanasia in small animals, such as rats and birds. To do this, they used 22 rats that were decapitated while an EEG was recorde ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 25 2011 - 11:24pm

The Shrinking Brain

Age does  a lot of things to us. And to our brains, which shrink when we grow older. Those incredibly complex neural networks inside our skulls not only shrink, but they also become more susceptible to scourges such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Pe ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 29 2011 - 12:40am

Mapping The Brain, With The Help Of Many

The brain is quite complex (talking about an understatement), with its billions of neurons with many connections between them. These neurons and their connections form an intricate three-dimensional structure which forms the seat for cognition, awareness ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 31 2011 - 3:14am

Football Concussion Researcher Captures Real-Time Data Of Player's Broken Neck

For the crowd watching an Illinois high school football game last fall, it was a sickening feeling watching one of their Unity High School cornerbacks collapse to the ground after delivering a heads-down tackle on an opposing running back (see video here.) ...

Article - Dan Peterson - Aug 8 2011 - 8:06am

The Emotional Life Of Bees

Most of us don’t have a problem attributing emotions to primates, dogs, horses and other vertebrates. But what about invertebrates? That seems less obvious. They have smaller, less complex brains, but is that enough to boldly claim they have no emotions? ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Aug 4 2011 - 1:22am

Altered States Or In A Coma- You Still Dream, Says Study

In patients with seriously altered states of consciousness, there is also the puzzle about dreaming.   Do ‘vegetative’ patients (also known in clunkier, politically correct fashion as patients in a state of unresponsive wakefulness) or minimally conscious ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 15 2011 - 12:03pm

Want Better Memory? Prepare Your Brain

A study on activity in a the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) found people will remember a visual scene when the brain is more active. The PHC, which has previously been linked to recollection of visual scenes, wraps around the hippocampus, a part of the brain ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 22 2011 - 11:21am