An Overview Of Brain Stimulation Therapies
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A group of “professional couch potatoes,” as one researcher described them, has proven that even moderate exercise – in this case walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week – can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks.
Scientists at Harvard University have found that humans can make difficult moral decisions using the same brain circuits as those used in more mundane choices related to money and food. These circuits, also found in other animals, put together two critical pieces of information: How good or bad are the things that might happen? What are the odds that they will happen, depending on one’s choice? The results suggest that complex moral decisions need not rely on a specific “moral sense.”
A new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has provided concrete evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) process sensory information such as sound, touch, and vision differently than typically developing children. The results appear in the August 17 online issue of Autism Research. Included in this report is a video interview with the lead researcher who explains these results.
It is unavoidable: breakdowns in brain connections slow down our physical response times as we age, a new study suggests. This slower reactivity is associated with an age-related breakdown in the corpus callosum, a part of the brain that acts as a dam during one-sided motor activities to prevent unwanted connectivity, or cross-talk, between the two halves of the brain, said Rachael Seidler, associate professor in the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology and Department of Psychology, and lead study author.
Just 11 hours of learning a meditation technique induces positive structural changes in brain connectivity by boosting efficiency in a part of the brain that helps a person regulate behavior in accordance with their goals, researchers report. The technique – integrative body-mind training (IBMT) – has been the focus of intense scrutiny by a team of Chinese researchers led by Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in collaboration with University of Oregon psychologist Michael I. Posner.
A new study focused on anxiety and brain activity pinpoints the brain regions that are relevant to developing childhood anxiety. Specifically, Kalin and colleagues demonstrated that increased brain activity in the amygdala and anterior hippocampus could predict anxious temperament in young primates. The findings, published in the August 12th edition of the journal Nature, may lead to new strategies for early detection and treatment of at-risk children. Check the end of this report for a link to a video interview with the lead researcher.
Scientists from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London have developed a pioneering new method of diagnosing autism in adults. For the first time, a quick brain scan that takes just 15 minutes can identify adults with autism with over 90 per cent accuracy. The method could lead to the screening for autism spectrum disorders in children in the future. The paper, ‘Describing the brain in autism in five dimensions – MRI-assisted diagnosis using a multi-parameter classification approach,’ is published in the Journal of Neuroscience today.
Everyone experiences social stress, whether it is nervousness over a job interview, difficulty meeting people at parties, or angst over giving a speech. In a new report, UCLA researchers have discovered that how your brain responds to social stressors can influence the body’s immune system in ways that may negatively affect health. The study appears in the current online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Our belief as to whether we will likely succeed or fail at a given task – and the consequences of winning or losing – directly affects the levels of neural effort put forth in movement-planning circuits in the human cortex, according to a new brain-imaging study by neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A paper about the research – led by Richard A. Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech – appears in the August issue of PLoS Biology.
Thinking about God may make you less upset about making errors, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress-response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who had not.
A commonplace electroencephalography (EEG) test may hold the key to predicting whether a person will respond to certain prescribed drugs, particularly those related to psychiatric conditions. In a study to be published by Clinical Neurophysiology, and now posted online, engineering and health sciences researchers at McMaster University applied machine learning to EEG patterns and successfully predicted how patients with schizophrenia would respond to clozapine therapy.
Where you grow up can have a big impact on the food you eat, the clothes you wear, and even how your brain works. In a report in a special section on Culture and Psychology in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Denise C. Park from the University of Texas at Dallas and Chih-Mao Huang from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discuss ways in which brain structure and function may be influenced by culture.
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