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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.

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.

In addition, the observation that the "noisiest" neurons have a survival advantage helps explain the prevalence of epilepsy, in which some neurons become hyperactive and fire in an uncontrollable fashion.

during childhood, when many neurons are still being added to the brain, it is likely that neurons that become pathologically hyperactive will be preferentially selected for survival, and these abnormal neurons will be the trigger for epilepsy,

Investigating the molecular signals launched by neuronal activity will potentially lead to new drugs that bolster the survival of new neurons. These drugs could be used to increase the efficacy of treatments that depend on grafting stem cell-derived neurons into the adult brain to treat neurological diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.

Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.

"We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."

You probably haven't realizd it, but as you acquire an ability – for example, the ability to read – you have actually created a system in the brain that does not exist, that's not in place, in the non-reader. It [the ability; the brain system that controls the ability] actually evolves in you as it has been acquired through experience or learning.

"There are some very useful exercises at www.BrainHQ.com that are free, and using them can give a person a better understanding of how exercising your brain can drive it in a rejuvenating direction. Using exercises at BrainHQ, most people, of any age, can drive sharp improvements in brain speed and accuracy, and thereby rewire the brain so that it again represents information in detail," he says.

Children operating in the 10th to 20th percentile of academic performance are commonly able to improve their scores to the middle or average level with 20-30 hours of intensive computer-based training. "That's a big difference for the child," he says. "It carries most children who are near the bottom of the class, on the average, to be somewhere in the middle or above average in the class. And that gives struggling children a chance to really succeed and in many cases excel in school."