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A Brain Pacemaker for Alzheimer’s Disease?
As many of you know, Alzheimer’s is an absolutely devastating neurodegenerative disease. It destroys the lives of loved ones with the disease, takes a terrible toll on family and friends who care for...
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Mice Learn Better with Help from Human Brain Cells
Human astrocytes in a mouse brainSource: Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., University of Rochester Medical Center What happens when you implant human glia—a type of brain cell that protects and nurtures...
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Creative Minds: Lighting Up Memory
One of the most debilitating, and heartbreaking, consequences of Alzheimer’s disease is the way it slowly robs people of their memories. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a cure for Alzheimer’s, let...
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Can Something in Young Blood Give a Boost to Old Brains?
Infusing blood from younger creatures into older ones in hopes of halting—or even reversing—the aging process may sound like a macabre scene straight out of “Game of Thrones.” However, several...
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Neuroscience: The Power of Curiosity to Inspire Learning
When our curiosity is piqued, learning can be a snap and recalling the new information comes effortlessly. But when it comes to things we don’t care about—the recipe to that “delicious” holiday...
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NIH-Funded Research Makes Science’s “Top 10” List
Modeled after Time’s Person of the Year, the journal Science has a tradition of honoring the year’s most groundbreaking research advances. For 2014, the European Space Agency nabbed first place with...
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Making the Connections: Study Links Brain’s Wiring to Human Traits
Caption: The wiring diagram of a human brain, measured in a healthy individual, where the movement of water molecules is measured by diffuse tensor magnetic resonance imaging, revealing the...
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Alzheimer’s Disease: Tau Protein Predicts Early Memory Loss
Caption: PET scan images show distribution of tau (top panel) and beta-amyloid (bottom panel) across a brain with early Alzheimer’s disease. Red indicates highest levels of protein binding, dark blue...
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Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
We all know that exercise is important for a strong and healthy body. Less appreciated is that exercise seems also to be important for a strong and healthy mind, boosting memory and learning, while...
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Creative Minds: Helping More Kids Beat Anxiety Disorders
Dylan Gee While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Dylan Gee often encountered children and adolescents battling phobias, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders. Most overcame them with the...
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How Sleep Resets the Brain
Caption: Colorized 3D reconstruction of dendrites. Neurons receive input from other neurons through synapses, most of which are located along the dendrites on tiny projections called spines. Credit:...
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Aging Research: Plasma Protein Revitalizes the Brain
For centuries, people have yearned for an elixir capable of restoring youth to their aging bodies and minds. It sounds like pure fantasy, but, in recent years, researchers have shown that the blood of...
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Creative Minds: Seeing Memories in a New Light
Steve Ramirez/Joshua Sariñana Whether it’s lacing up for a morning run, eating blueberry scones, or cheering on the New England Patriots, Steve Ramirez loves life and just about everything in it. As an...
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New Evidence Suggests Aging Brains Continue to Make New Neurons
Caption: Mammalian hippocampal tissue. Immunofluorescence microscopy showing neurons (blue) interacting with neural astrocytes (red) and oligodendrocytes (green).Credit: Jonathan Cohen, Fields Lab,...
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Unlocking the Brain’s Memory Retrieval System
Credit:Sahay Lab, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Play the first few bars of any widely known piece of music, be it The Star-Spangled Banner, Beethoven’s Fifth, or The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t...
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Study Suggests Light Exercise Helps Memory
Credit: iStock/Wavebreakmedia How much exercise does it take to boost your memory skills? Possibly a lot less than you’d think, according to the results of a new study that examined the impact of light...
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A New Piece of the Alzheimer’s Puzzle
Credit: National Institute on Aging, NIH For the past few decades, researchers have been busy uncovering genetic variants associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) [1]. But there’s...
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Distinctive Brain ‘Subnetwork’ Tied to Feeling Blue
Credit: :iStock/kieferpix Experiencing a range of emotions is a normal part of human life, but much remains to be discovered about the neuroscience of mood. In a step toward unraveling some of those...
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‘Exercise Hormone’ Tied to Bone-Strengthening Benefits
Credit: gettyimages/kali9 There’s no doubt that exercise is good for us—strengthening our muscles, helping us maintain a healthy weight, maybe even boosting our moods and memories. There’s also been...
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Sleep Loss Encourages Spread of Toxic Alzheimer’s Protein
Credit: iStock/bowdenimages In addition to memory loss and confusion, many people with Alzheimer’s disease have trouble sleeping. Now an NIH-funded team of researchers has evidence that the reverse is...
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The Brain Ripples Before We Remember
Credit: Thinkstock Throw a stone into a quiet pond, and you’ll see ripples expand across the water from the point where it went in. Now, neuroscientists have discovered that a different sort of...
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New Study Points to Targetable Protective Factor in Alzheimer’s Disease
Credit: gettyimages/Creatista If you’ve spent time with individuals affected with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), you might have noticed that some people lose their memory and other cognitive skills more...
View ArticleNew Grants Explore Benefits of Music on Health
It’s not every day you get to perform with one of the finest voices on the planet. What an honor it was to join renowned opera singer Renée Fleming back in May for a rendition of “How Can I Keep from...
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What a Memory Looks Like
Credit: Stephanie Grella, Ramirez Group, Boston University Your brain has the capacity to store a lifetime of memories, covering everything from the name of your first pet to your latest computer...
View ArticleA Real-Time Look at Value-Based Decision Making
All of us make many decisions every day. For most things, such as which jacket to wear or where to grab a cup of coffee, there’s usually no right answer, so we often decide using values rooted in our...
View ArticleDiscovering the Brain’s Nightly “Rinse Cycle”
Getting plenty of deep, restful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health. Now comes word of yet another way that sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and...
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How Our Brains Replay Memories
Caption: Encoding and replaying learned memory. Left panel shows the timed sequence of neurons firing in a part of a person’s brain involved in memory as it encodes the random pair of words, “crow”...
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The People’s Picks for Best Posts
It’s 2021—Happy New Year! Time sure flies in the blogosphere. It seems like just yesterday that I started the NIH Director’s Blog to highlight recent advances in biology and medicine, many supported...
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The Synchronicity of Memory
Credit: Zhou Y, et al. FASEB J, 2020 You may think that you’re looking at a telescopic heat-map of a distant planet, with clickable thumbnail images to the right featuring its unique topography. In...
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Human Brain Compresses Working Memories into Low-Res ‘Summaries’
Credit: Adapted from Kwak Y., Neuron (2022) You have probably done it already a few times today. Paused to remember a password, a shopping list, a phone number, or maybe the score to last night’s...
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The Amazing Brain: Seeing Two Memories at Once
Credit: Stephanie Grella, Boston University, MA The NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative is revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain. As...
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An Inflammatory View of Early Alzheimer’s Disease
Credit: Sakar Budhathoki, Mala Ananth, Lorna Role, David Talmage, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, NIH Detecting the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in middle-aged...
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