Attention to the Unseen

Natalia Mesa writes: The tiny hippocampus, deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobe, has long resisted easy explanation. Its prominent role in navigation seems at odds with its contributions to episodic memory. It contains cognitive maps of the external world yet also stores abstract relationships between concepts, objects and events. And it actively encodes memories during our waking hours but also replays this information offline during rest. Scientists have long debated how, or even if, the same neural circuits support…

Read More Read More

PsyPost reports: A new study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that different aspects of socioeconomic status are associated with distinct patterns of brain structure, connectivity, and behavior—and these associations can vary depending on whether they occur in early or later stages of life. Drawing on data from more than 4,200 young adults in China, the research provides a detailed look at how family income, neighborhood adversity, and regional economic conditions relate to memory, personality traits, mental health, and brain imaging…

Read More Read More

Luiz Pessoa writes: When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature…

Read More Read More

Washington University in St. Louis: Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have upended the decades-old dogma of how connections between brain cells are rearranged during states of heightened vigilance or attention. The team found that a brain chemical associated with alertness, attention and learning alters brain connectivity and function not by acting directly on neurons, the cells known for their quick transmission of information, but through the work of astrocytes, another, slower-acting type of brain cell…

Read More Read More

Ajdina Halilovic writes: When Todd Sacktor was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the lingering traces of her presence in the house. “There was this missing person — never spoken of — for which I had only one memory.” That memory, faint but enduring, was set in the downstairs den of their home. A young Sacktor asked his…

Read More Read More

Regenerating neurons may be one way to improve cognition. stanislavgusev/RooM via Getty Images By Aswathy Ammothumkandy, University of Southern California; Charles Liu, University of Southern California, and Michael A. Bonaguidi, University of Southern California Your brain can still make new neurons when you’re an adult. But how does the rare birth of these new neurons contribute to cognitive function? Neurons are the cells that govern brain function, and you are born with most of the neurons you will ever have…

Read More Read More

Elena Renken writes: Small may be mightier than we think when it comes to brains. This is what neuroscientist Marcella Noorman is learning from her neuroscientific research into tiny animals like fruit flies, whose brains hold around 140,000 neurons each, compared to the roughly 86 billion in the human brain. In work published earlier this month in Nature Neuroscience, Noorman and colleagues showed that a small network of cells in the fruit fly brain was capable of completing a highly…

Read More Read More

R. Douglas Fields writes: It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight. Now imagine the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an external threat. Would you still feel…

Read More Read More

Science reports: Lack of sleep wreaks havoc on the brain, making us worse learners and disrupting our memory, among other insults. Now, a study in mice suggests some of these effects could stem from changes in how brain cells are connected to one another. In a paper published today in Current Biology, researchers show that just hours of sleep deprivation reduce how many different types of synapses—the places where neurons meet—there are in brain regions associated with learning and memory….

Read More Read More