Neurology Diagnostics

Posts Tagged ‘brain activity’

The finding allows us to understand how memories are stored and how they change over time.

One study suggests that it is possible to identify the specific memory that a person is recovering from last episode, only on the pattern of brain activity. The results of work carried out by University College London, UK, published in the online edition of the journal Current Biology.

Explains Eleanor Maguire, head of the study, “we have observed brain activity in search of a specific episodic memory, and examine the trace of real memory. We found that our memories are represented permanently in the hippocampus. Now we’ve seen where they are we have a chance to understand how memories are stored and how they might change over time. “

The results are a continuation of an earlier discovery of the scientific team, which showed that one could identify where he was a person inside a virtual reality room in the same way.

The researchers showed ten people one of three very short films before a brain scan. Each film was played by a different actress and a daily scenario quite similar. For example, in one of the shorter a woman looking in her purse to find an envelope in a mailbox and threw in another one of them a different actress ended her coffee cup and threw in a trash empty.

The scientists scanned the brains of participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while calling on those who remember the movie, and then included the image data in a computer log designed to identify patterns of brain activity, memories associated with every film.

Finally, the authors showed that these patterns could be identified in separate fMRI data to predict exactly what movie I was thinking about a particular person when he passed through the scanner. Read the rest of this entry »

The erratic thinking is honored to be responsible for major discoveries like the law of gravity of Newton. All of us have ever experienced the benefits of letting our minds wander: the word on the tip of the tongue, where we left the screwdriver, the name of an old friend … But the price we pay for thinking instead of focusing on what we are doing could be high. Nothing less than happiness.

The brain is a kind of ‘super computer’, complex operation, which we know only a small part. We know it has conscious and unconscious activity, both of equal importance as they allow complex actions simultaneously and seamlessly, and is capable of thinking about the dinner menu while we attend a work call, a real evolution.

This ability to digression seems to be the default operating mode of the brain “, explained Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), in the pages of the journal Science. Without it, certain situations would be terribly boring, like driving for hours, sunbathing or jogging. But it appears that “abuse” a little of this resource. Read the rest of this entry »

The use of MRI has uncovered three distinct patterns of brain activity in autism.

A group of researchers at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven (USA) has identified a pattern of brain activity that may characterize genetic vulnerability associated with the development of autism spectrum disorders. The results of their work, which was coordinated by Kevin A. Pelphrey, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By using MRI, the authors have analyzed the brains of autistic children and siblings of those affected do not have the disease. The analysis was done as they watched animations that mimic the biological motion. Compared with the control group, Pelphrey and his team observed three distinct neural signatures.

Offset the risk

The first refers to a reduced brain activity in regions that autistic children and siblings had in common and that explains the brain disrrupciones to the disease. The second is a similarly reduced activity in regions linked only to the affected children, which provides neuroendofenotipos linked to genomic complexity and heterogeneity of the disease. The third point to increased activity in areas related only unaffected siblings. Read the rest of this entry »