Neuroscience

New insights into how sleep helps the brain to reorganise itself

A study has given new insights into how sleep contributes to brain plasticity – the ability for our brain to change and reorganise itself – and could pave the way for new ways to help people with learning and memory disorders.

Immunology

Competition for survival signals maintains immune balance

According to a new study published in the journal Immunity, two types of immune cells compete for a shared source of proteins that allow them to survive. The "contestants" are the recently discovered and ultra-rare innate ...

Neuroscience

How neurons sense our everyday life

Researchers from King's College London have discovered a molecular mechanism that enables neuronal connections to change through experience, thus fuelling learning and memory formation. The findings are published in the journal ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

A woman learns to live with dissociative identity disorder

Until she was 40 years old, Melanie Goodwin had no memory of her life before the age of 16. Then, a family tragedy triggered a cataclysmic psychological change. Suddenly she was aware of other identities inside her, and the ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Using drugs to weaken traumatic memories

A potential new approach to treat posttraumatic stress disorder: After taking the antibiotic doxycycline, study participants remembered an unpleasant event considerably less, as experiments conducted by a team of researchers ...

Autism spectrum disorders

Analysing the way children sleep could help us to understand autism

On average, humans spend roughly a third of their lives asleep. This might sound like quite a long time, but sleep has been shown to be vital for "normal" human functioning. Without enough sleep, things go downhill for most ...

Neuroscience

Scientists study Pavlovian conditioning in neural networks

In the decades following the work by physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his famous salivating dogs, scientists have discovered how molecules and cells in the brain learn to associate two stimuli, like Pavlov's bell and the resulting ...

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