Second, their brain functions, as measured by electrical activity and high-tech scanning, are dissimilar.
The team's experiments on rats and monkeys have shown that certain brain functions can be replaced with signals via electrodes.
Neurophysiologists have recently discovered that Nitric Oxide (NO) plays a vital role in many brain functions, including learning and memory.
The immediate reaction is the old brain, and the old brain functions in its own traditional, accepted, reactionary, animalistic sense.
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He also wondered if the vagus might help regulate other brain functions.
The valued leaders and successful employees of the Conceptual Age will be firing on all cylinders -- and many will involve right-brain functions.
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Especially confusing, says Gazzaley, is that key brain functions, like short-term memory, processing speed, and the capacity to multi-task, decline steadily as we age.
Detecting such insincere forms of communication require many brain functions, including the ability to read emotion, see the world from another person's perspective and understand others' intentions.
Mary Lou Jepsen of Google believes we can better understand brain disease, and brain functions like language learning, if we can massively increase the resolution of brain scans.
He is founder of The Allen Institute for Brain Science, a foundation dedicated to research on brain functions and the Experience Music Project a music museum in Seattle and the Paul G.
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Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, study author from the department of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, said the noise stimulation group showed improvements in cognitive and brain functions compared with the control group.
She added this could specifically help medical and military training and further research could be carried out to see if sleep loss affected other brain and memory functions in a similar way.
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He said the pope's full lung should be able to compensate for the partial one, similar to how parts of the brain may pick up functions of other regions damaged by a stroke.
There is also a crippling loss of nerve cells in brain areas involved in cognitive functions which leads to the main behavioural symptom, failure of the memory.
The dogs were clinically dead, with no heartbeat, respiratory functions, or brain activity, but their tissues and organs were perfectly preserved because the procedure lowers the body temperature to about 50 degrees F.
"Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking, " she told BBC News.
That's because the right side of the brain can take over some language functions.
That might sound drastic, but in 5-year-olds, whose brains are still actively growing, the remaining part of the brain can reorganize itself to control some functions that the missing half would have governed, although the child will probably not be completely neurologically normal, Gupta said.
Hawkins, who will continue to work as chief technical officer of Treo maker palmOne (nasdaq: PLMO - news - people ), already has his own research lab to study the neocortex, a massive part of the brain thought to hold such higher level functions as language, learning, memory and complex thought.
As the brain is squeezed it compresses vital regions regulating functions such as breathing.
As hearing declines the brain dedicates more resources to interpreting the information it is sent, stealing brain power which would be used for other functions.
Instead the team found an alkaline pH in the cells, suggesting that the brain had compensated over time by adapting its functions to redress the chemical changes brought about by the lack of oxygen.
In younger patients, the brain has greater plasticity and capability for recovery of functions.
The electroencephalograph picks up cognitive functions in 12 different regions of the brain, showing memory recall and the level of attention paid to visual and aural stimuli.
Meanwhile the Human Brain Project will attempt to simulate the trillions of neural connections that make up a human brain in an effort to comprehend how the organ functions.
The mechanism behind this bias appears to be located in a specific part of the brain, the left inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in language, among other functions.
Cummings noted that some patients can have massive amyloid buildup all over the brain yet only experience very specific neurological deficits, such as inability to speak, while maintaining other functions.
Researchers looked in detail at the hypothalamus section of the brain, which is known to regulate sleep, energy expenditure, appetite, thirst and many other critical biological functions.
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