http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (PhysOrg.com) -- For the very first time, scientists show what EEG can really tell us about how the brain functions. http://www.physorg.com/news179149173.html Medicine & Health Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:10:02 EST news179149173 Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people's beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.physorg.com/news178819089.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:59:26 EST news178819089 The human brain has evolved over millions of years to become a vast network of billions of neurons and synaptic connections. Understanding it is one of humankind's greatest pursuits. http://www.physorg.com/news173701962.html Biology Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:33:27 EST news173701962 Do infants only start to crawl once they are physically able to see danger coming? Or is it that because they are more mobile, they develop the ability to sense looming danger? According to Ruud van der Weel and Audrey van der Meer, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, infants' ability to see whether an object is approaching on a direct collision course, and when it is likely to collide, develops around the time they become more mobile. Their findings have just been published online in the Springer journal Naturwissenschaften. http://www.physorg.com/news173003137.html Medicine & Health Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:26:38 EST news173003137 The brain never sits idle. Whether we are awake or asleep, watch TV or close our eyes, waves of spontaneous nerve signals wash through our brains. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies studying visual attention have discovered a novel mechanism that explains how incoming sensory signals make themselves heard amidst the constant background rumblings so they can be reliably processed and passed on. http://www.physorg.com/news172932462.html Medicine & Health Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:40:01 EST news172932462 A team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology have pinpointed two groups of neurons in fruit fly brains that have the ability to sense and manipulate the fly's fat stores in much the same way as do neurons in the mammalian brain. The existence of this sort of control over fat deposition and metabolic rates makes the flies a potentially useful model for the study of human obesity, the researchers note. http://www.physorg.com/news169818724.html Medicine & Health Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:52:58 EST news169818724 New research has uncovered an early disruption in the process of memory formation in older humans who exhibit some early brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) but show little or no memory impairment. The work, published by Cell Press in the July 30th issue of the journal Neuron, sheds light on the role of amyloid protein in memory impairment and may lead to development of strategies for predicting and treating cognitive decline in individuals who are at-risk for AD. http://www.physorg.com/news168094743.html Medicine & Health Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:30:02 EST news168094743 Ducking a punch or a thrown spear calls for the power of the human brain to process 3-D motion, and to perceive an object (whether it's offensive or not) moving in three dimensions is critical to survival. It also leads to a lot of fun at 3-D movies. http://www.physorg.com/news167374780.html Medicine & Health Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:30:01 EST news167374780 New research shows that childhood adversity is associated with diminished neural activity in brain regions implicated in the anticipation of possible rewards. http://www.physorg.com/news166903502.html Medicine & Health Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:05:28 EST news166903502 A new study of the cognitive processes involved with honesty suggests that truthfulness depends more on absence of temptation than active resistance to temptation. http://www.physorg.com/news166726861.html Medicine & Health Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:01:29 EST news166726861 New research provides insight into how the brain can execute different actions in response to the same stimulus. The study, published by Cell Press in the April 16 issue of the journal Neuron, suggests that information from single brain cells cannot be interpreted differently within a short time period, a finding that is important for understanding both normal cognition and psychiatric disorders. http://www.physorg.com/news159022115.html Medicine & Health Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:49:02 EST news159022115 (PhysOrg.com) -- Formerly depressed women show patterns of brain activity when they are criticized by their mothers that are distinctly different from the patterns shown by never depressed controls, according to a new study from Harvard University. The participants reported being completely well and fully recovered, yet their neural activity resembled that which has been observed in depressed individuals in other studies. http://www.physorg.com/news157729370.html Medicine & Health Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:44:37 EST news157729370 Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind. Yet basic questions about the precise timing, location and dynamics of the neural event(s) allowing conscious access to information are not clearly and unequivocally determined. Some neuroscientists have even argued that consciousness may arise from a single "seat" in the brain, though the prevailing idea attributes a more global network property. Do the neural correlates of consciousness correspond to late or early brain events following perception? Do they necessarily involve coherent activity across different regions of the brain, or can they be restricted to local patterns of reverberating activity? http://www.physorg.com/news156522772.html Medicine & Health Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:33:48 EST news156522772 The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.physorg.com/news156171835.html Medicine & Health Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:05:09 EST news156171835 It may be possible to "read" a person's memories just by looking at brain activity, according to research carried out by Wellcome Trust scientists. In a study published today in the journal Current Biology, they show that our memories are recorded in regular patterns, a finding which challenges current scientific thinking. http://www.physorg.com/news156084067.html Medicine & Health Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:41:32 EST news156084067 Our eyes are in constant motion. Even when we attempt to stare straight at a stationary target, our eyes jump and jiggle imperceptibly. Although these unconscious flicks, also known as microsaccades, had long been considered mere "motor noise," researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that they are instead actively controlled by the same brain region that instructs our eyes to scan the lines in a newspaper or follow a moving object. http://www.physorg.com/news153670434.html Medicine & Health Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:14:50 EST news153670434 Humanoid robots have been used to show that that functional hierarchy in the brain is linked to time as well as space. Researchers from RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, have created a new type of neural network model which adds to the previous literature that suggests neural activity is linked solely to spatial hierarchy within the animal brain. Details are published November 7 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology. http://www.physorg.com/news145253120.html Biology Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:05:20 EST news145253120 Aging impairs the consolidation of memories during sleep, a process important in converting new memories into long-term ones, according to new animal research in the July 30 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings shed light on normal memory mechanisms and how they are disrupted by aging. http://www.physorg.com/news136569569.html Medicine & Health Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:59:29 EST news136569569 New research from Harvard University neuroscientists has pinpointed exactly how neural activity boosts blood flow to the brain. The finding has important implications for our understanding of common brain imaging techniques such as fMRI, which uses blood flow in the brain as a proxy for neural activity. http://www.physorg.com/news133697828.html Medicine & Health Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:17:08 EST news133697828