| The ability to speak a second language isn’t the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterparts—their brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second language—even one learned in adolescence—affects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again. |
| “The most important implication of the study is that even when a person is reading in his or her native language, there is an influence of knowledge of the nondominant second language,” Van Assche notes. “Becoming a bilingual changes one of people’s most automatic skills.” |
| psychologists at Washington University are finding that your ability to envision the future does in fact goes hand-in-hand with remembering the past. Both processes spark similar neural activity in the brain. |
| The study clearly demonstrates that the neural network underlying future thoughts is not only happening in the brain’s frontal cortex. Although the frontal lobes play an important role in carrying out future-oriented operations — such as anticipation, planning and monitoring — the spark for these activities may be the process of envisioning yourself in a specific future event. And that’s an activity based on the same brain network used to remember memories about our own lives. Also, patterns of activity suggest that the visual and spatial context for our imagined future is often pieced together using our past experiences, including memories of specific body movements: data our brain has stored as we navigated through similar settings in the past.Read more at www.sciencedaily.com |
| Scientists at Georgia State University have uncovered the mechanisms of how pain in infancy alters how the brain processes pain in adulthood.
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Research is now indicating that infants who spent time in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) show altered pain sensitivity in adolescence. These results have profound implications and highlight the need for pre-emptive and post-operative pain medicine for newborn infants.
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Using Sprague-Dawley rats, Jamie LaPrairie, a graduate student in associate professor Anne Murphy’s laboratory, examined why the brief experience of pain at the time of birth permanently decreased pain sensitivity in adulthood.
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| Endogenous opioid peptides, such as beta-endorphin and enkephalin, function to inhibit pain. |
| Since these peptides are released following injury and act like morphine to dampen the experience of pain, LaPrairie and Murphy tested to see if the rats, who were injured at birth, had unusually high levels of endogenous opioids in adulthood.
Read more at www.labspaces.net |
| Auditory hallucinations are considered by many medical professionals to be the most frequent and reliable symptom of psychosis. More than 70 percent of diagnosed schizophrenics suffer from them at some point in the course of their disease. |
| The main question the scientists sought to answer was whether there are identifiable brain tissue abnormalities in schizophrenic patients who frequently hear voices. And there are. Confirming earlier studies, Hugdahl’s group found significantly reduced grey matter density in the left peri-Sylvian region, an area of the cerebral cortex that includes Broca’s Area, Wernicke’s Area, and other language-processing structures. Lesions to the so-called peri-Sylvian region of the left superior temporal gyrus can cause loss of language capabilities. The researchers found that “hallucinating patients had significantly reduced grey matter density in the left superior temporal gyrus, the medial prefrontal cortex in peri-ventricular areas, and in the thalamus.” |
| Deep brain stimulation is an area of ongoing research whereby electrodes are surgically inserted into areas of the brain and a pacemaker is pulsed to activate that area. Promising developments have been made for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, Tourette’s Syndrome, phantom limb pain, or refractory major depression utilizing deep brain stimulation. |
| Scientists out of Oxford University have developed a deep brain stimulation protocol for the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, a small center behind the eyes which is believed to have a role in our perception of pleasure associated with food and sex. |
| “A few years ago, a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn’t like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed.” The doctor further comments that a “sex chip” utilizing this technology could be available within 10 years.Read more at brainblogger.com |
The relation between neurochemistry, beliefs and good athletes. Brugger was starting to suspect he had found one of the neurochemical mechanisms for a spiritual belief, but one experiment does not make a theory. His notion got a further boost when NIH geneticist Dean Hamer and other researchers started looking for a gene that encoded for these same spiritual traits. Their search is thoroughly and wonderfully delineated in Hamer’s book The God Gene. The end result of which is the discovery of VMAT2. |
VMAT2 is a gene that regulates the flow of serotonin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and, perhaps most importantly, dopamine in the brain. What they found was that those of us with the specific variation of the VMAT2 gene that ups the brain’s production of these same chemicals are also the people who score highest on the psychological tests for spirituality. |
| But what makes all of this especially relevant to sports stars is that all of the aforementioned neurochemicals do not just regulate spirituality and superstition, but athletic performance as well. Read more at www.psychologytoday.com |
More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.
Wait wait, did he just say the night owls showed no difference in attention-related brain activity and instead, after 10 hours they had grown more alert? This is great! I always worried about that, now seems like I don’t have to, anymore.  | Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner. |
| An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention.Read more at www.scientificamerican.com |
Playing Tetris, the classic eighties video game, can boost the brain’s grey matter, according to a new study.
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“This kind of research is demonstrating the reasons and the conditions under which the brain becomes adaptive and changes,” says Richard Haier, a psychologist and co-investigator in the study, published yesterday in the online journal BMC Research Notes.
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| a group of adolescent girls aged 12 to 15 who practised the puzzle game for 30 minutes a day over the course of three months. Using two brain imaging techniques, the study found that, compared with a control group of girls who did not practise Tetris, playing the game not only improved the brain’s efficiency, it also increased the thickness of the cortex, an area of the brain scientists believe plays a role in the planning of complex, co-ordinated movements. |
“It is a mystery,” Dr. Haier says.
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