Abuse, Stress, and the Brain

Did you know there appears to be a correlation between affectionate mothering and the ability of offspring to dampen their physiological response to stress? Studies at McGill University in Montreal appear to correlate abuse during childhood with changes to the brain (e.g., genes that code for cortisol receptors were about 40 percent less active in people who had been abused as children as compared to those who had not).

Estrogen and Brain What?

Did you know that the hormone estrogen plays a key role in how the brain processes sounds? Studies at the University of Rochester showed that there needs to be a correct balance of estrogen for the brain to extract and process sounds, to interpret the auditory information, and to lay down memories of the sounds. Both male and female bodies contain estrogen. The difference is in the relative amount of estrogen that each contains.

To Face or Not to Face

Did you know that the human brain almost never mistakes an object that may look like a face (e.g., New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain) for a human face? Facial recognition results from your two brain hemispheres working together. fMRI studies at MIT have shown that the left hemisphere calculates how facelike an image is. Then the right hemisphere uses that information to decide whether the object is, indeed, a human face. Although hemispheric differences have been seen in other brain functions such as language and spatial perception, according to the researchers, this distribution of labor is one of the first known examples of the left and right hemispheres taking on different roles in high-level visual-processing tasks.

Color and Brain Messages

Did you know that the colors you choose to wear may send a subtle message to the brains of others who see you? According to Leatrice Eiseman, author of the book More Alive With Color, police officers wear dark blue to indicate authority, while USP carriers wear brown to indicate reliability, and so on. Think about the colors you prefer to wear and/or the colors in which you feel most comfortable. Are they the same or different?

REM for Creativity

Did you know that REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when the brain is awake or in non-REM-sleep? In sleep studies at UC San Diego, volunteers who entered REM states during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40% (as compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep). The passage of time is enough for the brain to find solutions for creative problems that the person has already been working on. Lead researcher, Professor Sara Mednick, indicated that for new problems, however, only REM sleep enhances creativity.

Nanoparticles and the BBB

Did you know that being able to detect brain tumors quickly and accurately can be key to treatment? University of Washington researchers used nanoparticles, about 33 nanometers in diameter when wet, to safely cross the blood-brain barrier (an almost impenetrable barrier that protects the brain from infection) and enable a process known as brain tumor painting. This process lights up tumors and better pinpoints their location in the brain, which allows doctors not only to better identify the location of the tumor but also to identify its boundaries. Eventually, it may be possible even use the nanoparticles to carry treatment medication across the blood-brain barrier to the tumor.

Emotional Prosody

Did you know that the comprehension of emotional prosody is crucial for social functioning? According to researchers at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, this critical ability for recognizing, comprehending, or processing emotions appears to be compromised in various psychiatric disorders. For example, deficits for anger and sadness in schizophrenia, fear and surprise in bipolar affective disorder, and surprise in depression. Understanding that emotions do have their own brain-activity patterns may provide increased understanding of what happens in brains that have difficulty comprehending emotional prosody.