Sub-Topics Memory Mirror Neurons Near-Death Experiences Also Try Biotechnology Human Anatomy - Brain Resources Traumatic Brain Injuries Lesson Plans Brain (Franklin Institute) Shows how we get better at tasks as we repeat them. 5-02 Lists Brain and Neuroscience Resources (Awesome Library) Provides dozens of resources on the brain, brain research, and sources of information on neuroscience. 5-02 Neuroscience Philosophy (Stanford University Metaphysics Research Lab - Bickle and Mandik) Provides a distinction between neuroscience and neurophilosophy, as well as a discussion of the field of neuroscience. This work is part of the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Zalta. 5-01 Neuroscience Resources (Neurosci-Online) Provides sources of online information, especially journals, for neuroscience issues, studies, and basic information. 2-01 Neuroscience and Brain Resources (Chudler) Provides over 100 sources of information. 5-02 News -01-15-06 Retraining the Brain Therapies (CBS News) Merzenich is a leading developer of therapies based on what's called brain plasticity, which he defines as, 'the capacity of the brain to change itself. It actually changes physically, functionally, in ways that you can measure.' "" " 'There are no drugs and no surgery involved," Taub says. 'Nevertheless you get a very substantial treatment effect without any side effects.' " 12-05 -02-15-09 Biology and Religion (Time.com) "If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect." 02-09 -02-17-06 Growing New Cells to Cure Neurological Diseases (ABC News) "Scientists are getting closer to reaching one of the Holy Grails of medical research — regenerating brain cells to wipe out a wide range of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and epilepsy." 02-06 -02-17-06 Hand Holding May Affect Your Brain (ABC News) "As brain images have become more advanced, there have been a flood of studies claiming to illustrate the physiological effects of everything from meditation to political partisanship to love." "There's debate in the scientific community about how valuable these studies really are. But Davidson — who says he's been happily married for 28 years — believes his study shows that affection among loving couples may actually change people's brains." 02-06 -02-17-06 Regenerating Brain Cells Gets Closer (ABC News) Scientists are getting closer to reaching one of the Holy Grails of medical research — regenerating brain cells to wipe out a wide range of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and epilepsy." "Using a powerful microscope, the researchers photographed the stem cells in the petri dish every five minutes for up to 30 hours. They ended up with a time-lapse movie that shows exactly what changed every time a new chemical was tried out on the cells." "Thus they were able to change the course of the development by chemical manipulation, and that's perhaps the most important aspect of all. That suggests that chemicals, not surgery, may be able to correct a diseased mind that is now almost impossible to treat." 02-06 -02-26-07 Blind Woman Learns to See (Time Magazine) "Neuroscientists have long been convinced that the first few years of life are a crucial period for brain development--a time when connections between neurons are being forged at a prodigious rate as a baby learns to make sense of the external world. Interfere with that process, and you can cause permanent, irrevocable damage. If a child is born blind, for example, it's pretty much over by age 6. You can fix the eyes, and they might be able to perceive light and dark. Without the right visual circuitry in place, though, there's no way to form images--the essence of true sight." "But then there's the patient known as S.R.D. Discovered by researchers four years ago in Ahmedabad, India, she was a 32-year-old, dirt-poor maid who had been born with severe cataracts. They were removed surgically when she was 12--and within a year, despite what neuroscientific dogma would have predicted, S.R.D. learned to see." 02-07 -04-29-08 New Ways to Predict Mistakes (WebMD.com) "Wouldn't it be nice to have a crystal ball that tells you when you're about to make a mindless mistake? New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that may be possible in certain cases, a finding that could one day help improve workplace and employee safety." 04-08 -05-06-08 The Cost for Being Smart (New York Times) "Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health." 05-08 -06-19-06 Stem Cells Help Repair Rats' Paralysis (ABC News) "Scientists have used stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralyzed rats walk." 06-06 -07-03-06 Man "Rewires" Own Brain: A First (USA Today) "Doctors have their first proof that a man who was barely conscious for nearly 20 years regained speech and movement because his brain spontaneously rewired itself by growing tiny new nerve connections to replace the ones sheared apart in a car crash." 07-06 -07-14-06 Man Moves Objects With Thoughts (BBC News) "A sensor implanted in a paralysed man's brain has enabled him to control objects by using his thoughts alone." 07-06 -09-19-07 Army Tests Soldiers' Brains Before Deployment (MSNBC News) "It’s all part of a fledgling Army program that records how soldiers’ brains work when healthy, giving doctors baseline data to help diagnose and treat the soldiers if they suffer a traumatic brain injury — the signature injury of the Iraq war." 09-07 -12-08-05 Protein p25 Associated with Alzheimer's Disease -- and Creativity (HHMI.org) " Researchers have found evidence that may partially exonerate a protein known to be a culprit in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Their new studies show that the protein p25, which wreaks havoc in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, also has a good side in promoting the plasticity of the brain." 12-05. -12-08-05 Protein p25 Associated with Alzheimer's Disease -- and Creativity (HHMI.org) " Researchers have found evidence that may partially exonerate a protein known to be a culprit in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Their new studies show that the protein p25, which wreaks havoc in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, also has a good side in promoting the plasticity of the brain." 12-05. -12-09-05 "Mirror Neurons" Associated with Communication Impairment (Scientific American) "More than one in 500 children have some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All autistic children suffer from an impaired ability to communicate and relate to others, but some of them are able to socially interact to a greater degree than their peers. A recent study of a group of these so-called high functioning autistics suggests the neurological basis for their social impairment." "Neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California Los Angeles and her colleagues surveyed the brains of 10 autistic children and an equal number of nonautistic children as they watched and imitated 80 different faces displaying either anger, fear, happiness, sadness or no emotion." "The autistic children differed from their peers in only one respect: each showed reduced activity in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus--a brain region located near the temple." 12-05. -12-11-05 NASA Looking to Savant for Answers (Guardian Unlimited) Kim Peek "knows 9,000 books off by heart; he can direct people around US cities from maps he has memorised years ago; and he has total recall of the dates of all major world events." "Kim - now 54 - was born with a malformed cerebellum, at the base of his brain, and lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of nerves that normally connects the brain's two hemispheres. As a child he was assumed to be suffering from severe mental retardation." 12-05 Neural Bases of Understanding Social Relations (Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center) "Our aim was to describe the neural mechanisms that allow people to understand everyday social interaction. Subjects were asked to simply watch professionally prepared movie clips depicting everyday interactions. There were 18 clips depicting CS relationships in which the actors were socially equivalent in some respect and 18clips depicting AR relationships in which there was a hierarchical differentiation between the actors." 12-05. Out-of-Body Experiences Created in Lab (MSNBC News) "New virtual-reality experiments show the brain can be tricked into believing it's outside the body, lending credence to the strange claims of some patients and shedding light on how the brain might generate its 'self-image.' " 07-07 Report: Man with Almost No Brain Led a Normal Life (FoxNews.com) "French doctors are amazed that a 44-year-old civil servant with an abnormally small brain has led a normal life with a slightly lower than normal IQ, according to a report on Physorg.com." 07-07 Papers "Unselfish" Area of Brain Found (BBC News) "Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist." 01-07 -11-07-08 Progress With Persons With Quadraplegia (CBS News) "It is hard to imagine being completely paralyzed but fully conscious; able to see, hear, smell and sense pain, but unable to communicate with the world. That's what it means to be "locked in." And it was amazing to learn in the course of reporting for our story on Brain Computer Interface technology that a 2002 survey found that the mental health of people in this condition was not significantly lower than that of the general population. What was not surprising to learn is that what is paramount to everyone is finding a way to communicate, and that is precisely the hope for this exciting branch of neuroscience." 11-08 Decisions - Finding Where the Brain Makes Decisions (Wired.com - McGrath) "Scientists in the United Kingdom believe they may be close to unraveling some of the brain processes that ultimately dictate the choices we make as consumers." 5-02 Go, the Game, May Provide Insight on Intuition (International Herald Tribune - Hafner) Argues that Go is a game that is much more challenging than chess and can therefore reveal insight into the processes of intuition. Chess can be reduced to mathematical probabilities but Go is beyond such an analysis with current technology. "A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds." 7-02 History of the Study of the Brain (Time Magazine) Provides five paths to understanding the brain. 01-07 Meditating Your Way to a Better Brain (Newsweek - LabNotes) "Thanks to the Dalai Lama, lots of monks have lent Richard Davidson their brains. For almost 20 years Davidson, a neuropsychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a long-time meditator himself, has been curious about how Buddhist meditation of the kind the monks practice might change their brains. He has lugged electronic equipment up into the hills above Dharamsala (the Dalai Lama's home in exile in northern India) to test the brains of yogis, lamas and monks living in primitive huts there, and persuaded other monks to visit his lab." "Over the years he has found that the brains of monks who are the most experienced meditators are indeed different from other brains. They have a much stronger "gamma" wave, a form of electrical activity in the brain that is associated with consciousness and pulling together information and perceptions from different regions of the brain. They also have much greater activity in the left than the right prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead), a mark of well-being and happiness." 05-07 Neuroanatomy of Motivation and Addictions (CNN - Gupta and Zahn) Describes new findings on the area of the brain believed to be responsible for motivation for achievement, addictions, and similar personality characteristics. 6-02 New Robotic Arm Directed by Thoughts (BBC News) "Scientists in the US have created a robotic arm that can be controlled by thought alone." 06-06 Panic Disorders - Neurobiological Correlates (Journal of Postgraduate Medicine) Describes neurobiological correlates of panic disorder and agoraphobia. 01-01. Parkinson's Disease Treatment Successful (BBC News - Ghosh) Describes a promising treatment for Parkinson's Disease that involves regeneration of damaged portions of the brain. "The treatment involves putting a drug called GDNF (Glial cell line-Derived Neurotrophic Factor) into a mechanical pump, two of which feed it to the most damaged parts of the brain." 5-02 Pheromones (CNN - Rowland) Provides results from research that pheromones, chemicals that are received by the nose as smells, can affect human ovulation. Since humans are not aware of the smells, the mechanism by which ovulation is affected is still unknown. SIDS Research Reported (BBC News) Describes a method of using the Internet and supercomputers to allow "...a doctor to use a portable computer to compare a patient's brain scan with a composite image of what that brain is expected to look like." 5-02 SIDS Research Reported (CTNow.com - Hathaway) "Babies who die suddenly in their sleep may have abnormalities in brain cells that help regulate breathing, Yale University researchers reported Monday." 5-02 The Anatomy of Violence (MSNBC News) "Pathological genes, a disturbed mind, social isolation and a gun culture are not enough. Mass murderers also need the individual will to pull the trigger." 07-06 Periodicals Neuron (Cell Press) Provides research results related to neurons. College Level. 5-01 Neuroscience (Nature) Provides articles on the latest research in neuroscience. 10-00 Projects -08-07-08 Protein Key to Brain Rewiring (U.S. News) "Scientists say they're gaining insight into how the brain rewires itself as it learns new things, potentially helping them move toward better treatments for mental illness and brain injuries." 05-08 False Perception of Movement (FreeFreebies.com) Provides a graphic that looks like it is moviing...but it is not. 04-06 Research -02-07-06 Brain Change Continues After Age 18 (Brightsurf.com) "Two Dartmouth researchers are one step closer to defining exactly when human maturity sets in. In a study aimed at identifying how and when a person’s brain reaches adulthood, the scientists have learned that, anatomically, significant changes in brain structure continue after age 18." -02-07-06 Brain Hormone Puts Brakes on Reproduction (Brightsurf.com) "The hormone, a small protein, or peptide, called gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone (GnIH), puts the brakes on reproduction by directly inhibiting the action of the central hormone of the reproductive system–gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH). GnRH stimulates the pituitary gland to activate the reproductive system, whereas GnIH appears to reduce the effects of GnRH stimulation." Worksheets Brain and Nervous System Worksheets (Chudler) Neuroscience for Kids provides worksheets for teachers to use in the classroom. 12-99

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