Lifeboat Foundation

A Cambridge psychiatrist is developing an AI system to speed up mental health diagnosis in children.

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter—I’d get pissed off really easily.”

Her parents learned about research being conducted at Stanford Medicine and reached out; Arata was accepted as a participant. In 2018, physicians surgically implanted a device deep inside her brain, then carefully calibrated the device’s electrical activity to stimulate the networks the injury had subdued. The results of the clinical trial were published Dec. 4 in Nature Medicine.

Dynamic response of adult neural stem cells during pregnancy prepares the maternal olfactory bulb for motherhood.

The Strange Order of Things by Antonio Damasio review – why feelings are the unstoppable force.

Nietzsche would have given four cheers for this intricately argued book, which is at once scientifically rigorous and humanely accommodating, and, so far as this reviewer can judge, revolutionary. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, sets out to investigate “why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves … and how brains interact with the body to support such functions”. We are not floating seraphim, he reminds us, but bodies that think – and all the better for it.

From Plato onwards, western philosophy has favoured mind over “mere” body, so that by the time we get to Descartes, the human has become hardly more than a brain stuck atop a stick, like a child’s hobbyhorse. This is the conception of humanness that Damasio wishes to dismantle. For him, as for Nietzsche, what the body feels is every bit as significant as what the mind thinks, and further, both functions are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, from the very start, among the earliest primitive life forms, affect – “the world of emotions and feelings” – was the force that drove unstoppably towards the flowering of human consciousness and the creation of cultures, Damasio insists.

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Researchers have succeeded in restoring lost brain function in mouse models of stroke using small molecules that in the future could potentially be developed into a stroke recovery therapy. “Communication between nerve cells in large parts of the brain changes after a stroke and we show that it can be partially restored with the treatment,” says Tadeusz Wieloch, senior professor of neurobiology at Lund University in Sweden.

“Concomitantly, the rodents regain lost somatosensory functions, something that around 60 per cent of all stroke patients experience today. The most remarkable result is that the treatment began several days after a stroke,” Wieloch continues.

In an ischemic stroke, lack of blood flow to the brain causes damage, which rapidly leads to nerve cell loss that affects large parts of the vast network of nerve cells in the brain.

Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world.

Abstract. Individual differences in the spatial organization of resting-state networks have received increased attention in recent years. Measures of individual-specific spatial organization of brain networks and overlapping network organization have been linked to important behavioral and clinical traits and are therefore potential biomarker targets for personalized psychiatry approaches. To better understand individual-specific spatial brain organization, this paper addressed three key goals. First, we determined whether it is possible to reliably estimate weighted (non-binarized) resting-state network maps using data from only a single individual, while also maintaining maximum spatial correspondence across individuals. Second, we determined the degree of spatial overlap between distinct networks, using test-retest and twin data.

In this episode of the Lifespan podcast, Dr. David Sinclair and co-host Matthew LaPlante dissect the topic of brain aging. They explore evidence suggesting that the brain ages more slowly than other parts of the body and highlight how cognitive function is impacted by aging. Different interventions aimed at preserving brain health are also discussed, including a plant-based diet, exercise, metformin, NAD boosters, and sufficienh #Wellness #DavidSinclair #Longevity #BrainHealth #Healthspan

A recent study by European scientists shows that highly sensitive sensors based on color centers in a diamond can be used to record electrical activity from neurons in living brain tissue. The work is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Before people encounter symptoms of brain diseases such as dementia, slight changes have usually occurred already in the brain tissue. It may be that parts of the brain are swelling up or clumps of proteins are forming. These small changes might influence how nerve cells in the brain signal each other and communicate, how information is processed and memorized.

Medical scientists want to study these minor changes that occur in the very early stages of a disease. That way, the intention is to learn more about the causes of the disease to provide new insights and more efficient treatments. Today, microscopic studies on the brain are performed with one of two strategies: Optical inspection of brain tissue samples from animals or deceased patients that suffer from the studied disease or measurements of the signals from the nerve cells using wires, coloring, or light.