News tagged with human brain
My connectome, myself
The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia. ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Feb 07, 2012 |
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Gene regulator in brain's executive hub tracked across lifespan
For the first time, scientists have tracked the activity, across the lifespan, of an environmentally responsive regulatory mechanism that turns genes on and off in the brain's executive hub. Among key findings ...
Feb 02, 2012 |
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Extended synaptic development may explain our cognitive edge over other primates
Over the first few years of life, human cognition continues to develop, soaking up information and experiences from the environment and far surpassing the abilities of even our nearest primate relatives. In a study published ...
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Brain capacity limits exponential online data growth
Scientists have found that the capacity of the human brain to process and record information - and not economic constraints - may constitute the dominant limiting factor for the overall growth of globally stored information. ...
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Seeing really is believing
(Medical Xpress) -- Want to know why sports fans get so worked up when they think the referee has wrongly called their team's pass forward, their player offside, or their serve as a fault?
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Feb 01, 2012 |
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Investigators achieve important step toward treating Huntington's disease
A team of researchers at the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures has developed a technique for using stem cells to deliver therapy that specifically targets the genetic abnormality found in Huntington's disease, a hereditary ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Jan 19, 2012 |
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New research to enhance speech recognition technology
New research is hoping to understand how the human brain hears sound to help develop improved hearing aids and automatic speech recognition systems.
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Jan 17, 2012 |
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Fusion plasma research helps neurologists to hear above the noise
Fusion plasma researchers at the University of Warwick have teamed up with Cambridge neuroscientists to apply their expertise developed to study inaccessible fusion plasmas in order to significantly improve the understanding ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Jan 10, 2012 |
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Scientists map the frontiers of vision
There's a 3-D world in our brains. It's a landscape that mimics the outside world, where the objects we see exist as collections of neural circuits and electrical impulses.
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Jan 06, 2012 |
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Japan scientists hope slime holds intelligence key
A brainless, primeval organism able to navigate a maze might help Japanese scientists devise the ideal transport network design. Not bad for a mono-cellular being that lives on rotting leaves.
Dec 28, 2011 |
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Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects
(PhysOrg.com) -- An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can be identified by simply "looking" at an image. Introspectively, we know that the ...
Technology / Computer Sciences
Dec 21, 2011 |
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Did a good sense of smell give us an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals?
(PhysOrg.com) -- Our sense of smell may have been as important as language in helping to give us, modern humans, an evolutionary advantage over other human relatives such as the Neanderthals, scientists report ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Dec 13, 2011 |
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The big picture: Long-term imaging reveals intriguing patterns of human brain maturation
Neuroimaging has provided fascinating insight into the dynamic nature of human brain maturation. However, most studies of developmental changes in brain anatomy have considered individual locations in relative isolation from ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Dec 07, 2011 |
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Changes in the path of brain development make human brains unique
How the human brain and human cognitive abilities evolved in less than six million years has long puzzled scientists. A new study conducted by scientists in China and Germany, and published December 6 in the online, open-access ...
Dec 06, 2011 |
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Chimp study shows evidence of synaesthesia
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the never-ending struggle to understand how the human brain works, all manner of experiments are dreamed up and carried out. In one new one, for example, researchers in Japan have been ...
Human brain
The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. Enclosed in the cranium, it has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times as large as the brain of a mammal with an equivalent body size. Most of the expansion comes from the cerebral cortex, a convoluted layer of neural tissue that covers the surface of the forebrain. Especially expanded are the frontal lobes, which are involved in executive functions such as self-control, planning, reasoning, and abstract thought. The portion of the brain devoted to vision is also greatly enlarged in humans.
Brain evolution, from the earliest shrewlike mammals through primates to hominids, is marked by a steady increase in encephalization, or the ratio of brain to body size. The human brain has been estimated to contain 50–100 billion (1011) neurons[citation needed], of which about 10 billion (1010) are cortical pyramidal cells.[citation needed] These cells pass signals to each other via approximately 100 trillion (1014)[citation needed] synaptic connections.
In spite of the fact that it is protected by the thick bones of the skull, suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, and isolated from the bloodstream by the blood-brain barrier, the delicate nature of the human brain makes it susceptible to many types of damage and disease. The most common forms of physical damage are closed head injuries such as a blow to the head, a stroke, or poisoning by a wide variety of chemicals that can act as neurotoxins. Infection of the brain is rare because of the barriers that protect it, but is very serious when it occurs. More common are genetically based diseases[citation needed], such as Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and many others. A number of psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and depression, are widely thought to be caused at least partially by brain dysfunctions, although the nature of such brain anomalies is not well understood.
For more information about Human brain, read the full article at
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