What does the 1960s Beatles hit "Girl" have in common with Astor Piazolla's evocative tango composition "Libertango"?
Probably not much, to the casual listener. But in the mind of one famously eclectic singer-songwriter, the two songs are highly similar. That's one of the surprising findings of an unusual neuroscience study based on brain scans of the musician Sting.
Synapses are the power junctions that allow living creatures to function. Popularly associated with learning and memory, they play a more fundamental role in our existence by regulating everything from breathing, sleeping and waking and other bodily functions.
A new, non-invasive way to track the progression of Parkinson's disease could help evaluate experimental treatments to slow or stop the disease's progression.
University of Florida researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal areas where Parkinson's disease and related conditions cause progressive decline in brain activity.
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was published in the journal Neurology.
Neuroscientists peered into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease and two similar conditions to see how their neural responses changed over time. The study, funded by the NIH's Parkinson's Disease Biomarkers Program and published in Neurology, may provide a new tool for testing experimental medications aimed at alleviating symptoms and slowing the rate at which the diseases damage the brain.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have, for the first time, decoded and predicted the brain activity patterns of word meanings within sentences, and successfully predicted what the brain patterns would be for new sentences.
The link between overconfidence and poor decision making is under the spotlight in an international study by scientists from Monash University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.
People vary widely in their awareness of what they do and don't know, or metacognitive ability, and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance. This often leads to poor decision making with potentially disastrous consequences, according to the report's authors.
A new study indicates that Finland's national tobacco policies seem to be radically reducing the incidence of subarachnoid haemorrhage, the most fatal form of stroke.
Previously it was thought that in Finland approximately a thousand people suffer subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) every year - most of them adults of working age. Up to half of those afflicted die within a year. Subarachnoid haemorrhage is typically caused by a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, which leads to a sudden increase in the intracranial pressure. Smoking is a key risk factor for SAH.
Molecular recognition is fundamental to transcriptional regulation, the primary mechanism by which cells control gene expression. The specificity of this regulation originates in the binding interactions between special regulatory proteins, called transcription factors (TFs), and short regulatory sequences on the DNA, called binding sites. Although each type of TF preferentially binds certain regulatory DNA sequences, evidence shows that this binding specificity is limited, and that TFs bind other noncognate targets, too.
Researchers at Technical University of Munich discovered that our brain actively takes sugar from the blood. Prior to this, researchers around the world had assumed that this was a purely passive process. An international team led by diabetes expert Matthias Tschöp reported in the journal 'Cell' that transportation of sugar into the brain is regulated by so-called glia cells that react to hormones such as insulin or leptin; previously it was thought that this was only possible for neurons.
Humans have evolved a disproportionately large brain as a result of sizing each other up in large cooperative social groups, researchers have proposed.
A team led by computer scientists at Cardiff University suggest that the challenge of judging a person's relative standing and deciding whether or not to cooperate with them has promoted the rapid expansion of human brain size over the last 2 million years.
New research shows that burnout is caused by a mismatch between a person's unconscious needs and the opportunities and demands at the workplace. These results have implications for the prevention of job burnout.
USC researchers have tracked down two Zika proteins potentially responsible for thousands of microcephaly cases in Brazil and elsewhere -- taking one small step toward preventing Zika-infected mothers from birthing babies with abnormally small heads.
DURHAM, N.C. - There's a reason it's called a gut feeling. The brain and the gut are connected by intricate neural networks that signal hunger and satiety, love and fear, even safety and danger. These networks employ myriad chemical signals that include dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter most famous for its role in reward and addiction.
Duke University researchers have shown that manipulating dopamine signaling in the nervous system of the nematode worm C. elegans can control inflammation in the gut.
Neurons that fire together really do wire together, says a new study in Science, suggesting that the three-pound computer in our heads may be more malleable than we think.