How ’sleeping on it’ can help the prefrontal cortex regulate emotional responses, making us feel better in the morning

Instead of lying awake wor­ry­ing, we’re often told to “sleep on it” when mak­ing deci­sions both big and small. And there’s actu­al­ly a sci­en­tif­ic basis for this advice. Sleep can influ­ence our response to emo­tion­al sit­u­a­tions, and helps us to man­age our men­tal health. To under­stand why sleep and emo­tions are so con­nect­ed, it’s important…

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The Do’s and Don’ts of Harnessing Technology (and Anxiety) for Good

Wel­come to a new edi­tion of Sharp­Brains’ e‑newsletter, fea­tur­ing impor­tant brain & men­tal health news plus a few fun brain teasers to test your rea­son­ing skills and more… #1. Chal­lenge ahead: Har­ness­ing tech­nol­o­gy for good men­tal health “Tech­nol­o­gy can not only help us grow out of unhealthy habits, it is also pos­si­ble to expand human mental…

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On brain folding and fitting 86 billion neurons inside our 1400 cc crania

The human brain has been called the most com­plex object in the known uni­verse. And with good rea­son: It has around 86 bil­lion neu­rons and sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand miles of axon fibers con­nect­ing them. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the process of brain fold­ing that results in the brain’s char­ac­ter­is­tic bumps and grooves is also high­ly com­plex. Despite decades of…

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Growing backlash against the FDA approval of unproven Alzheimer’s treatment Aduhelm, by Biogen

ICER Issues State­ment on the FDA’s Approval of Adu­canum­ab for Alzheimer’s Dis­ease (Insti­tute for Clin­i­cal and Eco­nom­ic Review): The Insti­tute for Clin­i­cal and Eco­nom­ic Review (ICER) believes that the FDA, in approv­ing adu­canum­ab (Aduhelm™, Bio­gen) for the treat­ment of Alzheimer’s dis­ease, has failed in its respon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect patients and fam­i­lies from unproven treat­ments with…

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DARPA-funded nonsurgical neurotechnologies push the frontier of brain-machine interfaces

Rice Uni­ver­si­ty Charges Into the Future with Mag­net­ics and Bioim­plants (All About Cir­cuits): Advances in self-gen­er­at­ing drug deliv­ery sys­tems, brain-to-brain com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and injury mit­i­ga­tion tech­nolo­gies are just some of the newest research com­ing down the pipeline from Rice Uni­ver­si­ty. Sev­er­al research projects fund­ed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agen­cy’s (DARPA) N3 pro­gram might herald…

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Debate: Are depression and dementia two sides of the same coin? And, if they are, how to best approach treatment?

Every sev­en sec­onds, some­one in the world is diag­nosed with demen­tia. A typ­i­cal case that I often see in my prac­tice is as fol­lows: A 76-year-old woman has a two-year his­to­ry of pro­gres­sive wors­en­ing of short-term mem­o­ry and cog­ni­tive decline. She can’t recall the names of her grand­chil­dren and is dev­as­tat­ed by her dete­ri­o­rat­ing abilities.…

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