Children with a history of a prolonged febrile seizure show signs of acute hippocampal injury on magnetic resonance imaging. In addition, animal studies have shown that adult rats who suffered febrile seizures during development reveal memory impairments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that memory impairments related to hippocampal…

One would like to believe that advances in science have resulted in improved outcomes for troubled youth. Trends in treatment have changed dramatically in two decades. Technology to understand the brain and its functions are highly advanced. But the United States is now medicating youth more than any other country. There is growing concern about…

Brain mitochondrial dysfunction has been proposed as an etiologic factor in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging ([superscript 1]HMRS) and MRI were used to assess for evidence of brain mitochondrial dysfunction in longitudinal samples of children with ASD or developmental delay (DD), and cross-sectionally…

Teachers of science-based education in Malaysian secondary schools, especially those in the field of physics, often find their students facing huge difficulties in dealing with conceptual ideas in physics, resulting thus in a lack of interest towards the subject. The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the Brain-Based Teaching…

Thinking about the abstract concept power may automatically activate the spatial up-down image schema ("powerful up"; "powerless down") and consequently direct spatial attention to the image schema-congruent location. Participants indicated whether a word represented a powerful or powerless person (e.g. "king" or "servant"). Following each…

This research study was built upon findings in neuroscience of the brain's natural ability to physically change itself through cognitive modifiability by creating new pathways and neural connections. The purpose of the research was to investigate instructional music applications for improvement in basic math skills with students who are on the…

A nonverbal learning disability is believed to be caused by damage, disorder or destruction of neuronal white matter in the brain's right hemisphere and may be seen in persons experiencing a wide range of neurological diseases such as hydrocephalus and other types of brain injury (Harnadek & Rourke 1994). This article probes the relationship…

Emotional meaning impacts word processing. However, it is unclear, at which functional locus this influence occurs and whether and how it depends on word class. These questions were addressed by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a lexical decision task with written adjectives, verbs, and nouns of positive, negative, and neutral…

Processing and/or hemispheric differences in the neural bases of word recognition were examined in patients with long-standing, medically-intractable epilepsy localized to the left (N = 18) or right (N = 7) temporal lobe. Participants were asked to read words that varied in the frequency of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. For the right…

Math problems make more than a few students--and even teachers--sweat, but new brain research is providing insights into the earliest causes of the anxiety so often associated with mathematics. Experts argue that "math anxiety" can bring about widespread, intergenerational discomfort with the subject, which could lead to anything from fewer…

Right-handed participants respond more quickly and more accurately to written words presented in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). Previous attempts to identify the neural basis of the RVF advantage have had limited success. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study of lateralized word naming which established that the…

Joint attention develops during the first year of life but little is known about its effects on long-term memory. We investigated whether joint attention modulates long-term memory in 9-month-old infants. Infants were familiarized with visually presented objects in either of two conditions that differed in the degree of joint attention (high…

The individual roles played by the cerebral hemispheres during the process of language comprehension have been extensively studied in tasks that require individuals to read text (for review see Jung-Beeman, 2005). However, it is not clear whether or not some aspects of the theorized laterality models of semantic comprehension are a result of the…

In a recent paper, Chiarello, Welcome, Halderman, and Leonard (2009) reported positive correlations between word-related visual field asymmetries and reading performance. They argued that strong word processing lateralization represents a more optimal brain organization for reading acquisition. Their empirical results contrasted sharply with those…

In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…