Posts Tagged ‘research on brain’
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 »
It is well known that people enjoyed the sensual caresses, but it was not clear so far is that some parts of the brain react with the same intensity to see another person being touched, as new research reveals.
Be gently caressed by another person is an experience both physically and emotionally. But the way they caress and the reaction it causes in the brain constitute a science.
A group of researchers of the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, the Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has studied how the brain reacts to touch. The study subjects were measured by magnetic resonance imaging blood flow in the brain while being stroked slowly or quickly with a soft brush. As expected, the brain reacted more strongly to the slow strokes. Read the rest of this entry »
You could say that some people feel the need to pet any dog, cat or other animal they see on the street, while others simply startle appear on the screen to see a shark or a snake.
Whether you belong to the first group, and the second as the space between them, their reaction to the animals is based largely on a specific region of your brain that is prepared to rapidly detect non-human creatures. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) enrolled 41 patients with epilepsy in Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Read the rest of this entry »
A pianist plays a song that we do not know without score. How do we use the brain to decide whether this melody is improvised or only commands?
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, studied jazz musicians in order to discover which brain areas are particularly sensitive to the characteristics of improvised performance, at least in music.
Peter Keller and Annerose Engel from the institute mentioned above, investigated the brain activity of those jazz musicians while they listened to bits of improvised melodies and tested versions of the same tracks. Read the rest of this entry »
Brain responses to personalized messages used to quit smoking can predict the likelihood that someone will get four months later. So says a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Predictive responses are specifically in the areas of the brain that are activated when thinking about oneself, as the authors of the study, a team from the University of Michigan (USA), led by Hannah Faye Chua.
The scientists studied a group of 91 smokers who participated in a program to quit this harmful habit. Volunteers receive messages as they urged them to quit, making references to the individual’s life, needs and interests, as well as specific barriers to behavior change. Read the rest of this entry »