Researchers from the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center have completed a large-scale neuroimaging study of healthy adults from age 30 to 90 that measured beta-amyloid protein—a substance whose toxic buildup in the brain is a diagnostic marker for Alzheimer’s disease.
Education
Music training has biological impact on aging process
Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.
Researchers identify mechanism behind associative memory by exploring insect brains
A key feature of human and animal brains is that they are adaptive; they are able to change their structure and function based on input from the environment and on the potential associations, or consequences, of that input. For example, if a person puts his hand in a fire and gets burned, he learns to avoid flames; the simple sight of a flame has acquired a predictive value, which in this case, is repulsive. To learn more about such neural adaptability, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have explored the brains of insects and identified a mechanism by which the connections in their brain change to form new and specific memories of smells.
In the brain, an earlier sign of autism
In their first year of life, babies who will go on to develop autism already show different brain responses when someone looks at or away from them. Although the researchers are careful to say that the study, reported online on January 26 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, is only a first step toward earlier diagnosis, the findings do suggest that direct brain measures might help to predict the future development of autism symptoms in infants as young as six months.
The ethics of brain boosting
(Medical Xpress) — The idea of a simple, cheap and widely available device that could boost brain function sounds too good to be true.