brain

Brain

Blood-brain barrier (7)
Brain (3193)
Brain activity (104)
Brain areas (20)
Brain cell (171)
Brain function (45)
Brain lobes (14)
Brain region (71)
Brain science (33)
Brain signal (36)
Brain tissue (93)
Brainstem (9)
Brainwave (40)
Cerebellum (11)
Cerebrospinal fluid (27)
Diencephalon (18)
Endbrain (176)
Forebrain (5)
Midbrain (6)

It involves skills that the human brain is very good at, and can complete almost instantly.

Drugs that help people with brain and neuropsychiatric conditions improve concentration, planning and memory, or reduce impulsive

Brain scans he carried out found those with the lowest working memory capacity to begin with improved the most when taking Ritalin.

either boost or curb levels of circulating neurotransmitters, the chemicals that relay signals between nerve cells in the brain.

the brain is responding to scent molecules that have wafted into your nose and locked on to these receptors.

In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain so we know what we have sniffed.

A smattering of papers over the following few years reported sweet taste receptors in the bladder and the gut, bitter taste receptors in the sinuses, airways, pancreas and brain,

#For the first time a Marker of Neuroinflammation Is seen in Brain Scans of Depressed Patients Research conducted by Elaine Setiawan, Ph d.,a 2013 NARSAD Young Investigator grantee,

Dr. Setiawan and her colleagues used a new dye that is visible on brain scans of patients

whether the biological marker of neuroinflammation (called translocator protein) that is visible with the new dye would be elevated in regions of the brain that regulate mood.

The team said its findings rovide the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammationin major depression.

Specifically, this study is the first to see activation of immune cells called microglia that live in the brain and central nervous system.

Finding active microglia in the brains of people with MDD s important for improving treatment, Dr. Setiawan says,

#Problems With attention Traced to Specific Brain Circuit People with schizophrenia, for example, often find it difficult to focus their attention on a task or conversation.

In a paper published online December 15th in Nature Neuroscience, a team that included three NARSAD grant recipients described a specific circuit that filters out rrelevantinformation from elevantinformation entering the brain at the same time.

and 2013 NARSAD Young Investigator grantee Sarah Ahrens, Ph d.,all of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New york. The team confirmed a long-held theory that a part of the brain called the TRN

what is relevant to a structure called the thalamus. The thalamus is considered a atewayto higher processing areas in the brain cortex.

COMT is an enzyme that degrades dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls the brain's reward and pleasure centers,

a brain hormone that regulates mood, sleep and alertness--all of which are disrupted in PTSD. Antidepressants called SSRIS,

#Tracking subtle brain mutations systematically DNA sequences were thought once to be identical from cell to cell,

but it's increasingly understood that mutations can arise during brain development that affect only certain groups of brain cells.

and provides a new way to study both the normal brain and brain disorders such as epilepsy and autism.

one of several kinds of so-called somatic mutations that can arise as the brain develops.

The technique picks up somatic mutations that affect just a fraction of the brain's cells, in a"mosaic"pattern.

"showing when during brain development the mutations arise and how they spread through brain tissue as the mutated cells grow,

and this work gets at how somatic mutations are distributed in the brain, "says Christopher Walsh, MD, Phd, chief of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children's and co-senior author on the paper."

"Some mutations may occur on one side of the brain and not the other. Some may be clumped,'affecting just one gyrus fold of the brain,

disrupting just a little part of the cortex at a time.""The study examined brain tissue from a deceased 17-year-old who had been neurologically normal,

sampling in more than 30 brain locations. It builds on work published by the Walsh lab in 2012,

Somatic brain mutations, affecting just pockets of cells can be harmful, and have been suggested as a possible cause of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism,

because they suggest that every normal brain may in fact be a mosaic patchwork of focal somatic mutations,

"These same technologies can now be used to study the brains of people who died from unexplained neuropsychiatric diseases to determine

The study found that these mutations can occur in both normal and neurologically diseased brains s

#Brain imaging may help predict future behavior Noninvasive brain scans, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, have led to basic science discoveries about the human brain,

but they've had limited only impacts on people's day-to-day lives. A review article published in the January 7 issue of the Cell Press journalneuron,

which represents the major structural component of Lewy bodies protein clumps found in the brains of individuals with Parkinson disease and other neurological disorders.

Parkinson disease is characterized by impairment or deterioration of neurons in an area of the brain known as the substantia nigra In the familial form of the disorder,

who is also a member of Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute."

such as neurons firing in the rodent brain, crawling fruit fly larvae, and single cells in the zebrafish heart while the heart is actually beating spontaneously--this has not been possible until now."

even delivering neurons that flash as they fire in the living brain. Yet imaging techniques that can capture these dizzying dynamic processes have lagged behind.

Hillman and her collaborators have used already the system to observe firing in 3d neuronal dendritic trees in superficial layers of the mouse brain.

"Deciphering the functions of brain and mind demands improved methods for visualizing, monitoring, and manipulating the activity of neural circuits in natural settings,

Picture of robot and human arm Mopic-Fotolia The Smarthand project succeeded in developing a system that essentially tricks the brain into thinking that a real hand is attached to a person arm. hat for decades has been one of medicine greatest challenges

the and areais still present in the brain. This means an amputee can still imagine that the missing hand is moving. he artificial hand we developed can actually be controlled by an amputee thoughts,

The brain connection to the missing hand is so strong that it can be tricked into believing that the prosthetic hand is real.

#A second chance for injured brains Jouni Salmenjaakko, once a busy executive manager, now spends all his time with his family at their home in Turku in southern Finland.

and because our brains control virtually all bodily functions it is often a challenge for neurologists to offer a clear diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation.

#A machine which can read your mind e have developed so called brain-computer interfaces which allow the user to control different devices and programmes without hands, by means of the user thoughts.

which sit on the scalp translates user intentions into electronic commands. brain-computer interface captures various electrical impulses from the head of the user,

The frequency of the flashing is reproduced in the brain cortex and read by the electrodes. s soon as we have understood the electroencephalography patterns produced by the groups of neurons in the brain,

we can map the brain activity to any commands for any device, like a television or a motorised system for the home, said Arnau Espinosa Manzanal of the Research and development department,

and stop epileptic attacks without drugs and without major brain surgery. To the 50 million people worldwide who suffer from epileptic seizures a chronic neurobiological disorder this simple plan could transform their lives.

which help the brain return to normal functioning. It works in much the same way as an implantable cardiac defibrillator applies shocks automatically to the heart after detecting minor cardiac rhythm disturbances."

'transmits a special electric pulse through the brain. As the pulse travels from one temple to the other, it interferes (in a good way) with the areas causing the seizure,

#Expanding insight into Alzheimer's disease Chronic neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's, are all characterised by an inflammatory reaction within the brain.

based on research with mice, could open new avenues for the regulation of Alzheimer-like reactions in the brain related to the loss of memory and other mental abilities.

the brain structure involved in learning and memory. e showed that a self-repair mechanism is in place during widespread neurodegeneration,

The researchers know that infections elsewhere in the body communicate with the brain, and that is why we feel ill.

and analysed the results to show how self-repair might work with humans. iego found that the increase in brain immune cells was a result of local proliferation.

It has been designed for the insertion of instruments like biopsy probes or electrodes for deep brain stimulation through small holes in the head of the patient.

and at the same time receive feedback of the sensations that he would have operating directly on the brain.

The robot feedback is amplified to help the surgeon feel his way around the brain. So what kind of operation could be perfomed with this type of robot?

chronic pain and all types of brain cancer, said Cardinale. The robot, developed within the EU Robocast project, is a year away from surgical trials.

there is something in my brain that says that this is forbidden for me, because it is healthy food.

The reason why Alzheimer's develops in the brain is being elucidated, and a few drugs aiming to delay

and image dataset that is being collected Europe-wide can be exploited by a large neuroscience community through the application of sophisticated brain analysis algorithms.

they were not in a part of the brain that researchers predict would be affected by cell phone radiation.

and migraines as two very different brain events but new research has uncovered a surprising link between the two.

but migraine auras based on an underlying process called spreading depression are marked by a silencing of electrical activity in part of the brain.

Potassium and sodium contribute the ions that control electricity in the brain. Researchers added fundamental physics principles of conservation of energy charge

The brain needs a constant supply of oxygen to keep everything running because it has to keep pumping the ions back across cell membranes after each electrical spike.

It appeared that decades of observations of different phenomena in the brain could share a common underlying link.

While the initial intent was to better model the biophysics of the brain the connection

The ability to better understand the difference between normal and pathological activity within the brain may lead to the ability to predict

The researchers demonstrate that these converted cells survived at least six months after injection into the brains of mice

and behaved similarly to native cells in the brain.####Not only did transplanted these cells survive in the mouse brain they showed functional properties similar to those of native cells##says senior author Andrew S. Yoo assistant professor of developmental biology at the Washington University School of medicine in St louis.##These cells

are known to extend projections into certain brain regions. And we found the human transplanted cells also connected to these distant targets in the mouse brain.

That s a landmark point about this paper.####The investigators produced a specific type of brain cell called medium spiny neurons

Knowing exposure to these micrornas alone could change skin cells into a mix of neurons the researchers then started to fine tune the chemical signals exposing the cells to additional molecules called transcription factors that they knew were present in the part of the brain where medium spiny

When transplanted into the mouse brain the converted cells showed morphological and functional properties similar to native neurons.

The protein called NT3 is critical for maintaining communication between the ears and brain. The work reported in the journal elife suggests the protein might be a target for treating people who have suffered hearing loss due to noise or aging.

In addition to the protein the study also looked at the role of cells that have traditionally been seen as the##supporting actors##of the ear-brain connection.

Called supporting cells they form a physical base for the hearing system s##stars##the hair cells in the ear that interact directly with the nerves that carry sound signals to the brain.

The goal is to produce smaller devices that could be used to create a network of electrodes to study the brains of experimental animals in ways not currently possible."

"This requires being able to interface with cells using arrays of micro implants across the entire 3d structure of the brain."

#Brain surgery robot would go through the cheek Vanderbilt University Posted by David Salisbury-VU on October 16 2014for people with severe epilepsy treatment can mean drilling through the skull deep into the brain

Because the area of the brain involved is the hippocampus which is located at the bottom of the brain they could develop a robotic device that pokes through the cheek

and enters the brain from underneath. This strategy avoids having to drill through the skull

and is much closer to the target area. To do so however meant developing a shape-memory alloy needle that can be steered precisely along a curving path

of which are curved that allow the tip to follow a curved path into the brain. Unlike many common metals nickel-titanium is compatible with MRIS.

They learned that neuroscientists currently use the through-the-cheek approach to implant electrodes in the brain to track brain activity

Comber and Barth shadowed Neimat through brain surgeries to understand how their device would work in practice.##

including the heart, skeletal muscle, and brain. They are devastating diseases and there is no cure, so our findings about their transmission are very important.

and that others influence brain development in young mice says Argonne National Laboratory microbiologist Jack Gilbert who led the study.

Lead researcher Kaye Morgan from Monash University says the imaging method allows doctors to look at soft tissue structures for example the brain airways

The new imaging method which was developed using a synchrotron x-ray source may also open up possibilities in assessing how effective treatments were for other lung heart and brain diseases.

and spread in the brain. Instead they found that when they blocked cancer cells from making galectin-1,

because glioma researchers everywhere had assumed the extra protein had more to do with the insidious ability of gliomas to invade the brain,

The new research suggests that in the brain unique environment, galectin-1 creates an immunosuppressive effect immediately around tumor cells.

The brain cancer cells seem to have evolved the ability to express their galectin-1 genes far more than normal

#Glucose control switch links both types of diabetes Scientists have linked a mechanism in the brain that senses glucose levels in the blood

To understand the role of prolyl endopeptidase in this part of the brain the team used mice that were engineered genetically with low levels of this enzyme.

because it makes the neurons in this part of the brain sensitive to glucose. The neurons sense the increase in glucose levels

#See into living brain with lasers and nanotubes By injecting carbon nanotubes into the bloodstream, scientists can use near-infrared lasers to see blood flow in a living animal brain.

The new technique, which is almost completely noninvasive, was developed for mice, but could offer insight into human ailments, such as strokes, migraines,

Some of the most damaging brain diseases can be traced to irregular blood delivery in the brain.

or activity of the brain or even stimulate an immune response. Meanwhile noninvasive techniques such as CT SCANS or MRI visualize function best at the whole-organ level,

and skull and penetrate millimeters into the brain, allowing us to see vasculature in an almost noninvasive way,

First, the light penetration depth needs to be increased to pass deep into the human brain. Second, injecting carbon nanotubes needs approval for clinical application;

and Parkinson diseases might elicitr be caused in part byhanges in blood flow to certain parts of the brain.

Hong says. e could also label different neuron types in the brain with bio-markers

we might be able to use NIR-IIA to learn how each neuron functions inside of the brain.

This same gene mutation has been associated with the formation of plaque-like lesions in the brains of people with Alzheimer disease,

and her collaborators to create a transparent whole-brain specimen. With the CLARITY method, a rodent brain is infused with a solution of lipid-dissolving detergents

and hydrogel water-based polymer gel that provides structural supporthus learingthe tissue but leaving its three-dimensional architecture intact for study.

so that it can be used to clear other organs besides the brain, and even whole organisms.

They permanently bond to neurotransmitters in the brain, interfering with their ability to function and causing irreversible damage.

Clomid works by traveling to the brain, where it partially blocks estrogen receptors. This triggers the brain to send a signal to the ovaries to produce more estrogen,

which causes ovulation. Letrozole is prescribed to prevent recurrence of breast cancer in women by shutting off an enzyme that converts circulating testosterone to estrogen.

The brain sees this drop in estrogen and tells the ovaries to make more estrogen, which triggers ovulation,

and have many targets across the brain. The various other aspects of alcohol addiction, such as tolerance, craving,

Researchers performed special brain scans of the visual cortex, which showed marked improvements in brain activities in patients who also improved in field size and acuity.

#Fly-through brain images could unravel how we think Scientists have improved on a new imaging technology that provides spectacular fly-through views of the brain

and has been used by laboratories around the world to better understand the brain wiring. However two technological fixes could make it even more broadly adopted,

Second, the most commonly available microscopy methods were designed not to image the whole transparent brain. here have been a number of remarkable results described using CLARITY

and Li Ye and graduate student Brian Hsueh, anticipate that even more scientists will now be able to take advantage of the technique to better understand the brain at a fundamental level,

and also to probe the origins of brain diseases. CLEARING OUT THE FAT When you look at the brain

what you see is the fatty outer covering of the nerve cells within, which blocks microscopes from taking images of the intricate connections between deep brain cells.

while keeping the brain intact, complete with all its intricate inner wiring. The way Deisseroth and his team eliminated the fat was to build a gel within the intact brain that held all the structures and proteins in place.

They then used an electric field to pull out the fat layer that had been dissolved in an electrically charged detergent

leaving behind all the brain structures embedded in the firm water-based gel, or hydrogel. This is called electrophoretic CLARITY.

the team devised an alternate way of pulling out the fat from the hydrogel-embedded brain technique they call passive CLARITY.

Many groups have begun to apply CLARITY to probe brains donated from people who had diseases like epilepsy or autism

which might have left clues in the brain to help scientists understand and eventually treat the disease.

these colorful structures become visible throughout the entire brain, since no fat remains to block the light.

But to get a high-resolution image of an entire brain, the whole tissue is bathed in light throughout the time it takes to image it point by point.

This approach bleaches out the probes before the entire brain can be imaged at high resolution.

making it easier to image the entire brain without bleaching the probes. e can now scan an entire plane at one time instead of a point,

and can now see fine wiring structures deep within an intact adult brain, Deisseroth says.

and may pose threats to brain development during gestation potentially resulting in developmental delay or autism.

because the developing fetal brain may be more vulnerable than it is in adults. Because these pesticides are neurotoxic in utero exposures during early development may distort the complex processes of structural development

##In that early developmental gestational period the brain is developing synapses the spaces between neurons where electrical impulses are turned into neurotransmitting chemicals that leap from one neuron to another to pass messages along##Â#Hertz

#These neurons order stem cells to crank out new neurons Is it possible that your brain can repair itself from within?

Neuroscientists have suspected for some time that the brain has some capacity to direct the manufacturing of new neurons,

In a study with mice, his team found a previously unknown population of neurons within the subventricular zone (SVZ) neurogenic niche of the adult brain, adjacent to the striatum.

they were able to see clear changes in neural stem cell proliferation in the brain. The findings are detailed in an article published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

REGIONS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN The mature Chat+neuron population is just one part of an undescribed neural circuit that apparently talks to stem cells

but by controlling Chat+neuronssignals Kuo and his colleagues have established that these neurons are necessary and sufficient to control the production of new neurons from the SVZ niche. e have been working to determine how neurogenesis is sustained in the adult brain.

as the mouse has a large amount of its brain devoted to process the sense of smell and needs these new neurons to support learning.

and the complex basal ganglia. he brain gives up prime real estate around the lateral ventricles for the SVZ niche housing these stem cells,

These emerging threads have Kuo hopeful researchers will eventually be able to find the way to ngage certain circuits of the brain to lead to a hardware upgrade.

if you could upgrade the brain hardware to keep up with the new software? He says perhaps there will be a way to combine behavioral therapy

a practice that parts of the brain might normally resist. think that some neural circuits welcome new members,

#LED scanner safely peeks inside your brain New brain-scanning technology that shines dozens of tiny LED LIGHTS on the head works as well as more traditional methods without radiation exposure and bulky magnets.

and deep brain stimulators that are used to treat Parkinson disease. The magnetic fields in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) often disrupt either the function or safety of implanted electrical devices.

but the method had been limited to small regions of the brain. The new DOT instrument covers two-thirds of the head

and for the first time can image brain processes taking place in multiple regions and brain networks such as those involved in language processing

and self-reflection (daydreaming). hen the neuronal activity of a region in the brain increases, highly oxygenated blood flows to the parts of the brain doing more work,

and we can detect that, says senior author Joseph Culver, associate professor of radiology at Washington University in St louis. t roughly akin to spotting the rush of blood to someone cheeks

the most commonly used imaging method for mapping human brain function. Functional MRI also tracks activity in the brain via changes in blood flow.

In addition to greatly adding to our understanding of the human brain, fmri is used to diagnose and monitor brain disease and therapy.

Portable scans Another commonly used method for mapping brain function is positron emission tomography (PET), which involves radiation exposure.

Because DOT technology does not use radiation, multiple scans performed over time could be used to monitor the progress of patients treated for brain injuries, developmental disorders such as autism,

including learning more about how deep brain stimulation helps Parkinson patients, imaging the brain during social interactions,

and studying what happens to the brain during general anesthesia and when the heart is stopped temporarily during cardiac surgery.

Better image quality For the current study, published online in Nature Photonics, the researchers validated the performance of DOT by comparing its results to fmri scans.

researchers used DOT and fmri to detect brain networks that are active when subjects are resting

Researchersinterests in these networks have grown enormously over the past decade as the networks have been tied to many different aspects of brain health and sickness, such as schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer disease.

While DOT doesn let scientists peer very deeply into the brain, researchers can get reliable data to a depth of about one centimeter of tissue.

That centimeter contains some of the brain most important and interesting areas with many higher brain functions, such as memory, language and self-awareness, represented.

which will suffer potentially lethal brain bleeding. Researchers used standard magnetic resonance imaging as part of a new method to measure stroke damage to the blood-brain barrier.

that medicine could seep out of the bloodstream and into the brain, causing major damage.

if it could predict who had suffered a brain hemorrhage and who had not. The new test correctly predicted the outcome with 95 percent accuracy.

The blood-brain barrier limits the passage of molecules from the bloodstream into the brain. Without it

the brain is open to infection, inflammation, and hemorrhage. Ischemic stroke patients are at risk of bleeding into the brain

when there is damage to the barrier. TIMING IS EVERYTHING In an ischemic stroke, a blood clot is stuck in a vessel, cutting off blood flow to a portion of the brain,

which begins to die if the clot remains. When patients come to the hospital within a few hours of suffering an ischemic stroke,

however, there is already too much damage to the blood-brain barrier and the drug causes bleeding in the brain, severe injury,

or by directly injecting tpa into the brain. MRI FOR EVERY STROKE PATIENT Typically, physicians do a CT SCAN of a stroke victim to see