Concussions are common in young athletes but the underlying changes in brain function that occur have been poorly understood. Now, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study is the first to link changes in brain function directly to the recovery of the athlete.

The first study to examine brain activity patterns in severely traumatized children showed their brains function differently than those of healthy children, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

Heavy prenatal alcohol exposure does not always lead to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS); sometimes it can lead to cognitive and behavioral deficits in the absence of craniofacial features needed to make an FAS diagnosis.

A person searching for a ripe tomato at the grocery store is more likely to notice apples, strawberries and other red fruits as well, according to a new study that measured changes in blood flow in the brain. The researchers also discovered that more neurons are called into action to help the eyes find a particular object than has previously been documented.

People who meditate show signs they are surprisingly alert, the first study of its kind has found. Australian PhD researcher Dylan DeLosAngeles, at the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, shows that meditation produces changes in brainwaves usually associated with increased alertness.

Anybody who’s tried to concentrate on work while suffering a headache knows that pain compellingly commands attention—which is how evolution helped ensure survival in a painful world. Now, researchers have pinpointed the brain region responsible for pain’s ability to affect cognitive processing.

Psychologists from the University of Exeter have identified an 'early warning signal' in the brain that helps us avoid repeating previous mistakes. Published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, their research identifies, for the first time, a mechanism in the brain that reacts in just 0.1 seconds to things that have resulted in us making errors in the past.

Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body.

Compared to people with normal vision, those who were blind at birth tend to have excellent memories. Now, a new study reported online on June 21st in the journal Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press, shows that blind individuals are particular whizzes when it comes to remembering things in the right order.

The long supposed connection between mind and music has been further demonstrated by an international collaboration of physicists led by Simone Bianco and Paolo Grigolini at the Center for Nonlinear Science at the University of North Texas. A statistical analysis reveals a remarkable similarity between the distributions produced by music compositions and brain activity.

All anxiety is not created equal, and a research team at the University of Illinois now has the data to prove it. The team has found the most compelling evidence yet of differing patterns of brain activity associated with each of two types of anxiety: anxious apprehension (verbal rumination, worry) and anxious arousal (intense fear, panic, or both).

For almost one hundred years the brain's "central command" system - whose charge includes controlling the body's cardiorespiratory response to exercise - has been pursued. Animal experiments and functional imaging studies have provided clues to the location of this system, but the underlying electrophysiological activity has never been measured.