News Stories relating to "brain"

Your body isn't exhausted from that workout?it's your brainthat's tired. Scientists are trying to invent a pill thatwill give you all the benefits of exercise without actuallyhaving to do it.

James Randerson writes in New Scientist that new evidenceshows that it?s our brains that make us feel tired out afterexercise. This happens in...

If you think someone is watching you, it may not beparanoia. Researcher Stefan Schmidt believes he's provedthat our sixth sense is real. In one experiment, a volunteerin a sealed room watched a second volunteer in another roomon close circuit TV. The second volunteer was hooked up toelectrodes which recorded the electrical activity of theskin,...

Psychologists studying Chess experts have decided that, while Chess can be a slow, thoughtful game, the best players use their intutition to make quick decisions about which piece to play.

Psychologist Bruce D. Burns compared chess players' rankings in normal tournaments to their rankings at fast-paced "blitz" chess, where players have...

Those of us who've had to deal with cranky toddlers and stubborn teenagers will not be surprised to learn that the brain's center of reasoning and problem solving is the last to mature. This may be why it's so much harder for people to quit smoking if they began when they were teenagers.

Scientists have done regular MRI scans of 13...

It's one of our worst nightmares: being awake during surgery. But anesthesia doesn't work for everybody. The people this has happened to say the pain isn't the worst part, although that can be excruciating. It's the horror of being paralyzed and unable to talk to the surgeon, while being completely aware of what he's doing to you. Some patients...

Why are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? One reason may be that they've learned how to use both sides of their brain at the same time. Scientists know that the left side of the brain is the problem-solving side, while the right side is more imaginative. But if you're one of those rare people who can combine them, you can harness...

Researcher Mario Beauregard is studying where in the brain religious feelings are actually experienced by placing electrodes on the scalps of seven nuns in order to record the electrical activity in their brains as they recall a spiritual experience. Before they would allow him to do this, Beauregard had to convince the nuns that he was not...

The brains of jugglers are larger than those of non-jugglers, but if you stop juggling, your brain will return to normal size.

Researchers gave brain scans to 12 people who had learned to juggle and found that the areas of gray matter in their brains had grown. Grey matter is the part of the brain used for higher-level thinking. But...

This Christmas, as with every holiday season, we're bombarded with ads and find ourselves succumbing and buying things we didn't think we wanted. Now the organization Commercial Alert says universities are using their medical equipment and research funds in neuromarketing experiments, to figure out how to push consumers' "buy buttons."

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Christof Koch wants to find where consciousness lies inside what he calls our "zombie" self: the part of our brain that works automatically, so that our lungs breathe, our heart beats, our eyes blink, and we walk and talk. And he wants to know the purpose of consciousness, since we can obviously exist perfectly well, as zombies, without it....

Researchers have found a physical link between the herpes simplex virus and the amyloid precursor protein (APP), which forms the plaques that are present in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. This links the common cause of cold sores to Alzheimer's; however, 85% of us have the herpes simplex virus in our bodies and most of us will never...

Special Forces soldiers have neurological differences that make them less likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder than the average soldier. A study of soldiers based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, found that Green Berets were much less likely to suffer symptoms of PTSD after a week of exercises that simulated being captured and...

German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof had a brain operation in the 1960s that may have caused her to become one of Europe's most feared urban killers. German psychiatrist Bernhard Bogerts, who studied her brain for 5 years, says it showed "pathological modifications." Meinhof committed suicide in 1976, and her brain was removed without the family?s...

Scientist have found a way to keep slices of living brain tissue alive for weeks and use them to test drugs for neurological and psychiatric disorders. This sounds like something out of an old science fiction movie, where a decapitated human head was kept alive with wires coming out of it, but the "mini-brain" is much sleeker than that. It...