Lifeboat Foundation

She cooked up Italian food to protect her noodle!

A 60-year-old woman from the country’s Marche region prepared dozens of delicious stuffed olives while undergoing brain surgery — to reduce the risk of damaging the vital organ, according to a report Wednesday.

As doctors removed a brain tumor from her left temporal lobe, the unnamed patient whipped up 90 of the breaded-and-fried olives in a makeshift kitchen inside the operating room, according to the BBC.

Nootropics and smart drugs are natural or synthetic substances that can be taken to improve mental performance in healthy people.

They have gained popularity in today’s highly competitive society and are most often used to boost memory, focus, creativity, intelligence and motivation.

Here’s a look at the 14 best and how they enhance performance.

At Imperial College we’ve been comparing psilocybin to conventional antidepressants – and the results are likely to be game-changing, says Robin Carhart-Harris.

Speaking requires both sides of the brain. Each hemisphere takes over a part of the complex task of forming sounds, modulating the voice and monitoring what has been said. However, the distribution of tasks is different than has been thought up to now, as an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists and phoneticians at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics Berlin has discovered: it is not just the right hemisphere that analyzes how we speak—the left hemisphere also plays a role.

Until now, it has been assumed that the spoken word arises in the left side of the brain and is analyzed by the right side. According to accepted doctrine, this means that when we learn to speak English and for example practice the sound equivalent to ‘th,’ the left side of the brain controls the motor function of the articulators like the tongue, while the right side analyzes whether the produced sound actually sounds as we intended.

The division of labor actually follows different principles, as Dr. Christian Kell from the Department of Neurology at Goethe University explains: “While the left side of the brain controls temporal aspects such as the transition between speech sounds, the right hemisphere is responsible for the control of the sound spectrum. When you say ‘mother,’ for example, the left hemisphere primarily controls the dynamic transitions between ‘th’ and the vowels, while the right hemisphere primarily controls the sounds themselves.”

Is it possible to rapidly increase (or decrease) the amount of information the brain can store?

A new international study led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) suggests it may be. Their research has identified a molecule that improves brain function and memory recall is improved. Published in the latest issue of Cell Reports, the study has implications for neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, such as autism spectrum disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.

MR-compatible graphene fibre microelectrodes enable full activation pattern mapping during simultaneous deep brain stimulation and functional MRI.

Making rapid decisions on the basis of sensory information is essential to everyday behaviors. Why, then, are perceptual decisions so variable despite unchanging inputs?

Spontaneous neural oscillations have emerged as a key predictor of trial-to-trial

Perceptual variability. New work casting these effects in the framework of models.

It has previously been discovered that tanycytes—cells found in part of the brain that controls energy levels —detect nutrients in food and tell the brain directly about the food we have eaten.

Tanycytes do this by responding to amino acids found in foods, via the same receptors that sense the flavor of amino acids (“umami” taste), which are found in the taste buds of the tongue.

In the paper ‘Hypothalamic tanycytes generate acute hyperphagia through activation of the arcuate neuronal network.’ published today, the 8th June, in the journal PNAS, researchers from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, explain how tanycytes can increase appetite.

Our lungs, bones, blood vessels and other major organs are made up of cells, and one way our bodies keep us healthy is by using protein messengers known as ligands that bind to receptors on the surfaces of cells to regulate our biological processes. When those messages get garbled, it can make us ill with a host of different diseases.