Every generation has its James Dean: the rebel who refuses to follow the path beaten by their peers. Now, a new study in Current Biology has found a link between the amount of grey matter in one specific brain region and an individual’s likelihood of conforming to social pressures.
diseases
A new EEG shows how brain tracts are formed
In the past few years, researchers at the University of Helsinki have made several breakthroughs in discovering how the brain of preterm babies work, in developing treatments to protect the brain, and in developing research methods suitable for hospital use.
Challenges of identifying cognitive abilities in severely brain-injured patients
Only by employing complex machine-learning techniques to decipher repeated advanced brain scans were researchers at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell able to provide evidence that a patient with a severe brain injury could, in her way, communicate accurately.
Team isolates nerve cells involved in storing long term memory and gene proteins associated with them
(Medical Xpress) — A research team in Taiwan has succeeded in isolating two nerve cells in fruit fly brains that are believed to be the major players in allowing for the formation of long term memories. Furthermore, they’ve also found the genes that appear to be essential in creating related proteins that allow such memories to be saved. They have published a paper describing their work in Science.
Brain cells created from patients’ skin cells
(Medical Xpress) — Cambridge scientists have, for the first time, created cerebral cortex cells those that make up the brains grey matter from a small sample of human skin. The researchers findings, which were funded by Alzheimers Research UK and the Wellcome Trust, were published today in Nature Neuroscience.