Welcome to the April 2025 Learning Brain News.

Brain surgery robots, teenage depression, new autism research with over 1.1 million pregnancies and why students don’t like school.

Read about all these and more in this month’s edition.

Enjoy,
The Learning Brain News Team 

Future Thinking Training Reduces Impulsivity

A new study finds that training people to think about specific future events can reduce impulsivity and improve decision-making.

The research, published in the journal Brain Connectivity, suggests that future thinking could serve as an early intervention for substance use disorders.

Biological Pathway in the Brain Could Help Explain why Teenage Girls are More Depressed than Boys

Research has shown that a biological brain mechanism called the 'kynurenine pathway' is imbalanced in adolescents with depression, and this imbalance is more pronounced in teenage girls than boys.

First Therapy Chatbot Trial Shows AI Can Provide 'Gold-Standard' Care

Researchers conducted the first clinical trial of an AI-powered therapy chatbot and found that, on average, people with diagnosed mental disorders experienced clinically significant improvements in their symptoms over eight weeks, according to new results.

Tiny Robot Tools Powered by Magnets Could do Brain Surgery Without Cutting Open the Skull

Most brain surgery requires doctors to remove part of the skull to access hard-to-reach areas or tumours. It’s invasive, risky, and it takes a long time for the patient to recover.

New tiny robotic surgical tools that may let surgeons perform “keyhole surgery” on the brain have been developed. Despite their small size, the tools can mimic the full range of motion of a surgeon’s wrist, creating new possibilities for less-invasive brain surgery.

Genetics, Not Maternal Sickness, Drives Autism Risk

A large study analysing over 1.1 million pregnancies found no strong evidence that maternal health conditions during pregnancy cause autism. Instead, nearly all previously reported associations between maternal diagnoses and autism could be explained by genetic or environmental factors.

Which One Is Correct? Speling? Spieling? Spelling? Spealing?

For some folk, these words: Speling, Spieling, Spelling, Spealing, look so similar that it’s very confusing.

Good spelling is vital because it allows the writer to focus on what they want to say. It frees up brain space for their ideas to flourish. 

16 Terms to Help you Understand your Child's Learning Difficulties

If you have a child with language challenges, reading problems or learning difficulties, and you have sought help from their teacher, speech pathologist or other learning professional, you may have heard some unfamiliar terms.

Words like phonemic awareness, auditory processing, listening comprehension and working memory.

This eBook covers 16 common terms used in discussions about learning difficulties. Once you understand these, you should be able to have more productive discussions with your child's teacher or therapists.