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A search of the University Concordia Montreal the link between hormones, attention and learning.
Lack of energy and trouble concentrating? The fault could be hormone based on the results of new research from Concordia University published in the journal Brain and Cognition. This study shows that high levels of estrogen are associated with attention deficit disorder and learning. This is the first article to explain how these disorders can be attributed to the direct effect of hormones on brain structures mature.
“Even if we know that estrogen plays an important role in learning and memory, this is far from consensus,” said Wayne Brake, assistant professor in the Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology at Concordia University and lead author of the study. Thanks to a well-established model of learning called latent inhibition, our results show unequivocally that high levels of estrogen inhibit cognition in female rodents. ”
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Researchers at the University of Granada (UGR) have designed an intelligent system that could speed up the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, using an algorithm for interpretation of brain images with an accuracy of 95%. Progress has been published in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology.
Experts from the University of Granada ensure that the application automates the diagnosis and exceeds the current interpretation of the results of any patient, which is done by looking at pictures taken of the brain and therefore is subject to subjective criteria. The doctors allowed difference of opinion in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.
These difficulties in monitoring and diagnosis based on medical images could not be detected will lead to disease in the initial phase, which precisely provides the best opportunity to treat your symptoms, “says project manager, Javier Ramírez.
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Flies in detail movements are so fast that we humans are impossible to follow. The tiny brain of these aeronautical acrobats processes visual motion in just fractions of a second. There is a mathematical model to predict fairly accurately how the brain can perceive the flies so fast precise movements. However, after 50 years of research, remains a mystery how exactly are interconnected neurons in the brain of the flies.
Scientists from Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have become the first to successfully establish the technical conditions necessary to decode the mechanisms underlying vision of the movement in flies.
Although the number of neurons in flies is comparatively small, are highly specialized, the flow of images processed with great precision as the fly flies. Flies may therefore real-time processing a vast amount of information about the movements they perceive something beyond the reach of current computers, especially if their size is limited to the brain of a fly.
The area of the fly brain that is responsible for motion detection is tiny. That area, one sixth of a cubic millimeter of brain matter contains more than 100,000 neurons, and each has multiple connections with neighboring cells.
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Science has tried for a long time to explain why the brain of a baby is particularly flexible and why it changes so easily. Is it because the babies have to learn a lot? A group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization in Gottingen (Germany), Princeton University (United States) and other institutions, has now proposed a new explanation: Maybe it’s because the brain has yet to grow.
Using a combination of experiments, mathematical models and computer simulations, researchers have shown that neural connections in the visual cortex of cats are restructured during the growth phase and that this restructuring can be explained by recourse to processes capable of organizing themselves . The study was led by Matthias Kaschuba, former fellow of this Institute and now at the University of Princeton.
The brain is constantly changing. The neural structures are not fixed but change with each step of learning and every experience. However, certain areas of the brain of a newborn baby are particularly flexible. In animal experiments, the development of the visual cortex can be strongly influenced in the first months of life, for example, by different visual stimuli.
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These neurons, which could explain our ability to put ourselves in the place of others, had previously been shown that in monkeys.
Some neurons were active not only when one makes a gesture – such as getting a result and put it in his mouth – but also when observing another person perform the same action. Since their discovery, there fifteen years, these neurons – called mirror neurons – have aroused particular interest among neurobiologists, who saw the explanation of our ability to put ourselves in the place of others, to identify his intentions and feelings, in short, the neurobiological explanation of empathy.
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Karalyn Patterson is a renowned scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge (USA), famous for having created a test that bears his name to detect brain pathologies associated with memory loss. British expert visited the Institute of Neurosciences of Castilla y Leon (Incyl) in Salamanca, to explain the background of this test, which serves also to reveal the role of the brain areas involved in memory and language.
Its subject is the brain pathologies that arise after an injury, in particular, try to learn how to affect language and memory in adults, but now works in a progressive disease of memory.
“When I do not mean the memory type of memory that we all understand, about what we did last week, but I mean the name we give to objects. When we use a word, we all know what the subject is concerned, but some people may lose the ability to remember the meaning of a word that identifies objects, people or activities, that is semantic memory, in which we work, “said the expert.
These conditions are very focused on a particular area of the brain, so to understand this kind of problem is also know “what kind of role does this region of the brain in our daily lives,” says Patterson.
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Researchers at the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology are to propose and test a hypothesis about brain treatments that are causing the difficulties in producing sounds of a foreign language learned after infancy.
From their observations, the foreign accent depends on the organization syllabic representations we have of our mother tongue and foreign language. They also show that brain areas associated with this treatment syllabic involve a restricted area of the left front side of the brain. These works are published in journals Psychological Science and Neuroimage.
A speaker who has learned a second language but not a perfect bilingual will often produce the second language with sounds similar to the first, ie with a foreign accent. Many studies have been devoted to the differences between speech and native speech bilingual emphasis.
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The adverse effect of heavy drinking during pregnancy on fetal development is now known: it results in developmental problems causing cerebral generally cognitive and behavioral impairments in children lasting. A study conducted by Elizabeth Sowell, a professor of neurobiology at UC Los Angeles, and published in the Journal of Neuroscience March 17 showed that methamphetamine use during pregnancy has consequences at least as harmful to brain development.
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Gradually, the disease progresses the cells under stress produce a chemical messenger that attracts microglia with inflammatory reactions that lead to the elimination of neurons
Microglia, as is known, is the set of cells responsible for “immune surveillance” of the brain that trigger inflammatory reactions in response to tissue damage and infection. An international team of neuroscientists led by Jochen Herms has shown through a new research how these cells can actually make a decisive contribution to the neuronal loss characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.
Epidemiological surveys have estimated that approximately 18 million individuals around the world suffer from Alzheimer’s and their numbers will grow dramatically.
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The C. elegans, a tiny worm about a millimeter long, not much of a brain, but does have a nervous system consisting for 302 neurons. In the 1970s, a group of researchers in the University of Cambridge decided to create a “wiring diagram” track of how interconnected each of these neurons. Such wiring diagrams have recently been baptized as “connectomics. The connectomics C. elegans, published in 1986, took more a dozen years of hard work to be accomplished. Now a handful of researchers around the world is facing an far more ambitious.
The project in question is to the brain connectomics more Similar to humans and therefore a much higher amount to 302 neurons. The scientists, including several from MIT, are working in the technologies needed to accelerate the slow and laborious process investigators who dealt with the C. elegans used connectomics originally to get that worm. With these technologies, achieving the connectomics think of our animal cousins, and perhaps eventually even try to get human beings. The results of this research could change a substantially the current understanding of the brain.
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