Neuroscience

Soldiers With Traumatic Brain Injury Have High Rates Of Mental Health Disorders

An exploratory result, published in Military Medicine, finds that soldiers with traumatic brain injury are more likely than soldiers with other serious injuries to experience a range of mental health disorders. The retrospective analysis examined the cases ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 28 2020 - 7:27pm

Do You Like To Smell An Absent Partner's Clothing?

Having trouble sleeping? Nervous about an important interview? Smelling your partner’s worn clothing may help improve your sleep and calm your nerves. While it may sound strange to smell your partner’s clothing, these behaviors are surprisingly common. In ...

Article - The Conversation - Feb 13 2020 - 3:54pm

Folk Wisdom Is Not Right About Left Brains

We know the left and right side of our brain are specialized for cognitive abilities like language (left hemisphere) and the right hand. That functional lateralization is reflected by morphological asymmetry too. The left and right hemispheres differ subt ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 16 2020 - 8:00am

Protein Dispersing Factor May Be Key To Erasing Traumatic Memories

Drosophila flies lose long-term memory of a traumatic event when kept in the dark, and the authors of a new study link that to a specific molecular mechanism responsible.  Memories are difficult to erase but breakthroughs could be important for sufferers o ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 16 2020 - 11:35am

Can Alpha Waves Reveal The Bias In Your Brain?

Though implicit bias- the belief that you are prejudiced, it's just a matter of degree- is controversial, that's only because it lacks scientific footing. A new study seeks to advance that. We all have likes and dislikes but when it becomes bias ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 16 2020 - 2:25pm

What Brain Images Of The Three-Million-Year Old Lucy Species Just Revealed

Brain volume changes during evolution have shown how modern human brains diverged from the brains of our closest primate cousin, the chimpanzee, and a new study takes that a step further. CT-scans of three-million-year old brain imprints inside fossil skul ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 1 2020 - 4:07pm

The Biology Of Depression- Similarities In Suicide And Other Brains

There is no question depression can have physical effects but it is unclear how much of depression is caused by biology and how much is psychology.  A new study finds there are increased amounts of an unmodified structural protein, called tubulin, in lipid ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 22 2020 - 12:08pm

Are You Anxiety Prone? It May Be SLC6A4 Serotonin Cleanup Proteins

Anxiety-prone people can blame serotonin cleanup proteins gone awry in their amygdala, according to research in marmosets recently published in JNeurosci. Targeting the amygdala with anti-anxiety medication could provide quicker relief. The same event or ...

Article - News Staff - May 11 2020 - 7:19pm

FMRI Images Are Just Pretty Pictures

Ten years ago science journalists talked about functional MRI (fMRI) scans all of the time. Because if a part of the brain lit up when someone did, said, or read something, it went into a paper. Few asked who was doing the interpreting, how legitimate the ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 4 2020 - 3:51pm

Amodal: We Begin Linking Vocal And Facial Emotion At Age 8

Emotions are an integral part of our lives. They influence our behavior, perceptions, and day-to-day decisions. The spontaneous amodal coding of emotions- independent of perceptual modalities like the physical characteristics of faces or voices- is easy f ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2020 - 2:21pm