Summary: Between children born in 2007 and 2013, autism diagnoses rose by 73% for Hispanic children, 44% for African American children and 25% for white children aged 3–5. Source: University of Colorado at Boulder Autism prevalence among racial and ethnic minority children in the United States has grown substantially in recent years. New research from … Read more

Klotho Protein Shows Promise to Protect the Brain from Aging and Alzheimer’s Summary: Genetically increasing klotho improves cognitive function in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers. Source: UCSF. Neurologist and neuroscientist Dena Dubal, MD, PhD, is approaching neurodegenerative diseases—including Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia—by focusing on a shared underlying cause: aging. Aging … Read more

Summary: Memory encoding processes that shape later choices begin in the basolateral amygdala. That structure then drives lasting cellular changes in the nucleus accumbens that allow learned stimulus–reward associations to bias future decisions. Source: University of New South Wales Learned links between cues and reward — the same psychological process that gives brands their emotional … Read more

Summary: Differences in activity between the left and right superior colliculi allow researchers to predict whether an animal detected a visual event. Source: NIH/NEI. Researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) report that neurons in the superior colliculus — a conserved midbrain structure found in all vertebrates — play a central role in detecting visual … Read more

Forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, an estimated 271,000 veterans who served in the war zone continue to experience full or subthreshold posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more than one-third of those with war-zone PTSD have current major depressive disorder, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry. The National Vietnam Veterans … Read more

Summary: A controlled study from Northwestern University shows that a lucid dreaming app based on Targeted Lucidity Reactivation (TLR) significantly increases lucid dream frequency. Using pre-sleep training combined with subtle auditory cues delivered during sleep, participants’ average lucid dreams rose from 0.74 to 2.11 per week. The results indicate that sensory cues can reliably boost … Read more

Summary: Sleep plays a vital role in strengthening our brain’s ability to form and integrate complex associations within episodic memories. New research shows that sleep not only reinforces weak links between different elements of an experience but also helps create new connections among elements that were not directly linked during learning. This improvement supports the … Read more

Low-dose clonazepam reverses autistic-like behaviors in mice carrying a Dravet syndrome mutation, University of Washington researchers report. Dravet syndrome is a severe early-onset epilepsy marked by frequent seizures, developmental delays and behavioral features that overlap with autism spectrum disorders. The condition most often arises from a spontaneous mutation in the SCN1A gene in an affected … Read more

Summary: People with multiple sclerosis (MS) appear to allocate neural resources less efficiently when cognitive demands increase, which likely contributes to the pronounced mental fatigue experienced by many with this neurodegenerative condition. Source: Kessler Foundation Researchers at Kessler Foundation carried out a pilot study comparing brain activation patterns under mental fatigue in individuals with multiple … Read more

Summary: A new method has identified an extensive set of gene regulatory regions in the human brain that show evidence of positive selection during our evolution. Source: Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics With only about a 1% difference in protein-coding DNA, the human and chimpanzee genomes are remarkably similar. Discovering which biological changes underlie what makes … Read more