Whats the point of a brain? A fundamental question that has led Professor Daniel Wolpert to some remarkable conclusions about how and why the brain controls and predicts movement. In a recent talk for TED, Wolpert explores the research that resulted in him receiving the Golden Brain Award.
The sea squirt, a type of marine filter feeder, swims around looking for somewhere to settle down for the rest of its life. Once parked on a rock in a suitable spot it never moves again. So the first thing it does is eat its own brain. While this may seem a little rash to some, for Professor Daniel Wolpert it makes perfect evolutionary sense.
To me its obvious that theres no point in the brain processing or storing anything if it cant have benefits for physical movement, because thats the only way we improve our survival says Wolpert.
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The effects of nicotine upon brain regions involved in addiction mirror those of cocaine, according to new neuroscience research
A single 15-minute exposure to nicotine caused a long-term increase in the excitability of neurons involved in reward, according to a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience The results suggest that nicotine and cocaine hijack similar mechanisms of memory on first contact to create long-lasting changes in a persons brain
Of course, for smoking its a very long-term behavioral change, but everything starts from the first exposure, said Danyan Mao, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago Medical Center Thats what were trying to tackle here: when a person first is exposed to a cigarette, what happens in the brain that might lead to a second cigarette?
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Scientists have created a way to isolate neural stem cells – cells that give rise to all the cell types of the brain – from human brain tissue with unprecedented precision, an important step toward developing new treatments for conditions of the nervous system, like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases and spinal cord injury.
The work by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center was published in the Nov. 3 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Neurologist Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Neurology, led the team.
The latest paper marks a six-year effort by Goldman’s team to develop a better way to isolate pure preparations of neural stem cells directly from the human brain. These ste
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Five minutes in a scanner can reveal how far a child’s brain has come along the path from childhood to maturity and potentially shed light on a range of psychological and developmental disorders, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown.
Researchers assert this week in Science that their study proves brain imaging data can offer more extensive help in tracking aberrant brain development.
“Pediatricians regularly plot where their patients are in terms of height, weight and other measures, and then match these up to standardized curves that track typical developmental pathways,” says senior author Bradley Schlaggar, MD, PhD, a Washington University pediatric neurologist. “When
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