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The new research could help doctors to quickly identify patients who are aware despite appearing unresponsive and unable to communicate. Researchers from University of Cambridge in the UK have identified hidden networks in vegetative patients that could support consciousness, even when a patient appear to be unresponsive. There’s been a lot of interest lately into how much patients in vegetative states, such as comas, are aware of their surroundings. Recently, research involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning has shown that even patients who are unable to respond or move are able to carry out mental tasks, such as imagining...

Researchers conducting the largest ever study into near-death experiences have discovered that awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down, revealing more about what happens when we die. Scientists at the University of Southampton studied more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals across Britain, Austria and the United States. Around 40% of patients who survived described "awareness" during the time before their hearts were restarted, when they were clinically dead. One 57-year-old man, a social worker from Southampton, described the noise of the machines and what the medical staff were doing during this time....

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wearable brain scanners and lasers that can turn hundreds of cells on and off were among 58 projects awarded $46 million in federal grants as part of President Obama's $100 million initiative to unlock the secrets of the human brain. Launched in 2013, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is designed to give scientists greater insight into how the healthy brain works and a better understanding of what systems go awry in diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to schizophrenia. "The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. We’ve only just...

DON'T mind the gap. A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is. The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6. Doctors did...

The paper will be published Wednesday, August 27, 2014 in the Journal of Neuroscience. ... researchers used an MRI machine and the brains of 40 people between the ages of 18 and 25. They claim that the more marijuana a person smokes, the more those two neural regions get "damaged." Dr. Hans Breiter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, co-authored the study. He says, "Anytime you find there's a relationship to the amount of marijuana consumed and you see differences of core brain regions involved in processing of rewards, the making of...

Stimulating a particular region in the brain via non-invasive delivery of electrical current using magnetic pulses, called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, improves memory, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The discovery opens a new field of possibilities for treating memory impairments caused by conditions such as stroke, early-stage Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest and the memory problems that occur in healthy aging. "We show for the first time that you can specifically change memory functions of the brain in adults without surgery or drugs, which have not proven effective," said senior author Joel Voss, assistant professor of medical social...

Bad memories could be reversed after scientists discovered the part of the brain which links emotions to past events Bad memories of past trauma can leave people emotionally scarred for life. But now neuroscientists believe they can erase feelings of fear or anxiety attached to stressful events, in a breakthrough which could help treat depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Researchers at MIT, US, have discovered which brain circuits attach emotions to memories, and crucially, how to reverse the link. They managed to ‘switch off’ feelings of fear in mice which had been conditioned to feel anxious. It is likely the...

A few years ago, I worked at a web design agency as a product manager. The part of the job I loved the most was working on product with our design team and clients. Unfortunately, this was only about 10 percent of the work that I actually got to do. The majority of the time, I was trying to control the constant flow of stuff–keeping track of meeting notes, searching for files, and trying to stay up-to-date with the latest technology news.I was mentally exhausted. I’d get home feeling that I hadn’t really accomplished anything. Once I left the agency...

A new gene linked to suicide risk has been discovered, and researchers say the finding could lead to a blood test that predicts a person's risk of attempting suicide. The model correctly identified 80 percent to 96 percent of people who experienced suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide. It was more accurate among people at severe risk for suicide. If the findings are confirmed and lead to a blood test for suicide risk, such a test might be used to screen people in psychiatric emergency rooms or to determine how closely a person needs to be monitored for suicide risk, the...

Fossilized Brain May Give Paleontologists Headache by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Who has ever heard of a fossilized brain? Few would expect such a discovery, yet it looks like that's what researchers found inside a Stone Age skull from Norway. If so, it would confirm a published creation prediction and challenge many evolutionary timescales. Ten archaeologists have been digging out fossilized human remains from a fjordside location called Brunstad, an area that encompasses two Stone Age human encampments.1 The scientists' findings include Norway's oldest unburned skeletal remains and a skull remnant with an unexpected attachment. University of Oslo archaeologist and...

Now, researchers from the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, CA, and the University of California-San Francisco reveal they have successfully reversed learning and memory deficits in mouse models of Alzheimer's through transplantation of healthy brain cells. The team transplanted inhibitory neuron progenitors - early-stage brain cells that can change into mature inhibitory regulator cells - into the hippocampus of two mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. One mouse model possessed the apoE4 gene, while the other had the apoE4 gene alongside a build-up of amyloid-beta - a protein also believed to play a role in Alzheimer's development. The researchers found that...

The journal Epilepsy and Behavior published the findings of the accidental discovery. The evidence was found when scientists were studying an epilepsy patient. They used electrodes deep within a patient's brain to try to determine where her seizures were coming from. ... The scientists stimulated an area of the brain called the claustrum, an area of the brain that had never been stimulated. Once stimulated, the woman, who was reading, stopped responding to all visual and audible cues, as if she were a robot that had been shut down. The team was able to recreate the scenario several times to...

Certain areas of the brain associated with reward and response to gut feelings have shown links to trading behavior and success, according to research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study shows that activity in one area of the brain actually tracks price bubbles—and that higher earners get signals from a different area that are associated with selling before a price bubble peaks.

Is There a Brain Region Associated with a Belief in Social Justice? Some people believe that we could live in a just world where everybody gets what they deserve. Others believe that's impossible. Now, neuroscientists say they have evidence that the "just world hypothesis" is a cognitive bias that's connected with a specific part of the brain. This does not mean there is a "social justice center" in your brain. What neurologist Michael Schaefer and colleagues discovered is that there is a slightly different pattern of electrical impulses shooting through the brains of people who believe in a just world....

Shocking the brain with mild electrical current was once a controversial treatment for the mentally ill. Now evidence is emerging that it could quicken learning and improve attention, and as Emma Young discovers, the US military is very interested in its potential. An unusual trial is underway at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. An airman sits at a monitor in a laboratory, wired up with electrodes, his jacket slung over the back of his chair. Plane-shaped icons keep entering his airspace. He has to decide whether each incoming plane is a friend or a foe. If it’s...

Pedophiles’ brains are “abnormally tuned” to find young children attractive, according to a new study published this week. The research, led by Jorge Ponseti at Germany’s University of Kiel, means that it may be possible to diagnose pedophiles in the future before they are able to offend. The findings, published in scientific journal Biology Letters, discovered that pedophiles have the same neurological reaction to images of those they find attractive as those of people with ordinary sexual predilections, but that all the relevant cerebral areas become engaged when they see children, as opposed to fellow adults. The occipital areas, prefrontal...

New neurons may explain why adults can’t remember being infants Unlike the proverbial elephants, babies always forget. Infants’ memories may be wiped clean by the genesis of new brain cells, a study in rodents suggests. The findings offer an explanation for why people can’t recall memories from early childhood, a century-old mystery. The study’s authors “make a very interesting and compelling case,” says neuroscientist and psychiatrist Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. “It’s just truly fascinating,” he says. “Nobody has actually looked at this very carefully before.” More than 100 years ago, Sigmund...

Wednesday, 'Wheel of Fortune' had a very inspirational contestant in Trent Girone. The 21-year-old Peoria, Ariz., resident is a self-described "Wheel of Fortune" fanatic, but more important, he's the first special needs contestant ever to compete on the show.Girone has had nine brain surgeries and has both Asperger's and Tourette's syndromes, but that didn't stop him from taking early control of the wheel by successfully guessing the first puzzle, "a smashing success." Girone ultimately didn't win the game -- he hit the dreaded Bankrupt slot -- but he won viewer hearts from coast-to-coast.  WATCH:

Type 2 diabetes could cause the brain to age by up to two years every decade a person has the disease, researchers have claimed. It is the first time diabetes has been linked to a change in the size of the brain. The study also found that, contrary to common clinical belief, diabetes may not be directly associated with small vessel ischemic disease, where the brain does not receive enough oxygenated blood. 'We found that patients having more severe diabetes had less brain tissue, suggesting brain atrophy,' said lead author R. Nick Bryan, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology at the...

TRES RIOS, Costa Rica (AP) — On a warm spring day, Floribeth Mora was in her bed waiting to die from a seemingly inoperable brain aneurysm when her gaze fell upon a photograph of Pope John Paul II in a newspaper. "Stand up," Mora recalls the image of the pope saying to her. "Don't be afraid." Mora, her doctors and the Catholic Church say her aneurysm disappeared that day in a miracle that cleared the way for the late pope to be declared a saint on April 27 in a ceremony at the Vatican where Mora will be a guest...