Controlling Individual Cortical Nerve Cells By Human Thought
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A new analysis has found that childhood cancer survivors often suffer from sleep problems and fatigue, which negatively impact their attention and memory. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that addressing sleep hygiene among survivors of childhood cancer may help to improve their cognitive health.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have developed a new way to stimulate neuron production in the adult mouse brain and demonstrated that neurons acquired in the brain’s hippocampus during adulthood improve certain cognitive functions. The results appear in the Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature.
When we suddenly get the answer to a riddle or understand the solution to a problem, we can practically feel the light bulb click on in our head. But what happens after the ‘Aha!’ moment? Why do the things we learn through sudden insight tend to stick in our memory?
Researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have described for the first time how the brain’s memory center repairs itself following severe trauma – a process that may explain why it is harder to bounce back after multiple head injuries. The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, reports significant learning and memory problems in mice who were unable to create new nerve cells in the brain’s memory area, the hippocampus, following brain trauma.
Most people have had trouble remembering something they just heard. Now, a University of Missouri researcher found that forgetfulness may have something to do with being in a good mood. Elizabeth Martin, a doctoral student of psychology in the College of Arts and Science, has found that being in a good mood decreases your working memory capacity.
Everyone would like MDs to have the best education – and to absorb what they are taught. The lead article in the April 4 issue of the journal Academic Medicine* connects research on how the brain learns to how to incorporate this understanding into real world education, particularly the education of doctors.
While children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) are known to have deficits in verbal learning and recall, the specifics of these deficits remain unclear. This study compared the verbal learning and memory performance of children with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) with that of children with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and found that both groups of children have difficulty with learning and memory but in different ways.
A large body of neuropsychological and neuroimaging research has already determined the various brain regions responsible for face recognition and voice recognition separately, but exactly how our brain goes about combining the two different types of information (visual and auditory) is still unknown. Now a new study, published in the March 2011 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex, has revealed the brain networks involved in this “cross-modal” person recognition. Check the end of this report for a link to download the original, full-text study.
Scientists have long puzzled over the many hours we spend in light, dreamless slumber. But a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests we are busy recharging our brain’s learning capacity during this traditionally undervalued phase of sleep, which can take up half the night. The results of the study were published in the journal Current Biology.
Age alters memory. But in what ways, and why? These questions comprise a vast puzzle for neurologists and psychologists. A new study looked at one puzzle piece: how older and younger adults encode and recall distracting, or irrelevant, information. The results, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science, can help scientists better understand memory and aging.
