hippocampus tagged posts

The hippocampus is particularly active when a person solves conflicts quickly and successfully. Credit: © RUB, Grafik: Bierstedt

In everyday life, people are confronted with decision conflicts, especially if they need to suppress an action that would have made sense under normal circumstances. eg when the pedestrian lights go green, a pedestrian would normally start walking. If, however, a car comes speeding along at the same time, the pedestrian should stay where he is.

METHOD: Study participants heard the words “high” or “low” spoken in a high or low tone, and they had to state – regardless of the meaning of the word – at what pitch the speaker said them...

Dopamine-dependent long term depression of mediated transmission profoundly disrupts normal synaptic transmission between hippocampus and PFC. These results show how dopaminergic activation induces long-term hypofunction of NMDARs, which can contribute to disordered functional connectivity, a characteristic that is a hallmark of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. Credit: https://neurowiki2012.wikispaces.com/file/view/Reward_circuit.jpg/315908202/Reward_circuit.jpg

New research reveals mechanisms that trigger disruption in the brain’s communication channels linked to symptoms in psychiatric disorders. This research could have important implications for treating symptoms of brain disorders.

Many of our everyday cognitive functions such as learning and memory rely on normal communic...

University of Illinois Beckman Institute postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Burzynska and her colleagues analyzed the brain and cognition of Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old track-and-field athlete. Burzynska is now a professor at Colorado State University. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer

1st glimpse of potential effects of Exercise on the brains and cognitive abilities of the ‘oldest old.’ In the summer of 2012, Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old Canadian track-and-field athlete with more than 30 world records in her age group, submitted to an in-depth analysis of her brain.

A retired teacher and mother of two, Kotelko started her athletic career late in life: slow-pitch softball at age 65, and at 77 switched to track-and-field events...

We now know sleep has profound implications for lots of human tasks. Sleep improves our memory, and enables us to consolidate new information with the knowledge we already have. Sleep also changes the quality of stored info. We are more likely to adjust our memories slightly so that they fit better with previous experiences after sleeping. And we are more likely to avoid misleading background information in making decisions and judgements. But sleep also has a positive effect on problem solving.

It’s common to feel you can gain inspiration for something overnight. You may have even woken up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem, whether it be trivial or life-changing. These intuitions turn out to be absolutely correct.

METHOD: Volunteers a set of problems with 3 word...