Certain brain injuries can cause people to lose the ability to visually recognize objects — for example, confusing a harmonica for a cash register. Neuroscientists from Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University examined the brain of a person with object agnosia, a deficit in the ability to recognize objects that does not include damage to the eyes or a general loss in intelligence, and have uncove ...

Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that a "fountain of youth" that sustains the production of new neurons in the brains of rodents is also believed to be present in the human brain. The existence of a vital support system of cells around stem cells in the brain explains why stem cells by themselves cannot generate neurons in a lab dish, a major roadblock in using these stem cells for inju ...

Visual and tactile objects in our surroundings are translated into a perception by complex interactions of neurons in the cortex. The principles underlying spatial and temporal organization of neuronal activity during decision-making and object perception are not all understood yet. Jason Kerr from Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, in collaboration with Winfried Denk from the Max ...

Siblings of people with autism show a similar pattern of brain activity to that seen in people with autism when looking at emotional facial expressions. The University of Cambridge researchers identified the reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy and argue it may be a 'biomarker' for a familial risk of autism. The Medical Research Council funded study is published today, 12th July, ...

Bulimia nervosa is a severe eating disorder associated with episodic binge eating followed by extreme behaviors to avoid weight gain such as self-induced vomiting, use of laxatives, or excessive exercise. It is poorly understood how brain function may be involved in bulimia. A new study led by Guido Frank, MD, assistant professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director, Developmental Brain ...

University of Manchester scientists have taken a key step towards producing a high-performance computer which aims to create working models of human brain functions. Chips based on ARM processor technology will be linked together to simulate the highly-complex workings of the brain, whose functionality derives from networks of billions of interacting, highly-connected neurons. ...

The use of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging may help identify findings in brain tissue associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), according to two articles published Online First today by Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. As scientists seek to understand more about AD and other forms of dementia, they are exploring the use of PET, according to background information in the a ...

Although out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are typically associated with migraine, epilepsy, and psychopathology, they are quite common in healthy and psychologically normal individuals as well. However, they are poorly understood. A new study, published in the July 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has linked these experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to errors in the body’s se ...

The assumption that we human beings can control and intentionally forget unwanted memories has been controversial ever since Freud asserted it at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, psychology researcher Gerd Thomas Waldhauser has shown in neuroimaging studies that Freud was correct in his assumptions: in the same way as we can control our motor impulses (we can, for example, rapidly instruct the brain ...

In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she did not work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Associatio ...