Sleep resets neurons for new memories the next day, study finds
While everyone knows that a good night's sleep restores energy, a new Cornell University study finds it resets another vital function: memory.
Aug 15, 2024
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While everyone knows that a good night's sleep restores energy, a new Cornell University study finds it resets another vital function: memory.
Aug 15, 2024
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RIKEN neuroscientists have gained new insights into how the hippocampus generates and sustains oscillations, which will be helpful for informing models on how the brain region works.
Aug 1, 2024
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The mechanism by which our brains record events in stereo—with one channel recording details and another recording general impressions—has been elicited by two RIKEN neuroscientists.
Jul 4, 2024
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Value-based decision-making is the process through which humans choose between options associated with different costs or efforts, as well as rewards. These choices include, for instance, selecting different products at the ...
Some people with tough-to-treat epilepsy might benefit if doctors target a brain region newly linked to the disorder, a new study suggests.
Apr 17, 2024
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The hippocampus—a seahorse-shaped region of the brain that plays a particularly important role in cognitive aging and memory function—has been studied as a singular region for several years. However, until now, there ...
Mar 7, 2024
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People with aphantasia lack visual imagination. Researchers from the University Hospital Bonn (UKB), the University of Bonn and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) investigated how the lack of mental imagery ...
Feb 27, 2024
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Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have discovered that odors stimulate specific brain cells that may play a role in rapid "go/no-go" decision-making.
Feb 6, 2024
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Obesity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular metabolic diseases and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Long-term exercise improves memory and spatial cognition, reduces age-related cognitive decline, and maintains ...
Dec 1, 2023
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Researchers at The University of Queensland have identified new regions of the brain crucial to the formation of long-term memory.
Sep 21, 2023
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The hippocampus is a major component of the brains of humans and other mammals. It belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in long-term memory and spatial navigation. Like the cerebral cortex, with which it is closely associated, it is a paired structure, with mirror-image halves in the left and right sides of the brain. In humans and other primates, the hippocampus is located inside the medial temporal lobe, beneath the cortical surface. Its curved shape reminded early anatomists of the horns of a ram (Cornu Ammonis), or a seahorse. The name, in fact, was taken by the sixteenth century anatomist Julius Caesar Aranzi from the Greek word for seahorse (Greek: ιππος, hippos = horse, καμπος, kampos = sea monster).
In Alzheimer's disease the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to suffer damage; memory problems and disorientation appear among the first symptoms. Damage to the hippocampus can also result from oxygen starvation (hypoxia), encephalitis, or medial temporal lobe epilepsy. People with extensive hippocampal damage may experience amnesia—the inability to form or retain new memories.
In rodents, the hippocampus has been studied extensively as part of the brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Many neurons in the rat and mouse hippocampus respond as place cells: that is, they fire bursts of action potentials when the animal passes through a specific part of its environment. Hippocampal place cells interact extensively with head direction cells, whose activity acts as an inertial compass, and with grid cells in the neighboring entorhinal cortex.
Because of its densely packed layers of neurons, the hippocampus has frequently been used as a model system for studying neurophysiology. The form of neural plasticity known as long-term potentiation (LTP) was first discovered to occur in the hippocampus and has often been studied in this structure. LTP is widely believed to be one of the main neural mechanisms by which memory is stored in the brain.
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