Featured series 
Tag: cognitive neuroscience
-
Health
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 age-related decline in mental abilities marked by Alzheimer’s disease. To Bruce Yankner, professor of pathology and neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), it’s pretty clear…
-
Health
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 to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs? Aaron Berkowitz, a Harvard…
-
Health
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 progress. Now, using new research techniques, scientists have shown that a two-molecule aggregate (or dimer) of beta-amyloid protein fragments may play a role in initiating…
-
Science & Tech
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 not only illustrates a new method for studying such phenomena, but also provides the strongest evidence yetobtained against the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP.…
-
Health
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 trumps steak. Without reconsidering the salmon, you place your order — all because of a trait called “transitivity.” “Transitivity is the hallmark of rational economic…
-
Campus & Community
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.
-
Campus & Community
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 and Japanese, even though they don’t known what is being said. Now, Harvard psychologists find that monkeys can draw correct conclusions about novel situations. For…
-
Health
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 activity of these neurons might facilitate the process of decision-making that occurs when someone chooses between different goods. “We have long known that different neurons…
-
Health
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 the nervous system. The findings are reported in the Feb. 16, 2006 Neuron by Misao Higashi, April Duckworth, Aurnab Ghose, Thomas Schwarz, Alan Tenney, David…
-
Health
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 as a flyswatter, or in the laboratory, an electric shock that happens when it smells a certain odor. Now Harvard University biologists have identified a…
-
Campus & Community
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.
-
Health
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 fact, members of the Navajo tribe who regularly use peyote actually scored significantly better on several measures of overall mental health than did subjects from…
-
Campus & Community
Alien abduction claims explained
Abduction stories are strikingly similar. Victims wake up and find themselves paralyzed, unable to move or cry out for help.
-
Health
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 abnormal development and congenital malformations). Among other results, the study, which was carried on frog and chick embryos: • Provides the first molecular support for…
-
Health
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 we all continue to recommend exercising caution when consuming any type of alcohol, our study suggests that moderate consumption might provide older women some cognitive…
-
Health
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 [a severe complication of diabetes].” David C. Henderson, M.D., from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues evaluated 36 non-obese outpatients with schizophrenia…
-
Campus & Community
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 their brains. The region sits near the middle of the brain tucked between regions that have to do with thinking and emotion. It is known…
-
Health
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 cognitive impairment compared to those who were inactive. they also demonstrated the cognitive functioning of someone three-years younger than their actual age. The findings were…
-
Health
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.” Because languages differ in how they approach objects, many scientists suspected that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. That’s wrong,…
-
Health
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 words to create sentences. There is no evidence that animals have a similar system to produce sequences of calls with more expressive meaning. Together with…
-
Health
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 a foot shock. For this fear conditioning to take root in the brain, neurons located in the almond-shaped amygdala must become extraordinarily sensitized to the…
-
Campus & Community
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 a good night’s rest can enhance your performance as much as 20-30 percent. Not all memories, just those of motor skills such as riding a…
-
Health
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 the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory. In fact, the loss of this protein, synaptophysin, is at least as great as that…
-
Health
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 low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought predispose people to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others.” Carson,…
-
Health
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 Medical School. “Once the file has been created, if you don’t hit the ‘save’ button before shutting off the computer it will be lost. Our…
-
Science & Tech
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 represents an effort to link different developmental perspectives on the breakdown of written language. The second attempts to connect converging lines of research from brain-imaging…
-
Health
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 how to eliminate or lower the levels of these proteins in the brain as a potential treatment for the disease. But now researchers believe that…
-
Science & Tech
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 humans have it but no other animals do. That question in turn leads to two major theories of the origin of language. One is the…
-
Health
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,…