While patients with Alzheimer’s might not remember when their loved ones visit, it has a profound effect on how they feel, a new study finds.

The study showed both happy and sad video clips lasting around 20 minutes to people with Alzheimer’s disease and observed their emotional states (Guzmán-Vélez et al., 2014).

They did the same for a group of healthy adults.

Five minutes afterwards, all the participants were given a memory test to see if they could remember the video they had just seen.

As you’d expect, Alzheimer’s patients remembered significantly less about the clips they’d just seen than the healthy group

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The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to learn information about that topic. New research publishing online October 2 in the Cell Press journal Neuron provides insights into what happens in our brains when curiosity is piqued. The findings could help scientists find ways to enhance overall learning and memory in both healthy individuals and those with neurological conditions.

“Our findings potentially have far-reaching implications for the public because they reveal insights into how a form of intrinsic motivation—curiosity—affects memory. These findings suggest ways to enhance learning in the classroom and other settings,” says lead author Dr. Matthias Gruber, of University of California at Davis.

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Scientists can now monitor and record the activity of hundreds of neurons concurrently in the brain, and ongoing technology developments promise to increase this number manyfold. However, simply recording the neural activity does not automatically lead to a clearer understanding of how the brain works.

In a new review paper published in Nature Neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University’s Byron M. Yu and Columbia University’s John P. Cunningham describe the scientific motivations for studying the activity of many neurons together, along with a class of machine learning algorithms — dimensionality reduction — for interpreting the activity

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A phenomenon that has long baffled researchers is how the traumatic experience of a mother can affect her child – even when the event occurs before the baby is born. Inching closer to an explanation, a team of investigators studied mother rats and discovered how they transferred their fears to their pups during their early days of life – through odors released during distress.

The team, from the University of Michigan (U-M) Medical School and New York University, published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They say their findings helped them identify the specific brain area where fear transmission settles during the early days of life, which could lead to a better insight as to why not all children of distressed mothers experience the same effects.

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Can you speak two or more languages? If so, your brain may thank you for it later in life. New research published in the Annals of Neurology suggests that bilingualism may slow down age-related cognitive decline – even if a second language is learned in adulthood.

The research team, led by Dr. Thomas Bak of the Centre for Cognitive Aging and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, notes that recent studies have already indicated a link between bilingualism and delayed onset of cognitive decline and dementia.

But according to Dr. Bak: "Our study is the first to examine whether learning a second language impacts cognitive performance later in life while controlling for childhood intelligence."

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What Is Bipolar Disorder?

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. Symptoms of bipolar disorder are severe. They are different from the normal ups and downs that everyone goes through from time to time. Bipolar disorder symptoms can result in damaged relationships, poor job or school performance, and even suicide. But bipolar disorder can be treated, and people with this illness can lead full and productive lives.

Signs & Symptoms

People with bipolar disorder experience unusually intense emotional states that occur in distinct periods called "mood episodes." Each mood episode represents a drastic change from a person’s usual mood and behavior. An overly joyful or overexcited state is called a manic episode, and an extremely sad or hopeless state is called a depressive episode. Sometimes, a mood episode includes symptoms of both mania and depression. This is called a mixed state. People with bipolar disorder also may be explosive and irritable during a mood episode.

Extreme changes in energy, activity, sleep, and behavior go along with these changes in mood. Symptoms of bipolar disorder are described below.

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When your car needs a new spark plug, you take it to a shop where it sits, out of commission, until the repair is finished. But what if your car could replace its own spark plug while speeding down the Mass Pike?

Of course, cars can’t do that, but our nervous system does the equivalent, rebuilding itself continually while maintaining full function.

Neurons live for many years but their components, the proteins and molecules that make up the cell are continually being replaced. How this continuous rebuilding takes place without affecting our ability to think, remember, learn or otherwise experience the world is one of neuroscience’s biggest questions.

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According to George Bernard Shaw, “Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.” According to psychologists, imitation is something that we all do whenever we learn a new skill, whether it is dancing or how to behave in specific social situations.

Now, the results of a brain-mapping experiment conducted by a team of neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University strengthen the theory that an impaired ability to imitate may underlie the profound and enduring difficulty with social interactions that characterize schizophrenia. In a paper published online on Mar. 14 by the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers report that when patients with schizophrenia were asked to imitate simple hand movements, their brains exhibited abnormal brain activity in areas associated with the ability to imitate.

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A new study correlating brain activity with how people make decisions suggests that when individuals engage in risky behavior, such as drunk driving or unsafe sex, it’s probably not because their brains’ desire systems are too active, but because their self-control systems are not active enough.

This might have implications for how health experts treat mental illness and addiction or how the legal system assesses a criminal’s likelihood of committing another crime.

When these brain regions (mostly associated with control) aren’t active enough, we make risky choices. Z-statistic corresponds to predictive ability, yellow being the most predictive regions. Credit Sarah Helfinstein/U. of Texas at Austin.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, UCLA and elsewhere analyzed data from 108 subjects who sat in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner — a machine that allows researchers to pinpoint brain activity in vivid, three-dimensional images — while playing a video game that simulates risk-taking.

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