In recent decades, psychologists and psychotherapists have developed a wide range of new therapeutic approaches and strategies to increase their patients' wellbeing. Two distinct practices found to be particularly promising are mindfulness meditation and hypnosis.
In humans, aging is often associated with changes in sleeping patterns, cognitive abilities and functional network connectivity (i.e., the strength with which activity in different brain regions correlates over time). While many neuroscientists investigated these...
The hippocampus is an area of the brain known to play a key role in the encoding of long-term memories. In addition to contributing to the formation of event-related memories, this brain region supports the creation of so-called cognitive maps. These are mental maps...
The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is an area of the brain known to play a key role in regulating a variety of reward-related behaviors, including appetitive and aversive responses, feeding, social interactions and some types of learning. Studies on both humans and animals...
Memory, the human ability to recall things that happened in the past, is one of the topics most widely investigated by neuroscientists and psychologists. Past studies have collected extensive evidence suggesting that memory is a dynamic process, rather than a static...
Past research suggests that brain oscillations may support different cognitive functions by coordinating spike timing inside and across different brain regions. However, the role that the timing of these oscillations plays in specific neural computations is still...
The onset of puberty, the developmental stage at which adolescents reach sexual maturity, is known to be associated with the activity of a specific class of neurons, namely gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons. Past neuroscience research revealed that while...
Opioid receptors are proteins in the central nervous system that are targeted by opioid drugs for pain relief. There are three subtypes of opioid receptors, MOP, DOP and KOP, in addition to the opioid-related NOP receptor.
Oxidative stress is a condition resulting from an imbalance between the generation of reactive oxygen species (i.e., molecules containing oxygen with an uneven number of electrons) and the ability of antioxidants (i.e., molecules that can donate one electron to other...
When humans perform movements and actions in their surrounding environment, they typically feel that they own and control different parts of their body. Past theoretical studies have suggested that the sense of body ownership emerges from the integration of coherent...