Search results for "Brain function"
showing 10 items of 135 documents
Structural changes induced by daily music listening in the recovering brain after middle cerebral artery stroke: a voxel-based morphometry study
2014
[Abstract.] Music is a highly complex and versatile stimulus for the brain that engages many temporal, frontal, parietal, cerebellar, and subcortical areas involved in auditory, cognitive, emotional, and motor processing. Regular musical activities have been shown to effectively enhance the structure and function of many brain areas, making music a potential tool also in neuro- logical rehabilitation. In our previous randomized controlled study, we found that listening to music on a daily basis can improve cognitive recovery and improve mood after an acute mid- dle cerebral artery stroke. Extending this study, a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis utilizing cost function masking was perf…
The Resilient Emotional Brain: A Scoping Review of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Limbic Structure and Function in Resilient Adults With a History …
2020
Childhood Maltreatment (CM) is one of the strongest predictors of adult mental illness, though not all adults with CM develop psychopathology. Here, we describe the structure and function of emotional brain regions that may contribute to resilient functioning after CM. We review studies that report medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), amygdala and hippocampus (‘limbic regions’) structure, function, and/or connections, in resilient (i.e., adults reporting CM without psychopathology) vs. vulnerable (i.e., adults reporting CM with psychopathology), or healthy adults (adults without CM with no psychopatology). We find that resilient adults have larger hippocampal grey and white matter volume, and i…
Salivary testosterone is related to both handedness and degree of linguistic lateralization in normal women.
2003
The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that individual differences in testosterone (T) are associated with different patterns of linguistic lateralization and hand preference. Twenty left-handed (LH) and 19 right-handed (RH) women filled in a handedness questionnaire and performed a consonant–vowel dichotic listening test (DL-CV). Salivary T was measured by radioimmunoassay (RIA). LH women showed significantly lower mean salivary T than RH women. T levels were negatively correlated with the absolute value of the DL laterality index. Subjects with right ear advantage (REA) were classified into strongly and weakly lateralized following Wexler et al. method (Brain Lang. 13 (1981) 13)…
Lateralization of directional brain-heart information transfer during visual emotional elicitation
2019
Previous studies have characterized the physiological interactions between central nervous system (brain) and peripheral cardiovascular system (heart) during affective elicitation in healthy subjects; however, questions related to the directionality of this functional interplay have been gaining less attention from the scientific community. Here, we explore brain-heart interactions during visual emotional elicitation in healthy subjects using measures of Granger causality (GC), a widely used descriptor of causal influences between two dynamical systems. The proposed approach inferences causality between instantaneous cardiovagal dynamics estimated from inhomogeneous point-process models of…
Asymmetry in dopamine D2/3 receptors of caudate nucleus is lost with age
2007
Molecular and functional imaging techniques reveal evidence for lateralization of human cerebral function. Based on animal data, we hypothesized that asymmetry in dopamine neurotransmission declines during normal aging. In order to test this hypothesis, we measured dopamine D2/3 receptor availability with [18F]desmethoxyfallypride-PET (DMFP) in putamen and caudate nucleus (NC) of 21 healthy, right-handed males (24-60 years; 35+/-10). For volumetric analysis, high-resolution T1-weighted MR-images were obtained in 18 of the PET-subjects in order to assess possible age-related decreases in NC and putamen volume. The calculated DMFP binding potentials (BP) showed a right-ward asymmetry in NC of…
Differential impact of continuous theta-burst stimulation over left and right DLPFC on planning
2011
Most neuroimaging studies on planning report bilateral activations of the dorsolateral prefron- tal cortex (dlPFC). Recently, these concurrent activations of left and right dlPFC have been shown to dou- ble dissociate with different cognitive demands imposed by the planning task: Higher demands on the extraction of task-relevant information led to stronger activation in left dlPFC, whereas higher demands on the integration of interdependent information into a coherent action sequence entailed stronger activa- tion of right dlPFC. Here, we used continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate the supposed causal structure-function mapping underlying this double dissociation. Two grou…
Time and spatial attention: Effects of prism adaptation on temporal deficits in brain damaged patients
2011
Growing evidence indicates that the representations of space and time interact in the brain but the exact neural correlates of such interaction remain unknown. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies show that processing of temporal information engages a distributed network in the right hemisphere and suggest a link between deficits in spatial attention and deficits in time perception. In the present study we used the procedure of prismatic adaptation (PA) to directionally manipulate spatial attention in order to explore the effect of attentional deviation on time perception in patients with right (RBD) vs. left (LBD) brain damage. In a first experiment, two groups of RBD and LBD patien…
Asymmetry in the human primary somatosensory cortex and handedness.
2003
Brain asymmetry is a phenomenon well known for handedness and language specialization and has also been studied in motor cortex. Less is known about hemispheric asymmetries in the somatosensory cortex. In the present study, we systematically investigated the representation of somatosensory function analyzing early subcortical and cortical somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEP) after electrical stimulation of the right and left median nerve. In 16 subjects, we compared thresholds, the peripheral neurogram at Erb point, and, using MRI-based EEG source analysis, the P14 brainstem component as well as N20 and P22, the earliest cortical responses from the primary sensorimotor cortex. Handedness w…
Alterations of Continuous MEG Measures during Mental Activities
2000
In a pilot study, we investigated the topography of 11 continuous MEG measures for the eyes-opened and eyes-closed condition together with three simple mental tasks (mental arithmetic, visual imagery, word generation). One-minute recordings for each condition from 16 right-handed subjects were analyzed. The electrophysiological measures consisted of 6 spectral band measures together with spectral edge frequency and spectral entropy, plus the time-domain-based entropy of amplitudes (ENA) and the nonlinear measures correlation dimension D2 and Lyapunov exponent L1. In summary, our results indicate a pronounced task-dependent difference between the anterior and the posterior region, but no lat…
Left-hemisphere dominance in early nociceptive processing in the human parasylvian cortex.
2003
Pain perception comprises sensory and emotional dimensions. While the emotional experience is thought to be represented in the right hemisphere, we here report a left-hemisphere dominance for the early sensory component of pain perception using brain electrical source analysis of laser-evoked potentials. Ten right-handed subjects underwent several series of laser radiant heat stimuli to pairs of parallel lines on the dorsum of the left or right hand. Stimulus location and intensity were randomised independently. The sensory-discriminative aspects of pain were emphasised by asking the subjects to perform either a spatial or an intensity discrimination task and were contrasted with active dis…