OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to increase understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in cigarette addiction by identifying neural substrates modulated by visual smoking cues in nicotine-deprived smokers. METHOD: Event-related ...

Most vertebrates communicate acoustically, but few, among them humans, dolphins and whales, bats, and three orders of birds, learn this trait. FOXP2 is the first gene linked to human speech and has been the target of positive ...

Functional MRI (fMRI) can detect blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) hemodynamic responses secondary to neuronal activity. The most commonly used method for detecting fMRI signals is the gradient-echo echo-planar imaging ...

Researchers who study the neuronal basis of cognition face a paradox. If they extract the brain, its cognitive functions cannot be assessed. On the other hand, the brain's microcircuits are difficult to study in the intact ...

The brain keeps track of the movements it makes so as to process sensory input accurately and coordinate complex movements gracefully. In this chapter we review the brain's strategies for keeping track of fast, saccadic ...

Each movement we make activates our own sensory receptors, thus causing a problem for the brain: the spurious, movement-related sensations must be discriminated from the sensory inputs that really matter, those representing ...

Movements are necessary to engage the world, but every movement results in sensorimotor ambiguity. Self-movements cause changes to sensory inflow as well as changes in the positions of objects relative to motor effectors ...

Biological systems by default involve complex components with complex relationships. To decipher how biological systems work, we assume that one needs to integrate information over multiple levels of complexity. The songbird ...

Auditory and vocal regulation of gene expression occurs in separate discrete regions of the songbird brain. Here we demonstrate that regulated gene expression also occurs during vocal communication in a parrot, belonging ...

The ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH) plays a central role in the regulation of the female reproductive behavior lordosis, a behavior dependent upon the sequential activation of receptors for the ovarian steroid hormones estradiol ...