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New Western University research shows that neurons in the part of the brain found to be abnormal in psychosis are also important in helping people distinguish between reality and imagination. The researchers, Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo, principal investigator and professor at Western University's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and Dr. Diego Mendoza-Halliday, postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T., investigated how the brain codes visual information in reality versus abstract information in our working memory and how those differences are distributed across neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex region of the brain. The results were published today in Nature Communications. "You can look...

My wife has stage 4 metastatic cancer. She has battled this before and survived twice. This time the cancer has reached her brain and the doctors are a bit more apprehensive than before. Does anyone know about grants? All of her doctors are telling us to apply for grants to pay for her medicine. Any advice would be appreciated. I may not be able to respond right away, but I will do my best. Lots of planning and preparation on my part.

Scientists have grown the first working 'mini-brains' in a dish which could provide future treatments for autism and epilepsy. The lab-grown organs have their own brain cells, formed into circuits similar to those of a two-month-old baby in the womb. Described as 'thrilling science', it is the first time a human forebrain has been seen in action outside the body. Scientists hope to use the mini-brains to watch in real time the triggers for epilepsy, when brain cells become hyperactive, and autism, where they are thought to form bad connections. It could pave the way for drugs to treat these...

People who have had their brains cryogenically frozen could be 'woken up' within three years, a pioneering Italian surgeon has claimed. Professor Sergio Canavero, Director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, is aiming to carry out the first human head transplant within 10 months and then wants to begin trials on brain transplants. If the procedures are successful, he believes that frozen brains could be thawed and inserted into a donor body. Hundreds of people who are dying or paralysed have had their bodies or brains cryogenically preserved in the hope that medical science will be able to bring them...

Scientists believe they have found a way to treat and perhaps reverse Parkinson's disease, by making replacement cells to mend the damaged brain. They say human brain cells can be coaxed to take over the job of the ones that are destroyed in Parkinson's. Tests in mice with Parkinson-like symptoms showed that the therapy appeared to ease the condition. Many more studies are needed before similar tests can begin in people. Experts say the research published in Nature Biotechnology is hugely promising, although at a very early stage.

Was just informed that Las Vegas Dave has had bleeding in the frontal lobe of his brain. Is on a trache and is not responsive. Prayer greatly needed and appreciated.

Doctors in a Canadian intensive care unit have stumbled on a very strange case - when life support was turned off for four terminal patients, one of them showed persistent brain activity even after they were declared clinically dead. For more than 10 minutes after doctors confirmed death through a range of observations, including the absence of a pulse and unreactive pupils, the patient appeared to experience the same kind of brain waves (delta wave bursts) we get during deep sleep. And it's an entirely different phenomenon to the sudden 'death wave' that's been observed in rats following decapitation. "In...

Mother of two has been receiving treatment at Rashid Hospital after slipping into coma in April 2015A Filipina who has been undergoing treatment and physiotherapy at Rashid Hospital after waking up from a nine-month coma is now well on her way to recovery and is ready to go back to the Philippines to see her children. Perlite Almonte, 35, was first admitted to the hospital on April 18, 2015 after she was found unconscious in the bathroom of her house. Doctors who examined Almonte said she had slipped into a coma. Dr Zeyad Al Rais, Head of Critical Care Department...

Older adults who experience good cardiac fitness may be also keeping their brains in good shape as well. In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, older adults who scored high on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) tests performed better on memory tasks than those who had low CRF. Further, the more fit older adults were, the more active their brain was during learning. These findings appear in the journal Cortex. Difficulty remembering new information represents one of the most common complaints in aging and decreased memory performance is one of the hallmark impairments in Alzheimer's disease. Healthy...

My family and I would really appreciate your thoughts and prayers for healing over the next few weeks. On the 19th of January I'm scheduled to have brain surgery. At end of October I suffered a minor stroke. It didn't feel minor at the time but fortunately I recovered quickly and almost completely. Within a few weeks I was back at work, and after a month of therapy my speech and movement had resolved to a level where only those who knew me very well pre-stroke had any idea something had happened. In the MRI taken to diagnose the stroke,...

About half the world's population is right-handed but has left-handed family members. Such right-handers have special neurological organization of language and thought. This has implications for therapies and our understanding of the genetic bases for language. Our brain imaging studies show that grammatical knowledge is represented differently if you have left-handers in your family. For example, when it comes to language, everyone’s brain responds to certain language tasks quickly. But that response is much stronger in the brain's right hemisphere if you have left-handers in your family and stronger in the left hemisphere if you have no left-handers in your...

People who will commit most crime can be predicted by looking at deprivation and brain health in childrenA fifth of the population is responsible for four fifths of crime, two fifths of obesity, three quarters of fatherless families and for claiming two thirds of benefits. What’s more, scientists say, you can identify this troublesome group at the age of three. A 45-minute test rating children on IQ and self-control, combined with information about deprivation and maltreatment, allowed researchers to predict “with considerable accuracy” which would go on to be the greatest burden on the state. The 38-year study may be...

Results by Rose et al. overturn a theory that in order for short-term memories to exist, neurons that represent that memory must be constantly active. Instead, the neural activity supporting that memory need only arise when the person trying to recall it consciously focuses his or her attention on the memory. Credit: N.S. Rose et al. =========================================================================================================================== It's clear that your working memory—which holds attention on small things of short-term importance—works, or you wouldn't be able to remember a new phone number long enough to dial it. Describing how it works, however—how the brain determines what to keep in mind,...

Claudia Fugazza, Ákos Pogány, and Ádám MiklósNovember 23, 2016 People have a remarkable ability to remember and recall events from the past, even when those events didn't hold any particular importance at the time they occurred. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on November 23 have evidence that dogs have that kind of "episodic memory" too. The study found that dogs can recall a person's complex actions even when they don't expect to have their memory tested. "The results of our study can be considered as a further step to break down artificially erected barriers between non-human animals...

Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to surround herself with more scandals than you can shake a stick at, as we said when I was growing up in Texas. We had the Mena, Arkansas scandals when her husband, Bubba, otherwise known as William Jefferson Clinton, was Attorney General and then Governor. Ambrose Evans Pritchard, the British Telegraph investigative journalist did a masterful documentation of that in his The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, when Bill was President facing impeachment in the 1990's. Then there are the Clinton Foundation scandals documented in the 2015 Peter Schweitzer book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of...

An unidentified patient in Florida is being treated after being infected with a brain-eating amoeba last week, according to the Florida Department of Health. It is the fourth known case this year of infection by the parasite Naegleria fowleri. "We believe that the individual contracted the infection after swimming in unsanitary water on a single private property," said Mara Gambineri, the health department's communications director, noting that there is no risk to the general public. The parasite is almost always deadly. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1962 and 2015 there were 138 known cases of...

Concerns over the Zika virus have focused on pregnant women due to mounting evidence that it causes brain abnormalities in developing fetuses. However, new research in mice from scientists at The Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology suggests that certain adult brain cells may be vulnerable to infection as well. Among these are populations of cells that serve to replace lost or damaged neurons throughout adulthood, and are also thought to be critical to learning and memory. "This is the first study looking at the effect of Zika infection on the adult brain," says Joseph Gleeson,...

Our increasing reliance on the Internet and the ease of access to the vast resource available online is affecting our thought processes for problem solving, recall and learning. In a new article published in the journal Memory, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign have found that 'cognitive offloading', or the tendency to rely on things like the Internet as an aide-mémoire, increases after each use. We might think that memory is something that happens in the head but increasingly it is becoming something that happens with the help of agents outside the...

A new study suggests that people are are overweight tend to be less intelligent than those who are not. According to the study, people who are overweight have less grey and white matter in key parts of the brain, meaning their brain develops an “altered reward processing,” effectively meaning they lack the ability to control their eating. The results were extracted from “very thorough” brain scans of 32 people from Baltimore....

There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers. That's massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like