http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. (HealthDay) -- Sadness increases subjective pain ratings and affects pain-evoked cortical activity, according to a study published in the July issue of The Journal of Pain. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-sadness-subjective-pain.html Psychology & Psychiatry Fri, 06 Jul 2012 13:46:46 EST news260801122 Magnetic fields generated by microscopic devices implanted into the brain may be able to modulate brain-cell activity and reduce symptoms of several neurological disorders. Micromagnetic stimulation appears to generate the kind of neural activity currently elicited with electrical impulses for deep brain stimulation (DBS) – a therapy that can reduce symptoms of Parkinson's disease, other movement disorders, multiple sclerosis and chronic pain – and should avoid several common problems associated with DBS, report Massachusetts General Hospital investigators. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-tiny-magnetic-modulate-neural-safer.html Neuroscience Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:00:01 EST news259925679 Visual and auditory stimuli that elicit high levels of engagement and emotional response can be linked to reliable patterns of brain activity, a team of researchers from The City College of New York and Columbia University reports. Their findings could lead to new ways for producers of films, television programs and commercials to predict what kinds of scenes their audiences will respond to. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-tense-scenes-trigger-brain-ways.html Neuroscience Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:44:29 EST news258896526 (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 Combined, complimentary therapies have the ability to maximize the benefits of neural stem cell (NSC) transplantation for spinal cord repair in rat models, according to a study carried out by a team of Korean researchers who published in a recent issue of Cell Transplantation (20:9), now freely available on-line. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-neural-stem-cell-transplants-spinal.html Medical research Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:14:44 EST news253898054 A team of University of Pittsburgh mathematicians is using computational models to better understand how the structure of neural variability relates to such functions as short-term memory and decision making. In a paper published online April 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Pitt team examines how fluctuations in brain activity can impact the dynamics of cognitive tasks. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-link-neural-variability-short-term-memory.html Neuroscience Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:25:44 EST news252602734 (Medical Xpress) -- Princeton University researchers have used a novel virtual reality and brain imaging system to detect a form of neural activity underlying how the brain forms short-term memories that are used in making decisions. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-scientists-neural-sequences-memory-decision-making.html Neuroscience Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:21:05 EST news250960854 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 (Medical Xpress) -- What drives addicts to repeatedly choose drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, overeating, gambling or kleptomania, despite the risks involved? http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-scientists-brain-circuitry-linked-healthy.html Neuroscience Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:00:31 EST news239200577 The most common form of heritable cognitive impairment is Fragile X Syndrome, caused by mutation or malfunction of the FMR1 gene. Loss of FMR1 function is also the most common genetic cause of autism. Understanding how this gene works is vital to finding new treatments to help Fragile X patients and others. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-linking-fragile-syndrome-proteins-rna.html Neuroscience Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:00:06 EST news239201250 When people dream that they are performing a particular action, a portion of the brain involved in the planning and execution of movement lights up with activity. The finding, made by scanning the brains of lucid dreamers while they slept, offers a glimpse into the non-waking consciousness and is a first step toward true "dream reading," according to a report published online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 27. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-brain-imaging-true.html Neuroscience Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:04:59 EST news238939489 In order to make sense of its environment, the brain forms and maintains an internal model of the external world. A study published in the journal Science shows that neural activity recorded in darkness, uncovers hallmarks of this internal model, allowing some insight into the computations performed by the visual areas of the brain. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-darkness-neural.html Neuroscience Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:23:51 EST news234685347 (Medical Xpress) -- Scientists have long known that the right amygdala (one of two almond-shaped parts of the brain located deep with the temporal lobes) is heavily involved in processing memory and emotional responses to external stimuli; now however it appears that this tiny part of our brain also responds quite excitedly, to images of animals. Florian Mormann and colleagues from Caltech have discovered that large numbers of neurons in the right amygdala light up when a person looks at images of animals. The group have published the results of their study in Nature Neuroscience. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-08-team-human-brain-sensitive-images.html Neuroscience Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:28:26 EST news233918871 The hippocampus is a brain structure that plays a major role in the process of memory formation. It is not entirely clear how the hippocampus manages to string together events that are part of the same experience but are separated by "empty" periods of time. Now, new research published by Cell Press in the August 25 issue of the journal Neuron finds that there are neurons in the hippocampus that encode every sequential moment in a series of events that compose a discrete experience. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-08-cells-bridge-gap-memories-event.html Neuroscience Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:12:30 EST news233410245 In 1991, Carl Lewis was both the fastest man on earth and a profound long jumper, perhaps the greatest track-and-field star of all time in the prime of his career. On June 14th of that year, however, Carl Lewis was human. Leroy Burrell blazed through the 100-meters, besting him by a razor-thin margin of three-hundredths of a second. In the time it takes the shutter to capture a single frame of video, Lewis's three-year-old world record was gone. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-08-fast-neural-circuitry-reaction.html Neuroscience Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:41:30 EST news232202476 Scientists at the University of Michigan Health System have for the first time demonstrated how memory circuits in the brain refine themselves in a living organism through two distinct types of competition between cells. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-competition-brain-cells-spurs-memory.html Neuroscience Thu, 23 Jun 2011 04:30:02 EST news228020225 The precise wiring of our visual system depends upon the pattern of spontaneous activity within the brain that occurs well before birth, a new study by Yale researchers shows. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-sight-requires-exact-pattern-neural.html Neuroscience Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:34:42 EST news227964867 (Medical Xpress) -- Cornell researchers have identified a group of spinal cord nerve cells that manages running in mice. In the process they have illuminated an interesting step in mouse evolution: When you're being chased by a hawk, you're better off scampering than galloping, even though galloping is faster. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-neural-wiring-mouse.html Neuroscience Thu, 12 May 2011 06:45:53 EST news224401492