Tag: neuroscience

John Markowitz, a clinical psychiatrist and professor, argues that the NIMH’s exclusive focus on neuroscience research is failing patients in The New York Times....

"It’s an appealing idea: the notion that understanding the learning brain will tell us how to maximise children’s potential, bypassing the knotty complexities of...

A new study published in the journal Neuroscience finds that rats given regular doses of amphetamines during adolescence have brain and behavioral changes in adulthood....

According to new research summarized by ScienceDaily, there is evidence that the brain prepares for multiple possible actions before a decision is made.

New research on gender and the brain found that only a very small number of people have brains that are “entirely male, female, or intermediate between the two.” “The vast majority,” they write, have “a mosaic.”

“My vegetable beds have even buoyed me through more acute stressors, such as my medical internship, my daughter’s departure for college, and a loved one’s cancer treatment,” writes Dr. Daphne Miller. Now neuroscientists are attempting to study the antidepressant effects of soil microbes in hopes of unlocking the secrets of a powerful mood enhancer.

Nature magazine reports on recent discoveries by neuroscientists that microbes that live in the intestinal track may have an influence on brain development and behavior. “Researchers have drawn links between gastrointestinal pathology and psychiatric neurological conditions such as anxiety, depression, autism, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disorders—but they are just links.”

Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbert’s piece on “Why can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?” in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,” he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.

The Boston Globe highlights a new book, “In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis,” by Casey Schwartz, which explores the importance on psychoanalysis in the age of neuroscience. The author explains that the psychoanalytic approach offers “an absolutely incomparable depth and attention to the specifics of each individual person and their reality. This is exactly what’s disappearing in neuroscience: the quirks, the particularities, the subtleties of the individual.”

People diagnosed with severe depression show the same changes in brain scans when they respond to a placebo as they do when they take an actual antidepressant, according to a new study. Researchers also found that those whose symptoms were decreased by a placebo were more likely to report relief from antidepressant drugs.

While a great deal of the excitement about advances in psychological treatments comes from the potential for research in neuroscience to unlock the secrets of the brain, many mental health experts would like to temper this enthusiasm. A special issue of the Behavior Therapist released this month calls into question the predominant conception of mental illnesses as brain disorders.

New research is investigating how “poverty reduction promotes cognitive and brain development.”

Julia Belluz at Vox interviews Russ Poldrack, the director of the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience, on recent efforts to “clean up the house of...

The impact of long-term SSRIs on memory-related nerve cell receptors does have functional consequences. Research shows that SSRIs impair the acquisition of fear memories. (Perhaps a positive outcome.) But unlearning fear memories involves new learning as well, and according to a study by LeDoux and colleagues, long-term exposure to SSRIs makes it harder to unlearn fear memories.

Tension mounts across the ideological divide as D-Day (DSM-5 Day) approaches. The APA has powerful allies on its side. President Obama has just launched Decade of the Brain 2 with the announcement two weeks ago that heralds the arrival of BRAIN ( Brain Research through Advances in Innovative Neurotechnologies). If that’s not enough, those who believe that science will ultimately explain madness can always rely on the media to fawn at their feet.