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Neuroscience news

Neuroscience

Brain-inspired AI: Human brain separates goals and uncertainty to enable adaptive decision-making

Humans possess a remarkable balance between stability and flexibility, enabling them to quickly establish new plans and adjust goals even in the face of sudden changes. However, "model-free reinforcement learning," which ...

Neuroscience

'Attentional bias' reveals deep connection between numbers and space in the brain

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have studied the relationship between numerical information in our vision, and how it affects our perception of space.

HIV & AIDS

Brain chemistry can reactivate or suppress dormant HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections are still fairly common and an estimated 40 million people worldwide are currently living with this condition. The HIV virus attacks the body's immune system and thus makes those ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Humans could have as many as 33 senses

Stuck in front of our screens all day, we often ignore our senses beyond sound and vision. And yet they are always at work. When we're more alert, we feel the rough and smooth surfaces of objects, the stiffness in our shoulders, ...

Neuroscience

To flexibly organize thought, the brain makes use of space

Our thoughts are specified by our knowledge and plans, yet our cognition can also be fast and flexible in handling new information. How does the well-controlled and yet highly nimble nature of cognition emerge from the brain's ...

Neuroscience

How age affects recovery from spinal cord injury

A study published in Neurology looks at how age may affect recovery for people with spinal cord injuries. "With population growth and improvements in medicine, the number of people diagnosed with spinal cord injury is increasing ...

Neuroscience

Why there's always room for dessert—an anatomist explains

You push back from the table after Christmas lunch, full from an excellent feast. You really couldn't manage another bite—except, perhaps, a little bit of pudding. Somehow, no matter how much you've eaten, there always ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Compulsive behaviors may stem from too much (misguided) self-control

A long-held view is that compulsive behaviors involve individuals getting stuck in a "habit loop" that overrides self-control, but new research in rats from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) suggests this might not ...

Oncology & Cancer

How brain tumor cells influence neurons and vice versa

Gliomas are cancers that originate directly in the brain, instead of spreading to the brain from other parts of the body. These cancers cannot be cured with conventional cancer treatments, as they spread into healthy brain ...

Neuroscience

A Pa. woman is receiving a new treatment for a rare form of ALS

On a quiet farm in Erie County, Pennsylvania, 67-year-old Diane Zaczyk used to think nothing of hefting 50-pound sacks of chicken feed onto her shoulder. But not long ago, she found herself struggling to lift the feed bags ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Mental time travel: A new case of autobiographical hypermnesia

Remembering past events in minute detail, revisiting them methodically, and reliving past emotions—this is the peculiarity of people with an exceptional memory of their own lives, known as autobiographical hypermnesia, ...