The researchers could watch in a top-down view the 36 participants passing through a bottleneck during a simple evacuation situation. Each pedestrian was controlled by a real experimental participant who viewed the situation in a realstic way from the...
Comparison of grey matter (brown) and white matter (yellow) in sex-matched subjects A (56 years, BMI 19.5) and B (50 years, BMI 43.4) Credit: Lisa Ronan
From middle-age, the brains of obese individuals display differences in white matter similar to...
Many patients with neuropsychiatric disorders such as anxiety or depression experience negative moods that lead them to focus on the possible downside of a given situation more than the potential benefit.
MIT neuroscientists have now pinpointed a brain region that...
Panoramic Sunset.Credit: © Salvatore D'Oro / Flickr
When asked to visualize your childhood home, you can probably picture not only the house you lived in, but also the buildings next door and across the street. MIT neuroscientists have now identified...
A newly identified protein can be manipulated to make opioid painkillers effective at lower doses while also muting the reward mechanism that leads to addiction, Mount Sinai researchers have found.
The protein, RGSz1 (Regulator of G protein signaling z1), which is...
NYU researchers offer a new theory, based on a computational model, on how the brain separates relevant from irrelevant information in these and other circumstances.
Imagine yourself sitting in a noisy café trying to read. To focus on the book...
Ask a dozen people about their greatest fears, and you'll likely get a dozen different responses. That, along with the complexity of the human brain, makes fear—and its close cousin, anxiety—difficult to study. For this reason, clinical anti-anxiety medicines...
Itching is a highly contagious behavior. When we see someone scratch, we're likely to scratch, too. New research from the Washington University Center for the Study of Itch shows contagious itching is hardwired in the brain. Credit: Michael Worful
Some...
Humans, like other animals, possess an enormous learning capacity that allows for the apprehension of new sensory information to master new skills or to adapt to an ever-changing environment. However, many of the mechanisms that enable people to learn...
Nobody really knows how the activity in your brain reorganizes as you learn new tasks, but new research from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh reveals that the brain has various mechanisms and constraints by which it...
For a recent “positive computing” study by informatics researchers at UCI, subjects were asked to smile and snap a selfie with their smartphone every day for three weeks.Credit: Steve Zylius / UCI
Regularly snapping selfies with your smartphone and sharing...
