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 (via EEG) 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 t ...

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 ...

A specific area in our brains is responsible for processing information about human and animal faces, both how we recognize them and how we interpret facial expressions. Now, Tel Aviv University researcher Dr. Galit Yovel is exploring what makes this highly specialized part of the brain unique - a first step to finding practical applications for that information. Her most recent research on the brain's face ...

Imagine technology that allows you to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when, and where the next attack will occur. That is not nearly as far-fetched as it seems, according to a new Northwestern University study. Say, for purposes of illustration, that the chatter about an imminent terrorist attack is mounting, and specifics about the plan emerge, about weapons that will be used, the date of s ...

The neurological responses caused by observing somebody else playing a game have been uncovered. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience found differing responses for neutral observers compared to those who wished the player to fail and those who wanted to see the player succeed. Check the end of this report for a link to download this open access article. ...

Scientists recorded brain potentials (event-related potentials, or ERPs) while participants read the words in silence. "We analyzed the influence of the context given by a word when linking the physical traits of its components to the abstract representations of letters," explains to SINC Nicola Molinaro, main author of the study and researcher of the Basque Research Center on Cognition, Brain and Language ...

As doctors increasingly prescribe meditation to patients for stress-related disorders, scientists are gaining a better understanding of how different techniques from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions produce different results. A new paper published in Consciousness and Cognition discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation. ...

A commercial brain fitness program has been shown to improve memory in older adults, at least in the period soon after training. The findings are the first to show that practicing simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or "working" visual memory. The research, led by scientists at UCSF, is also one of the first to measure both mental performance and changes in neural activity caused by ...

Typically, migraine is considered to be an episodic disorder with discrete attacks of headache. But new research by Dr. Till Sprenger and his team from UCSF Headache Group and Technische Universität München found increased network activity - stronger functional connectivity - bilaterally in the visual, auditory and sensorimotor network in migraineurs. Findings will be presented at the American Headache Soci ...

Reporting at the American Headache Society's 52nd Annual Scientific Meeting in Los Angeles this week, new research shows that sleep deprivation leads to changes in the levels of key proteins that facilitate events involved in the underlying pathology of migraine. The work was supported by Merck & Co. ...