http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Whether in society or nature, decisions are often the result of complex interactions between many factors. Because of this it is usually difficult to determine how much weight the different factors have in making a final decision. Neuroscientists face a similar problem since decisions made by the brain always involve many neurons. Working in collaboration, the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, supported within the framework of the Bernstein Network, researchers lead by CIN professor Matthias Bethge have now shown how the weight of individual neurons in the decision-making process can be reconstructed despite interdependencies between the neurons. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-neuroscientists-decision-making-neurons.html Neuroscience Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:31:43 EST news277493495 German neurophysiologists have developed a new method to study widespread networks of neurons responsible for our memory. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-neural-interaction-periods-silence.html Neuroscience Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:00:14 EST news272724699 Fog is an atmospheric phenomenon that afflicts millions of drivers every day, impairing visibility and increasing the risk of an accident. The ways people respond to conditions of reduced visibility is a central topic in vision research. It has been shown that people tend to underestimate speeds when visibility is reduced equally at all distances, as for example, when driving with a uniformly fogged windshield. But what happens when the visibility decreases as you look further into the distance, as happens when driving in true fog? New research by Paolo Pretto at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen published in eLife, reveals that people tend to overestimate their speed when driving in fog-like conditions and therefore naturally tend to drive at a slower pace. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-foggy-perception.html Medical research Wed, 31 Oct 2012 18:08:07 EST news270925674 (Medical Xpress) -- Consciousness is a selective process that allows only a part of the sensory input to reach awareness. But up to today it has yet to be clarified which areas of the brain are responsible for the content of conscious perception. Theofanis Panagiotaropoulos and his colleagues - researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona - have now discovered that the content of consciousness is not localized in a unique cortical area, but is most likely an emergent property of global networks of neuronal populations. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-conscious-perception-global-neural-networks.html Neuroscience Wed, 13 Jun 2012 08:11:28 EST news258793878 Scientists from Germany discovered new functions of brain regions that are responsible for seeing movement. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-movement-world-eyes.html Neuroscience Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:21:20 EST news251554873 Scientists have now discovered how different brain regions cooperate during short-term memory. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-short-term-memory-based-synchronized-brain.html Neuroscience Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:48:49 EST news247236518 In order to get a better picture of our surroundings, the brain has to integrate information from different senses, but how does it know which signals to combine? New research involving scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen, the University of Oxford, and the University of Bielefeld has demonstrated that humans exploit the correlation between the temporal structures of signals to decide which of them to combine and which to keep segregated. This research is about to be published in Current Biology. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-multisensory-implies-causation.html Neuroscience Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:54:48 EST news243176078 (Medical Xpress) -- Over the years pianists develop a particularly acute sense of the temporal correlation between the movements of the piano keys and the sound of the notes played. However, they are no better than non-musicians at assessing the synchronicity of lip movements and speech. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-music-multiple-sensory-stimuli-brain.html Neuroscience Thu, 24 Nov 2011 08:40:01 EST news241344568 In everyday life, attention and awareness appear tightly interwoven. Attending to the scissors on the right side of your desk, you become aware of their attributes, for example the red handles. Vice versa, the red handles could attract your attention to the scissors. However, a number of behavioural observations have recently led scientists to postulate that attention and awareness are fundamentally different processes and not necessarily connected. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-attention-awareness-uncoupled-brain-imaging.html Neuroscience Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:00:05 EST news240154664 Visual and tactile objects in our surroundings are translated into a perception by complex interactions of neurons in the cortex. The principles underlying spatial and temporal organization of neuronal activity during decision-making and object perception are not all understood yet. Jason Kerr from Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, in collaboration with Winfried Denk from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, now investigated how different sensations are represented by measuring activity in neuronal populations deep in the cortex. The scientists developed a method, with which they can study the neuronal activity in some of the deepest layers of the cortex in rodents, something that has not been possible up until now. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-deeper-insight-cortical-cells.html Neuroscience Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:45:27 EST news229697110 If you thought that judging the position of a falling object is easier when you're lying on your side, think again. New research, led by the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biological Cybernetics in Germany and presented in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, shows that while the physical laws governing object stability are well represented by the brain, you can better determine how objects fall when you're upright. The results shed new light on existing theories of how humans perceive the physical stability of objects. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-brain-perception-falling.html Psychology & Psychiatry Mon, 02 May 2011 12:00:01 EST news223554699 The next time you are in Pisa, try looking at its tower from a different perspective. Newton's laws of motion predict that an object will fall when its centre-of-mass lies beyond its base of support. But how does your brain know whether the tower will fall or not? http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-scientists-brain-newton-laws-affects.html Psychology & Psychiatry Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:00:07 EST news223131639