New Scientist Tech informs that Neda Gould of the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues have considered the use of a Duke Nukem inspired videogame to measure the severity of depression.

The basis for this is that depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays a role in spatial memory. The idea is that if they get a videogame that can test spatial memory, they will be able to measure the severity of depression.

They used a videogame that was developed based on some scenes from Duke Nukem.

Participants of the test were asked to navigate through a virtual town and find their way to as many landmarks as possible within a set amount of time. It was found that depressed people found their way to an average of 2.4 locations compares with 3.8 locations for healthy controls. It was found that the more depressed a person was, the lower the score would be.

Gould hopes that the test may eventually be able to provide a quantifiable measure of depression.

Always finding yourself lost in Saint's Row or GTA? Cheer up emo boy.

For the past half-century medical practitioners have come to agree that the brain's memory system is similar to how a computer downloads data from the internet. New theories proposed by German and American scientists, however, are challenging the notion.

The old belief that memories for a day were temporarily stored in the hippocampus, similar to how data passes through the RAM. The hippocampus is a curved part of the brain which fires electric signals during sleep. When this happens, the information goes to the neocortex (which is similar to a hard drive) for permanent storage.

This was the basis of the explanation why people with damaged hippocampi had trouble with creating short term memories but could easily recall old ones because the neocortex is intact.

The old theory made a lot of sense, but new findings by researchers at Brown University and the Max Planck institute of Medical Research suggest a different explanation. They say that the hippocampus is not the engine driving the neocortex. Brown neuroscientist Mayank Mehta says "what seems to be [happening] is that all the neuron types in the hippocampus are showing some echo or antiecho of the neocortex. None of them seem to be driving neocortex."

In a nutshell, there is really no one-way data transfer that happens during sleep. The truth is, they claim, that both parts actually show activity through resonances of information. When all is said and done, the hippocampus is cleared of its content, and gets set for another day of data gathering.

Some experts, however, are not fully convinced that this explanation is entirely accurate. Pointing out to how the research was conducted. "One has to be very careful, in interpreting the results done under anesthesia," he warns, "because it's totally not the same brain." says Bruce McNaughton, University of Arizona director for the Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging.

In an act of class and professionalism, Mehta acknowledged the fragility of the theory, saying that many a researcher have been fooled by the brain before, and it will be foolhardy to say that this is how the brain really works at this point.

Listen up, insomniacs! Princeton University researchers have found that for every sleep you miss out on, you are actually depriving yourself of new brain cells. According to the Princeton team, lack of sleep "affected the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories."

Using the ever-dependable lab rats, they discovered that those who lacked rest had higher levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone. Apart from this, they produced significantly lesser new brain cells in th hippocampus area. What this suggests is that the elevated stress hormone levels due to sleep deprivation have a direct effect on the production of brain cells.

Says Dr. Neil Stanley of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, "It is an interesting finding. It would be interesting to see if partial deprivation - getting a little bit less sleep every night that you need - had the same effect."

Are you listening, gamers? So don't lose sleep over a game. Trust us, you'd need them new brain cells to overcome the big boss over at the next level.

We all know that junk foods are so not good for us, in fact, eating too much of that stuff may even cause various mental illnesses. Now new studies have shown that folic acid, the vitamin prescribed to pregnant women could set back effects of brain aging by five years.

In a study conducted by scientists at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, they found out that people who took high dose of supplements of folic acid did significantly better in tests of memory and cognitive performance.

All of the participants had above average levels of a naturally occurring enzyme called homocysteine, which is over-produced due to low folate levels. High homocysteine levels increase the risk of heart disease and have been associated with atrophy of the hippocampus. This is the part of the brain which plays a pivotal part in memory consolidation.

The 818 study participants, aged 50 to 70, were given 800 micrograms of folic acid daily for three years. Tests showed that their performance on memory and speed of thinking tasks could be comparable to that of people five years younger. However, cognitive functions such as word fluency didn't benefit from the supplements.

That study sure gives us more reasons to eat them green leafy vegetables, beans, and liver, right?

If you're naturally prone to forgetting, then you should all the more stay away from Marijuana. That's because scientists may have already found the reason why weed impairs memory.

With the help of them ever-friendly lab rats, Neuroscientists at Rutgers University have found that the weed's active ingredient, THC, actually disrupts the hippocampus activity, that brain area linked to memory. Putting the rats under a standard memory test where they had to go through a maze in order to get water, with THC injected in them, they apparently became more prone to and actually committed more mistakes. Although there was no difference on how often the cells fired nerve impulses, it was the timing that was affected, as it got erratic.

Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki compared it to having an orchestra where the musicians are deafened and perhaps blindfolded. While they could still play their own pieces, it was without any feedback from the other instruments played by other musicians or the conductor. "What is missing is the temporal coordination."

What this suggests is that memory formation is crucially dependent on synchronized brain cell activity. Furthermore, THC impairs memory precisely by disrupting this set synchronized activity.

On the brighter side of things, however, there's also the suggestion that the way THC disrupts the synchronized brain cell activity could help fight epileptic seizures. The thing with seizures is that the brain activity becomes abnormally synchronized. So therefore, the idea is that THC's disruptive effect might actually temper down this abnormally synchronized activity. Then again, further studies still have to be conducted in order for that theory to be conclusive.

If you want to see the report on the findings, check out the December issue of the journal of Nature Neuroscience.

Err...what's the findings about again?

Athletes know that without constant exercise and training, muscles atrophy. Your teachers and (hopefully) your parents have probably nagged you about similar issues when it comes to your brain. It's been said for years that if one fails to continually exercise his/her brain by learning new tasks, one's mental abilities will also atrophy. Until now however, there's been little scientific proof of this.

That scientific proof seems to have arrived. A recent study in mice now suggests that the survival of newly formed adult brain cells depends on the amount of input they receive. Scientists at the Salk Institute in California performed a study in which the hippocampus region of lab mice brains were infected with a virus that suppressed the ability of new brain cells to produce proteins that allow them to form synapses, or connect.

The hippocampus is the part of the brain involved with learning and memory, which in turn allows for the development of new skills. The virus used attacked only new brain cells - older cells were not affected. What the scientists found was that the infected cells without the protein - called NMDA receptors - died off sooner than those able to form synapses.

In order to confirm these findings,  a control group of infected mice were injected with a compound that blocked all NMDA receptors. This caused uninfected cells to die off sooner, while extending the lifespan of some infected cells. The bottom line - it appears that the activation of these receptors determines the survival of brain cells. When these receptors are not activated, they literally wither and die.

So - how do you activate your NMDA receptors? Learn a new skill - a second language, a musical instrument, or software programming. Study something new. And keep reading our science blogs - you're always bound to learn something new, here!