Dream and daydream: differences and similarities

Did you know that daydreams reflect events from the previous two days and “night” dreams resemble a fictional plot?

Does your dog have social skills?

A study suggests that viewing the owner’s face works as a positive social reinforcement for dogs. Learn more about this and other surprising results about “man’s best friend”.

BIAL Foundation celebrates its 29th anniversary

Today, the BIAL Foundation celebrates 29 years of activity in three areas with the aim of stimulating new discoveries and contributing to the improvement of human life: the attribution of Awards, the Grants Programmes for Scientific Research and the “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposia.

Structural analysis of hippocampal astrocytes

João Filipe Oliveira, principal investigator of the research project 37/18 - Decoding the neuron-astrocyte dialogue that supports cognitive processing, supported by the BIAL Foundation, published the paper Astrocyte structural heterogeneity in the mouse hippocampus in the journal GLIA. The author concludes that “the main finding of this work is that hippocampal astrocytes display structural heterogeneity across hippocampal subfields that is conserved along the dorsoventral axis.”

The role of TrkC in the regulation of fear

In the scope of the research project 85/18 - Role of NT3/TrkC in the regulation of fear, supported by the BIAL Foundation, the principal investigator, Mónica Santos, published in the journal Molecular Neurobiology the paper TrkC Intracellular Signalling in the Brain Fear Network During the Formation of a Contextual Fear Memory. It was observed an overall decrease in TrkC activation in brain fear network (amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex), both in the consolidation and reconsolidation phases of fear memory formation. In particular, the most relevant differences were observed in the amygdala during the consolidation phase and in the hippocampus during the reconsolidation phase of fear memory. In fact, consolidation and reconsolidation of contextual fear memories are dually dissociable processes that recruit different pathways.