neuroscience

Visually impaired people appear to be fearless, navigating busy sidewalks and crosswalks, safely finding their way using nothing more than a cane as a guide. The reason they can do this, researchers suggest, is that in at least some circumstances, blindness can heighten other senses, helping individuals adapt.
Now scientists from the UCLA Department of Neurology [...]

Short-term memory may depend in a surprising way on the ability of newly formed neurons to erase older connections. That’s the conclusion of a report in the November 13th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, that provides some of the first evidence in mice and rats that new neurons sprouted in the [...]

Regularly playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain and may be used in therapy to improve cognitive skills.
There is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians. In particular, the areas of the brain used to process music are larger or more active in musicians. [...]

Modern tissue engineering developed at the University of Michigan could improve the function of prosthetic hands and possibly restore the sense of touch for injured patients.
Researchers will present their updated findings Wednesday at the 95th annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons.
The research project, which was funded by the Department of Department of [...]

A new neurosurgical procedure may prove helpful for patients with treatment-resistant depression. Bilateral epidural prefrontal cortical stimulation (EpCS) was found generally safe and provided significant improvement of depressive symptoms in a small group of patients, according to lead researcher Ziad Nahas, M.D. at the Medical University of South Carolina. The data are reported in the [...]

University of Michigan mathematicians and their British colleagues say they have identified the signal that the brain sends to the rest of the body to control biological rhythms, a finding that overturns a long-held theory about our internal clock.
Understanding how the human biological clock works is an essential step toward correcting sleep problems like insomnia [...]

Neuroscience researchers at the University of Louisville will be the only team collaborating with an international group of scientists that last week announced they had enabled paralyzed rats to walk while supporting their own weight.
Dr. Susan Harkema, the University of Louisville’s Owsley Brown Frazier Chair in Neurological Rehabilitation, rehabilitation director at the university’s Kentucky Spinal [...]

As most good students realize, repeated studying produces good memory. Those who study a lot realize, further, that what they learn tends to be preserved longer in memory if they space out learning sessions between rest intervals. Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have now discovered how this so-called “spacing effect” is controlled in [...]

A tiny neuron is a very complicated structure. Its complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action.
It turns out that neurons, at one level, operate like another complicated structure — the United States, particularly its system of [...]

A woman looks familiar, but you can’t remember her name or where you met her. New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists — you simply can’t retrieve it.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person’s brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first [...]

Brain imaging shows playing Tetris leads to a thicker cortex and may also increase brain efficiency, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Research Notes. A research team based in New Mexico is one of the first to investigate the effects of practice in the brain using two image techniques.
Researchers from Mind [...]

In a major step in spinal cord injury research, scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have demonstrated that regenerating axons can be guided to their correct targets and re-form connections after spinal cord injury. Their findings were published in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience on August 2.
In [...]

To learn from experience, it is essential to know whether a past action was associated with a desired outcome. Now, scientists have demonstrated how this information can be coded by a single cell. The research, published in the July 30th issue of the journal Neuron, provides strong support for a neural mechanism that allows reward [...]

Can neuroscience read people’s minds? Some researchers, and some new businesses, are banking on a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal hidden thoughts, such as lies, truths or deep desires.
New research by neuroscientists at UCLA and Rutgers University provides evidence that fMRI can be used in certain circumstances to [...]

The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity.
The brain’s tendency to call upon these connections could help explain the curious phenomenon of “referred [...]

The ability to learn and to establish new memories is essential to our daily existence and identity; enabling us to navigate through the world. A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of [...]

Just as our world buzzes with distractions — from phone calls to e-mails to tweets — the neurons in our brain are bombarded with messages. Research has shown that when we pay attention, some of these neurons begin firing in unison, like a chorus rising above the noise. Now, a study in the May 29 [...]

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have proposed a sweeping new theory of autism that suggests that the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.
The central tenet of the theory, published in the March issue of Brain Research Reviews, is [...]

Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos,” at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.
Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate [...]

Burda and Strowbridge offer firsrt report of brain stimulation using light-activated semiconductor nanoparticles
Traditionally, stimulating nerves or brain tissue involves cumbersome wiring and a sharp metal electrode. But a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University is going “wireless.”
And it’s a unique collaboration between chemists and neuroscientists that led to the discovery of a remarkable [...]