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The hippocampus is a region of the brain involved in memory and how we interpret the world around us. MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies have shown that the hippocampus shrinks in people with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that...
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People who are addicted to cocaine have less grey matter in the frontal parts of their brain and in their hippocampi. The frontal parts of the brain are important for paying attention and organising one's behaviour while the hippocampus is important...
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Parents often worry about their children going bad ways when they reach adolescence but a new brain-scan study by a team led by Jennifer H. Pfeifer from the University of Oregon suggests that their willpower (or at least the part of the brain responsible...
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In another thread ("What's a good reading against type-identity theory for neuroscientists?"), I mentioned that I had a forthcoming paper in Philosophical Psychology that puts pressure on the IBE argument for identity theory. Below is the...
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A team of researchers led by Brian Hallahan from the National University of Ireland in Galway have carried out a review of studies into brain volume, bipolar disorder and the effectiveness of lithium. They found that people with bipolar disorder had increased...
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A lot of coverage of science concentrates on how what goes on in the brain affects the way we feel and think but the relationship can, of course, work both ways with treatments and good and bad events in people's lives having an effect on what happens...
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Researchers from Oxford and Cambridge and two German universities have shed new light on the power of the mind and the brain's ability to cope with pain. They studied 22 volunteers, each of whom had a pain device placed on their skin that was too...
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Men are more likely to suffer from autism than women and men with autism have more testosterone than men without the condition. Researchers at Washington State University have been looking into the influence of male and female sex hormones on a gene called...
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People who suffer from migraines and severe headaches do show changes to their brain over time but don't show symptoms of cognitive decline. Researchers from Inserm and the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris studied 780 people over 65. They studied...
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Brain scans could be used to help people at risk of developing schizophrenia so that they can be offered help before they become unwell. Schizophrenia is known to run in families and researchers from Edinburgh University compared 146 people with a family...
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Researchers from the University of Illinois have been looking into the links between brain structures and learning. They studied 34 people looking at brain activity in structures called the caudate nucleus, the putamen and the nucleus accumbens. The caudate...
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The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep within the temporal lobe of the brain. Research on apes and monkeys has shown that the more sociable they are the larger their amygdalas and a new study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests...
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The default mode network (DMN) connects various parts of the brain; it is active when we are daydreaming or staring into space and gives rise to spontaneous thought but is suppressed when we are concentrating on a particular task. New research from the...
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Alzheimer's disease is thought to be caused by the build up of tangles, or plaques, of a protein called beta amyloid in the brain. However, researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have found that in people who have a...
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In In Search of Lost Time Proust describes a whole host of memories suddenly brought back to him when he dips a madeliene biscuit into a cup of lime tea. Psychologists call this process unconscious memory and researchers from the University of California...