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The US team believe the "waste removal system" is one of the fundamental reasons for sleep. Their study, in the journal Science, showed brain cells shrink during sleep to open up the gaps between neurons and allow fluid to wash the brain clean. They also suggest that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders. Their findings build on last year's discovery of the brain's own network of plumbing pipes - known as the glymphatic system - which carry waste material out of the brain.

Study: Oreo Cookies As Addictive As Cocaine Research Indicates High Fat, High Sugar Foods Trigger Pleasure Center In Brain October 15, 2013 4:59 PM NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – Research out of Connecticut College shows that “America’s Favorite Cookie” may be as addictive as cocaine. Connecticut College psychology professor Joseph Schroeder and four students studied in rats whether high fat, high sugar foods can be as addictive as drugs of abuse. The research looked at the behaviors and the effects the cookies had on the brain. “We found that the behavior they exhibited was equally strong for Oreo cookies as it...

“Fascinating,” says medical resuscitation expert Sam Parnia of a recent PLOS One study finding highly unexpected electrical activity in the hippocampus of one man, and 26 cats, with flat-lined “isoelectric” electroencephalograms (EEGs). The isoelectric flat line—so popular in movies and on TV shows—helps determine if patients are in a brain death they can’t recover from.

New guidance for psychologists will acknowledge that adolescence now effectively runs up until the age of 25 for the purposes of treating young people. So is this the new cut-off point for adulthood? "The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult just doesn't quite ring true," says child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, who works at London's Tavistock Clinic. "My experience of young people is that they still need quite a considerable amount of support and help beyond that age." Child psychologists are being given a new directive which is that the age range they work with is increasing from 0-18...

Adolescence no longer ends when people hit 18, according to updated guidelines being given to child psychologists. The new directive is designed to extend the age range that child psychologists can work with from 18 years old up to 25. It is hoped the initiative will stop children being 'rushed' through their childhood and feeling pressured to achieve key milestones quickly, reports the BBC.

It’s an inconvenient truth of aging: In our 30s and up, it gets increasingly harder for most of us to recall names, faces, and details from the past. Scientists have long debated whether this gradual decline is an early form of Alzheimer’s disease—a neurodegenerative condition that leads to severe dementia—or a distinct neurological process. Now, researchers have found a protein that distinguishes typical forgetfulness from Alzheimer’s and could lead to potential treatments for age-related memory loss. Previous studies have shown that Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory loss involve different neural circuits in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure in the brain...

Cross-section of miniature human brains termed cerebral organoids Miniature "human brains" have been grown in a lab in a feat scientists hope will transform the understanding of neurological disorders.The pea-sized structures reached the same level of development as in a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought.The study, published in the journal Nature, has already been used to gain insight into rare diseases.Neuroscientists have described the findings as astounding and fascinating. The human brain is one of the most complicated structures in the universe. Scientists at Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now reproduced some...

Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work on what is now commonly known as right brain-left brain thinking. Sperry theorized that some very specific activities were controlled by one side of the human brain or the other — for example, the right side controlled creative tasks, while the left side was where logic, language and reasoning lived. People were fascinated by the idea, and in the three decades since, bookstores, television, the Internet and college psychology classes everywhere have been filled with endless discussions of the differences between right-brain, left-brain, and whole-brain thinkers. (Ironically, Sperry’s...

In the new study, the team from Harvard randomly assigned 60 elderly people to drink two cups of flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor cocoa every day for a month. There weren't any overall differences between the high- and low-flavanol groups in terms of cognitive abilities, so the researchers looked a little deeper. They found that people who had compromised blood flow to the brain and white matter damage at the beginning of the study did show a difference after drinking the cocoa for a month: Blood flow in their brains improved by about 8%, and the time it took them to complete...

Researchers manipulate mouse neurons to create a false memory; the work could lead to a better understanding of how memories form. Remember this: The red neurons are the brain cells in the hippocampus of a mouse carrying a new memory of a particular place. Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses...

8 Things We Simply Don't Understand About the Human Brain Despite all the recent advances in the cognitive and neurosciences, there’s still much about the human brain that we do not know. Here are 8 of the most baffling problems currently facing science. 1. What is consciousness? Without question, conscious awareness is the most astounding — and most perplexing — aspect of the human brain. It’s what makes us the unique, self-reflective creatures that we are. Consciousness allows us to experience and react to our environment in an apparently self-directed way. We’re not just zombies; we have our own private...

Scientists have found the brain's 'misery molecule' believed to be responsible for all of our feelings of stress and anxiety. Researchers believe that the protein - named CRF1 - could also be linked to depression...

Online advertising giant Google's new wearable accessories are merely a stepping stone to its ultimate ambition - a microchip which can be embedded in users' brains. The company, which uses its search, email and other services to funnel personalised advertising to users, is currently trialling prototypes of its Glass device, which is worn like a pair of glasses. But Google is staking its future on a new service which will use the information it holds on registered users to automatically predict their search needs and present them with the data they want. The ultimate ambition is to literally get inside...

Pennsylvania scientists have discovered the cause of the chronic disorder known as tinnitus, and have also found a way to treat it. Their goal is a preventive strategy for individuals whose work situations could cause them to be exposed to very loud noise. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers found that an epilepsy drug known as retigabine prevents tinnitus in animal models, according to ScienceDaily. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Strictly speaking, tinnitus isn't a condition, but a symptom of some type of disorder, like hearing loss related to age, a...

The daredevil teen awoke from his sodium-induced coma after three days.A young man who drank a quart of soy sauce went into a coma and nearly died from an excess of salt in his body, according to a recent case report. The 19-year-old, who drank the soy sauce after being dared by friends, is the first person known to have deliberately overdosed on such a high amount of salt and survived with no lasting neurological problems, according to the doctors in Virginia who reported his case. The case report was published online June 4 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine....

Inside a Mouse's Brain Lies a Chemical Key to the Fountain of Youth By Greg Thomas Source image via Wikipedia If a scientist came to you with a plan to tweak a gland in the center of your brain so that you may live to be 140 years old, you'd probably back out of the room slowly and go to file a police report, because that's creepy. But new research shows that it's not altogether impossible. A new report from researchers at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx shows that scientists can tinker with the minds of...

Two pioneering researchers of brain disease among athletes in violent sports recommended Saturday that investigators conduct special autopsy tests on amateur boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev to determine whether the Boston Marathon bombing suspect could have been affected by boxing-related brain damage.

The taste of beer, without any effect from alcohol itself, can trigger dopamine release in the brain that is associated with drinking and other drugs of abuse, researchers have claimed. Using positron emission tomography (PET), the researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine tested 49 men with two scans, one in which they tasted beer, and the second in which they tasted Gatorade. The researchers were looking for evidence of increased levels of dopamine, a brain neurotransmitter that has long been associated with alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The scans showed significantly more dopamine activity following the taste of...

New York - Scientists have for the first time linked the brains of a human and a rat, enabling the man to use just his thoughts to wiggle the rodent's tail. This is the first case of a brain-to-brain interface between species, and the first example of a noninvasive brain-to-brain interface, researchers claimed. Earlier this year, scientists had linked together the brains of two rats.This first known instance of a brain-to-brain interface apparently helped the rodents share data to accomplish certain tasks, even across intercontinental distances, LiveScience reported. In the latest experiment, researchers from Harvard Medical School employed noninvasive techniques...

Yesterday was filled with big doin’s around here. MO did a movie review while, down the hall, BO addressed the importance of having a brain. Lady M, as part of her continuing series of culturally sensitive movie reviews, held a film workshop on the movie “42.” “42” is a biopic about Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the Major League’s color barrier in 1947 (he also was a successful business man after his baseball career butt he didn’t do that on his own). Jackie’s wife, Rachael Robinson, was in attendance along with the film’s stars Harrison Ford, and other...