Brain Imaging

Syndicate content

Playing Tetris may increase brain efficiency

Brain imaging shows playing Tetris leads to a thicker cortex and may also increase brain efficiency, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Research Notes. A research team based in New Mexico is one of the first to investigate the effects of practice in the brain using two image techniques.

Get the full story...

Scientists read minds with infrared scan

Researchers at Canada's largest children's rehabilitation hospital have developed a technique that uses infrared light brain imaging to decode preference – with the goal of ultimately opening the world of choice to children who can't speak or move.

Get the full story...

Study finds connections between genetics, brain activity and preference

A team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has used brain imaging, genetics and experimental psychology techniques to identify a connection between brain reward circuitry, a behavioral measurement of preference and a gene variant that appears to influence both.

Get the full story...

MIT unlocks mystery behind brain imaging

In work that solves a long-standing mystery in neuroscience, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have shown for the first time that star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes—previously considered bit players by most neuroscientists—make noninvasive brain scans possible.

Get the full story...

Improving anxiety treatment through help of brain imaging

Wouldn’t it be nice if our doctors could predict accurately whether we would respond to a particular medication" This question is important because research studies provide information about how groups of patients tend to respond to treatments, but inevitably, differences among groups of patients with the same diagnosis mean that findings about groups of patients may not apply to individuals from those groups.

Get the full story...

Scientists explore brain's reaction to potent hallucinogen

Brain-imaging studies performed in animals at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory provide researchers with clues about why an increasingly popular recreational drug that causes hallucinations and motor-function impairment in humans is abused.

Get the full story...

Harvard researchers publish MRI images of genes in action in the living brain

Biologists have just confirmed what poets have known for centuries: eyes really are windows of the soul—or at least of the brain. In a new study published in the April 2008 print issue of The FASEB Journal, Harvard researchers describe the development of gene probe eye drops that—for the first time—make it possible to monitor and detect tissue repair in the brain of living organisms using MRI.

Get the full story...

Introspective experiences inform inferences about similar people

Using fMRI scanning, researchers have found that the region of the brain associated with introspective thought is also accessed when inferring the thoughts of other people who are similar to oneself. However, this is not the case when considering those who are different politically, socially, or religiously.

Get the full story...

High-tech interrogations may promote abuse

There is evidence that brain imaging technology is being used to interrogate suspected terrorists despite concerns that it may not be reliable, and that it might inadvertently promote abuse of detainees, according to a Penn State researcher.

Get the full story...

Myth of runner's high revisited with brain imaging

Throughout the world, amateurs, experts and the media agree that prolonged jogging raises people's spirits. And many believe that the body’s own opioids, so called endorphins, are the cause of this. But in fact this has never been proved until now. Researchers at the Technische Universitet Munchen and the University of Bonn succeeded to demonstrate the existence of an ‘endorphin driven runner’s high’.

Get the full story...

Culture influences brain function

People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Get the full story...

Where thoughts of familiar objects occur inside human brain

A team of Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists, combining methods of machine learning and brain imaging, have found a way to identify where people’s thoughts and perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain by identifying the patterns of brain activity associated with the objects.

Get the full story...