Latest news
We know active learning is better than passive learning, but for the first time a study gives us some idea of how that works. Participants in the imaging study were asked to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer screen. |
Clinical records of 211 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease have revealed that those who have spoken two or more languages consistently over many years experienced a delay in the onset of their symptoms by as much as five years. |
A study involving 68 healthy older adults (65-85) has compared brain activity among four groups, determined whether or not they carry the Alzheimer’s gene ApoE4 and whether their physical activity is reported to be high or low. |
When stroke or brain injury damages a part of the brain controlling movement or sensation or language, other parts of the brain can learn to compensate for this damage. It’s been thought that this is a case of one region taking over the lost function. |
While brain laterality exists widely among animal species, the strong dominance of right-handedness in humans is something of an anomaly. |
An imaging study of 10 illiterates, 22 people who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, has confirmed that the visual word form area (involved in linking sounds with written symbols) showed more activation in better readers, although everyone had similar levels of activation i |
Following a study showing that playing Tetris after traumatic events could reduce memory flashbacks in healthy volunteers, two experiments have found playing Tetris after viewing traumatic images significantly reduced flashbacks while playing Pub Quiz Machine 2008 (a word-based quiz game) increa |
A comparison of the brain and body size of over 500 species of living and fossilised mammals has found that the brains of monkeys grew the most over 60 million years, followed by horses, dolphins, camels and dogs. Those with relatively bigger brains tend to live in stable social groups. |
There are a number of ways experts think differently from novices (in their area of expertise). |
Last month I reported on a finding that toddlers with autism spectrum disorder showed a strong preference for looking at moving shapes rather than active people. |
Many genes have been implicated in autism; one of them is the CNTNAP2 gene. |
If our brains are full of clusters of neurons resolutely only responding to specific features (as suggested in my earlier report), how do we bring it all together, and how do we switch from one point of interest to another? |
In a study in which 14 volunteers were trained to recognize a faint pattern of bars on a computer screen that continuously decreased in faintness, the volunteers became able to recognize fainter and fainter patterns over some 24 days of training, and this correlated with stronger EEG signals fro |
New imaging techniques used on macaque monkeys explains why we find it so easy to scan many items quickly when we’re focused on one attribute, and how we can be so blind to attributes and objects we’re not focused on. |
A rat study using powerful imaging techniques has revealed how an injured brain continues to change long after the original trauma. |
A six-year study involving over 1200 older women (70+) has found that low amounts of albumin in the urine, at levels not traditionally considered clinically significant, strongly predict faster cognitive decline in older women. |
Twice a week for four weeks, female hamsters were subjected to six-hour time shifts equivalent to a New York-to-Paris airplane flight. |