A new interdisciplinary Stanford University initiative called NeuroCircuit aims to find the specific brain circuits that are responsible for mental-health conditions and then develop ways of noninvasively stimulate those circuits to potentially lead to improved treatments for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“You see things activated in brain images but you can’t tell just by watching what is cause and what is effect,” said Amit Etkin, Neurocircuit co-leader… read more

Activated through permanent stress, immune cells in the brain can cause changes to the brain, resulting in mental disorders, a research team headed by professor Georg Juckel, Medical Director of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) LWL university clinic, has found. The research was based on psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body.

The team focused mainly on … read more

MIT spinoff Empatica, which is developing a medical-quality wearable device to monitor epileptic seizures* and alert caregivers, has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to fund its development.

“When people that have epilepsy wear Embrace, they will get an alert when an unusual event happens, like a convulsive seizure,” the Indiegogo site says. “It will go via their smartphone to parents, roommates or caregivers, so somebody can check… read more

University of Michigan scientists have come up with a possible explanation for the impressive ability of neurons to perform a wide range of functions.

They explored this using the C. elegans* roundworm. They found that a single neuron in C. elegans regulates both the speed and direction in which the worm moves, shedding light on how the human brain works, say investigators in the lab of… read more

Neuroscientists have discovered mechanisms that enable certain brain cells to persuade others to create “the wave” (a wave of standing spectators that travels through a crowd*), which may help understand more about neurocognitive disorders such as dementia, the researchers say.

Inhibitory neurons** can persuade networks of other neurons to imitate their vibrations, setting off global synchronous oscillations in the brain. The neuroscientists, at Imperial College London and the… read more