Psychiatric Symptoms May Signal Brain Damage From Diet Pills
...nger chemicals like serotonin and form synapses -- connections with other neurons. Fenfluramines damage serotonin-secreting neurons by pruning these axons, which do not grow back in monkeys, although studies show that they do in rodents. And since human brains are more like those of monkeys, any such damage i...Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Enhances Short-Term Brain Plasticity
...resulted from short-term strengthening of specific connections betweenneurons, rather than from sprouting of new connections, Dr. Cohen says. "Newtechniques or a reformulation of existing techniques might be able to inducemore lasting effects," he adds. For example, long-term TMS or drug therapy,combined with ......rts thatbabies essentially form all the nerve-cell connections in the brain required tocomprehend the sounds of their native language by the time they are a year old,even if they cannot yet vocalize their words. In an effort to understandfurther how the infant brain wires itself to incoming language information...Study Ties Cerebral Palsy To Inflammation And Blood-Clotting Abnormalities
...that then act as toxins, damagingneurons and their connections in the developing brain. Cytokine abnormalitiesmight also reflect underlying genetic or environmental factors that affect thebrain. Because the levels of some cytokines were strongly related to development of CP,testing for abnormally high concentra...Now Is Time To Design Brain-Saving Drugs Specifically For Children, UCSF Neurologist Says
...o develop andchange, as some neurons grow and make connections and others are pared away.When children's brains are damaged by a disease or an accident, the effect canbe widespread, because the injury can alter a whole stage of brain development. That also means that drugs must be designed to avoid damaging the...Brain Activity Differs In Introverts And Extroverts, UI Study Shows
...extroverts. This is the first study to reveal the connections between activity of thethalamus and introversion and extroversion, said Debra L. Johnson, Ph.D., UIassistant research scientist in psychology and the study's lead investigator."We found more evidence that people might be shy or outgoing because of th...New Book Says Cross-Train Your Brain To Increase Mental Function
... Basically, brain cells learn by making new connections with one another,growing tendril-like connections called dendrites, said Katz and Rubin, seniorcreative supervisor at K2 Design in New York City and t......es are encoded in the changing strengthof synaptic connections in the brain, that is, in the effectiveness with whichone neuron in the brain communicates with another. As the human cerebral cortexcontains about 1014 (100 trillion) synapses, a lot of information could bestored. Understanding how memory works is o...Discussion about learning processes reopens
...ption that boththe number of nerve cells and their connections in the human brain areimmutable. However, over the past decades a growing body of evidence revealedthat even the adult brain is able to reorganize and optimize its microstructureand internal connections. For instance, it has been possible to optimize...Immunology experiment aboard historic shuttle mission
...s studies. Acton became interested and helped make connections withBioServe Space Technologies in Colorado. BioServe schedules and helps preparecommercial payloads for spaceflight. "The advantage of going through a commercial enterprise is you can get aflight," Acton said. "If we went through the NASA sp...Study reveals how brain controls eating in normal rats
... shown these leptin-sensitive cells have hardwired connections to key cells in another region of the hypothalamus that control the urge to eat. In the medial hypothalamus, leptin activates "anorectic" nerve cells, which release appetite-suppressing neuropeptides. At the same time, leptin inhibits another grou...Scientists provide first detailed maps of wiring circuitry in the living human brain
...w information on the orderly patternof these fiber connections and may one day lead to improvements in brainsurge... that, scientists may be able to identify abnormal connections betweenbrain areas that might be important in diseases such as schizophrenia." The study, pu...UI study suggests variable effects of fetal alcohol syndrome on brain
...ntake can increase the number of cellscontributing connections passing through corpus callosum in offspring." The contradiction motivated Miller and two University of Washington researchersto investigate how fetal alcohol syndrome affects the corpus callosum inmacaques, primates that closely resemble humans. The...Novel neural net recognizes spoken words better than human listeners
...rule that allows thetemporal properties of the net connections to change. The USC research was funded by the Office of Naval Research; the DefenseDepartment's Advanced Research Projects Agency; the National Centers forResearch Resources, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The universityhas applied for......urites--dendrites andaxons--which make millions of connections from birth up until adolescence, whenthe connections in the cerebral cortex begin to stabilize. As stabilizationoccurs, long term memory is acquired, al...Northwestern researchers present findings at Neuroscience Meeting
...GDNF gene therapymaintained over 50 percent of the connections between the substantia nigra, thearea of brain tha...rkinson's disease, and the striatum, whichreceives connections from the substantia nigra. The animals that did not receivethe gene therapy maintained only 25 perce...Personal story aims to improve 'connections' between hard of hearing and the hearing world
...things go, we'll miss out on conversations, social connections that are really at the heart of relationships." Stenross, who taught sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 19 years before accepting an administrative position earlier this year, found that she has a high frequency hearing ......wly generated cells to mature and make appropriate connections provides an explanation for the 'therapeutic lag' in antidepressant therapy," Jacobs told the meeting. Jacobs thinks serotonin could also help to treat other neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's. But he cautions that it probably won't be of us......arning and memory. Using the large nerve cells and connections of squid, the scientists devised a form of electrical recording that for the first time allowed them to observe the activity of mitochondria inside the synaptic terminal of a neuron, where information is passed from one neuron to the next. "The effec...Brains of those in certain professions shown to have more synapses
...ic countof brain cells (neurons) and synapses (the connections between neurons) in 16 healthy people. Basedon fa... store thisinformation in the form of new synaptic connections between neurons," Black said. No significant differences were found in the subjects' occipital cort...