Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...skill as Grandpa. Now we think teens are wastrels who get high on OxyContin and rouse themselves only to shoot up a school or update their MySpace profiles. But there's strong evidence that U.S. adolescents are actually getting smarter--or at least making better decisions. Could the teen brain be evolving...
...pair knew from their previous research that, presented with certain stimuli, depressed bipolar patients don't use the prefrontal (or higher thinking) part of their brain as much as healthy subjects do, instead recruiting other (more hardwired) parts to compensate. And they found a similar pattern of activation in patients at the manic end of the spectrum. This was tantalizing because it suggested the disparities were related not to mood but to bipolar itself. Needing more evidence, they began studying bipolar patients in the euthymic state - when their moods have stabilized and they appear to be well. The results continued...
...their latest study, Malhi and Lagopoulos used functional magnetic resonance imaging to see what happens in the normalized bipolar brain when subjects are asked to interpret facial expressions-specifically, of fear and disgust. While reading faces is something bipolar patients often feel they're struggling with, the study showed that the 10 patients' interpretations were as accurate and speedy as the 10 controls'. Crucially, however, their method of processing was different...
...Shown faces expressing fear, the healthy brains lit up predictably in the lozenge-shaped amygdala, an emotional center involved in recognizing expressions and tones of voice. But with the patients, the same images caused less activation of the amygdala and more of several other areas including the hippocampus, which encodes and retrieves memories. "Instead of processing a particular face in the context of right now, the brain is basically going back into its filing cabinet and picking out previous experiences, which is not an efficient way for it to work," says Malhi, chair of psychological medicine at the University...
...case - the two types of depression are quite different, they say-but Malhi adds: "No study has directly compared the two groups... and this would be the ideal experiment." For Malhi and Lagopoulos, it's a reminder that the deeper we delve into the mysteries of the brain, the more there is to learn...