Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease that attacks motor neurons until muscle weakness, atrophy and paralysis lead inexorably to death. Victims of this monstrous malady could be forgiven for feeling unlucky.
How, then, can we explain the attitude of the disease’s namesake, baseball great Lou Gehrig? He told a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” The Iron Horse then recounted his many …

If you are reading this, the good news is that you have a brain inside your head. And you have probably read about the emerging brain fitness movement: frequent articles in the media, an ongoing PBS special, more and more products and games.
Newsweek’s Sharon Begley recently wrote that “With the nation’s 78 million baby boomers approaching the age of those dreaded “where did I leave my keys?” moments, it’s no wonder the market for computer-based brain training has shot up from essentially zero in 2005 to $80 million this year, …

For the first time, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine what parts of the brain are active when people consider whether to purchase a product and to predict whether or not they ultimately choose to buy the product. The study appears in the journal Neuron and was co-authored by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

This paper is the latest from the emerging field of neuroeconomics, which investigates the mental and neural processes that drive economic decision-making. The results …

Until just a few years ago, doctors believed that the brain stopped making new neural connections – meaning that the memory began to get irreversibly worse – when the body stopped developing, usually in the early 20s. And doctors knew that, like any other part of the body, neurons weaken as people age. Loss of brain function due to neural breakdown was assumed to be a normal, unavoidable part of aging. It turns out they were wrong.
In the past few years, it has become clear that you can, in fact, …

Human intelligence has little to do with having a big brain, scientists claim.
Rather, much like a computer, it is all down to its processing power.
Scientists made the discovery when comparing human brains with other living creatures.
Previously it was thought that superior intellect was due to larger brains having more nerve connections. Scientists believed protein components of nerve junctions, or synapses, were similar in most living beings.
But researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, have discovered that mammals have a higher percentage of proteins in their brain synapses.
They …

Hypnotism is not all in the mind… it creates real, measurable, changes in the brain, research has found.
A study into how people can be made to forget offers hope for the treatment of memory loss
New Zealand clinicians said an Israeli study, in which people were hypnotised to forget, might point the way to new treatments for memory loss. Auckland Hospital neurologist Barry Snow said identifying the parts of the brain involved in repressing memories would be a big step forward.
“Usually memories are not lost – they are just misplaced,” he …