Zif proteins have been found to control whether a brain stem cell differentiates into a neuron or renews as a brain stem cell. There are Zif related proteins in humans that may be targeted by new treatments for brain cancer and other diseases.
Computational neuroscience research provides new information on the N-type calcium channel and synaptic transmission. The computational neuroscience model investigated shows that a single open N-type calcium channel's current may be sufficient to enable neurotransmitter release.
Neuroscience research involving epileptic patients with brain electrodes surgically implanted in their medial temporal lobes shows that patients learned to consciously control individual neurons deep in the brain with thoughts.
Recent visual neuroscience research provides evidence that blind people process the sense of touch faster than people with normal vision. The research also found that each blind person's tactile perception time was nearly equal to their average speed of their finger moving from one Braille character to the next.
Neurobiologists have genetically engineered mice to smell light. This optogenetics research provides a better understanding of the neural basis of...
Neuroscientists at UC Berkeley have discovered that stimulation of a certain area of the brain can cause a change in which hand a person favors to perform a task. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation on right handed test subjects, researchers discovered that stimulating the posterior parietal cortex on the left side caused an increase in the use of the left hand. Researchers suggested this finding might be useful in discovering methods to help patients overcome learned limb disuse.
Correlating data from 588 patients diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe degeneration (FTLD), researchers found that subjects with professions which related highly for verbal skills had greater tissue loss on the right hand side of the brain. By contrast, those whose professions required less aptitude for verbal skills, for example flight engineers, had more tissue damage to the left hand side of the brain.
This research shows that the loss of connections in the corpus collosum could be partly responsible for slower response times seen in older animals and humans due to too much crosstalk and confusion between the brain hemispheres.
New brain research shows that the size of fish telencephalons was correlated with risk taking and timid behaviors. Fish with...
A prosthetic hand system has been created that allows the user's brain to pick up sensory information from the prosthetic hand.
A new study from researchers at UCLA indicates that new memories with emotional content can be formed even if the amygdala is damaged. Researchers believe that other areas compensated for the damaged amygdala, and aided learning and memory.
SIRT1 was again found to be important in learning and memory for mice, but boosting SIRT1 above the normal levels of expression did not lead to an improvement in learning and memory.
