Tag: cognitive neuroscience
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Nation & World
Did rapid brain evolution make humans susceptible to Alzheimers?
Of the millions of animals on Earth, including the relative handful that are considered the most intelligent — including apes, whales, crows, and owls — only humans experience the severe…
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Nation & World
The Improvising Brain
What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment…
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Nation & World
Scientists isolate a toxic key to Alzheimer’s disease in human brains
Scientists have long questioned whether the abundant amounts of amyloid plaques found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s actually caused the neurological disease or were a by-product of its…
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Nation & World
Neuroimaging fails to demonstrate ESP is real
Psychologists at Harvard University have developed a new method to study extrasensory perception that, they argue, can resolve the century-old debate over its existence. According to the authors, their study…
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Nation & World
Transitivity, the orbitofrontal cortex, and neuroeconomics
You study the menu at a restaurant and decide to order the steak rather than the salmon. But when the waiter tells you about the lobster special, you decide lobster…
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Nation & World
Bad times make for more accurate memories
Pleasurable experiences are more fun to relive than negative ones, but a new study by psychologists at Harvard University reveals that memories of good times can be less accurate than those of bad times.
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Nation & World
Monkey see, monkey infer
Monkeys keep turning out to be smarter than people think they are. Researchers have shown that they can count to four and are aware of differences between languages like Dutch…
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Nation & World
Attention shoppers: Researchers find neurons that encode the value of different goods
Researchers at Harvard Medical School report in the April 23, 2006 issue of Nature that they have identified neurons that encode the values that subjects assign to different items. The…
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Nation & World
Ancient molecules guide new synapse growth
Recent research has shifted the understanding of a group of specialized molecules in the extracellular matrix, recasting them from scaffolding only to key cue-providers that help guide the formation of…
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Nation & World
Long-term memory controlled by molecular pathway at synapses
Even for a fruit fly, learning and memory are important adaptive tools that facilitate survival in the environment. A fly can learn to avoid what may do it harm, such…
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Nation & World
Waking up to how we sleep and dream
The Oct. 27, 2005 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature devotes almost 40 pages to bringing readers up-to-date on what happens during sleep. Three of the articles are by Harvard Medical School scientists who discuss such things as an on-off sleep switch, and learning while we sleep.
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Nation & World
Study: No psychological or cognitive deficits from peyote
Researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital report that Native Americans who use the hallucinogen peyote regularly in connection with religious ceremonies show no evidence of brain damage or psychological problems. In…
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Nation & World
Alien abduction claims explained
Abduction stories are strikingly similar. Victims wake up and find themselves paralyzed, unable to move or cry out for help.
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Nation & World
Brain chemical serotonin involved in early embryo patterning
A study published in the May 10, 2005, Current Biology has ramifications for neuroscience, developmental genetics, evolutionary biology and, possibly, human teratology (a branch of pathology and embryology concerned with…
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Nation & World
One alcoholic drink per day improves cognitive function among older women
According to the study’s senior author, BWH’s Francine Grodstein, Sc.D., “Much evidence has demonstrated the heart benefits of light alcohol drinking, but less research has focused on cognitive functioning. While…
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Nation & World
Anti-psychotic drugs may be associated with increased risk of diabetes in schizophrenia patients
According to the article’s background information, “Recently, the newer ‘atypical’ antipsychotic agents have been linked to several forms of morbidity, including obesity; hyperlipidemia; type 2 diabetes mellitus; and diabetic ketoacidosis…
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Nation & World
Discovering how we appreciate a loss
A committee of psychiatrists, surgeons, ethicists, and others decided that the only course left for five people with otherwise untreatable mental disorders was to cut out a certain area of…
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Nation & World
Walking improves cognitive functions in older women
In a study, elderly women who engaged in the most activity — for example, walking at least 6 hours per week — had a 20 percent decrease in risk of…
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Nation & World
Which comes first, language or thought?
“Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects,” says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. “These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later.”…
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Nation & World
Monkeys unable to master grammar crucial to human language
Grammar is essentially a system of rules for taking a finite set of discrete elements and combining them into a limitless range of novel expressions. For humans, grammar cobbles together…
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Nation & World
Keeping synapses clean may hold key to fear-conditioning
As readers of introductory psychology texts know, animals easily learn to fear a harmless stimulus, such as a tone, if that stimulus is paired with a painful one, such as…
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Nation & World
New stage of memory found
It’s been known for a while that sleep helps consolidate certain memories; that’s probably a major purpose of sleep. But the latest experiments by Harvard Medical School researchers show that…
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Nation & World
Adolescent stress can change brain during adulthood
Researchers found that adult rats exposed to a social stress during adolescence (ages approximating 13 to 15 years in humans) showed a significant decrease in a specific protein found in…
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Nation & World
The links between creativity, intelligence, and mental illness
“Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers,” notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. “Our research results indicate that…
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Nation & World
Stages of memory described in study
“To initiate a memory is almost like creating a word processing file on a computer,” explains researcher Matthew Walker, instructor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard…
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Nation & World
Painting a new picture of how we learn to read
The research of Tami Katzir, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, centers on reading development and reading breakdown. Her interests revolve around three connected areas: The first…
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Nation & World
Alzheimer’s disease: New theory on how it damages brain
Studies have shown that the buildup in the brain of certain toxic proteins, called amyloids, leads to the emergence of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Research has traditionally focused on…
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Nation & World
Researchers debate origin of language
Birds sing, chimps grunt, and whales whistle, but those sounds fall far short of expressing the richness of their experiences. Their lack of language goes to the question of why…
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Nation & World
Starship memories
Psychologists are at odds over the idea that people can forget traumatic events then “recover” intact memories of the trauma years later. On one side are clinicians, who observe that painful memories can be repressed, banished from a trauma survivor’s consciousness until they’re “recovered” with the help of certain psychotherapeutic techniques in adulthood. Memory researchers,…