ScienceDaily (Aug. 22, 2012) Scientists at Georgia State University have found that the ability to hear is lessened when, as a result of injury, a region of the brain responsible for processing sounds receives both visual and auditory inputs. Yu-Ting Mao, a former graduate student under Sarah L. Pallas, professor of neuroscience, explored how the brain's ability to change, or neuroplasticity, affected the brain's ability to process sounds when both visual and auditory information is sent to the auditory thalamus. The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The auditory thalamus is the region of the brain responsible for carrying sound information to the auditory cortex, where sound is processed in detail. When a person or animal loses input from one of the senses, such as hearing, the region of the brain that processes that information does not become inactive, but instead gets rewired with input from other sensory systems. In the case of this study, early brain injury resulted in visual inputs into the auditory thalamus, which altered how the auditory cortex processes sounds. The cortical "map" for discriminating different sound frequencies was significantly disrupted, she explained. "One of the possible reasons the sound frequency map is so … Continue reading →

Behavioral control and decision-making take part in different regions of the brain's frontal lobe, new research shows The study effectively created a map of the frontal lobes, making it possible for patients with brain injuries to get an accurate prognosis early in treatment. "That knowledge will be tremendously useful for prognosis after brain injury," Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Caltech and a coauthor of the study published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said in a press release. "Many people suffer injury to their frontal lobes -- for instance, after a head injury during an automobile accident -- but the precise pattern of the damage will determine their eventual impairment," he added. BLOG: Could Brain Injuries Unleash Pedophilia? When you're making a decision, several different parts of the brain might be activated. How a person functions after a brain injury depends on precisely where a brain injury occurs. Other parts of the brain might compensate, allowing the person to function typically, or the person might be left with a lifelong hardship in making decisions. "We can use our lesion maps and compare the location of damaged brain areas … Continue reading →

ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2012) Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. Published in the Aug. 21 edition of Nature Communications, the discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease. "We know that brain cells fire in a predictable way before we move our bodies," explained Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We hypothesized that neurons would also react differently when we pronounce specific sounds. If so, we may one day be able to decode these unique patterns of activity in the brain and translate them into speech." Fried and Technion's Ariel Tankus, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Fried's lab, followed 11 UCLA epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. The researchers recorded neuron activity as the patients uttered one of five vowels or syllables containing the vowels. With Technion's Shy Shoham, the team studied how the neurons encoded vowel articulation at both the single-cell and collective level. The scientists found two areas -- the … Continue reading →

For many people, social media is a way to keep in touch with friends and family. For Mike Black, it has become a way to help save lives, starting with his own. On May 21, 2011, Black was involved in a serious car accident in Orlando, Florida. Black was ejected from his vehicle on impact and landed on his head, shearing his brain stem. Black was in a coma for several weeks, and doctors were forced to remove a portion of his brain in an effort to save his life. His prognosis was grim. Black's mother and stepfather, Allen residents Bernadette and Tom Coleman, flew to Orlando to be by his side. Because of the demands Black's care placed on his parents, they often found themselves unable to keep the rest of their family informed of Black's progress. They found a solution through social media, creating a Facebook page called "The Beans Recovery Group." Though the page began as a means to keep family and friends informed of Black's recovery and progress, it soon found a much wider audience. "What's crazy is other people started to join the site," Bernadette Coleman said. "People from all around the world started to … Continue reading →