Word: neural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there are many such changes associated with autism, most are very rare. This paper, however, found an intriguing pattern among two genes already linked to autism and nine newly identified targets. Most play a role in two key systems in the brain. One is the same brain-wiring system - neural cell adhesion - implicated in the first paper. The second is a set of housekeeping proteins - the ubiquitin system - that whisk away old brain connections and set the stage for new ones...
...Overall, Flo's brain shows the global neural reorganization that's a mark of advancing intelligence. What's striking about this relative sophistication is that it developed in such a small brain case. A prime indicator of increasing human intelligence has long been thought to be increasing brain size. However, Falk says, the hobbit's skull is a bit of a mishmash of characteristics in terms of who it resembles. "Its brain sorts with africanus, yet its outside skull features look like Homo erectus," she says...
...That same area of the brain is also strongly interconnected with neural networks that regulate some of the body's most basic functions, such as breathing and blood pressure, which indicates that complex social emotions build on systems that evolved early, including those essential to our survival. "It is important to realize that they recruit the brain in a very deep manner," says Antonio Damasio, one of the authors of the study published online this week in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California...
...What we are suggesting is a central-governor model," says Ed Chambers, one of the study's co-authors and a researcher at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at the University of Birmingham. "Ultimately, the brain controls exercise performance by controlling the neural outflow to the exercising muscles...
...Tononi and a growing number of other scientists believe that sleep - not just in flies but also in higher-order mammals - may perform such a pressure-releasing role. During sleep, researchers theorize, the brain actively prunes the neural network laid out during waking hours, trimming away weaker connections that haven't been used in a while or weren't strong enough to begin with. The stronger connections are believed to be filed during sleep into long-term memory, where they can be accessed again and again as needed. All this nocturnal tidying creates room for new connections to be formed...