Featured series 
Tag: cognitive neuroscience
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Health
Practice makes perfect
Harvard Medical School researchers conducted a study in which people were taught to type a sequence of keys on a computer keyboard as quickly and accurately as possible. A group trained in the morning and then re-tested 12 hours later were able to improve their performance by about two percent. However, the performance of those…
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Changes in brain shown with learning
Harvard Medical School researchers Vadim Bolshakov, Evgeny Tsvetkov, and Bill Carlezon, based at McLean Hospital, reported with colleagues in the April 11, 2002 issue of the journal Neuron that they have found clear evidence of cause and effect between learning and long-term changes in the brain. Their research focused on how learned fear made changes…
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Meditation dramatically changes body temperatures
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson, who has been studying a meditation technique known as “g Tum-mo” for 20 years, says that “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can…
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Imagination important for children’s cognitive development
Paul Harris, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, says there are two very different ways to define imagination. “You can either see it as disappearing or waning during childhood, or you can see it the way I do, as persisting throughout life,” Harris says. The message in his book, “The Work of the…
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Alien abduction claims examined
Richard McNally, a Harvard professor of psychology, and his colleagues recruited six women and four men who claimed they had been spirited away by extraterrestrials, some of them more than once.
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Researchers find better way to predict childhood brain tumor outcomes
About 2,000 children a year are diagnosed with medulloblastoma, or brain tumor. In a study, researchers examined gene expression patterns from 99 patient tumor samples of three different types of brain tumors. In addition to distinguishing tumor types from each other, the study found strong expression of a signaling protein known as “Sonic Hedgehog,” which…
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Link found between body rhythms and circadian clock, light
The brain’s circadian clock is a tiny cluster of neurons behind the eyes. This cluster of cells sends out signals that control the body’s daily rhythms. New research from Harvard Medical School has started us on the path to understanding better how this process works. The possible implications of understanding how the circadian clock works…
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Study adds to the understanding of musical pitch perception
There are differences in the sounds of two voices or two musical instruments even if they hit the same note, and somehow the brain knows that. A new study shows that the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that interprets sound, is important for frequency processing and pitch perception. The research findings, published in…
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Pain and pleasure activate same brain structures
David Borsook is a Harvard Medical School associate professor of radiology, who both treats patients and conducts research. “Over 15 years of seeing patients with pain it became obvious that we do not have good methods of assessing chronic pain,” Borsook says. “And we do not have good methods for treating it.” So Borsook and…
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“Commoner” in brain crowns the cortex
With its role in higher cognitive functions, the cortex represents a significant evolutionary development in mammals, culminating in the enlarged hemispheres of humans and other primates. In the development of this crowning structure, neurons are guided by factors that are both genetic and environmental. A research team led by Christopher A. Walsh, the Bullard professor…
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How does the brain reinvent itself?
In order for us to use our minds for memory, for learning, and so forth, our brains must continually reinvent themselves. How do they do it? A Harvard Medical School research team has looked at the complicated interactions within nerve cells of ion channels, peptide hormones, growth factors, and a host of regulatory proteins and…
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An alternate take on Alzheimer’s
Much of Alzheimer’s research has focused on the role of a protein, amyloid-beta, found at high levels in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and which coagulates into plaques. Researcher Ashley Bush, a Harvard Medical School associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, believes that something else causes Alzheimer’s dementia: oxidation of trace metals in…
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Circadian rhythms may distinguish Alzheimer’s disease
Researcher David Harper and his colleagues monitored two key components of the circadian system — the rise and fall of core body temperature and the waxing and waning of spontaneous motor activity — in 38 dementia patients with either Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia, frontotemporal degeneration. They found that body temperature reached its…
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Scientists look people in the ‘I’
Harvard researchers seek a scientific answer to a question posed by 16th century philosopher René Descartes: “What is this ‘I’ that I know?” “Understanding the brain essence of self-awareness helps us come closer to understanding what makes us conscious human beings,” says researcher Alvaro Pascual-Leone. “We are able to reflect on ourselves and our actions.…
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Rules for music wired into the brain
“Music is in our genes,” says Mark Jude Tramo, a musician, prolific songwriter, and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Many researchers like myself are trying to understand melody, harmony, rhythm, and the feelings they produce, at the level of individual brain cells. At this level, there may be a universal set of rules that governs…
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How embryonic stem cells become fine-tuned brains
Research by Michael Greenberg, Harvard Medical School professor of neurology at Children’s Hospital, begins to explain how the embryonic brain’s stem cells decide whether to mature into nerve or glial cells as development proceeds. Greenberg and colleagues reported that neurogenin, a protein known to nudge stem cells toward turning into neurons, does so by actively…
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A new reason to sleep on it
In findings published in the December 2000 issue of Nature Neuroscience, a team of Harvard Medical School scientists found that people who stay up all night after learning and practicing a new task show little improvement in their performance. That means that school kids who are cutting back on sleep to finish ever mounting piles…
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Researchers learn to control dreams
For years, scientists have been stymied in their quest to understand dreams because they are unique events that cannot be replicated.
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Arts-to-smarts link overblown, researchers say
“Arts advocates need to stop making sweeping claims about the arts as a magic pill for turning students around academically,” says Lois Hetland, project manager of the largest, most comprehensive study ever conducted on the effects of arts on education. “Arts teachers should not be held responsible for better test scores in math or history.”…
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Cognitive testing of elderly could help detect medical problems
Shari Bassuk, research fellow in the Department of Health and Social Behavior at the Harvard School of Public Health, and her colleagues have found that even mild impairments in areas such as memory and orientation were strongly predictive of mortality among people under the age of 80 years old. “There are major implications for these…
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Researchers face up to liars
What category of people do you think would be best at detecting lies? It’s not Secret Service agents, or psychiatrists, or even mothers. Investigators working at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have found that aphasics — people who, because of stroke or other forms of brain damage, have been robbed of their ability to understand…
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Science & Tech
Professor’s survey method opens ‘windows of consciousness’
Bringing together theories and tools from disciplines ranging from psychology to neuroscience, the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School attempts to define and qualify consumers’ and managers’ thoughts and feelings about an array of ideas, from “loyalty” to “privacy” to “chocolate.” The work is spearheaded by the lab’s co-director, Gerald Zaltman, whose…
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Unlocking the mystery of artistic taste
“Unlike infants, who share innate preferences about shapes and colors, preschoolers already differ in their artistic tastes,” says Kim Sheridan, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Using cognitive development, developmental psychology, art, brain-imaging technology, and education, Sheridan is now trying to unlock the mystery of artistic taste. A year in Kenya…
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Science & Tech
Differences between vowels and consonants are real
While working with colleagues in Rome, two Harvard researchers serendipitously met two women with intriguing speech deficits. As the result of a stroke, one patient could not reproduce the sounds of vowels properly. Another patient experienced the same trouble with consonants. After studying the two women, the Harvard team concluded that the difference between vowels…
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Electromagnets used in treating depression
Recent studies by Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., have enlarged the body of knowledge about a promising, though still experimental, treatment for a variety of psychiatric disorders. The treatment is called “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” and essentially involves placing a powerful electromagnet on a person’s scalp. The electromagnet alters brain activity by inducing…