Latest Functional magnetic resonance imaging Stories

Piano practicing finetunes the brain circuitries that temporally bind signals from our senses Over the years pianists develop a particularly acute sense of the temporal correlation between the movements of the piano keys and the sound of the notes played. However, they are no better than non-musicians at assessing the synchronicity of lip movements and speech. This was discovered by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in a comparative study on the...

CHICAGO, Nov. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The controversy over whether or not violent video games...

CHICAGO, Nov. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have identified abnormalities in the brains of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that may serve as a biomarker for the disorder, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). ADHD is one of the most common childhood disorders, affecting an estimated five to eight percent...

Recovery depends on the exchange of information between the brain hemispheres The structure of the corpus callosum, a thick band of nerve fibres that connects the two halves of the brain with each other and in this way enables the rapid exchange of information between the left and right hemispheres, plays an important role in the regaining of motor skills following a stroke. A study currently published in the journal Human Brain Mapping has shown that in stroke patients with particularly...

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Everyone is told to exercise, exercise, exercise - it improves your health. Now, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center say that it may also have benefits for a serious medical condition. Presented at the society of Neuroscience's annual meeting - Neuroscience 2011, the study showed that six weeks of exercise substantially improved memory retention and pain control for fibromyalgia patients who were no longer being treated with medications....

John DeLuca, PhD, Vice President for Research at Kessler Foundation presented findings on the use of a behavioral technique for cognitive rehabilitation in people with multiple sclerosis (MS).  Lead investigator was Nancy Chiaravalloti, PhD, director of the Neuropsychology & Neuroscience Laboratory at Kessler Foundation.  The presentation on modified Story Memory Technique was made on October 21, 2011 in Amsterdam at the 5th Joint Triennial Congress of the European and Americas...

Georgetown researchers use fMRI to correlate exercise with memory performance changes in the brain Areas of the brain responsible for pain processing and cognitive performance changed in fibromyalgia patients who exercised following a medication holiday, say researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center. They say the changes indicate brain functioning is more streamlined after an exercise intervention because less of the brain’s resources is devoted to processing bothersome...

Brain imaging experiments uncouple two apparently intimately connected mental processes In everyday life, attention and awareness appear tightly interwoven. Attending to the scissors on the right side of your desk, you become aware of their attributes, for example the red handles. Vice versa, the red handles could attract your attention to the scissors. However, a number of behavioural observations have recently led scientists to postulate that attention and awareness are fundamentally...

Scientists measure dream content for the first time and find that dreams activate the brain in a similar way to real actions. The ability to dream is a fascinating aspect of the human mind. However, how the images and emotions that we experience so intensively when we dream form in our heads remains a mystery. Up to now it has not been possible to measure dream content. Max Planck scientists working with colleagues from the Charité hospital in Berlin have now succeeded, for the first...

Haxby found that the brain's responses to movies reveal a detailed code that is the same for all individuals A team of neuroscientists at Dartmouth College has shown that different individuals' brains use the same, common neural code to recognize complex visual images. The paper, "A common, high-dimensional model of the neural representational space in human ventral temporal cortex," is in the October 20, 2011, issue of the journal, Neuron. The lead author of the paper is James Haxby,...