Word: cortex
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...that assign values to different material objects to facilitate decision-making. The results could provide insight into the mechanisms behind human choice. The report, which appeared in the online edition of the journal Nature on Sunday, located these neurons in an area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). “There are neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex whose activity represents or encodes the value that subjects assign to the available goods when they make choices,” said Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, an HMS research fellow who authored the study along with Associate Professor of Neurobiology...
...they've developed a better way. Described in the American journal Muscle & Nerve, it involves 40-year-old technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which the pair have tailored for a new purpose. Held against a subject's head, a magnetic coil discharges a current that stimulates the motor cortex - the part of the brain that controls movement - causing an involuntary twitch in the subject's right hand...
...prospect of earlier diagnosis may be only one implication of the pair's findings. Assuming it's confirmed in subsequent trials, tracing the starting point of MND to the motor cortex is a step toward unlocking the mysteries of the disease. "We still don't know what the cause of MND is in the majority of cases," says Vucic. "We don't even know where the disease begins - whether it's in the brain, the spinal cord or the peripheral nerves. Our research, however, suggests it starts in the brain." The brain cells of the MND sufferer are primed...
...switching of attention from one task to another, the toggling action, occurs in a region right behind the forehead called Brodmann's Area 10 in the brain's anterior prefrontal cortex, according to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by Grafman's team. Brodmann's Area 10 is part of the frontal lobes, which "are important for maintaining long-term goals and achieving them," Grafman explains. "The most anterior part allows you to leave something when it's incomplete and return to the same place and continue from there." This gives us a "form of multitasking," he says, though...
...differences in the subjects' brain scans were equally striking. The typical pain signal follows a well-worn path from the brain stem through the midbrain and into the cortex, where conscious feelings of pain arise. In Schulz-Stbner's study, the hypnotized group showed subcortical brain activity similar to that of nonhypnotized volunteers, but the primary sensory cortex stayed quiet. The "ouch" message wasn't making it past the midbrain and into consciousness...