2017 Archive

Monkey sees. . . monkey knows?

September 6, 2017

Monkey

When asked a question, a human being can decline to answer if he knows that he does not know the answer. Although non-human animals cannot verbally declare any sort of metacognitive judgments, Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester, and PhD candidate Stephen Ferrigno, have found that non-human primates exhibit a metacognitive process similar to humans.

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Patient Plays Saxophone While Surgeons Remove Brain Tumor

August 25, 2017

Brad Mahon surgery

Music is not only a major part of Dan Fabbio’s life, as a music teacher it is his livelihood. So when doctors discovered a tumor located in the part of his brain responsible for music function, he began a long journey that involved a team of physicians, scientists, and a music professor and culminated with him awake and playing a saxophone as surgeons operated on his brain. Fabbio’s case is the subject of a study published today in the journal Current Biology that sheds new light on how music is processed in the brain.

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Surviving a Stroke Propels Career in Brain Research

July 26, 2017

On a warm day in July 2005, Frank Garcea’s soccer playing days came to an abrupt end when he suffered what could have been a deadly stroke during a practice with his teammates. Instead, the events of that day and his subsequent treatment – which serve as the basis for a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) – set him on a career path that would ultimately lead to a Ph.D. studying how the brain recovers from injury.

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