Brain

In a major case of academic poaching involving crosstown rivals, USC has lured away two prominent neuroscientists from UCLA with a promise to expand their internationally renowned lab that uses brain imaging techniques to study Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, autism and other disorders. Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Even though its ubiquitous Internet search engine practically mints money, Google Inc. was widely seen as a company whose best days were behind it. It was written off as the next Microsoft Corp. - a staid high-tech giant in the shadows of Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. that had lost its sense of urgency and innovative edge. But that sentiment has shifted dramatically over the last year, and when Google swings open the doors to its annual conference for software developers Wednesday, it won't just be showcasing its latest products.

Walking is good for your head. Sure, we knew about the improvements it can provide to aerobic capacity, not to mention muscles and joints, but two recently released studies show that walking can enhance brain function too. Walking or other repetitive exercise can change the brain in a number of ways, says Dr. Gary Small, professor of psychiatry and aging at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. The heart pumps more blood, affecting not only muscles but also the brain.

In a major case of academic poaching involving crosstown rivals, USC has lured away two prominent neuroscientists from UCLA with a promise to expand their internationally renowned lab that uses brain imaging techniques to study Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, autism and other disorders. Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI.

When he became a psychiatrist in the 1970s, John Ratey didn't expect to evolve into an exercise buff. But today, the Harvard University professor and expert in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder calls exercise the single most important tool people have to optimize brain function. If you get your body in shape, he says, your mind will follow. Ratey describes the emerging research on exercise and the brain in a book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," which was published in January by Little, Brown.

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you. " "It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?" The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit.

Her screams seemed endless. Through nights when she gasped for breath and came close to death, through days when her infant body convulsed, then lay rigid, she screamed. They were the screams of a child whose injured, swollen brain had left her barely able to breathe, totally unable to eat, see, hear or speak. In her inarticulate anguish, Katherine Blackburn, 7 months old, bitten by an encephalitis-carrying mosquito in Silver Lake in November, 1984, could do nothing but scream.

Beta blockers, a venerable class of blood pressure drugs that has fallen from favor in recent years, may help protect the aging brain against changes linked to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia that rob memory and mental function, new research indicates. In autopsies on the brains of 774 men after their deaths, scientists found that those who took beta blockers to help control hypertension had fewer of the brain lesions and less of the brain shrinkage seen in Alzheimer's than men who took other types of blood pressure medications and those who left the condition untreated.

A biological medication already widely used to treat plaque psoriasis may be able to slow the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, a new study has found. The same study found that in older mice with established Alzheimer's, this treatment approach, which suppresses the brain's immune reaction to beta amyloid, brought a marked improvement in cognitive function and may even halt or reverse early signs of Alzheimer's. The new study was published this week in the journal Nature Medicine.

Montel Williams is not your typical pot-smoking snowboarder. Best known as an Emmy-winning talk show host, the former Marine and decorated naval intelligence officer was also a champion boxer, bodybuilder and power-lifter. In 1999, Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and it hit him hard. After a downward slide to rock bottom, Williams decided to get his life back. Were you active in your younger years? I was extremely active. I was a martial artist.

Fly toy helicopters with your mind. Be a DJ and shift musical tracks based on how you feel. Wiggle robotic cat ears by increasing your state of calm. Astonishing advances in the ability to harness brain waves have made the fantastic notion of moving and controlling objects with the mind possible. Now neuroscientists are grappling with another challenge: Find a "killer app" that will demonstrate the true potential of tapping into brain waves and ignite the neurotechnology revolution.

It is always easier to be critical when you don't have a dog in the fight, so let's go ahead. The NBA playoffs are in full swing. If we think hard, we in Los Angeles can remember what that's like. People flying purple flags out car windows. The Clippers going past the first round. Close your eyes and savor. Then open them so we can take a hard look at the game and the league that has built such a ga-ga fan base. As popular as it is, the NBA keeps edging closer to pro wrestling.

Babies wise up fast. By the time infants are 3 months old, their unfinished brains are laced with a trillion connections, and the collective weight of all those firing neurons triples in a year. But the indecipherable babbling and maladroit wiggling so beloved by parents just leave scientists in baby labs scratching their heads. What do those little people know, and when do they know it? A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can't tell us. "I think we have a pretty nice answer," said Sid Kouider of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, whose findings were published Friday in the journal Science.

Why is hockey such a violent and dangerous sport? Medical researchers from Canada have an answer: Blame the media. “Media reports of an issue such as TBI in sport can contribute to an altered culture,” they write in a study published online Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. TBI stands for traumatic brain injury , and it's become a major public health concern in recent years. It happens when sudden trauma causes the head to hit an object and damages the brain. A concussion is an example of TBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains.

PALO ALTO - We hallucinate. But we are often of two minds about having two minds. We produce drugs to enhance hallucinations and drugs to dull them. Medical science seeks to relieve schizophrenics of their visions. Religion, on the other hand, sanctifies visionaries. Neurologists hunt for explanations. Art is haunted by the haunted. Where would opera be without its mad scenes and wild fantasies? Where would the Beatles have been without LSD? Stanford University made an ambitious attempt to bring together much of the above in its new Bing Concert Hall on Friday night with the premiere of "Visitations" - two short chamber operas about hallucinations by faculty composer and neurological researcher Jonathan Berger.

Remember that Jamie Foxx song "Blame It (On the Alcohol)"? If not, perhaps it's just as well, because scientists say that even the taste of beer (without the intoxicating effects of alcohol) can trigger that flow of striatal dopamine in the brain. The findings, published online Monday in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, "demonstrate for the first time the important role of an alcoholic drink's flavor, absent alcohol's pharmacological effects," the study authors wrote.  Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis asked 49 men to try two beverages: Gatorade and their preferred beer.

In addition to claiming lives, marriages, homes and careers, alcoholism has a greedy way of robbing its victims of brainpower, as well. Over time, alcohol dependence literally shrinks the brain and several of its components. And in so doing, it erodes an alcoholic's ability to learn new tasks, remember things and organize for action. Even regular, heavy drinking can take a cognitive toll, researchers have found.

I've been to Disneyland hundreds of times over the last two decades and have been writing the Funland theme park blog for about four years now. As a result, people are always asking me how to do everything at Disneyland in a single day. The short answer is you probably can't. It can be a struggle for even hard-core fans with military assault-like strategies. The longer answer is there's lots of ways to maximize your time in the park and get on the most rides possible. PHOTOS: How to do Disneyland in a day So in honor of Disneyland's 24-hour Leap Day celebration , here are my seven tips for tackling Disneyland in a day: Tip 1: If you're trying to get the most out of your day at Disneyland , I always recommend arriving just before the park opens in the morning, staying until the park closes at night and taking a long break in the heat of the afternoon at your hotel pool or cocktail bar. It may sound like a long day, but you'll get more done in the first two hours and the last two hours of your day than if you spent 15 hours straight at the park.

Got burning questions about how memories are made and stored in the brain? You are in luck: Two prominent neuroscientists are taking questions from the public about memory and the brain on Google Chat today and you can watch it live, here. The hangout will run from 11:30 a.m. to noon PDT on Thursday. The scientists will discuss recent discoveries that show memories aren't formed and permanently lodged in just one part of the brain, but rather rely on an extensive network of pathways throughout different regions of the brain.

Scientists at Stanford University on Wednesday released a video of a three-dimensional tour of a mouse brain, using a technique that made the brain see-through. The development could lead to rapid advances in research into Alzheimer's disease and other brain maladies. The researchers also made part of a human brain transparent, and used it to produce sharp imagery of deformed neurons that may be associated with Down syndrome and autism. It took six years for engineers and biochemists to remove the matrix of fats from a brain and replace it with a plastic gel. Imagine taking the binder out of a casserole and replacing it with Jell-O and you're close to what they've done.