A dream provides us with a form of overnight therapy, say University of California – Berkeley researchers who have discovered that during dreams our stress chemistry shuts down while the brain processes emotional experiences and takes the painful edge off difficult memories. The new findings offer some of the first insights into the emotional function […]
Everyone has experienced the frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were planning to do in there. The reason, says University of Notre Dame psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky, is that entering or exiting household doorways serves to create “event boundaries” in the mind. Radvansky conducted three experiments – in both real and virtual […]
The brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii, found in an estimated 15 percent of the population, has been found to dramatically increase the production of dopamine, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers.T. gondii has previously been linked to a whole raft of brain disorders and some scientists speculate that the parasite affects human behavior on a […]
Researchers from the University of Missouri have found distinct differences between the facial characteristics of children with autism compared to those of typically developing children. Because the face and brain develop in tandem, with each influencing the other, the researchers believe their findings could further our understanding of the origins of autism. “There is no […]
In a discovery with major implications for treating psychiatric diseases and neurodegenerative disorders, Johns Hopkins neurologists have established that non-dividing brain cells, thought to be inherently stable, can instead undergo large-scale dynamic changes as a result of brain stimulation. Their findings are reported in Nature Neuroscience. Specifically, the researchers found evidence of an epigenetic change […]
A mathematical model that simulates the effects of overconfidence shows that harboring a mistakenly inflated belief that we can easily meet challenges or win conflicts is beneficial in business, sport and war. The developers of the model, from the University of Edinburgh and the University of California, San Diego, use it to simulate the effects […]
Social and physical environments can have a profound effect on metabolic processes, say the scientists behind rodent experiments that showed how an engaging social environment can burn more fat than a treadmill. Researcher Matthew During, of Ohio State University, explained that when mice are given a more engaging place to live with greater opportunities for […]
In a fascinating new study, University of Missouri researchers have shown that contrary to previous research, alcohol doesn’t reduce your awareness of mistakes – it reduces how much you care about making those mistakes. For the study, researcher Bruce Bartholow and his team measured the brain activity of participants aged 21 to 35 as they […]
Scientists at Duke University Medical Center and the University of Melbourne have found that addictive drugs appear to hijack the same nerve cells and connections in the brain that serve a powerful, ancient instinct: our appetite for salt. In the new study, appearing in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team demonstrate […]
The notion that we can intentionally forget unwanted memories has been controversial ever since Freud proposed it at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, neuroimaging experiments show that Freud was correct and we can control what we forget. Swedish researcher Gerd Thomas Waldhauser, from Lund University, carried out the experiments with volunteers who were […]
