Losing the ability to speak can be devastating. Sometimes, though, people lose this ability without losing the ability to plan the proper mouth movements for speaking.
The connections between nerve cells- called synapses- are essential for all brain functions, including thinking, behavior, and movement. Impaired development of these synaptic connections can contribute to disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, and epilepsy.
Protein trafficking is the cellular process by which proteins are transported from their site of synthesis to where they are functionally required. How this is accomplished, and whether there are differences in this process between cell types is unclear.
Interoception is the process by which animals and humans sense their bodily state, and deficits in interoception are proposed to underlie numerous psychiatric disorders and maladaptive behaviors.
Pediatric epileptic encephalopathies are debilitating disorders that begin with severe and frequent seizures in infancy or early childhood. These diseases progress to complex syndromes involving not only recurring seizures but also disrupted movement, sensation, cognition, and emotional processin...
Human and non-human animals learn from a myriad of experiences accumulated across their lifetimes. In addition to forming memories of individual experiences, brains associate information across distinct experiences, a process that leads to an understanding of the world far beyond capturing memori...
The brain processes and stores information by dynamically changing the structure and function of synaptic connections between individual neurons. This synaptic plasticity allows us to acquire new information, learn challenging skills and recover from brain injury and disease.
Coordinated multi-joint limb and digit movements – “manual dexterity” – underlie both specialized skills (e.g., playing the piano) and more mundane tasks (e.g., tying shoelaces). Impairments in dexterous skill cause significant disability, as occurs with motor cortical inj...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect 1 in 59 children in the US. Despite the high prevalence and the debilitating nature of these conditions, we have only a vague picture of what causes autism and therefore very few effective diagnostic tools or therapies have been developed.
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays a critical role in complex cognitive and emotional functions including decision making, mood and social behaviors. mPFC undergoes a uniquely protracted maturation which is likely essential to produce these complex behaviors, but also opens a prolonged win...
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