As animals experience new things, the connections between neurons, called synapses, strengthen or weaken in response to events and the activity they cause in the brain. Neuroscientists believe that ...

Researchers now suggest that the human brain goes through five distinct phases of development over the course of a lifetime.

Researchers from Kyushu University discovered a previously unrecognized synaptic "hotspot" that forms during adolescence, ...

In the Alzheimer’s disease brain, synaptic loss correlates with cognitive decline, and is considered a sign of disease progression. But is synaptic loss always bad? Provocative new data from several ...

How do we learn something new? How do tasks at a new job, lyrics to the latest hit song or directions to a friend's house become encoded in our brains? The broad answer is that our brains undergo ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition in which affected individuals experience difficulties in social communication and exhibit restricted, repetitive patterns of ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 107, No. 50 (December 14, 2010), pp. 21784-21789 (6 pages) ...

A new study on the detriments of too many synaptic connections in the mouse cerebellum by neuroscientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis corroborates previous human ...