Latest Frontal lobe Stories
A new neuroimaging study on stressed-out students suggests that male humans, like male rats, don't do their most agile thinking under stress. The findings, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that 20 male M.D. candidates in the middle of preparing for their board exams had a harder time shifting their attention from one task to another than other healthy young men who were not under the gun.Previous experiments had found that stressed rats...
A new study conducted at the Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience of the University of Bologna, and published by Elsevier in the February 2009 issue of Cortex shows that, in confabulating patients, memory accuracy improves when attentional resources are reduced.Most cognitive processes supporting adaptive behavior need attentional resources for their operation. Consider memory. If memory was a car, attention would be its fuel: New information is not stored into memory if...
A Massachusetts psychiatrist said it took her one year to knit an anatomically correct replica of the human brain out of yarn. Dr. Karen Norberg, of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, said she used different colors to distinguish the different parts of the brain, including cream and pale green for the frontal cortex, blue, purple and green for the visual cortex and baby pink for the hippocampus, Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Friday. For me, there were two...
A new study provides a novel theory for how delusions arise and why they persist. NYU Langone Medical Center researcher Orrin Devinsky, MD, performed an in-depth analysis of patients with certain delusions and brain disorders revealing a consistent pattern of injury to the frontal lobe and right hemisphere of the human brain. The cognitive deficits caused by these injuries to the right hemisphere, leads to the over compensation by the left hemisphere of the brain for the injury, resulting in...
HOUSTON -- A new Rice University study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that socioemotional meanings, including sexual ones, are conveyed in human sweat.Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice, looked at how the brains of female volunteers processed and encoded the smell of sexual sweat from men. The results of the experiment indicated the brain recognizes chemosensory communication, including human sexual sweat.Scientists have long known that animals use scent to...
After middle age, people start to lose the battle to repair myelin in their brain and motor and cognitive functions begin a long decline, U.S. researchers say. Dr. George Bartzokis of the University of California, Los Angeles, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and colleagues compared how quickly a group of males ranging in age from 23 to 80 could perform a motor task and then correlated their performances to their brains' myelin integrity. In the study, each of the 72...
MRI studies show brain changes in the adolescent brain impact cognition, emotion and behaviorPhiladelphia -- Many parents are convinced that the brains of their teenage offspring are different than those of children and adults. New data confirms that this is the case. An article by Jay N. Giedd, MD, of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), published in the April 2008 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health describes how brain changes in the adolescent brain impact cognition,...
A team of scientists from Princeton University has devised a new experimental technique that produces some of the best functional images ever taken of the human brainstem, the most primitive area of the brain.The scientists believe they may be opening the door to inquiries into a region that acts as the staging area for the brain chemicals whose overabundance or absence in other parts of the brain are at the root of many neuropsychiatric disorders, like addiction, schizophrenia and...
Researchers at New York University and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have identified patterns of brain activation linked to the formation of long-term memories. The study, which appeared in the journal Neuron, also offered an innovative and more comprehensive method for gauging memories. It asked subjects to recall the content of a television sit-com, which more accurately simulated real-life experiences because it required retrieving material that occurs in more complex settings...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- When the going gets tough, older adults' brains get going, according to new research by a University of Michigan professor studying how key regions of the brain click on when needed. Several regions in the brain, especially in the frontal cortex, are involved in helping people meet the demands of a constantly changing environment. While earlier research focused on older adults' failures to activate these regions, the new U-M research found that older adults can activate...
