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

UT Southwestern scientists have developed a genetically engineered mouse and imaging system that lets them visualize fluctuations in the circadian clocks of cell types in mice. The method, described online in the journal Neuron, gives new insight into which brain cells are important in maintaining the body’s master circadian clock. But they say the approach […]

Children with autism born to mothers who had immune conditions during their pregnancy are more likely to have behavioral and emotional problems, a UC Davis Health study has found. The study examined maternal immune history as a predictor of symptoms in children with autism. “We tested the ability of maternal immune history to predict ASD […]

Some highly effective medications also happen to be highly mysterious. Such is the case with the antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs: They are the most common treatment for major depression and have been around for more than 40 years, yet scientists still do not know exactly how they work. Nor […]

By making use of an unexpected species difference between rats and mice, scientists have identified a system in the brain that controls how males behave when they become fathers. A central component in this system is the hormone, prolactin, which has previously been shown to prepare the female for motherhood. The researchers were also able […]

What would you do if you knew how long you had until Alzheimer’s disease set in? Don’t despair. New UC Berkeley research suggests one defense against this virulent form of dementia — for which no treatment currently exists — is deep, restorative sleep, and plenty of it.

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.

Vocabulary that one uses to describe their emotions is an indicator of mental and physical health and overall well-being, according to an analysis led by a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and published today in Nature Communications A larger negative emotion vocabulary—or different ways to describe similar feelings—correlates with more psychological […]

Researchers led by Takeo Yoshikawa at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan have discovered a biomarker that can detect autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in preschool-aged children. Published in Brain Communications, the new study found that levels of the protein FABP4 were much lower in four- to six-year-old children with ASD than they were […]

The study, published in Nature Communications, describes a newly discovered mechanism of learning in the brain shown to stabilize memories and reduce interference between them. Its findings also provide new insight into how humans form expectations and make accurate predictions about what could happen in future.