Category News

Another step towards understanding how the brain encodes what is good or bad

Neuroscientists at the Institute for Research in Life and Health Sciences (ICVS), at the University of Minho School of Medicine, have made significant progress in understanding how the brain processes positive and negative stimuli. Their findings, published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, shed new light on the role of neurons in a region of our brain that is key to perceiving pleasure and aversion, the nucleus accumbens.

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Production of new astrocytes contributes to an improvement in depressive and anxious behavior

The production of new astrocytes in the adult human brain may contribute to an improvement in depressive and anxious behavior in patients with neuropsychiatric diseases, as well as to the restitution of neural cells in the hippocampus, a brain region important for the control of emotional and cognitive behaviors. These are the main conclusions of a study carried out by a research team from the ICVS, and recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Read MoreProduction of new astrocytes contributes to an improvement in depressive and anxious behavior