By Margaret Lehar
Study Suggests Possible Connection Between TBI and Homelessness
Many homeless men have suffered a traumatic brain injury in their life, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital.
After collecting data from over 100 men aged 27 to 81 from a shelter in downtown Toronto, researchers found that nearly half of the homeless men surveyed had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Of those who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, 87 percent experienced the injury prior to becoming homeless.
Visual Deprivation Could Improve Hearing in Adults
Most people are familiar with the idea that people who are blind have better hearing than those with normal vision. It was formerly thought that this compensation for lack of vision could only develop in the brains of the very young. However, new research conducted at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University suggests that the brain may be more flexible than previously believed.
In the study, researchers kept one group of healthy mice in total darkness for a week, and exposed the other group to natural light for a week. Then the team used electrodes to measure activity in neurons in the mice’s primary auditory cortex. This is the part of the brain that processes how loud a sound is and its source. By analyzing this data, researchers found that the mice who were exposed to a week of darkness had much better hearing than the control mice.
This suggests that the circuits that process sensory information can be re-wired in the brains of adult mice, even after the early critical period for hearing. These findings seem to contradict the idea that once the critical period for hearing is past, the auditory system doesn't respond to changes in an individual's soundscape.
Autism Signs May Appear in First Months of Life
Before babies can crawl or walk, they explore the world around them by looking at it. This is a natural and necessary part of infant development, and it sets the stage for future brain growth. By using eye-tracking technology, scientists were able to measure the way infants look at and respond to different social cues. This new research suggests that babies who are reluctant to look into people’s eyes may be showing early signs of autism.
The researchers at Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine followed babies from birth until age 3, and discovered that infants later diagnosed with autism showed declining attention to the eyes of other people, from the age of 2 months onwards.
Scientists Discover Gene Needed for ‘Memory Extinction’
Painful memories: a thing of the past?
What if you were able to erase all of your painful memories by simply taking a pill? While this might sound like something out of a sci-fi film, a recent study conducted by a group of researchers at MIT suggests that it may be possible in the future.
The researchers say that they’ve identified a gene known as Tet1 that appears to be important in the process of “memory extinction.” Memory extinction is the natural process of older memories being overridden by newer experiences. In this process, conditioned responses to stimuli can change: what once elicited a fearful response doesn’t always need to if the danger has ceased.
In the study, researchers compared normal mice to mice without the Tet1 gene. The researchers conditioned all of the mice to fear a particular cage where they received a mild shock. Once the memory was formed, the researchers then put the mice in the cage but did not shock them. After a while, mice with the Tet1 gene lost their fear of the cage as new memories replaced the old ones. However, mice lacking the Tet1 gene remained fearful.
