Med­i­ta­tion Appears to Pro­duce Endur­ing Changes in Emo­tional Pro­cess­ing in the Brain (Sci­ence Daily):

“A new study has found that par­tic­i­pat­ing in an 8-week med­i­ta­tion train­ing pro­gram can have mea­sur­able effects on how the brain func­tions even when some­one is not actively meditating…While neu­roimag­ing stud­ies have found that med­i­ta­tion train­ing appeared to decrease acti­va­tion of the amyg­dala — a struc­ture at the base of the brain that is known to have a role in pro­cess­ing mem­ory and emo­tion — those changes were Read the rest of this entry »

Satel­lite Nav­i­ga­tions Could Blind Dri­vers On Road (BioScholar):

“Dri­ving with a satel­lite nav­i­ga­tion can make you blind to pedes­tri­ans, because try­ing to hold an image of the screen in your mind makes you ignore what is in front of your eyes, a new study has revealed. Focus­ing on Read the rest of this entry »

Pre­dict­ing How Patients Respond to Ther­apy (press release):

“A new study led by MIT neu­ro­sci­en­tists has found that brain scans of patients with social anx­i­ety dis­or­der can help pre­dict whether they will ben­e­fit from cog­ni­tive behav­ioral therapy…Social anx­i­ety is usu­ally treated with either cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy or med­ica­tions. How­ever, Read the rest of this entry »

A sta­tis­ti­cal model of the net­work of con­nec­tions between brain regions (Kurzweil):

- “Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge have devel­oped a sim­ple math­e­mat­i­cal model of the brain which pro­vides a remark­ably com­plete sta­tis­ti­cal account of the com­plex web of con­nec­tions between var­i­ous brain regions.” Read the rest of this entry »

Rewiring the Brain to Ease Pain (Wall Street Journal):-

“How you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels. That’s the intrigu­ing con­clu­sion neu­ro­sci­en­tists are reach­ing as scan­ning tech­nolo­gies let them see how the brain processes pain. That’s also the prin­ci­ple behind many mind-body approaches to chronic pain that are prov­ing sur­pris­ingly effec­tive in clin­i­cal tri­als. Some are as old as med­i­ta­tion, hyp­no­sis and tai chi, while oth­ers are far more high tech.”

Link to Study Towards a physiology-based mea­sure of pain (PloS One): Read the rest of this entry »

‘Chemo Brain’: MRI Shows Brain Changes After Chemother­apy (Medscape):

- “Breast can­cer sur­vivors who have been treated with chemother­apy show sig­nif­i­cant changes in brain activ­ity, mea­sured by func­tional mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI), accord­ing to a study pub­lished in the Novem­ber issue of the Archives of Neu­rol­ogy.”

- “The find­ing val­i­dates patients’ claims of reduced cog­ni­tive func­tion after receiv­ing chemother­apy, a phe­nom­e­non referred to as “chemo brain,” said lead author Shelli R. Kesler, PhD, from Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity School of Med­i­cine in California.”

Link to study Pre­frontal Cor­tex and Exec­u­tive Func­tion Impair­ments in Pri­mary Breast Can­cer (Archives of Neu­rol­ogy): Read the rest of this entry »

In two inno­v­a­tive pilot stud­ies, Ian Gotlib and his col­leagues at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, Cal­i­for­nia, showed that brain train­ing can be used to help elim­i­nate depres­sion, even before it starts. They stud­ied young girls (10 to 14 year old) whose moth­ers were depressed and who thus were at higher risk of devel­op­ing depres­sion them­selves later-on. The girls had not expe­ri­enced depres­sion per se but already showed behav­iors typ­i­cal of depressed brains, such as over­re­ac­tion to neg­a­tive stim­uli. Read the rest of this entry »