Scanning people’s brains with fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) was significantly more effective at spotting lies than a traditional polygraph test, researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

When someone is lying, areas of the brain linked to decision-making are activated, which lights up on an fMRI scan for experts to… read more

An international team of neurologists led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has identified three specific regions of the brain that appear to be critical components of consciousness: one in the brainstem, involved in arousal; and two cortical regions involved in awareness.

To pinpoint the exact regions, the neurologists first analyzed 36 patients with brainstem lesions (injuries). They discovered that a specific small area of the brainstem —… read more

In a review of neuroscience literature from more than 200 journals, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a University of British Columbia-led team has proposed a radical new framework for understanding “mind wandering” and mental illness.

Within this framework, spontaneous thought processes — including mind-wandering, creative thinking, and dreaming — arise when thoughts are relatively free from deliberate and automatic constraints. Mind-wandering is not… read more

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a “passive haptic learning” (PHL) system that teaches people Morse code within four hours, using a series of vibrations felt near the ear. Participants wearing Google Glass learned it without paying attention to the signals —they played games while feeling the taps and hearing the corresponding letters.

They were 94 percent accurate keying a sentence that included every letter… read more

A new theory on how the brain first learns basic math could alter approaches to identifying and teaching students with math-learning disabilities, according to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers.

The widely accepted “sense of numbers” theory suggests people are born with a “sense of numbers,” an innate ability to recognize different quantities, and that this ability improves with age. Early math curricula and tools for diagnosing math-specific… read more

Embryonic neural stem cells transplanted into damaged areas of the visual cortex of adult mice were able to differentiate into pyramidal cells — forming normal synaptic connections, responding to visual stimuli, and integrating into neural networks — researchers at LMU Munich, the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried and the Helmholtz Zentrum München have demonstrated.

The adult human brain has very little… read more