Berkeley Neuroscience PhD Program drops GRE requirement
Starting this year, GRE scores are not required to apply to our PhD program. Read the announcement from our PhD Program Director, Professor Michael Silver, to learn more.
A map of the brain can tell what you’re reading about
Too busy or lazy to read Melville’s Moby Dick or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? That’s OK. Whether you read the classics, or listen to them instead, the same cognitive and emotional parts of the brain are likely to be stimulated. And now, there’s a map to prove it. UC Berkeley neuroscientists have created interactive maps that can predict where […]
Long-term and persistent vocal plasticity in adult bats
Bats exhibit a diverse and complex vocabulary of social communication calls some of which are believed to be learned during development. This ability to produce learned, species-specific vocalizations – a rare trait in the animal kingdom – requires a high-degree of vocal plasticity. Bats live extremely long lives in highly complex and dynamic social environments, […]
$47 million grant to explore how a healthy lifestyle changes the aging brain
According to the Alzheimer’s Association 2019 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report, an estimated 5.8 million Americans of all ages are living with Alzheimer’s dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S. Barring the development of medical breakthroughs, the number may nearly triple to 13.8 million by 2050. Previous results suggest that lifestyle changes […]
Scientists map our underappreciated ‘little brain’
Scientists at UC Berkeley and Western University in Canada have used brain imaging to map the cerebellum, a formerly underappreciated neural region that contains the vast majority of the brain’s neurons, hence its Latin moniker “little brain.” The results of their study appear this month in the Nature Neuroscience journal. The map can be viewed at this link.
Disrupted sleep in one’s 50s, 60s raises risk of Alzheimer’s disease
People who report a declining quality of sleep as they age from their 50s to their 60s have more protein tangles in their brain, putting them at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life, according to a new study by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
Teaching science and the science of teaching: PhD Program alum Robin Ball
Robin Ball, who was in the first class of PhD Program students, is a lecturer at Berkeley and facilitates a program to help faculty improve their teaching.
Do Brain Waves During Sleep Reflect Aβ and Tau Pathologies?
Could gauging Aβ and tau accumulation in healthy older adults be as simple as measuring their brain activity during sleep? Researchers led by Matthew Walker, University of California, Berkeley, think it might. In the June 17 Journal of Neuroscience, they describe distinct EEG patterns that associate with each of these pathologies. Less slow-wave activity during […]
Bats’ brains sync when they socialize
The phrase “we’re on the same wavelength” may be more than just a friendly saying: A new study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers shows that bats’ brain activity is literally in sync when bats engage in social behaviors like grooming, fighting or sniffing each other. “Whenever the bats were socially interacting, you could see […]