[Source:  Science Daily]  

Ever wonder how the human brain, which is constantly bombarded with millions of pieces of visual information, can filter out what's unimportant and focus on what's most useful?

The process is known as selective attention and scientists have long debated how it works. But now, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have discovered an important clue. Evidence from an animal study, published in the July 22 online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that the prefrontal cortex is involved in a previously unknown way.

[Source:  Medical News Today]

UT Dallas researchers recently demonstrated how nerve stimulation paired with specific experiences, such as movements or sounds, can reorganize the brain. This technology could lead to new treatments for stroke, tinnitus, autism and other disorders.

In a related paper, UT Dallas neuroscientists showed that they could alter the speed at which the brain works in laboratory animals by pairing stimulation of the vagus nerve with fast or slow sounds.

[Source: Science Daily]

In the ongoing battle to get children to eat healthfully, parents may do well invoking the names of superheroes to come to their rescue, say Cornell researchers.

Just as Popeye inspired a generation to eat spinach, such role models as Spiderman or Batman could help children make healthy choices, according to Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

Infants are able to detect how speech communicates unobservable intentions, researchers at New York University and McGill University have found in a study that sheds new light on how early in life we can rely on language to acquire knowledge about matters that go beyond first-hand experiences.

Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

[Source:  Health Day via Yahoo News]

A new technology may enable people who have lost the ability to move their arms or legs to use their eyes to write in cursive, or script.

The technology, which enables people to produce smooth eye movements in desired directions, could be of great benefit to people who have lost limb movement because of diseases such as Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called ALS) or spinal or other injuries, according to the study published online July 26 in the journal Current Biology.

Premature babies are more likely to survive when they are born in high-level neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) than in hospitals without such facilities, and this benefit is considerably larger than previously reported.

The likelihood that an extremely premature baby will survive if born in a high-technology, high-volume hospital unit was already known, but the current study, the largest to date, revealed a stronger effect. Pediatric researchers who analyzed more than 1.3 million premature births over a 10-year span found that the survival benefits applied not only to extremely preterm babies, but also to moderately preterm newborns.

[Source:  Science Daily]

Neuroscientists from Wayne State University and the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) are taking a deeper look into how the brain mechanisms for memory retrieval differ between adults and children. While the memory systems are the same in many ways, the researchers have learned that crucial functions with relevance to learning and education differ.

The team's findings were published on July 17, 2012, in the Journal of Neuroscience.

According to lead author Noa Ofen, Ph.D., assistant professor in WSU's Institute of Gerontology and Department of Pediatrics, cognitive ability, including the ability to learn and remember new information, dramatically changes between childhood and adulthood. This ability parallels with dramatic changes that occur in the structure and function of the brain during these periods.