Group items tagged

In 2001, there was a need for a science website that was dedicated strictly to neuroscience research news, so NeuroscienceNews.com was started. To this day, the site is an independent science news website focusing mainly on neuroscience and other cognitive sciences.No funds have been taken from governments, grants, pharmaceutical companies, big businesses, banks, schools, or others with possibly conflicting interests, to help with this site at any time.We scour news sources from universities, labs, news agencies, scientists, science publishers, and other science departments. We post full articles, releases, abstracts, and sometimes full research journal papers on our site. We also take submissions from nearly anyone.We attempt to link to the original news releases in our posts. We try to include a link to the research papers discussed in the press release, or article, as well as other information that may be important to our readers. We try to include the full list of authors, journal names, research title and identifiers (doi) under the content of each post.

1. Figure out what fMRI can truly tell us about our brains. 

There’s little question fMRI is valuable, but too many disparate forces are out there spinning brain scans in too many ways. Perhaps one solution, or start of a solution, is a summit hosted by a credible, well-respected institute or organization to gather the best of the best minds in the field to establish a game plan moving forward.

2. Determine what role, if any, neuroscience should play in the courtroom.

One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a professor of psychology at Pomona College in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

But she also finds that if you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember — say someone talks about cherry pits as you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name — suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection. (It also sometimes works to silently run through the alphabet until landing on the first letter of the wayward word.)

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

The research team, led by Seth Grant of the Sanger Institute near Cambridge, England, compiled the first exact inventory of all the protein components of the synaptic information-processing machinery. No fewer than 1,461 proteins are involved in this biological machinery, they report in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience.

Each neuron in the human brain makes an average 1,000 or so connections with other neurons. There are 100 billion neurons, so the brain probably contains 100 trillion synapses, its most critical working part.

The 1,461 genes that specify these synaptic proteins constitute more than 7 percent of the human genome’s 20,000 protein-coding genes, an indication of the synapse’s complexity and importance.