Monthly Archives: February 2013

Decades of research have highlighted the amygdala’s role in fear behavior. In this report, Feinstein and colleagues found that inhalation of 35% CO2 evoked not only fear, but also panic attacks, in three rare patients with bilateral amygdala damage. They … Continue reading →

Changes in memory performance are one of the hallmark symptoms of mild cognitive impairment and are affected by healthy aging as well. Pattern separation, which refers to the process of orthogonalizing overlapping inputs into distinct memory representations, may be a … Continue reading →

Nature Neuroscience FOCUS ON MEMORY Nature Neuroscience presents a special Focus that discusses some of the most exciting recent developments and emerging ideas in our understanding of the neurobiology of learning and memory. Read this Focus online: www.nature.com/neuro/focus/memory

This supplement on ageing contains a number of useful articles on brain ageing.  See: Abbott A: Cognition: The brain’s decline. Nature 492: S4-S5 (Dec 2012); doi:10.1038/492S4a . http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427_supp/full/492S4a.html Stranahan AM and Mattson MP:  Science and society: Recruiting adaptive cellular stress … Continue reading →

The optogenetic technique allows study of the causal role of millisecond-scale activity of genetically or anatomically defined populations of neurons. In this paper, Smith and Graybiel use optogenetics to study habitual behavior, specifically the neural basis of habit formation. With … Continue reading →

The amyloid cascade hypothesis states that amyloid-beta accumulation is the key event in Alzheimer disease neurodegeneration. However, recent data put this model into question. Knopman DS et al (Ann. Neurol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ana.23816) recently compared cognitively normal elderly human subjects with amyloid-beta … Continue reading →

Binge drinking, which is defined as the consumption of five drinks of alcohol within 2 hours in men or four drinks in women, once a month or more often is associated with an increased risk for developing the metabolic syndrome … Continue reading →

In some people, childhood trauma can interact with genotype to increase the risk of stress-related disorders such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adulthood, but the molecular mechanisms remain unclear. The authors of this paper report that polymorphisms … Continue reading →