Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute – Change perception, change your world | Chen Institute

Anxiety, the most common family of mental illnesses in the U.S., has been pushed to epic new heights by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that nearly 1 in 3 U.S. adults and a staggering 41% of people ages 18-29 experienced clinically significant anxiety symptoms in late August. Now, […]

Humans are hard-wired to prefer experiences that end well, and the influence of previous experience declines the longer ago it happened. This means we can’t always trust that choices we make based on previous experience will serve our best interests in the future. New research, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, has revealed that […]

The brain and its functions still pose many open questions. One of them is how exactly we form long-term memories about the environment. In a new study Ryuichi Shigemoto and his group from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) together with researchers from Aarhus University and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences […]

Fruit flies may be able to teach researchers a thing or two about artificial intelligence. University of Michigan biologists and their colleagues have uncovered a neural network that enables Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies to convert external stimuli of varying intensities into a “yes or no” decision about when to act. The research, scheduled to publish […]

A team based in the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford in the UK and Yale University in the US investigated the different approaches to avoiding pain for the first time. They found that when learning to avoid harming ourselves, our decision-making tends to be more forward-looking and deliberative. The findings, published in Proceedings of the […]

A new study published in Current Biology identifies the biological triggers that promote quicker nerve regeneration. From their previous studies, the researchers knew that damaged nerves regrow more quickly when “stress granules” in the site of the nerve injury are broken apart. Now they know what causes those stress granules to disassemble through a process […]

Drugs of abuse, like cocaine, are so addictive due in part to their cellular interaction, creating strong cellular memories in the brain that promote compulsive behaviors. Researchers have tried to understand the formation of these memories in hopes of finding ways to disrupt them as a potential treatment for substance use disorder (SUD). A new […]

More than 20 million people in the U.S. suffer neuropathic pain. At least 25% of those cases are classified as unexplained and considered cryptogenic sensory polyneuropathy (CSPN). There is no information to guide a physician’s drug choices to treat CSPN, but a researcher from the University of Missouri School of Medicine and MU Health Care […]

The mammalian neocortex has an orderly and beautiful six-layer structure. Neurons in each layer develop the dendrites and form a normal network. Recently, it has been reported that dendritic abnormalities are found in patients with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Therefore, understanding the mechanism by which dendrites are normally formed is important for […]

In a novel research study conducted by a team from the Neuroregeneration Institute at McLean Hospital, investigators believe they have found key brain cell type changes involving lipids, inflammation, and the development of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Their findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United […]