Panzee doesn’t talk, but she knows a word when she hears one — even if it’s emitted by a computer with a synthetic speech impediment. That’s not too shabby for a chimpanzee. Raised to recognize 128 spoken words by pointing to corresponding symbols, Panzee perceives acoustically distorted words about as well as people do, say psychology graduate student Lisa Heimbauer of Georgia State University in Atlanta and her colleagues. Panzee thus challenges the argument that only people can recognize highly distorted words, thanks to brains tuned to speech sounds. Read the full story.
Archive for Brain
Chimp Recognizes Human Words
Alzheimer’s Has a Genetic Component
The high-risk version of a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease hinders the brain’s ability to clear out a troublesome protein, a new study finds. Researchers have known that people who carry the e4 version of the gene APOE are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s disease and more likely to have cell-killing plaques in their brains than people who have the e3 or e2 versions. But it hasn’t been clear whether people with the e4 version made more of the plaque protein — called amyloid-beta — or if the stuff just stuck around in their brains longer. Read the full story.
Sleep is Important to Learning and Memory
Sleep’s function has long been a mystery, but many researchers have gathered evidence that it is important for learning and memory. Two new studies confirm that sleep plays a central role in solidifying memories and preparing the brain for new learning. Tickling a few neurons located at the top of the fruit fly brain triggers the insects to sleep, researchers led by Paul Shaw at Washington University in St. Louis discovered. Turning on the sleep-initiating brain cells makes short-term memories into long-lived ones, the researchers report June 24 in Science. A separate study in the same issue of Science, by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, describes microscopic evidence that during sleep, connections between brain cells are pruned.
City Living Increases Mood Disorders
Cities can be stressful places, and are a far cry from the sparsely populated landscapes in which our prehistoric ancestors evolved. All of that noise, traffic, pollution and crowding has a well-documented impact on our mental health. People who live in cities are more likely to have mood or anxiety disorder (21 percent and 39 percent, respectively) and are twice as likely to have schizophrenia. With more than half of the world’s population currently living in urban areas—and about 70 percent projected to be city dwellers by 2050—figuring out how to curb the mental toll of city life could become a major public policy issue. Read the full story.
Brain Training Boosts IQ
Could a simple memory workout make you smarter? An intriguing new study by researchers at the University of Michigan suggests it can — a finding that adds a wrinkle to the prevailing notion that IQ is largely fixed by genes. The study involved 62 elementary- and middle-school children from southeast Michigan who were randomly assigned to train on one of two video game-like computer tasks. One group performed a mental-training exercise aimed at improving working memory, the ability to hold and retrieve information in the short term. The other group practiced general knowledge and vocabulary skills. Both groups trained for one month, five times a week for 15 minutes per session. Read the full story.
Stomach Bacterium May Cause Brain Disease
A bacterium that lives in the stomachs of about half the people in the world, may help trigger Parkinson’s disease, researchers reported May 22 at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that kills dopamine-producing cells in some parts of the brain. People with the disease have trouble controlling their movements. About 60,000 new cases of the disease are diagnosed each year in the United States. Read the full story.
Third Grade Changes in the Human Brain
Recent third-grade graduates use their brains in an entirely different way when solving math problems, a study in an upcoming NeuroImage finds. Third-graders showed heightened activity in a brain region important for working memory, which keeps relevant info handy. Earlier studies of older children found that this region, the left prefrontal cortex, was less active with age while doing math, so the new results may reflect an age-specific approach to math. Read more about the research by clicking here.