It’s a neurotransmitter thing

Wayne Chen's lab at UCalgary identifies a way to interrupt and prevent progression of devastating condition

The happiness neurotransmitter serotonin can act as a growth factor for the stem cells in the fetal human brain that determine brain size.

Dopamine and serotonin are brain chemicals implicated in a range of neurological disorders including Parkinson’s and depression, so understanding how they work could be key to the development of more effective treatments for these conditions.

After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

MANY OF US BELIEVE WE ARE MASTERS OF OUR OWN DESTINY, but new research is revealing the extent to which our behavior is influenced by our genes. It’s now possible to decipher our individual genetic code, the sequence of 3.2 billion DNA “letters” unique to each of us, that forms a blueprint for our brains and bodies.

A number of studies have shown how playing video games can lead to structural changes in the brain, including increasing the size of some regions, or to functional changes, such as activating the areas responsible for attention or visual-spatial skills. New research from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has gone further to show how cognitive changes can take place even years after people stop playing.

Critics doubt that Emotiv's earphone-style sensors can reliably track things like stress and attention—and some worry the technology will become yet another form of workplace surveillance.

Achieving the next level of brain-computer interface (BCI) advancement, researchers at the University of Helsinki used artificial intelligence (AI) to create a system that uses signals from the brain to generate novel images of what the user is thinking and published the results earlier this month in Scientific Reports.

Prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to severe health problems in humans and other animals. But why is sleep so vital to our health? A UCLA-led team of scientists has made a major advance in answering this question and has shown for the first time that a dramatic change in the purpose of sleep occurs at the age of about 2-and-a-half.

Computers and phones have become the go-to note-taking method for many. But your brain benefits from an old-fashioned pen and paper.

The reasons are different. They include, for example, stress through circulatory, respiratory, trauma, eating problems, and simply incorrect sleep hygiene, by which we mean a general set of factors that are not conducive to successful sleep, such as too much blue light being emitted by electronic devices before the planned sleep. Sometimes sleep disorders are short-term and occasional and the body makes up for the lack of sleep quite quickly.

A new study reveals how video games can influence cognitive changes even after years of not playing them.

Quite a few online articles suggest that spouses’ faces start to resemble each other more with the passage of time. Even a fair amount of psychological literature makes the same claim, perhaps most notably one widely-cited paper from 1987.

Technology could enable new health diagnostics and achieve Elon Musk's goal of integrating with artificial intelligence

After centuries of misunderstanding, research has finally tied the speech disorder to certain genes and brain alterations — and new treatments may be on the horizon

A robust new study from researchers at UC Berkeley has found a consistent association between poor sleep and greater accumulation of the toxic proteins thought to be the pathological cause of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers suggest fragmented sleep could be an effective early way to predict…

The way we decide may even give insight into delusional thinking

The brain cells of a young man who died almost 2,000 years ago in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius have been found intact by a team of researchers in Italy.

Your iPhone addiction might be creating physical changes in your brain, according to a new study. Researchers looked into smartphone addiction and how it correlates to structural and functional changes in the brain. They conducted MRI scans on 48 people, 22 of whom had smartphone addiction (SPA). The study found that SPA alters the brain in a way similar to what doctors see in drug addicts. The findings only get worse from there.