Latest Amygdala Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Two US neuroscientists have discovered new cells are added to a person’s brain when they go through puberty – a biological change designed to better equip growing boys and girls for the rigors of becoming adults. Previously, experts had believed the human brain maintained a set number of cells from birth through old age, but then studies demonstrated that new brain cells were formed in adults. Initially, it was believed those...
A team of political scientists and neuroscientists has shown that liberals and conservatives use different parts of the brain when they make risky decisions, and these regions can be used to predict which political party a person prefers. The new study suggests that while genetics or parental influence may play a significant role, being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain functions. Dr. Darren Schreiber, a researcher in neuropolitics at the University of Exeter, has been working...
Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study from the University of Iowa (UI) recently found the amygdala, an almond-shaped area of the brain, is not the only part of the brain managing fear; other regions, such as the brainstem, the insular cortex and the diencephalon, also play a role. “This research says panic, or intense fear, is induced somewhere outside of the amygdala,” explained the senior author of the study John Wemmie, who serves as an associate...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A noise in the dark, a rustle in the undergrowth; these are sounds likely to make an animal or a person stop sharply and be still, anticipating a predator. Freezing is part of the natural fear response, a reaction to a stimulus in the environment and part of how the brain decides whether to be afraid of it. A new study released by a neuroscience group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) examines how fear responses are learned,...
Following the birth of a child, new mothers may have an altered perception of stresses around them, showing less interest in threats unrelated to the baby. This change to the neuroendocrine circuitry could help the mothers adapt to the additional stress often accompanying newborns, say researchers from Indiana University's Kinsey Institute and the University of Zurich. When viewing disturbing images during the study, postpartum women reported less distress and demonstrated less activity in...
Having a drink after a stressful day at work may seem like a natural response for some, but can your neural circuits predict when a drink or two will become problem drinking? A study published in BioMed Central's open-access journal Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders suggests that may be the case. The study describes a highly novel mechanism predicting problem drinking in college students from fMRI data measuring individual differences in the functioning of reward and threat circuits in...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Meditation has been part of the human experience for at least 5,000 years. Our first written records of the ancient art are found in Indian scriptures, called tantras. Around 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautma, commonly called Buddha, began teaching meditation as a road to enlightenment. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s that Western professors and researchers began studying the effects of mediation in earnest. Participating in an...
Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently discovered that early family stress during infancy could be related to changes that occur in the daily brain function and anxiety of teenage girls. The data was pooled from a population study that looked at the relationship between stress and the developmental pathway of the brain. For female infants who lived in homes with stressed out mothers, they were more likely to...
Researchers supported by the Wellcome Trust have discovered that we use a different part of our brain to learn about social hierarchies than we do to learn ordinary information. The study provides clues as to how this information is stored in memory and also reveals that you can tell a lot about how good somebody is likely to be at judging social rank by looking at the structure of their brain. Primates (and people) are remarkably good at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online There are noises that set our teeth on edge, make us recoil, and generally unnerve us. For me, that noise is the sound of someone popping his or her back. Scientists from Newcastle University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging say heightened activity between the emotional and auditory areas of the brain can explain why the sound of chalk on a blackboard, a knife on a bottle, or a joint popping is so unpleasant. A new...
