About memory

A study has found that brain regions responsible for making decisions continue to be active even when the conscious brain is distracted with a different task.

A study involving nearly 6,000 African American older adults has found those with a specific gene variant have almost double the risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease compared with African Americans who lack the variant.

A study involving 67 college football players has found that a protein biomarker for traumatic brain injury (S100B) was present in varying degrees in the blood samples of all the players after every game, even though none of them suffered a concussion.

As many of you will know, I like nature-improves-mind stories.

A humanoid robot has been designed, and shows promise, for teaching joint attention to children with ASD. Robots are particularly appealing to children, and even more so to those with ASD.

We say so blithely that children learn by copying, but a recent study comparing autistic children and normally-developing ones shows there’s more to this than is obvious.

A study involving 97 infants, of whom 56 were at high risk of an autism spectrum disorder, has found that the high-risk infants later found to have ASD (only 16 of the 56) were slower to orient or shift their gaze (by approximately 50 milliseconds) than both high-risk-negative and low-risk infan

Analysis of data from 418 older adults (70+) has found that carriers of the ‘Alzheimer’s gene’, APOEe4, were 58% more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment compared to non-carriers.

A new finding points to brain reorganization, rather than brain size, as the driver in primate brain evolution.

Analysis of eight studies on diet and stroke published between 1990 and 2012 has found that risk of first-time stroke dropped with every 7g increase in total daily fibre. That amount of fibre is contained in a bowl of wholewheat pasta plus two servings of fruit or vegetables.

Matching patterns of sales data for lottery games in one American county for a year against daily temperature has revealed that sales for scratch tickets (many options to select) fell by nearly $600 with every 1° Fahrenheit increase in temperature.

Caffeine occurs naturally in the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers. A study of honeybees has revealed that those fed on caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than bees fed sugar alone, after 24 hours.

Data from the very large, long-running UK National Child Development Study has revealed that those who exercised at least four times weekly as both a child and an adult performed better on cognitive tests at age 50 than those who exercised two to three times per month or less, and the latter

A 2-year trial involving 251 patients with Parkinson's disease and early motor complications (mean age, 52 years; mean duration of disease, 7.5 years) has found that those given deep brain stimulation surgery significantly improved their quality of life, motor disability, activities of daily

More evidence for the importance of

A study involving 520 intensive care patients who had been put on ventilators for acute lung injury (ALI), of whom 186 patients of the 275 survivors were followed up over the next two years, found that 35% of them had clinically significant symptoms of PTSD.

Brain scans of 61 older adults (65-90), of whom 30 were cognitively healthy, 24 cognitively impaired and 7 diagnosed with dementia, found that, across all groups, both memory and executive function correlated negatively with brain infarcts, many of which had been clinically silent.

A study involving 187 children and adolescents with multiple sclerosis, plus 44 who experienced their first neurologic episode (clinically isolated syndrome) indicative of MS, has found that 35% of those with MS and 18% of those with clinically isolated syndrome were cognitively impaired.