A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
We're not wired to feel safe all the time, but maybe one day we could be. A recent study investigating the neurological basis of anxiety in the brain has identified 'anxiety cells' located in the hippocampus – which not only regulate anxious behaviour but can be controlled by a beam of light. The findings, so far demonstrated [...]
Illustration by Dale Edwin Murry In April 2011, Robert Froemke and his team were reprogramming the brains of virgin mice with a single hormone injection. Before the treatment, the female mice were largely indifferent to the cries of a distressed baby, and were even known to trample over them. But after an injection [...]
Interdiscplinarity forces us to think in new ways. Photograph: Helen Pynor/GV Art Due to its incredible complexity, the brain is an immensely challenging subject of study. The average human brain has about 90 billion neurons that make 100 trillion connections or synapses. Scientists believe this staggering number of neurons is responsible for the [...]
Flickr/ Credit: Ann Larie Valentine You might expect that neighboring neurons would be closely related to one another, or that entire regions would arise from the same ancestral cells. But that’s not the case. Christopher Walsh from Boston Children's Hospital has now shown that in one region, the prefrontal cortex, any given neuron [...]
If you can't control the urge to drink, there is a set of neurons to be blamed. Scientists have pinpointed a population of neurons in the brain that influences whether one drink leads to two and so on. The discovery could ultimately lead to a cure for alcoholism and other addictions, researchers from the Texas [...]
Compared to the monumental machines of science, things like the International Space Station or the Large Hadron Collider, the human brain doesn't look like much. However, this three-pound amalgam of squishy cells is one of the most complicated and complex structures in the known universe. - Evan Lerner via Researchers model neural structures on [...]
