According to Discovery News:

Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. . . "This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia."

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words . . . For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently. For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

However, another possibility is that English-speakers with dyslexia might be better-suited to read and write in Chinese. And vice-versa. Teaching children both languages could be another way to foster writing ability and reading comprehension. Image via Discovery.

Dyslexia Differs by Language [Discovery News]

John Kessler, lead author on the Journal of Neuroscience paper says it'll be at least a few years before you find the gel in your local hospital, and it hasn't been shown to work in humans yet. He plans to submit the gel to the Food and Drug Administration for approval as a pharmaceutical in the not-too-distant future.

Source: Northwestern University via EurekAlert

Says Rogers:

We'd like to have an electric circuit that could wrap around part of the brain and detect signal patterns to predict the onset of seizure before it happens . . . You can't take a sheet of plastic and wrap a brain, you really need stretchability.

According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Ali Salahpour and colleagues explored the impact of DAT levels on the response to amphetamines—a group of addictive chemicals closely tied with dopamine sensitivity. Amphetamines are used legally to treat ADHD, narcolepsy, and to suppress appetite, but are well-known as illicit "club" drugs and performance enhancers. To investigate the consequence of high DAT levels, the researchers developed transgenic mice with three-fold higher levels of DAT compared with unmodified animals. The authors discovered that the drug was more powerful in animals with more DAT. The dopamine-enhanced animals were more sensitive to the effects of amphetamines, becoming hyperactive and more rewarded by the drug, according to the authors.

Increased Amphetamine-Induced Hyperactivity [PNAS]

According to a release:

In the study, [Valentin] Dragoi and co-author Diego Gutnisky, a graduate research assistant at The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston, measured the effects of visual stimulation on the responses of multiple neurons whose electrical activity was measured simultaneously in animals. They carefully examined the responses of a population of cells in visual cortex to dynamic stimuli, which consisted of movie sequences displayed on a video monitor.

"We provide empirical evidence that brief exposure, or adaptation, to a fixed stimulus causes pronounced changes in the degree of cooperation between individual neurons and an improvement in the efficiency with which the population of cells encodes information," Dragoi and Gutnisky report. "These results are consistent with the 'efficient coding hypothesis' - that is, sensory neurons are adapted to the statistical properties of the stimuli that they are exposed to and with changes in human discrimination performance after adaptation." . . .

While their study focused on how neuronal populations adapt to visual stimulation, the same could hold true for other senses - hearing, smell, taste and touch, Dragoi said. "We're trying to understand how a network of sensory neurons changes its encoding properties to properly represent the environment," he said. "Our results may have general implications for sensory and motor coding in a variety of brain areas."

First Empirical Study Demonstrating that Populations of Nerve Cells Adapt to Changing Images [Eurekalert]

A release about the study explained:

Co-author Alison Willing, PhD, of the USF Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair [said,] "The increase in neurogenesis we saw after injecting UCBCs seemed to be due to a decrease in inflammation."

According to lead author Carmelina Gemma, Ph.D., of the James A. Haley Veterans Administration Medical Center (VA) and USF, the decrease in neurogenesis that accompanies aging is a result of the decrease in proliferation of stem cells, not the loss of cells.

"In the brain, there are two stem cell pools, one of which resides in the hippocampus," explained graduate student and first author Adam Bachstetter. "As in other stem cell pools, the stem cells in the brain lose their capacity to generate new cells. A potent stressor of stem cell proliferation is inflammation."

Prior to this study, the research team led by Paula C. Bickford, Ph.D., of the VA and USF found that reducing neuroinflammation in aged rats by blocking the synthesis of the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL1B rescued some of the age-related decrease in neurogenesis and improved cognitive function.

"We think that UCBCs may have a similar potential to reduce inflammation and to restore some of the lost capacity of stem/progenitor cells to proliferate and differentiate into neurons," said Dr. Bickford.

Umbilical Cord Blood Stimulates Neurogenesis [BMC Neuroscience]

Here's an artist's rendering of a person undergoing brain surgery inside an MRI machine. Now surgeons can guide the robotic arms with even more precision, seeing exactly where each surgical tool goes as it enters your gray matter. So what is the robotic arm made of? Check out what the roboticists and surgeons who built it have to say in this video. And here's another picture of neuroArm, the brain surgery robot. Yup, it's just plain cool. Images via AP.

Project neuroArm [University of Calgary]

Though their methods are far from perfect, this breakthrough could help replace dead or damaged brain cells in people suffering from Alzheimer's as well as any type of injury. It's just a matter of extending the brain's natural self-healing powers.

According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science today:

Magdalena Götz and colleagues found that cells called astrocytes expand and multiply after brain injury. The authors induced brain injury in mice, then observed as quiescent astrocytes activated themselves and became reactive, causing reactive gliosis, which is the universal cellular reaction to brain injury. The researchers found that the reactive astrocytes remained astrocytes in the cerebral cortex, whereas in a cell culture they could be coaxed to switch to different brain cell types, including neurons. These results identify astrocytes as a source of stem cells in the injury site and show that other types of brain cells do not have this potential. The authors conclude that the cells provide a promising cell type to initiate repair in humans after brain injury.

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that's attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn't be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

A more far-future implant might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see google results on your retina. No matter how the instant, subtle, brain-controlled access to google works, the same benefits and problems are likely to exist.

PRO:

Ability to "remember" many details about a person or issue in the middle of a conversation, so that you can marshal facts quickly and check the accuracy of what other people are saying.

CON:

The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.

PRO:

You will never get lost because you've got maps at your synapse tips, and you'll always know what's playing at your local theaters. You'll also get the latest news headlines and stock quotes at the twitch of an eyelid.

CON:

You'll spend so much time in your head reading google news and watching YouTube that you'll zone out during conversations and forget to pay attention to what your best friends are telling you (unless they're telling you in the form of a google news alert).

PRO:

Instant access to infinite data storage allows you to quickly store your every interesting thought, and search through them instantly. More innovative ideas result.

CON:

Over reliance on "offloaded" memory means people make less of an effort to remember important things and therefore brain flexibility actually erodes. Ideas become boring repetitions of what you've thought up before, or what other people have thought up and posted on the Web.

PRO:

You can cheat on tests.

CON:

You can cheat on tests.

PRO: Need something desperately and can't get to the computer to order it? Just buy it through Froogle.

CON: Google ads are constantly running in your head, perhaps designed to respond to thought patterns.

PRO: Every time Google ads a cool new service, like Gmail or Picasa, you've got instant access to it in your brain.

CON: Google is famous for its "silent update" system, which occasionally results in pretty buggy services. Imagine what it will be like when Google silently updates your brain.

According to Albert Y. Hung, a staff neurologist at Mass General and co-author of the study:

These opposite effects on different types of learning are reminiscent of the mixed features of autistic patients, who may be disabled in some cognitive areas but show enhanced abilities in others. The superior learning ability of these mutant mice in a specific realm is reminiscent of human autistic savants.

Hung said that while it seems counter-intuitive that loss of an important synaptic scaffold protein would result in improved learning among the mice in this study, the absence of this protein may "trap" the mice's synapses in a more plastic state, which means the synapses are ready to respond to input but not maintain it in long-term memory. Aberrant synapse development and faulty structure of dendritic spines—tiny protrusions on the surface of neurons that receive messages from other neurons—are often associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, in humans.

It turned out that men and women use exactly the same parts of their brains to engage in the imaginative exercise required to imagine, a future scenario. Even more intriguing was that both genders relied heavily on the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that's usually associated with memory. Write the authors in a study published earlier this year in the journal Hippocampus:

Behavioral, lesion and neuroimaging evidence show striking commonalities between remembering past events and imagining future events. In a recent event-related fMRI study, we instructed participants to construct a past or future event in response to a cue. Once an event was in mind, participants made a button press, then generated details (elaboration) and rated them. The elaboration of past and future events recruited a common neural network.

The study of babies' math skills — which did involve silly EEG hats like the one above — also revealed something more general about human brains. When we look at a group of objects, different parts of our brains process the number of objects and the type of objects. So we recognize how many duckies there are with a different brain region than the one that recognizes that we are looking at duckies.

Says a release about the study:

Behavioral experiments indicate that infants aged 4 ½ months or older possess an early "number sense" that allows them to detect changes in the number of objects. However, the neural basis of this ability was previously unknown. This week in the online journal PLoS Biology, Véronique Izard, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, and Stanislas Dehaene provide brain imaging evidence showing that very young infants are sensitive to both the number and identity of objects, and these pieces of information are processed by distinct neural pathways.

Distinct Neural Pathways for Object Identity and Number in Young Infants [PLoS Biology]

The study focused on scratching, which is a common, slightly-painful thing that everybody does to relieve itches. Researchers stuck people in an MRI brain imaging machine and scratched their legs with brushes for five minutes, watching to see which parts of their brains were active or non-active. Areas associated with painful feelings became less active, as well as areas associated with memory. The researchers say:

We know scratching is pleasurable, but we haven't known why. It's possible that scratching may suppress the emotional components of itch and bring about relief.

The researchers suggest that further study might reveal a way to produce a drug that has the same effects as scratching or cutting does on the brain — thus preventing physical damage while providing the same relief.

Ah, that's the spot [Reuters]

Research suggests why scratching is so relieving [Eurekalert]

Over the past year, researchers have demonstrated several times that they can turn mice autistic by messing with brain chemistry — and then "cure" them using the same techniques. The discoveries could lead to a scenario similar to the one in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky, where people are given a brain treatment called "focusing" that essentially turns them autistic and makes them obsessive, detail-oriented workers.

It might also lead to recreational autism, where people who want to take a break from having messy emotions about other people decide to unplug and enter a state where human relationships are no more important than inanimate objects.

Read about how scientists can induce autism [PNAS] and how they can cure it [BBC News].

Researchers at the University of Illinois kept several mice in isolation from each other to see what chemical changes took place in their brains. Turns out the lonely mice experienced reduced levels of a brain enzyme that helps create a stress-relieving neurosteroid called allopregnanolone. A release from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, where the researchers' paper was published, explained:

Such alterations in the synthesis of allopregnanolone may account for the anxiety, aggression, and memory impairments that result from social isolation, the authors suggest.

Image is of a fluorescent neuron.

Social-isolation behavior in mice [PNAS]

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people's pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness [PNAS]

Experiments conducted on mice at the University of California in Los Angeles showed for the first time that the central nervous system can rewire itself to create small neural pathways between the brain and the nerve cells that control movement.

The creators of this device, called the Fingersight, write:

Extending the hand's innate ability, we mount miniature cameras on individual fingertips, permitting rapid sweeping through the 3D visual environment at greater distances. The information gleaned from each fingertip camera is fed back to that finger by a small vibrator, so the sense of touch remains related to each finger's individual interaction with the environment. Metaphorically speaking, we have given eyesight to the fingers, and thus we call the resulting capability, "Fingersight."

Fingersight [IEEE Xplore]

Apparently the more you drink, the more your brain's neurological structure gets rewired to crave the drinkies. (This is something that people who study addiction have known for a while.) What nobody knew before was exactly how that re-wired affected sexual behavior. Turns out it causes "disinhibition," which makes flies more likely to try to mate — with anybody:

Among the team's discoveries is that male fruit flies, which typically court females, also actively court males when they are given a daily dose of [alcohol's active ingredient] ethanol.

Scientists conducted an experiment where they asked people in an MRI brain scanner to look at ten pictures of different tools and houses. Meanwhile, the researchers fed the data into a computer algorithm so that the program would learn to recognize the unique signature of electrical patterns produced by the objects in each subject's brain. Eventually the algorithm began to "recognize" thought signatures associated with the objects. The surprise was that people's thought patterns related to each object were quite similar.

Tom Mitchell, a neuroscientist and computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who worked on the study, said:

There has always been a philosophical conundrum as to whether one person's perception of the color blue is the same as another person's. Now we see that there is a great deal of commonality across different people's brain activity corresponding to familiar tools and dwellings.

We hope to progress to identifying the thoughts associated not just with pictures, but also with words, and eventually sentences.

Using fMRI Brain Activation to Identify Cognitive States Associated with Perception of Tools and Dwellings [PLoS One]

Two neuroscience experts interviewed in Nature, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir, talked about mind performance-enhancing drugs for healthy people who aren't suffering from disorders like ADHD or Alzheimers. They say:

In academia, we know that a number of our scientific colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges.

And, apparently, so are professors.

Professor's little helper [Nature Commentary]

Artists these days don't just use paintbrushes and canvas. Spencer Finch, in fact, uses brainwaves, a popular sixties TV show, microwave signals, and the bluest stars in the night sky. Aptly named "Blue (one second brainwave transmitted to the star Rigel)," this piece is actually an early 1990s neuroscience experiment that won't yield results for almost 2,000 years.

While you hunker down in front of the TV screen, which is showing an episode of Hawaii Five-O, the electrodes behind the orange chair read your brainwaves. Then the antenna sends microwave signals containing your brain waves to the bluest star in the sky. The bluest star in the sky, for those of you who don't know, is 960 years away. At least according to Finch's calculations. Let's hope the 'waves get there safely without running into alien ships.

Here's another sky-oriented sculpture by Finch, called Cloud.

Images courtesy of Spencer Finch

Just as people who do bio-feedback can train themselves to calm down, you could train yourself to have extra-intense orgasms by learning what it is you're doing when your brain shows the most intense orgasms occurring. Think I'm kidding? Rutgers University professor Barry Komisaruk has suggested that this would be an ideal use for home MRI machines. Not to mention that they can help you locate damage in carpal tunnel syndrome, and figure out exactly where there's blockage in your hands to make the circulation so bad in your fingers. Someday, MRI machines will be as common in the home as thermometers are today. Image by MAURICIO LIMA via Getty.

Portable MRI Technology [Medgadget]