Reviews & Analysis

The brain can be rendered more tolerant to injury by prior exposure to certain non-injurious stimuli. Gidday describes the adaptations that occur at multiple levels in response to preconditioning stimuli, which lead to the establishment of an ischaemia-tolerant phenotype.

Uchida and colleagues consider integration of information for perceptual decision making, focusing on olfactory and visual systems. They argue that there are neural mechanisms that construct discrete sensory samples from a continuous input stream to facilitate important computational functions.

Male–female differences can be seen in brain anatomy, chemistry and function. Cahill reviews the latest findings on sex-related influences on the brain and discusses the importance of recognizing these differences, particularly in the context of disease states.

Williams syndrome is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder with a distinct behavioural and neuropsychological profile. Meyer-Lindenberget al. describe new research relating structural and functional differences to the underlying genetics of this disorder and their influence on cognition and behaviour.

Transplantation of neural stem cells holds great promise for treating neurological disorders. Martino and Pluchino argue that neural stem cells achieve their therapeutic efficacy exculsively by a cell-replacement mechanism, rather than by the recently proposed alternative mechanism of bystander neuroprotection.

Sensory and motor information in the brain is represented as activity in populations of neurons. But how does correlated noise affect population coding? These authors evaluate empirical and theoretical evidence on the interactions between correlations, population codes and neural computations.

Attention represents the crucial links between the brain and behaviour, and has attracted increasing interest from neuroscience and psychology alike. Raz and Buhle review the recent evidence for the existence of several anatomically and functionally distinct attentional networks.

The sympathetic nervous system is an important regulator of blood pressure. Guyenet describes the central control regions that influence the activity of sympathetic efferent neurons and their potential contribution to neurogenic hypertension.

Birdsong learning in avian species has strong similarities with speech acquisition in human infants. Recent research on the song system has shed fresh light on the neural substrate of song memory and sensorimotor learning in both male and female songbirds.

The recent convergence of neuroscience and social psychology has shed fresh light on the neural mechanisms underlying social interaction. Amodio and Frith review anatomical and functional characteristics of the medial frontal cortex, highlighting its central role in social cognitive processing.

Molecular changes that occur during ageing are also seen in neurodegenerative diseases. Mattson and Magnus review the mechanisms by which age-related changes contribute to neuronal vulnerability in these diseases and ways in which adaptive responses might facilitate healthy neural ageing.

Youdim and colleagues describe how the recent solving of the crystal structures of monoamine oxidase enzymes has increased our understanding of the action of their inhibitors, some of which are now showing therapeutic value in the treatment of neurodegenerative conditions.

Data sharing in neuroscience remains relatively rare. Ascoli describes the obstacles that need to be overcome, and highlights the great potential for sharing neuronal morphology data as a starting point to mobilize data sharing in the wider neuroscience community.

The relatively simple architecture of the hippocampus makes it an ideal model to study cortical lamination. Försteret al. review recent work on the molecular mechanisms that guide the formation of cell and fibre layers in the hippocampus.

Mitochondrial dysfunction has long been implicated in Parkinson's disease. Wood and colleagues review recent evidence on the roles of the genes associated with the disease in mitochondrial pathways, highlighting the involvement of oxidative stress in the aetiology of the disorder.

Emotional body language is a rapidly emerging research field in cognitive neuroscience. de Gelder reviews the body's role in our understanding of emotion, action and communication, and discusses similarities in the neuroanatomy and temporal dynamics between face and body perception.

Lledo and colleagues provide an up-to-date review of recent developments in our understanding of neurogenesis in the adult brain, with a comparative view of the generation of new neurons in the olfactory bulb and the dentate gyrus.

Feldman and Del Negro consider recent evidence for two distinct respiratory rhythm generators – the preBötzinger Complex and the retrotrapezoid nucleus/parafacial respiratory group – and underscore the importance of intrinsically rhythmic pacemaker neurons that drive rhythm generation.

Komatsu provides several striking examples of filling-in — in which a region of the visual field is filled in with the visual attributes of its surround — before considering possible neural mechanisms underlying this remarkable perceptual phenomenon.

Astrocytes are not mere 'brain glue', but direct, active communication partners of neurons. Seifert and colleagues discuss their roles in the pathogenesis of several neurological disorders, and argue that these cells might present a therapeutic target in treating these diseases.