Latest Neurophysiology Stories

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Nov. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ExploreLearning, a division within Cambium Learning Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: ABCD), announced today that students using Reflex logged 350,000 hours, the equivalent of 40 years, outside of school hours during the 2011-12 school year. During this time, students gained over 2.8 million new fluent facts. The online math fact fluency program is helping educators extend learning in mathematics beyond the school day for hundreds of thousands...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Chinese researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology in Chengdu, China have developed a method to transform brain waves into music that closely resembles something a human composer would write. According to their report in the open access journal PLOS ONE, they were able to use an electroencephalogram (EEG) to create the pitch and duration of a note, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to control...

Why being preterm could impair memory, learning New research at the University of Adelaide has demonstrated that teenagers born prematurely may suffer brain development problems that directly affect their memory and learning abilities. The research, conducted by Dr Julia Pitcher and Dr Michael Ridding from the University of Adelaide's Robinson Institute, shows reduced 'plasticity' in the brains of teenagers who were born preterm (at or before 37 weeks gestation). The results of the...

A thin, flexible electrode developed at the University of Michigan is 10 times smaller than the nearest competition and could make long-term measurements of neural activity practical at last. This kind of technology could eventually be used to send signals to prosthetic limbs, overcoming inflammation larger electrodes cause that damages both the brain and the electrodes. The main problem that neurons have with electrodes is that they make terrible neighbors. In addition to being...

University of Michigan Health System Researchers coax cells to grow and myelinate along thin fibers, with potential use in testing treatments for neurological diseases Every week in his clinic at the University of Michigan, neurologist Joseph Corey, M.D., Ph.D., treats patients whose nerves are dying or shrinking due to disease or injury. He sees the pain, the loss of ability and the other effects that nerve-destroying conditions cause – and wishes he could give patients more...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Surgeons have been using general anesthesia since the 19th century, but until now physicians and neurologists didn’t know exactly how brain activity correlates to the loss of consciousness. A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that was recently published in the journal PNAS demonstrated how distinctive brain activity patterns are associated with the loss of...

Brain's code for visual working memory deciphered in monkeys -- NIH-funded study The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object. Charles Gray, Ph.D., of Montana State University, Bozeman, a grantee of...

A gene that is associated with regeneration of injured nerve cells has been identified by scientists at Penn State University and Duke University. The team, led by Melissa Rolls, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, has found that a mutation in a single gene can entirely shut down the process by which axons -- the parts of the nerve cell that are responsible for sending signals to other cells -- regrow themselves after being cut or damaged. "We are...

A study in The Journal of Cell Biology shows how a transcription factor called STAT3 remains in the axon of nerve cells to help prevent neurodegeneration. The findings could pave the way for future drug therapies to slow nerve damage in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. In Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) and other neurodegenerative diseases, nerve cells usually die in stages, with axons deteriorating first and the cells themselves perishing later. Axon degeneration may represent a...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Can't remember what you dreamt about last night? Never fear, because a team of Japanese researchers has reportedly discovered a way to determine what thoughts are going through a person's mind about while they sleep. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a member of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and colleagues recruited three male volunteers and monitored them while they slept, using electroencephalography to record their...