An unprecedented study of brain plasticity and visual perception found that people who, as children, had undergone surgery removing half of their brain correctly recognized differences between pairs of words or faces more than 80% of the time. Considering the volume of removed brain tissue, the surprising accuracy highlights the brain’s neuroplasticity– and its limitations […]
Long disregarded as a party drug, loved by hippies and alternative thinkers, LSD has been recently demonstrated to be much more than that, being useful as an anti-depressive and in therapy against PTSD and other traumas. Now, another “power” of LSD has been uncovered: it potentiates brain plasticity, thereby improving memory and other cognitive processes […]
How to breed more intelligent humans? This is a difficult question, one which raises numerous issues, both ethical and scientific. Would you give your eyesight away to become brighter? As crazy as this question may sound, a blinding mutation might increase intelligence. The CORD7 (cone-rod dystrophy 7) mutation of the RIMS1 gene produces progressive blindness […]
For a long time, it was thought that dreaming occurred in the rapid eye movement phase of sleep (REM sleep). It is now well established that it can occur at any stage of sleep and, therefore, is not exclusive to a specific global vigilance state. Today, there is no known physiological correlate of a dream […]
Intermittent fasting is more than the latest diet fad, it has proven benefits –at least in animal models– against longevity, and it appears that it could even improve nerve regeneration, according to new research. The problems with axons in the peripheral nervous system is that their regenerative capacity is not very high. There are certain […]
Modelling of neuron-glial interactions is an emerging field of Computational Neuroscience. The ubiquity of these interactions and the possibility that they may occur within the time and spatial scales that are usually ascribed to neuronal and synaptic function, calls for a revision of current neuron-based modeling paradigms to include potentially relevant effects mediated by glial […]
A common saying refers to the power of the eyes as a window inside our souls; interestingly, our eyes could also be a window into our brains, helping identify certain neurological conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent work published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found distinct electrical recording signatures […]
A single MRI scan of the brain using standard equipment could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, according to new results. The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer’s. The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that […]
Humans are unrivalled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers. Our understanding of brain function has […]
Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 […]