(Medical Xpress) — Johns Hopkins neurologists report success with a new means of getting rid of potentially lethal blood clots in the brain safely without cutting through easily damaged brain tissue or removing large pieces of skull. The minimally invasive treatment, they report, increased the number of patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) who could function independently by 10 to 15 percent six months following the procedure.
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Decoding brain waves to eavesdrop on what we hear
Neuroscientists may one day be able to hear the imagined speech of a patient unable to speak due to stroke or paralysis, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
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 rewrite textbook on location of brain’s speech processing center
Scientists have long believed that human speech is processed towards the back of the brain’s cerebral cortex, behind auditory cortex where all sounds are received — a place famously known as Wernicke’s area after the German neurologist who proposed this site in the late 1800s based on his study of brain injuries and strokes.
New mechanistic insights into adaptive learning
The brain is a fantastically complex and mysterious device, too large and with too many internal connections to be entirely programmable genetically. Its internal connectivity must therefore self-organize, based on the one hand on genetically regulated biases and on experience and learning on the other. The brain can change its internal connectivity based, for example, on correlations between the inputs it receives and the consequences of actions associated with those inputs, in a phenomenon we generally call associative learning. There are, in our daily life, numerous examples of this type of learning; its consequence is that a smell or a tune on the radio can trigger memories from the past, which lay dormant for some time.