Just a few drinks can change how memories are formed
Researchers at Brown found that alcohol hijacks a conserved memory pathway in the brain and changes which versions of genes are made, forming the cravings that fuel addiction. (more…)
Tag Archives: brain
Atomic Magnetometer Could Have Biomedical, Navigation Applications
Measuring very small changes in the brain’s magnetic fields could lead to a better understanding of maladies such as epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic brain injury, but the equipment used for such measurements today is bulky and expensive. Scientists and engineers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) want to address that issue by creating a new generation of atomic magnetometers based on clouds of rubidium atoms. (more…)
Where the brain processes spiritual experiences
Yale scientists have identified a possible neurobiological home for the spiritual experience — the sense of connection to something greater than oneself. (more…)
Princeton researchers show how the brain breaks down events
Research by Princeton University neuroscientists provides a new framework for understanding how the experience of life is accumulated, stored and recalled by the human brain.
“When you go about your day, you’re continuously assaulted with visual, auditory and other sensory information,” said Christopher Baldassano, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). “We don’t try to understand our world as the continuous stream that’s coming in, but we break it up into pieces we can understand and remember. The goal of this research was to look for the signatures of this kind of activity.” (more…)
Sleep biology discovery could lead to new insomnia treatments that don’t target the brain
UCLA scientists report the first evidence that a gene outside the brain controls the ability to rebound from sleep deprivation — a surprising discovery that could eventually lead to greatly improved treatments for insomnia and other sleep disorders that do not involve getting a drug into the brain. (more…)
Daily crosswords linked to sharper brain in later life
The more regularly people report doing word puzzles such as crosswords, the better their brain function in later life, a large-scale and robust online trial has found. (more…)
Trading changes how brain processes selling decisions
Market experience leaves people less susceptible to economic bias, study finds
Experience in trading changes how the human brain evaluates the sale of goods, muting a well-established economic bias known as the endowment effect, according to researchers at the University of Chicago. (more…)
Study shows how judgment of sensory simultaneity may develop in the brain
In a study using tadpoles, neuroscientists tracked how the brain develops its sense of whether two sensory inputs — for example, vision and touch — happened at the same time.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Most people encounter most things by sensing them in multiple ways. As we hear the words people speak, we also see their lips move. We smell, see and hear the onions as we chop them — and we feel them with teary eyes. (more…)