http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. (Medical Xpress)—It has long been held that in a new environment, visual adaptation should improve visual performance. However, evidence has contradicted this expectation: Adaptation sometimes not only decreases sensitivity for the adapting stimuli, but can also change sensitivity for stimuli very different from the adapting ones. Recently, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Schepens Eye Research Institute formulated and tested the hypothesis that these results can be explained by a process that optimizes sensitivity for many stimuli, rather than changing sensitivity only for those stimuli whose statistics have changed. By manipulating stimulus statistics – that is, measuring visual sensitivity across a wide range of spatiotemporal luminance modulations while varying the distribution of stimulus speeds – the researchers demonstrated a large-scale reorganization of visual sensitivity. This reorganization formed an orderly pattern of sensitivity gains and losses predicted by a theory describing how visual systems can optimize the distribution of receptive field characteristics across stimuli. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-visual-economist-neural-resource-allocation.html Neuroscience Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:38:40 EST news283865771 New research from the University of Georgia has identified the neural pathways in an insect brain tied to eating for pleasure, a discovery that sheds light on mirror impulsive eating pathways in the human brain. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-brain-pathway-triggering-impulsive.html Medical research Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:36:33 EST news281277384 (HealthDay)—People who have lost a loved one in the past year can have difficulty coping during the holidays, an expert says. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-coping-grief-holidays.html Health Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:50:01 EST news275838474 Consumers face a barrage of product claims each day. These claims create consumer expectation of safety and product performance and, assuming they are accurate, facilitate well informed choice. But increased scrutiny of claims, especially where the claim involves potential health outcomes, means that claim substantiation and the science behind it are more important than ever. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-regulatory-science-health-functional-food.html Health Sun, 19 Aug 2012 13:40:01 EST news264601924 (HealthDay) -- Some patients will feel better after taking a medication even if the drug doesn't actually do anything to treat their condition. It's called the "placebo effect." But there's another side to the power of suggestion: Patients may develop symptoms and side effects purely because they've been told about them. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-clinicians-unintentionally-prompt-nocebo-effect.html Health Fri, 03 Aug 2012 11:28:10 EST news263212082 Just back from holiday? The chances are you felt that the journey home by plane, car or train went much quicker than the outward journey, even though in fact both distances and journey times are usually the same. So why the difference? Now it has been scientifically demonstrated why the return journey appears to be shorter than the outward one. Our expectation about the duration of the journey was found to be the determining factor. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-08-false-journey-shorter-outward.html Psychology & Psychiatry Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:10:01 EST news233486863