Neuroscience & Neurology Topic
Glass Half Full or Faulty Frontal Lobe?
Researchers recently reported that optimism may not be as rosy as once thought. In fact, optimism may actually be due to a brain malfunction. How is that for a glass-half-empty view of the world?Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London enrolled 14 volunteers to evaluate optimism in the face of bad news. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance image scans, the volunteers were presented with 80 negative scenarios, including being divorced, developing chronic diseases, and being a victim of crime.
The Love Drug
Since man first walked the Earth, the quest for love has been a constant preoccupation and the loss of love has been a source of the most dramatic events, including suicide, homicide, and even terrible wars. Breakups can be perceived as failure and a promise of future loneliness, and they can have severe consequences such as depression and anxiety. Rejection in love can in fact be so dramatic, that it has been compared to withdrawal from addictive substances.
The NeuroSocial Network
Social neuroscience is a rapidly growing discipline that examines the relationship between the brain and social behavior. The “social brain hypothesis” posits that, over evolutionary time, living in large, social groups favored the physical growth of brain regions important for social behavior. In non-human primates, some evidence indicates that the size of the amygdala is related to social behavior. Little is known, however, about this relationship in humans. A provocative new study finds that the volume of a key component of the social brain, the amygdala, is directly related to the size and complexity of social networks in adult humans.
Female Orgasm – Unlocking the Neuroscientific Mysteries
Recently Brain Blogger featured an article entitled Your Brain on Sex and Love. While it delineated a few recent studies that focused on what goes on in the brain during sex, few recognize how little is known about human sexuality, particularly the neural and psychological responses that stem from it. Logistically, it is difficult to study human sex in a lab setting, simply because it is difficult for test subjects to engage in intercourse, or even to self-stimulate, in an fMRI scanner.
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