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ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News |
| Mental speed hardly changes over a lifespan Posted: 18 Feb 2022 12:30 PM PST Mental speed -- the speed at which we can deal with issues requiring rapid decision-making -- does not change substantially over decades. Psychologists have come to this conclusion. They evaluated data from a large-scale online experiment with over a million participants. The findings of the new study suggest that the speed of cognitive information processing remains largely stable between the ages of 20 and 60, and only deteriorates at higher ages. |
| Treatment for Parkinson’s could now get even better Posted: 18 Feb 2022 07:07 AM PST Specialized groups of neurons within the brainstem control movement. Now researchers have found that activation of such neurons is sufficient to restore full movement function in mice with symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. The study helps clinicians to focus Deep Brain Stimulation to the right therapeutic spot and hopefully could improve treatment of motor symptoms in Parkinson's Disease. |
| Posted: 18 Feb 2022 07:06 AM PST Researchers show how major disturbances occur in the gut microbiome of patients suffering from heart disease. Given this latest evidence from microbiome research, researchers now call for stronger and more focused public health initiatives to prevent or delay these common diseases that are a leading cause of premature death worldwide through encouraging a plant-based and energy-controlled diet, avoidance of smoking and compliance with daily exercise. |
| Myelination determines the nerve cell power of inhibition, study finds Posted: 18 Feb 2022 07:06 AM PST Researchers shed new light on how myelin loss might underpin aberrant brain activity which have been observed in people with multiple sclerosis. The study suggests that myelination, however patchy on specific interneurons, is required to reach their full inhibitory potential. |
| Posted: 18 Feb 2022 07:06 AM PST The new study from the University of Bath's School of Management reveals care from a co-worker inspires people to be supportive to their partner at home, showing that co-workers have a significant role to play in enabling couples to cope with balancing the demands of work and family life. This spiral of support has knock on benefits for creative thinking at work. |
| Study shows differences between brains of girls, boys with autism Posted: 17 Feb 2022 03:17 PM PST Girls with autism differ in several brain centers compared with boys with autism, suggesting gender-specific diagnostics are needed, a new study using artificial intelligence finds. |
| How motor neurons develop into subtypes that activate different muscles Posted: 17 Feb 2022 03:17 PM PST Motor neurons play a vital role in movement, linking the central nervous system with different muscles in the body. A new study has uncovered details about the process through which motor neurons develop into subtypes that connect the spinal cord with different target muscles and help to control different body parts. The research concludes that a gene called Kdm6b helps control motor neurons' fate. |
| More chemicals, fewer words: Exposure to chemical mixtures during pregnancy alters brain development Posted: 17 Feb 2022 11:13 AM PST By linking human population studies with experiments in cell and animal models, researchers have provided evidence that complex mixtures of endocrine disrupting chemicals impact children's brain development and language acquisition. With their novel approach, the scientists show that up to 54 per cent of pregnant women were exposed to experimentally defined levels of concern. While current risk assessment tackles chemicals one at a time, these findings show the need to take mixtures into account for future risk assessment approaches. |
| Scientists think a peptide could stop, reverse damage to nerve cells Posted: 17 Feb 2022 11:12 AM PST Researchers found a way to inhibit the mitochondrial fission in nerve cell axons, which can promote normal growth and potentially stop further damage in neurodegenerative disorders like hereditary spastic paraplegia and Parkinson's disease. |
| Flies possess more sophisticated cognitive abilities than previously known Posted: 17 Feb 2022 11:12 AM PST Common flies feature more advanced cognitive abilities than previously believed. Using a custom-built immersive virtual reality arena, neurogenetics and real-time brain activity imaging, researchers found attention, working memory and conscious awareness-like capabilities in fruit flies. |
| Scientists pinpoint genetic target with promise for treating many forms of blindness Posted: 17 Feb 2022 11:12 AM PST Developing therapies for genetic forms of blindness is extremely challenging, in part because they vary so widely, but scientists have now highlighted a target with great promise for treating a range of these conditions. The scientists have highlighted that a specific gene (SARM1) is a key driver in the damage that ultimately leads to impaired vision (and sometimes blindness), and -- in a disease model -- showed that deleting this gene protects vision after a chemical kick-starts the chain of dysfunction that mimics a host of ocular conditions. |
| Study analyzes brain changes associated with juvenile fibromyalgia Posted: 17 Feb 2022 11:12 AM PST Analyzing the brain changes that occur in the first stages of juvenile fibromyalgia could help to better understand the pathophysiology of this syndrome. |
| Children with insomnia likely to continue to suffer as adults, long-term study finds Posted: 17 Feb 2022 09:24 AM PST Children with insomnia symptoms are likely to persist with them as young adults and are significantly more likely to develop an insomnia disorder in early adulthood compared to children who do not have difficulty sleeping, according to new research. The study describes the developmental trajectories of childhood insomnia symptoms through adolescence and into young adulthood. |
| Depression and Alzheimer’s disease share genetic roots Posted: 17 Feb 2022 09:23 AM PST Epidemiological data have long linked depression with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive dementia that affects nearly 6 million Americans. Now, a new study identifies common genetic factors in both depression and AD. Importantly, the researchers found that depression played a causal role in AD development, and those with worse depression experienced a faster decline in memory. |
| Dendrites may help neurons perform complicated calculations Posted: 17 Feb 2022 09:23 AM PST Researchers have demonstrated how dendrites -- branch-like extensions that protrude from neurons -- help neurons perform computations on information that comes in from other parts of the brain. |
| New imaging scan reveals a culprit in cognitive decline of Alzheimer’s Posted: 17 Feb 2022 06:07 AM PST Advanced imaging technology has helped scientists confirm that the destruction of brain synapses underlies the cognitive deficits experienced by patients with Alzheimer's disease. For many years, scientists have assumed that the loss of connections between brain cells caused Alzheimer's-related symptoms, including memory loss, but actual evidence of the role of synaptic loss had been limited to a small number of brain biopsies and post-mortem brain exams conducted on patients with moderate or advanced disease. However, the emergence of a positron emission tomography (PET) scanning technology has allowed researchers to observe the loss of synapses in living patients with even mild symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. |
| How picking up your smartphone could reveal your identity Posted: 17 Feb 2022 06:07 AM PST The time a person spends on different smartphone apps is enough to identify them from a larger group in more than one in three cases say researchers, who warn of the implications for security and privacy. They fed 4,680 days of app usage data into statistical models. Each of these days was paired with one of the 780 users, such that the models learnt people's daily app use patterns. The researchers then tested whether models could identify an individual when provided with only a single day of smartphone activity that was anonymous and not yet paired with a user. Software granted access to a smartphone's standard activity logging could render a reasonable prediction about a user's identity even when they were logged out of their account. An identification is possible with no monitoring of conversations or behaviors within apps themselves. |
| Exercise can help older adults retain their memories Posted: 17 Feb 2022 06:06 AM PST Conducting a meta-analysis of 3,000 patients over 36 studies (carefully vetted from more than 1,200 studies in all), psychologists were able to find that specific exercise helps episodic memory -- 3 times a week for 4 months, with greater improvements among those who are age 55 to 68 years. |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2022 04:18 PM PST Repetitive headers and accidental head impacts in soccer are leading to changes in blood patterns, linked to brain signalling pathways and potential alterations -- the latest study to assess potential dangers of heading in soccer shows. |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2022 10:03 AM PST With an alarming rise in the number of prescriptions filled for non-benzo sleeping/z-drugs and anti-epilepsy gabapentinoids over the last two decades, researchers aimed to fill in the gap in knowledge in the proportion of overdose deaths involving those medications. They found that overdose deaths involving these drugs increased more than three-fold between 2000 and 2018. Until now there was little data on overdose deaths involving non-benzodiazepines and gabapentinoids. |
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