I have a big birthday coming up so aging is on my mind. Having things "on your mind" is good because the brain benefits from being stimulated.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery, which is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders, is now being studied for its potential to treat a variety of conditions. For example, DBS of the hypothalamus has been used to treat cluster headaches and aggressiveness in humans, and stimulating this area influences feeding behavior in animals.

A brain chemical that makes us sleepy also appears to play a central role in the success of deep brain stimulation to ease symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease and other brain disorders. The surprising finding is outlined in a paper published online Dec. 23 in Nature Medicine.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have for the first time measured the electrical activity of nerve cells and correlated it to changes in blood flow in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive method to stimulate neurons in the brain.

An Adelaide University PhD student has found part of the brain which learns best at night. Martin Sale has been named Young Scientist of the Year as part of National Science Week.

How often old people read a newspaper, play chess, or engage in other mentally stimulating activities is related to risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published June 27, 2007, in the online edition of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

A study at the University Clinics of Bonn and Cologne gives people with therapy-resistant depression reason for hope. The doctors treated two men and a woman with what is known as deep brain stimulation. All three patients have been suffering from very severe depression for several years which could neither be brought under control using medication nor by other therapies. During the simulation the condition of two of the three patients improved within a few days.

Every thought, feeling and action originates from the electrical signals emitted by diverse brain cells enmeshed in a tangle of circuits. At this fundamental level, scientists struggle to explain the mind. Worse yet, they have lacked tools to understand what's going wrong in patients with ailments such as depression or Parkinson's disease.