UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered exactly how acute stress — short-lived, not chronic — primes the brain for improved performance.

In studies on rats, Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley and  post-doctoral fellow Elizabeth Kirby they found that significant but brief stressful events caused stem cells in rat brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that,… read more

A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas.

The new study is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills — from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph.

“Working memory… read more

Princeton University researchers have found that making an erroneous decision is caused by errors, or “noise,” in the information coming into your brain, rather than errors in how your brain accumulates or processes that information.

The researchers separated sensory inputs from the internal mental process. ”To our great surprise, the internal mental process was perfectly noiseless. All of the imperfections came from noise in the sensory… read more

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed tiny devices containing light-emitting diodes (LEDs) the size of individual neurons that activate brain cells with light.

“This strategy should allow us to identify and map brain circuits involved in complex behaviors related to sleep, depression, addiction, and anxiety,” says co-principal investigator Michael R. Bruchas, PhD, assistant… read more