A new study conducted at the Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience of the University of Bologna, and published by Elsevier in the February 2009 issue of Cortex shows that, in confabulating patients, memory accuracy improves when attentional resources are reduced.

Neurons in the sound-processing part of the brain’s cortex are experts at timing. With remarkable precision, they fire electrochemical pulses or “spikes” in sync with the cues they receive from other neurons, even when these cues are separated by very small time intervals.

Recognising people, objects or animals by the sound they make is an important survival skill and something most of us take for granted. But very similar objects can physically make very dissimilar sounds and we are able to pick up subtle clues about the identity and source of the sound.

It is well established that a child's brain has a remarkable capacity for change, but controversy continues about the extent to which such plasticity exists in the adult human primary sensory cortex.

Brain areas that control attention were thinnest in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who carried a particular version of a gene in a study by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). However, the areas, on the right side of the brain’s outer mantle, or cortex, normalized in thickness during the teen years in these children, coinciding with clinical improvement.