MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitThe free Belonging in School resources have arrived! These resources offer tools that schools and educators can use to revise or develop policies for educational inclusion, particularly as they pertain to learners with neurodevelopmental differences. It was so good to see so many of you at our in-person and online launches. But if you missed […]
Camilla Nord receives Wellcome Career Development Award
Congratulations to MRC CBU’s Camilla Nord who has received a Wellcome Fellowship. Camilla has been awarded a £1.5 million Wellcome Career Development Award to investigate the neural mechanisms of bodily symptoms in neuropsychiatric conditions. This eight-year award builds on Camilla’s current MRC-funded programme on brain-body interactions, and is jointly hosted by the MRC CBU and […]
Mind over Matter: how hippocampal GABA enables inhibitory control over unwanted thoughts
We can’t always control what we think, for those with psychiatric disorders, this is especially challenging. Intrusive memories, flashbacks, and hallucinations are hallmark symptoms of a variety of mental health conditions. Although these symptoms are often attributed to problems with brain regions that help us inhibit unwanted thoughts—such as the prefrontal cortex—difficulties in controlling intrusive […]
MRC CBU’s Ajay Halai awarded an MRC Career Development Award (CDA)
Many congratulations to MRC CBU’s Ajay Halai who has been awarded an MRC Career Development Award (CDA), for his project ‘Developing a neuroscience-led basis for diagnosis, prognosis, management and therapy for aphasia post-stroke.’ A career development award is a personal award that aims to support individuals seeking to transition to independence through protected research time […]
Simulating interactions between regions during semantic memory
The human ability to remember is not rooted in the activity of a single brain region. Rather, many regions contribute to memory, much like many different instruments contribute to an orchestra. And just as musicians must precisely coordinate their playing, so must brain regions dynamically interact to support functions like memory. But most previous studies […]
A pioneering model of language resolves centuries-old contradictions
Communication lies at the heart of human life and society, and people who lose their ability to understand and produce language often suffer far-reaching difficulties. This condition, which typically arises through a brain injury like a stroke, is known as aphasia. Scientists began to study aphasic patients back in the 1800s, but because their explanations […]
A transdiagnostic approach to capture the clinical spectrum of frontotemporal lobar degeneration
Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) syndromes are highly heterogeneous and overlapping in their clinical phenotype and brain morphometry. Thus, utilizing a transdiagnostic approach to capture the heterogeneous nature of FTLD is important for understanding and treating FTLD syndromes. The primary hypothesis of this study was that syndromes associated with FTLD are multidimensional rather than discrete clinical […]
The early role of apathy in frontotemporal dementia
A common feature of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is apathy. Having apathy symptoms, including deficits in working memory and mental/cognitive flexibility, has been linked to worse prognosis and survival for FTD patients. However, its role as an early marker of FTD progression is unclear. The aim of this study was to assess whether apathy in presymptomatic […]
