Sounds can penetrate deep sleep and enhance associated memories upon waking

...The building is named for Richard B. Silverman, the John Evans Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and his wife, Barbara. Silverman donated to the University a portion of the royalties that he receives from sales of the drug Lyrica to help fund construction of the building. In 1989 Silverman and his Northwestern research group first synthesized an organic molecule, which ultimately was marketed as Lyrica. The drug, sold by Pfizer, Inc., is used to combat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and fibromyalgia....

Good readers learn from repeating auditory signals but poor readers do not

Non-Western communal cultures keep biology from having its way with depression...The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- A child’s brain has to work overtime in a noisy classroom...“The ‘b,’ ‘d’ and ‘g’ consonants have rapidly changing acoustic information that the nervous system has to resolve to eventually match up sounds with letters on the page,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, where the work was performed. ...The research offers an unparalleled look at how noise affects the nervous system’s transcription of three little sounds that mean so much to literacy. The online version of the study was published July 13 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (http://www.pnas.org/papbyrecent.shtml).