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The next step: the same capability, sans surgery.

New research looks at distinctive differences in brain connectivity that may underlie autism spectrum disorders (ASD) — and possibly provide much-needed biomarkers to aid in identifying the disorder.

Diagnosis for ASD is still behaviorally based. But getting a diagnosis can take longer due to several factors, including lack of resources and trained clinicians. This delays autism diagnosis, on average, until age 5 or 6.

“Within ASD, two important research questions are: How can we minimize the delay in diagnosis, and what kind of intervention can we give the child?” said Rajesh Kana, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences.

Continue reading “Finding Differences in Brain Connectivity May Aid in Autism Diagnosis” »

Despite unbelievable advances in medical science in recent decades, breast cancer kills. Approximately 1 in 8 American women will develop breast cancer cells during the course of their lifetime.

Finding a cure is imperative, and as such, fervent research continues. At the European Breast Cancer Conference in Amsterdam, scientists presented a pair of drugs with an astounding claim: this treatment can eradicate some types of breast cancer in only 11 days, eliminating the need for chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy, whilst an amazing feat of medical-scientific engineering, is known for its uncomfortable and sometimes debilitating side effects. Women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer treatment may lose their hair, suffer extreme fatigue, and even loss of cognitive function.

Continue reading “No Chemo, No Cancer: Trial Eradicates All Signs of Breast Tumors in Only 11 Days” »

A new study has found that dopamine — a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning — plays a direct role in the reward experience induced by music. The new findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In everyday life, humans regularly seek participation in highly complex and pleasurable experiences such as music listening, singing, or playing, that do not seem to have any specific survival advantage. Understanding how the brain translates a structured sequence of sounds, such as music, into a pleasant and rewarding experience is thus a challenging and fascinating question,” said study author Laura Ferreri, an associate professor in cognitive psychology at Lyon University.

“In the scientific literature, there was a lack of direct evidence showing that dopamine function is causally related to music-evoked pleasure. Therefore in this study, through a pharmacological approach, we wanted to investigate whether dopamine, which plays a major role in regulating pleasure experiences and motivation to engage in certain behaviors, plays a direct role in the experience of pleasure induced by music.”

Continue reading “Listening to the music you love will make your brain release more dopamine, study finds” »

Too many people have forgotten what it’s like to live in a time where everyone got the measles. The vaccine was invented in 1963, and by 1968 cases in the U.S. had already dropped. By the ’70s it was downright rare to get measles as a child, when just a decade or so earlier it had been uncommon not to get it. By 2000, the U.S. declared the disease eliminated—rare cases always came from outside the country. But 2019 has begun with some of the worst outbreaks we’ve seen in recent years, and it’s crystal clear to researchers why the measles is coming back: we got lax about vaccines.

Thanks in part to a famous, fraudulent study claiming to link the MMR vaccine (that’s for measles, mumps, and rubella) to autism, parents across the country have been dissuaded from fully vaccinating their children. The measles virus infects nearly everyone it comes in contact with, so our main protection from it comes from herd immunity—you need upwards of 95 percent of a population to be vaccinated against it to avoid harboring pockets of the virus.

But in recent years, thanks to state laws that allow parents religious and/or philosophical belief exemptions, those rates have been dropping. It’s only by a few percentage points, but remember: we need to stay above 95 percent. The same thing is happening in Europe, where several countries have dipped below that mark or even lower, into the high 80’s. Even a few percentage points can make a difference—Europe saw one of its worst years for measles cases on record, with tens of thousands falling ill from a completely preventable disease.

A new paper offers a broad challenge to a certain kind of ‘grand theory’ about the brain. According to the authors, Federico E. Turkheimer and colleagues, it is problematic to build models of brain function that rely on ‘strong emergence’.

Two popular theories, the Free Energy Principle aka Bayesian Brain and the Integrated Information Theory model, are singled out as examples of strong emergence-based work.

Continue reading “How Emergent is the Brain?” »

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As important as sleep is for health, happiness, and performance, it really is a time suck. Those eight or so hours when we lose consciousness may be restorative, but just think of what we could accomplish if we could actually put them to productive use. Scientists believe that we can use these unconscious hours to begin to learn new facts or languages in our sleep, as long the information is presented in the right way.

In his paper published Thursday in Current Biology, University of Bern neuropsychologist Marc Züst, Ph.D., presents evidence that it’s actually possible to form new “semantic connections” at specific moments during the sleep cycle. These, he explains, are associations between two words that we use to help encode new information and give words context. For instance, when we hear the word “winter,” we think of cold temperatures, skiing, or, most recently, polar vortices. In his study, Züst found that the brain can actually learn to make these associations if we hear two words paired together at certain times within the sleep cycle.

“Humans are capable of sophisticated information processing without consciousness,” Züst tells Inverse. “Sleep-formed memory traces endure into the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to foreign words, even though you think you’ve never seen that word before. It’s an implicit, unconscious form of memory — like a gut feeling.”

Continue reading “Learning Language in Deep Sleep Isn’t Just Science Fiction Anymore” »

Research has revealed the cluster of neurons that helps the brain’s internal GPS remember key landmarks. It is hoped that the findings will provide insight into a range of psychiatric disorders.