The drug was able to replicate the movement recovered in physical rehab, the traditional treatment.
Category: neuroscience – Page 2
McGill researchers have demonstrated something long assumed: that glances can transmit information about one’s mental state to others without a single word being exchanged. They speculate that this primal ability may have played a role in assuring the survival of human society at times when making a sound could have attracted predators.
The research is published in the journal Communications Psychology.
“Humans have a long history of living in complex groups and social situations. It has been theorized that this has led our brains to develop a heightened ability to focus on social cues from faces, and especially from eyes,” said Jelena Ristic, a professor in McGill’s psychology department. She has been working in the field for over 20 years. “It’s a system that has evolved to support very quick exchanges of complex social information.”
Scientists found a genetic link between autism and DM1, where repeat DNA sequences disrupt brain gene splicing. This sheds light on ASD’s development and opens new paths for targeted treatments. Researchers from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UN
UNIGE scientists have identified a brain circuit that may be at the root of the social difficulties experienced by individuals with autism spectrum disorders. From birth, human survival relies on the ability to connect with others. This capacity, crucial for healthy development, appears to be dis
A new study offers insight into what is happening in our brains when our working memory must use its limited resources to remember multiple things.
Researchers found that two parts of the brain work together to ensure that more brain resources are given to remember a priority item when a person is juggling more than one item in memory.
The study involved people remembering spatial locations. Imagine seeing two books on different shelves of a cluttered bookcase that was not arranged in any order. How could you remember where they were if you came back a few seconds later?
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and collaborating institutions reveal in Nature Cell Biology a strategy that helps medulloblastoma, the most prevalent malignant brain tumor in children, spread and grow on the leptomeninges, the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
They discovered a novel line of communication between metastatic medulloblastoma and leptomeningeal fibroblasts that mediates recruitment and reprogramming of the latter to support tumor growth. The findings suggest that disrupting this communication offers a potential opportunity to treat this devastating disease.
“Metastases, the spreading of a tumor away from its original site, are the most common and most important cause of illness and death for children with medulloblastoma,” said co-first author Dr. Namal Abeysundara, a postdoctoral fellow who was working in the lab of Dr. Michael D. Taylor at the Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumor Research Center and the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Program at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada during this project.
A team from Stanford Medicine has developed AI-powered digital twins of the brain, trained on large datasets of brain activity. These models predict neural responses to new stimuli, offering profound insights into brain function.
Our brain doesn’t passively receive visual input—it actively orchestrates a symphony of neural oscillations to process the complex, dynamic scenes we see in everyday life.
People with Alzheimer’s disease may retain their ability to empathize, despite declines in other social abilities, finds a new study led by University College London (UCL) researchers.
The researchers found that people with Alzheimer’s disease scored slightly higher on a measure of empathy than peers of the same age with mild cognitive impairment, despite scoring worse on other measures of social cognition such as recognizing facial emotions and understanding the thoughts of others.
The authors of the study, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, say this may be the first time a cognitive domain has been found to improve in dementia.
A brief episode of anxiety may have a bigger influence on a person’s ability to learn what is safe and what is not. Research recently published in npj Science of Learning has used a virtual reality game that involved picking flowers with bees in some of the blossoms that would sting the participant—simulated by a mild electrical stimulation on the hand.
Researchers worked with 70 neurotypical participants between the ages of 20 and 30. Claire Marino, a research assistant in the ZVR Lab, and Pavel Rjabtsenkov, a Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, were co-first authors of the study.
Their team found that the people who learned to distinguish between the safe and dangerous areas—where the bees were and were not—showed better spatial memory and had lower anxiety, while participants who did not learn the different areas had higher anxiety and heightened fear even in safe areas.