Tobacco smoking is the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the U.S., with more than 400,000 deaths each year attributable to smoking or its consequences. And yet teens still smoke. Indeed, smoking usually begins in the teen years, and …
Cambridge, MASS- When your brain encounters sensory stimuli, such as the scent of your morning coffee or the sound of a honking car, that input gets shuttled to the appropriate brain region for analysis. The coffee aroma goes to the olfactory cortex…
A study led by Academy Research Fellow Eleanor Coffey identifies new players that put the brakes on. They show in mice that lack the star player “JNK1”, that newborn neurons spend less time in the multipolar stage, which is when the cells prepare fo…
Why do some people fret over the most trivial matters while others remain calm in the face of calamity? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified two different chinks in our brain circuitry that explain why some of us ar…
Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 — Wouldn’t life be easy if everything happened as we anticipated? In reality, our brains are able to adapt to the unexpected using an inbuilt network that makes predictions about the world and monitors how those predi…
Milan, Italy, 31 January 2010 — Most people who survive a stroke recover some degree of their motor, sensory and cognitive functions over the following months and years. This recovery is commonly believed to reflect a reorganisation of the central…
Philadelphia, PA, 4 January 2011 – Normally, cortical nerve cells or neurons reside in the brain’s gray matter with only a few scattered neurons in the white matter, but some people with schizophrenia have a higher number of neurons in the white mat…
TORONTO, December 22, 2010 − Research from York University is revealing which regions in the brain “fire up” when we suppress an automatic behaviour such as the urge to look at other people as we enter an elevator.
A York study, published …
Cold Spring Harbor, NY– Newly published research led by Professor Z. Josh Huang, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) sheds important new light on how neurons in the developing brain make connections with one another. This activity, calle…
Milan, Italy, 20 December 2010 — The capacity to remember that a zebra has stripes, or that a giraffe is a four-legged mammal, is known as semantic memory. It allows us to assign meaning to words and to recall general knowledge and concepts that w…
A small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have found.
The perirhinal cortex was thought to be involved, like the neigh…
Milan, Italy, 8 December 2010 — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and developmental reading disability (RD) are complex childhood disorders that frequently occur together; if a child is experiencing trouble with reading, symptoms of …