Archive for the ‘Medicine’ Category
Apart from specific brain diseases, brain undergoes normal wear and aging. Memory, in its various facets, is one of the mental skills that suffer more with advancing age. In new research, we analyzed now what brain components fail more memory with aging. The results have been somewhat unexpected.
Judging from the evidence obtained in previous studies, everything seemed to indicate that spatial memory would be most affected by aging. But instead of this, the Wisconsin researchers have found that the aging brain seems to be more likely to lose its ability to react to signs that indicate when it’s time to stop, even momentarily, the task you are working for move to another address.
Anyway, this is consistent with the difficulty for older people to do several things at once, and explain the precise cause. The team of Mark Laubach, Faculty of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was studying the impact of aging on working memory, the type of memory that allows us to remember that dinner is cooking as we speak by phone, and we can not leave it too long to fire or burn. Read the rest of this entry »
How the brain coordinates the creation of one hundred billion cells, each with specific functions? Nature tends to do without problems, but for the scientific community this wonder has always been involved in mystery. Recently, a team of researchers at the Linkoping University, Sweden, has moved a step closer to clearing up this mystery.
It is necessary to understand the mechanisms that diversify to maintain neurons and diversified, as this knowledge will be essential for in a not too distant future perhaps, to grow nerve cells to use them as parts of other, as Mattias Alenius says, professor of neuroscience at the Linkoping University.
Alenius and his research team at the Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine seek the answer to this important question from a more localized: the olfactory system of the fruit fly. Read the rest of this entry »
It is known that different areas of the brain specialize in different senses, including vision, smell, and touch. But the work of a brain region need not always be isolated from the work of others.
A spectacular demonstration of this last has recently become to see, for the first time, activate the visual cortex of the brain with a small amount of electrical stimulation improves the sense of smell.
The team of Dr. Christopher Pack, the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, Canada, and colleagues from McGill University in the same country and the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, USA, proposed the idea to check that activation of brain regions devoted mainly to a sense could influence the processing of data from other senses. Read the rest of this entry »
A new three-dimensional image of the neural connections that map shows roads in a grid, allowing the organization at multiple scales. “More than a century trying to explain the anatomy of brain connections”, said Van J. Wedeen, associate professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School (USA).
Wedeen published this week in Science the way in which neurons are opened step by the brain. “This is a beautiful crossing pattern is like a cloth of gold in three dimensions”, he says excitedly. This brain map is ‘drawn’ by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The images obtained ‘track’ the nerve cells of the gray matter, which is entangled in the fibers and cables of the white matter.
The scientist said that if, in its way neurons were bystanders of a big city like New York, avenues and streets of Manhattan elevators need to build the third dimension of the district of the Big Apple. Read the rest of this entry »
Each body part has its own area of nerve cells in the brain. We can say therefore that we have a map of our body in our head. It is not known for sure how important are these maps, but a new study may help to estimate it more safely, and also provides a more detailed explanation of the low reaction rate of the middle finger.
The researchers undertook the study subjects a simple task to measure the speed of decision: they showed a picture on a monitor representing the ten fingers. If one finger marking appeared, subjects had to press a corresponding key as quickly as possible with that finger.
The thumb and little finger were the fastest. The middle finger was the slowest. You might think that this difference is due to anatomical causes or exercise-dependent which gives each finger as compared to others. Read the rest of this entry »
A study conducted by King’s College London, in England, found that children as young as three months old can recognize a different set of sounds made by humans, such as coughing or laughing.
However, the most significant of the research is that after several experiments it was found that newborns are able to detect even if the sounds are emotional charge as sadness. One of the directors of the report, Anna Blasi said that this is probably due to the human voice is an important social reference that the brain shows early specialization for processing.
Analyses were performed using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of 21 babies between three and seven months old while they were sleeping. During sleep, the infants were exposed to a series of neutral human sounds such as coughing or yawning, and sounds of water toys. Read the rest of this entry »
For the many people with diabetes that there is in the world (it is calculated that only in the United States there is 26 million), the habitual way to verify its levels of glucose is being extracted blood. It is an invasive method and produces, although be little, something of pain.
A team of investigators is working in a new sensor that can determine the levels of sugar in the blood by means of a measurement of the concentrations of glucose in the saliva.
The technique takes advantage of advances in the nanotechnology as well as in the surface plasmon. The team, of the University Brown in the United States, created by means of engraving thousands of plasmonic interferometers in a biochip of the size of a nail, and used this to measure the present glucose molecules concentration in a sample of water. Its results indicate that this biochip can detect levels of similar glucose to the presents in the human saliva. Read the rest of this entry »
A new and fascinating investigation suggests that can be possible to use technology that act on the brain to achieve things as for example to learn to touch the guitar, to reduce the mental stress or to improve the aim, with little or no conscious effort, a technological capacity that seems in concept to it shown in the movies of the saga of “Matrix” and in other histories of science fiction.
The experiments carried out in the Boston University in United States, and the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan, have shown that through the person’s visual cortex, researchers using brain interest patterns obtained through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can induce bosses of mental activity in the brain of the subject, of such way that those bosses agree with them exhibited in certain states mental associates to the execution of the tasks that intends to teach, and improve the efficiency of the apprentice with that task. Read the rest of this entry »
When a person breaks his arm and let it hang motionless, his brain regions occupied other arm activities increase in size, while decreasing the related disabled members. A study by the University of Zurich shows that immobilization induces rapid reorganization of the sensor motor system.
The human brain is an organ in constant evolution. For example, if it is reduced sensation and mobility of some parts of the body, plastically transforms to adapt to new conditions. A group of researchers at Zurich of University have studied how brain structure changed from 10 right-handers who had broken his right arm and had to wear a splint or cast for at least 14 days.
After immobilizing we note a reduction in the amount of the white and grey matter on the left side of the brain. In addition, it increased motor skills of the left hand, which are related to an increase of these substances in the right-hand motor area. Read the rest of this entry »
Although many mental illnesses occur only in humans, animals sometimes exhibit abnormal behaviors similar to those seen in people with certain psychological disorders.
Now researchers at California Institute of Technology have found that mice lacking a gene encoding a particular protein present in brain synapses show a set of abnormal behaviors similar to those occurring in humans with schizophrenia, and as in people suffering from autism spectrum disorders.
Mary Kennedy’s team observed the effect in mice that lack the gene for a protein has densina-180, abundant in brain synapses, which are the connections between a neuron and electrochemical other connections that allow networking between them. Read the rest of this entry »