All Posts: neuroscience
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Taking Neuroscience to School: Brain Scans Reveal the Hidden Shape of Thinking and Predict Students’ Learning Better Than Test Scores
Category: News Release
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Key Mental Abilities Can Actually Improve During Aging
WASHINGTON (August 19, 2021) — It’s long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. Now, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view. The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behavior, show that two key brain functions, which allow us […]
Category: News Release
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New Finding Suggests Cognitive Problems Caused by Repeat Mild Head Hits Could Be Treated
WASHINGTON (May 10, 2021) — A neurologic pathway by which non-damaging but high frequency brain impact blunts normal brain function and causes long-term problems with learning and memory has been identified. The finding suggests that tailored drug therapy can be designed and developed to reactivate and normalize cognitive function, say neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical […]
Category: News Release
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MCGSO Members Virtually Volunteer for BrainSTEM Week
(April 23, 2021) — Members of the Medical Center Graduate Student Organization (MCGSO) shared their passion for science with students from Hardy Middle School in Washington, D.C., during BrainSTEM Week via Zoom April 5-9. Comprising demonstrations, career talks and research discussions, BrainSTEM Week combined two annual MCGSO events: Brain Awareness Week and STEM Night. As […]
Category: GUMC Stories
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Immune-Compromised People with HIV, APOE4 Gene May Have a Compounded Risk for Alzheimer’s
WASHINGTON (February 22, 2021) — People living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who have a history of severe immunosuppression and at least one copy of the Alzheimer’s disease-related gene variant APOE4 might see a compounded adverse effect on the circuitry that impacts memory. This could eventually lead to an increased risk for dementia after […]
Category: News Release
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Art Installation Illustrates Dyslexic Brains at Work
(January 14, 2021) — When a person practices a skill, the neural representations in the relevant parts of the brain change, allowing the person to perform the skill better. Research by Guinevere Eden, PhD, a Georgetown University professor of pediatrics and the director of the Center for the Study of Learning, found that the same […]
Category: GUMC Stories
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Tweaking AI Software to Function Like a Human Brain Improves Computer’s Learning Ability
WASHINGTON (January 12, 2021) — Computer-based artificial intelligence can function more like human intelligence when programmed to use a much faster technique for learning new objects, say two neuroscientists who designed such a model to mirror human visual learning. In the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University […]
Category: News Release
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Study of Reaching and Grasping with Hand or Foot Reveals Novel Brain Insights
WASHINGTON (October 26, 2020) — People born without upper limbs who use their feet to reach for an item engage the same area in the brain that people with hands use to reach for something, report Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. The finding, published October 26, 2020, in PNAS, advances the basic science of brain […]
Category: News Release
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Study Suggests Unconscious Learning Underlies Belief in God
WASHINGTON (September 9, 2020) — 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. Their research, reported in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to […]
Category: News Release
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Children Use Both Brain Hemispheres to Understand Language, Unlike Adults
WASHINGTON (September 7, 2020) — Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. […]
Category: News Release