Free Republic

Learning takes brain acrobatics When neural areas more easily switch communication partners, learning improves Peer inside the brain of someone learning. You might be lucky enough to spy a synapse pop into existence. That physical bridge between two nerve cells seals new knowledge into the brain. As new information arrives, synapses form and strengthen, while others weaken, making way for new connections.You might see more subtle changes, too, like fluctuations in the levels of signaling molecules, or even slight boosts in nerve cell activity. Over the last few decades, scientists have zoomed in on these microscopic changes that happen as...

Video shows hideously ugly organism jiggling and pulsating as it's dragged from the water. A DISGUSTING blob creature that looks like a BRAIN has been discovered in a lake called The Lost Lagoon. The horrible beastie is a nasty brown colour and is said to feel squishy but firm to the touch, a bit like jelly. This horrible thing is made up of millions of tiny organisms ===================================================================== Celina Starnes, an ecologist from the Stanley Park Ecology Society, dragged the blob from its watery home This image gives a sense of the size of the horrible creature ====================================================================== Celina Starnes...

As Obamacare was winding its way through the Senate in 2009, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) slipped in an amendment requiring that members of Congress, and their staff, enroll in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. The idea was simple: that if Congress was going to impose Obamacare upon the country, it should have to experience what it is imposing firsthand. But now, word comes that Congress is quietly seeking to rescind that provision of the law, because members fear that staffers who face higher insurance costs will leave the Hill. The news has sparked outrage from the right and left. Here’s...

Two-year-old Eden Carlson lost a significant amount of brain tissue after spending 15 minutes underwater. Director of Hyperbaric Medicine, Dr. Paul Harch, says she made remarkable improvements after being treated with oxygen for 45 minutes twice a day. Weeks later, Eden’s parents brought her to New Orleans, and Harch put her in a hyperbaric chamber. “I dosed it at the same level of oxygen but now with pressure, and she made another very noticeable improvement with just the first hyperbaric treatment and from there just accelerated,” Harch said. In February of 2016, Eden escaped the baby gate in her home...

Doctors: Warmbier suffered "severe injuries to all areas" of his brain Doctors treating an American who was released earlier this week by North Korea said he suffered "severe injuries to all areas" of his brain while he was in captivity. Speaking at a press conference Thursday, Otto Warmbier's doctors said he is breathing on his own but does not consistently respond to verbal cues. Warmbier, who was in a coma when he was released, suffered "extensive loss of brain tissue in all regions of the brain," one of his doctors said. Doctors Daniel Kanter, Jordan Bonomo and Brandon Foreman briefed...

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...