Category Archives: Neuroscience

How Music May Help Ward Off Hearing Loss As We Age

Posted on August 29, 2011 by admin

Older people often have difficulty understanding conversation in a crowd. Like everything else, our hearing deteriorates as we age. There are physiological reasons for this decline: We lose tiny hair cells that pave the way for sound to reach our … Continue reading →

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Brain’s synaptic pruning continues into your 20’s

Posted on August 24, 2011 by admin

The synaptic pruning that helps sculpt the adolescent brain into its adult form continues to weed out weak neural connections throughout our 20s. The surprise finding could have implications for our understanding of schizophrenia, a psychological disorder which often appears … Continue reading →

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Device Lets You See With Your Ears

Posted on August 20, 2011 by admin

A new device that links spy glasses, a webcam and a smart phone could make it easier for blind people to “see” shapes by converting visual signals to auditory ones and sending them to another part of the brain. Its … Continue reading →

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Feel the Noise: Touch, Hearing May Share Neurological Roots

Posted on July 27, 2011 by admin

About a year and a half after her stroke, a 36-year-old professor started to feel sounds. A radio announcer’s voice made her tingle. Background noise in a plane felt physically uncomfortable. Now Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at the City College … Continue reading →

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Does coffee make you hear things?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by admin

Scholars at Australia’s La Trobe University just released a study showing a correlation between caffeine intake and auditory hallucinations. In layman’s terms: Lots of coffee might make you more likely to hear things that aren’t there. Researchers came to the … Continue reading →

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Musical training offsets memory-loss & effects of aging

Posted on May 13, 2011 by admin

Lifelong musical training appears to offset some of the deleterious effects of aging — memory and the ability to hear speech in noise — researchers at Northwestern University have found. The researchers tested 18 musicians and 19 non-musicians aged 45 … Continue reading →

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Skull electrodes give memory a boost

Posted on January 28, 2011 by admin

The first non-invasive way of stimulating the brain that can boost visual memory has been identified by scientists. The technique uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak electrical currents are applied to the scalp using electrodes, reports the … Continue reading →

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Neurons lose information at one bit per second

Posted on January 28, 2011 by admin

Information stored in the activity patterns of cerebral cortex neurons is discarded at the surprisingly high rate of one bit per active neuron per second, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University of Gottingen … Continue reading →

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Blue light taps directly into your emotions

Posted on October 30, 2010 by admin

We’re all happier on sunny days, but why? It seems that light taps directly into brain areas that process emotion – good and bad. Although light is used to treat mood disorders, we don’t understand how this works. While rods … Continue reading →

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Robot limbs to plug into the brain with light

Posted on October 17, 2010 by admin

Imagine a bionic arm that plugs directly into the nervous system, so that the brain can control its motion, and the owner can feel pressure and heat through their robotic hand. This prospect has come a step closer with the … Continue reading →

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