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Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain — an effort that tests the limits of technology.
Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries — signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Mortifying childhood memories come easily to Candice Broom, a 29-year-old elementary school teacher from Birmingham, Ala.
“Why doesn’t he listen to me?’ “Why can’t he remember what I tell him?”“What is it with him and that remote control?” Sound familiar? Yep, I thought so. It’s not uncommon for women to feel that their partner is not listening to them. This is not to say that all men refuse to listen, but it’s a common enough trend among them to at least raise this issue.
A football player who never competed beyond the college level suffered from a degenerative brain disease previously discovered in former NFL players.
A new international study is endeavoring to apply hard science to one of life’s biggest mysteries — its end. “Most people think of death as a moment,” said the project’s founder, Dr. Sam Parnia. “We’ve found it goes on for a period of time.”
The AWARE (Awareness During Resuscitation) study is harnessing technology to learn whether “out-of-body experiences” really occur. Here are questions and answers about this new international effort to learn what really happens when we die.
Dr. Sam Parnia is founder of the AWARE (Awareness During Resuscitation) study to discover whether “out-of-body experiences” really happen. His research indicates that the brain may continue to be active and aware after flatlining.
Curran: If you think you’ve read it all before when it comes to the aftereffects of concussions on NFL players, think again. It's worse.
Three NFL players announced Monday they will donate their brains and spinal cord tissue to a Boston University medical school program that studies sports brain injuries.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has died at age 77 after battling a brain tumor. He was diagnosed with a malignant glioma after suffering a seizure last May.
Do your friends cover their ears when you sing along with the radio? Does the choir director ask you to lip-sync?
A new study shows that some people are more mentally nimble on sunny days, but have duller brains on cloudy days, regardless of the season. The findings add to growing evidence that the weather affects how we think.
Scientists have found seven key genes in the type of brain tumor affecting Sen. Edward Kennedy that together can predict how aggressive a patient's cancer will be.
Toyota Motor Corp. says it has developed a way of steering a wheelchair by just detecting brain waves, without the person having to move a muscle or shout a command.
One of the earliest primates lived in trees and relied more on smell than vision, a new study indicates. A tiny cousin of the earliest ancestors of humans lived 54 million years ago in what is now Wyoming, researchers report in Tuesday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As Victor Fabry napped in his hospital bed, a quiet symphony filled his room. The steady pulse of a cardiac monitor marked the progress of his mending heart. Over that beat, the swaying strains of a Brazilian guitarist pumped nearly nonstop from a CD player on the shelf.
Ever make a resolution to go out and exercise and end up grabbing a gooey chocolate cupcake instead?
For one day last year I got to be “17 Again,” like the main character in the movie of that title. OK, I didn’t really go back in time, but I did unexpectedly spend around 24 hours in the mindset I had at that age.
Every soldier who's gone to war in the past year paused before leaving to take a brain test — basic math, matching numbers and symbols and identifying patterns to measure response time and accuracy. Now that some of these troops have returned, they're taking a fresh round of tests, all part of a broad effort by the military to better treat head injuries.
When patients had both hands transplanted, their brains re-established connections much more quickly with the left hand than the right, a team of researchers in France reports.
A so-called "smart drug" popular with young people may carry more of an addiction risk than thought, a small government study suggests. Scans of 10 healthy men showed that the prescription drug Provigil caused changes in the brain's pleasure center, very much like potentially habit-forming classic stimulants. Modafinil, the drug's generic name, is sometimes used as an illegal study aid by college students.
A 300-million-year-old fossilized brain has been discovered by researchers studying a type of fish that once lived in what is now Kansas and Oklahoma.
Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Go to any museum and there will be men and women admiring paintings and sculpture. But it turns out they are thinking about the sight differently. Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job, researchers report in Tuesday's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Weight gain is not always just a matter of lacking willpower, but has more to do with how your brain reacts to what it sees, according to a new study by neuroscientists.
BBC News - Mussolini's 'brain and blood for sale on internet'The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet. Alessandra Mussolini, a former showgirl turned MP, said she immediately informed the police when she found out.
Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.
The Teaching Company FREE Video Lecture on Memory and the BrainModern neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new insights into the fascinating ways our brains create and harness the power of memory, so that understanding this process is no longer a mystery. The key to memory lies in the dynamic nature of the synapses in our brains—a
Potential Treatment for Down SyndromeDrugs that boost the chemical messenger norepinephrine in the brain have been shown to alleviate cognitive problems in mice engineered to mirror Down syndrome.
The quest to stop the brain drain - The Boston GlobeIt is possible that is true. The more we exercise our brain the longer it could stay sharp.
First Seed of Metaphysical Viners Group: Signature of consciousness captured in brain scansA telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.
Wireless Phones Can Affect The Brain, Swedish Study SuggestsA study at Örebro University in Sweden indicates that mobile phones and other cordless telephones have a biological effect on the brain.
Mind - Dreams as Anticipation for the State of Being Awake - NYTimes.comIn a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological.
Drug May Help Smokers Quit...Moving to Phase III TrialsThe NicVAX vaccine prompts the immune system to create antibodies that bind to the nicotine molecules in the blood. The now-larger molecules are prevented by their size from crossing the blood-brain barrier.
Dreams as Anticipation for the State of Being Awake"It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams," Dr. Hobson said in an interview. "It's like jogging; the body doesn't remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up.
A Resurgence for Gene Therapyscientists say gene therapy may be on the edge of a resurgence.
This Is Your Brain, on Sofa | Wired Science | Wired.comIt's either the ultimate in couch comfort or a totally bizarre idea dreamed up by a pair of designers obsessed with neuroscience. Either way, the "Brainwave Sofa" is clearly a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture.
Gene Therapy Restores SightThe boy relied on a cane and adults to guide him, and, unable to see blackboard writing, sat in back with a teacher's aide, large-type computer screen and materials in Braille.
Brains: the secret to better schools - thestar.comFrench neuroscientist Bruno della Chiesa met with his country's education minister in Paris to talk about the groundbreaking international movement to link the fields of teaching and brain science.
Brain scanners can tell what you're thinking about Last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, Jack Gallant, a leading "neural decoder" at the University of California, Berkeley, presented one of the field's most impressive results yet.
The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination
The question is not whether more of us should be good citizens, it is how and the answer is inside our own heads. A thoughtful piece from England on the findings of recent brain research and the implication it has for politicians on the Right and the Left.
Ghost In The Brain: An 'Apparition Hemorrhage' To me it looked like a ghost. That's exactly what I thought it was. At first I was thinking, "Is this the angel of death?" I was showing it to my colleagues. They were calling it an "apparition hemorrhage."
IBM Is Building A Computer Which Will Model The Human BrainBlue Brain is an IBM computer built to simulate a human brain. It's powered by 2,000 microchips, each acting as a single neuron, that enable it to execute 22.8 trillion operations per second.
Monkeys Repulsed by CGI Monkey Renderings...Just Like We Were to the Polar ExpressThe response takes its name from a graph ([image in article]) of human emotional response as a function of a depiction's human-likeness.
Confronting Bad Behavior: Is There A Social Payoff?Suppose you are at a busy playground and you hear an 11-year-old using language he didn't learn on Sesame Street. There are plenty of other adults around, but, apparently, not this child's parents. Do you intervene? Does anyone?
Scientists Give Flies False MemoriesBy directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.
Study Finds Brain Waves Surge Moments Before Death: Support for "Out of Body" Experiences?"A study of seven terminally ill patients found identical surges in brain activity moments before death."
We were never meant to read One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on.
Where Religious Belief And Disbelief MeetWhen it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain, is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number?...
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