News by Subject Social & Behavior

With hopes to capitalize on the smell factor in flavor development, researchers are exploring how the route an aroma takes to get to the olfactory system, through the nose or the back of the throat, influences our response to the scent in question.

What The Study Did: This study included a meta-analysis that combined the results of 74 studies with 2.7 million participants to estimate how common globally dementia is in people younger than age 65.

If you're regularly out in the fresh air, you're doing something good for both your brain and your well-being. This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). The longitudinal study recently appeared in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

If you didn't have a brain, could you still navigate your surroundings? Thanks to new research on slime molds at the Wyss and Tufts University, the answer may be "yes." Scientists discovered that the brainless Physarum polycephalum uses its body to sense mechanical cues in its environment, and decides where to grow based on that information. This finding provides a model for understanding different types of cognition, including our own.

A new study sheds light on how the specter of dementia and chronic pain reduce people's desire to live into older ages. Among Norwegians 60 years of age and older the desire to live into advanced ages was significantly reduced by hypothetical adverse life scenarios with the strongest effect caused by dementia and chronic pain. The paper is among the first to study Preferred Life Expectancy (PLE) based on hypothetical health and living conditions.

Listening to vocal music is a simple and cost-efficient way of promoting recovery and brain health after a stroke.

How a pandemic progresses in a country is largely determined by social, political and psychological processes. Predicting these socio-dynamics seems hardly possible until today; thus making it impossible to foresee the course the pandemic takes. This is where a new simulation study carried out by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon comes into play, which is now published in the journal Scientific Reports.