Neuroscience

Learning New Skills: It's All About Flexing The Brain

Learning a new skill is easier when it is related to an ability we already have. For example, a trained pianist can learn a new melody easier than learning how to hit a tennis serve. Scientists from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) have ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 2:22pm

Brain Networks Hyper-Connected In Depressed Young Adults

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led University of Illinois at Chicago scholars to conclude that young adults who previously experienced the mental illness have hyper-connected emotional and cognitive networks in the brain. The college stu ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 27 2014 - 3:01pm

Studying Prefrontal Lobe Damage Unlocks Brain Mysteries

Until the last few decades, the frontal lobes of the brain were shrouded in mystery and erroneously thought of as nonessential for normal function—hence the frequent use of lobotomies in the early 20th century to treat psychiatric disorders. A review in N ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 11:14am

Synaptic Plasticity And Memory In Silent Neurons

When we learn, we associate a sensory experience with other stimuli or with a certain type of behavior. The neurons in the cerebral cortex that transmit the information modify the synaptic connections that they have with the other neurons and according to ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 1 2014 - 10:30am

Brain Size Matters When It Comes To Remembering

Want more working memory? Then you need to expand your brain. Credit: Flickr/Elena Gatti, CC BY By Joel Pearson Before we had mobile phones, people had to use their own memory to store long phone numbers (or write them down). But getting those numbers int ...

Article - The Conversation - Aug 30 2015 - 11:54am

Estrogen And Cannabis- Today's Concentrated Pot Risky Business For Women

There are sex differences in the development of tolerance to THC, the key active ingredient in cannabis, according to a new paper.  Psychology professor Rebecca Craft of Washington State University believes that estrogen levels are why female rats are at ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 3 2014 - 10:00am

Gateway Hypothesis: Nobel Laureate Says E-Cigarettes Promote Drug Addiction

Eric R. Kandel, MD, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries related to the molecular basis of memory, and Denise B. Kandel, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, write in the New England ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2014 - 5:01pm

Why You Can't Catch Any: Fish Are As Smart As Chimpanzees

Coral trout are fast when chasing prey above the reefs of their habitat, but can't pursue their quarry if it buries itself into a hard-to-reach reef crevice- so they instead team up with a snake-like moray eel to flush out the unfortunate fish, which ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2014 - 9:00am

Intelligence Inheritance – 3 Genes That Add To Your IQ Score

There's no one universal 'intelligence gene' but many thousands each contributing a small increment – and here are three.Credit: Andrew Huff/Flickr (cropped), CC BY By Beben Benyamin, The University of Queensland and Peter Visscher, The Uni ...

Article - The Conversation - Aug 30 2015 - 11:01am

Sex Hormones Implicated In Autism

Males get more diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorders than females and it may be related to changes in the brain's estrogen signaling, writes a paper in Molecular Autism.  Autism Spectrum Disorders are a broad category of diagnoses that include brain ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2014 - 2:37pm