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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

The brain is central to our health and sense of self, but when it comes to how it works, there is still much to be understood. Maybe you've heard that doing crossword puzzles can improve memory, that playing classical music makes babies smarter, or that drinking alcohol kills brain cells -- but are these and other common claims about the brain really true? An article in this month's issue of Popular Science seeks to separate brain facts from myths. One of the first questions that come to mind regarding the brain is how much of it we actually use. Science...

Play CBS News Video People may joke they're addicted to desserts, but new brain imaging research shows there may be some truth to the statement.Researchers have found eating highly-processed carbohydrates like cakes, cookies and chips could affect pleasure centers in the brain, leading to serious cravings that might cause people to overeat.13 PhotosAre you a food addict? Take our online test "Beyond reward and craving, this part of the brain is also linked to substance abuse and dependence, which raises the question as to whether certain foods might be addictive," study author Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New...

University Medical Center (GUMC) researchers for the first time have discovered that veterans who suffer from “Gulf War Illness” have physical changes in their brains that may account for pain from actions as simple as putting on a shirt. Brain scans of 31 veterans with the illness, compared to 20 control subjects, revealed anomalies in the bundles of axons, also known as nerve fibers, that connect brain areas involved in the processing and perception of pain and fatigue. The Georgetown findings, published online today in PLOS ONE, could provide insight into the mysterious medical symptoms reported by Gulf War veterans,...

One of the most popular and widely accepted theories on the cause of autism spectrum disorders attributes the condition to disrupted connectivity between different regions of the brain. This 'connectivity hypothesis' claims that the social and cognitive abnormalities in people with autism can be explained by a dearth of connections between distant regions of the brain1. Some flavours of this theory also predict more connections between nearby brain regions. Recent studies, however, have found that when a person moves their head while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) |[mdash]| a method that maps how different neuroanatomical structures of the brain...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is growing from showy adolescence into a workhorse of brain imaging. The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. With their heads held still, the volunteers watched flashing lights or tensed their hands, while the research teams built the data flowing from the machines into grainy images showing parts of the brain illuminated as multicoloured blobs. The results showed that a technique called functional...

As any high school senior staring down the SAT knows, when the stakes are high, some test-takers choke. A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure. The results, presented April 1 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, says psychologist Thomas Carr of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Sometimes you come across a study you wish you'd done yourself,” he says “This is such...

Scientists are a step closer to constructing a digital version of the human visual system. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an algorithm that can be applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imagery to show a moving image a person is seeing. Neuroscientists have been using fMRI to study the human visual system for years, which involves measuring changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. This works fine for studying how we see static images, but it falls short when it comes to moving imagery. Individual neuronal activity occurs over a much faster time scale,...

Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Nature represents a pioneering foray across that divide. Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and...

Los Angeles, CA (May 26, 2011) – Precision tinted lenses have been used widely to reduce visual perceptual distortions in poor readers, and are increasingly used for migraine sufferers, but until now the science behind these effects has been unclear. Now research published in the journal Cephalalgia, published by SAGE, uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for the first time to suggest a neurological basis for these visual remedies. The new research shows how coloured glasses tuned to each migraine sufferer work by normalizing activity in the brain. The researchers saw specific abnormal brain activity (known as hyperactivation) when migraine...

2 acceleration methods make scanning more than 7 times fasterAn international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible. In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds. "When we made the first images, it was unbelievable...

Depicting brain damage, scans distinguish between a trio of syndromes, researchers say SALT LAKE CITY Nearly two decades after vets began returning from the Middle East complaining of Gulf War Syndrome, the federal government has yet to formally accept that their vague jumble of symptoms constitutes a legitimate illness. Here, at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting, yesterday, researchers rolled out a host of brain images – various types of magnetic-resonance scans and brain-wave measurements – that they say graphically and unambiguously depict Gulf War Syndrome. Or syndromes. Because Robert Haley of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person's mind, researchers said Thursday. British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone. "We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory -- to look at actual memory traces," said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire. "We found that...

FRIDAY, Dec. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The brains of autistic people are less active than expected when they're engaged in self-reflective thought, a finding that helps explain autism-related social difficulties, say British researchers. Using functional MRI, they measured the brain activity of 66 males, half of whom had autism, while they were asked questions about their own or the Queen's thoughts, opinions,preferences, or physical characteristics. The researchers were particularly interested in an area of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be active when people think about themselves. In non-autistic volunteers, this part of the brain...

Human see. Human do. As with monkeys, it’s apparently the same for some nerve cells in the brain. Macaque monkeys have specialized brain cells — called mirror neurons — that activate when a monkey performs an action involving an object, such as picking up a grape, or when watching someone else do the same task. The discovery of these neurons in 1996 led to speculation that they could be involved in everything from simulating others’ actions to language development to autism. There was only one problem: no one had definite proof that such cells exist in humans. Now a new...

Anticipatory brain mechanism may be complicating MRI studies. Blood vessel activation in the brain. The dark central area is the response to a visual stimulus.Y. Sirotin & A. Das Popular brain-imaging techniques may be painting a misleading picture of brain activity, according to a new study.Scientists using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) make the assumption that blood flow into a particular brain region is directly linked to the amount of activity in the cells of that region. This is because active cells need more oxygen, and blood ferries it to them.But a study by Aniruddha Das and...

New research by a Rice University psychologist clearly identifies the parts of the brain involved in the process of choosing appropriate words during speech. The study, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers better understand the speech problems that stroke patients experience.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2008) — It turns out there's a scientific reason why older people tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses. Medical researchers have identified brain activity that causes older adults to remember fewer negative events than their younger counterparts. Neuroscientists from Duke University Medical Center have discovered that older people use their brains differently than younger people when it comes to storing memories, particularly those associated with negative emotions.

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep. The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex...

Researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas are pioneering the use of spatial statistical modeling to analyze brain scan data from Persian Gulf War veterans, aiming to pinpoint specific areas of the their brains affected by Gulf War Syndrome. Richard Gunst, Wayne Woodward and William Schucany, professors in SMU's Statistical Science Department, are collaborating with imaging specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center to compare brain scans of people suffering from the syndrome with those of a healthy control group. The SMU team is working with renowned UTSW epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley, one of the foremost experts on the syndrome. A...