Psychology and Neuroscience

The exact cause of schizophrenia, a complex psychiatric disorder, has baffled researchers. However, a team of researchers led by Andrew Pocklington from Cardiff University’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics has made headway into understanding its root cause. Read more about their research here.

A group of neuroscientists has developed a technique of making living cells and tissues bigger, which could enable biologists to image an entire brain in molecular detail using an ordinary microscope, and to resolve features that would normally be beyond the limits of optics. Read on to find out more about the technique.

The lateral habenula, considered to be one of the oldest regions of the brain, evolution-wise, has always been linked to depression and avoidance behavior. But a new study has found that this region of the brain plays a crucial role in decision making. Read on to know more. 

A team of researchers from Columbia University Medical Center led by Yuki Oka discovered two groups of neurons in the hypothalamus that control the feeling of thirst in mice. In an attempt to understand how the brain controls the desire for water, the team used optogenetic experiments to stimulate specific neurons with a laser. Read on to find out what the team discovered. 

A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign studied the effect of Internet usage on our memory. According to them, we have come to rely heavily on the Internet to access information and to aid our memory. Read more about their research here.

Researchers from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute discovered that the first language we are exposed to has a lasting influence on the way the brain processes the other languages even when the first language is no longer spoken. They studied how the children from diverse linguistic backgrounds processed pseudo-French words and used the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the parts of their brains that got activated. Read more about their research here.

A study conducted on the brain by researchers at the Northwestern University suggests that the long-held belief that Wernicke’s area is the prime area of language comprehension might not be accurate. Read more about their research here.

A team of researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center led by Dr. Linda Buck, a biologist and a Nobel Prize winner, has discovered a small area of the mouse brain that plays an important role in fear. They studied the scent-induced fear response in mice by exposing them to the smell of bobcat’s urine, who is their natural predator. Read more about their research here.

Researchers Robert Malenka and Boris Heifets at Stanford University have expressed the need for an in-depth study of the drug ecstasy, scientifically known as MDMA. According to the pair, the workings of the MDMA drug in humans have not been studied well. The drug is classified as Schedule -1, which indicates that it has a high abuse potential and has no accepted medical use. Read more about their research here.

In a study led by study researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, it was found that the human brain is more developed at detecting diseases in others and avoiding the disease than previously thought. Read more about their research here.