Lifeboat Foundation

I’d heard that fear of the dark is a protein, Scotophobin A, which can be isolated from the brains of rats. My Chemistry teacher told us that 1-hexanol smelled like cut grass. I watched her draw it once, on the whiteboard. A colorless liquid that, I imagined, smelled like memory, summer term, sports day, an army of ants cresting the summit of a picnic blanket, damp loam after rain.

I’d hoped that studying neuroscience would teach me all about things like that. I imagined watching sunlight refract through a conical flask, some clear liquid roiling inside. “Fear of abandonment is a sequence of seventeen peptides,” our lecturer might say, “isolated from the muscles of the heartbroken.”

“Look here,” he would say, pointing to another vial. “We can synthesize these things in a lab now. This one is awe.”

Scientists working in connectomics, a research field occupied with the reconstruction of neuronal networks in the brain, are aiming at completely mapping of the millions or billions of neurons found in mammalian brains. In spite of impressive advances in electron microscopy, the key bottleneck for connectomics is the amount of human labor required for the data analysis. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, have now developed reconstruction software that allows researchers to fly through the brain tissue at unprecedented speed. Together with the startup company scalable minds they created webKnossos, which turns researchers into brain pilots, gaining an about 10-fold speedup for data analysis in connectomics.

Billions of nerve cells are working in parallel inside our brains in order to achieve behaviours as impressive as hypothesizing, predicting, detecting, thinking. These neurons form a highly complex network, in which each nerve cell communicates with about one thousand others. Signals are sent along ultrathin cables, called axons, which are sent from each neuron to its about one thousand “followers.”

Continue reading “10-fold Speed up For The Reconstruction of Neuronal Networks” »

Seemingly countless self-help books and seminars tell you to tap into the right side of your brain to stimulate creativity. But forget the “right-brain” myth—a new study suggests it’s how well the two brain hemispheres communicate that sets highly creative people apart.

For the study, statisticians David Dunson of Duke University and Daniele Durante of the University of Padova analyzed the network of white matter connections among 68 separate brain regions in healthy college-age volunteers.

The brain’s white matter lies underneath the outer grey matter. It is composed of bundles of wires, or axons, which connect billions of neurons and carry electrical signals between them.

😗😁 Year 2022

Quantum processes are helpful to know about when we hear a gimcrack new theory that dismisses or explains away human consciousness. We know it can’t just be that simple.

Continue reading “Why Many Researchers Now See the Brain as a Quantum System” »

Glioblastoma is a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor. As one of the most common malignant brain tumors, life expectancy after diagnosis is between 14 and 16 months. Roughly 1% of patients survive more than ten years with the longest patients living over 20 years. Symptoms include headaches, double vision, vomiting, loss of appetite, changes in mood and personality, inability to accurately think and learn, seizures, and difficulty speaking. Unfortunately, there is no cure, and treatment options include radiation and chemotherapy with limited efficacy. Glioblastoma is difficult to treat due to its location in the brain, its resistance to common treatment, the brains limited ability to heal itself, disrupted blood supply, blood vessel leakage, seizures, and neurotoxicity from treatments. Due to limited treatment and the life expectancy of this devastating disease, researchers at the SALK Institute in La Jolla, California have set out to find better ways to treat glioblastoma and prolong survival in patients.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are a form of immunotherapy that block receptors on immune cells which activate them to kill tumor cells. The ICI using by the SALK group is known as anti-CTLA-4, which binds to the CTLA-4 protein on the T immune cells responsible for killing infected cells. This therapy was generated by Dr. James Allison at the MD Anderson Comprehensive Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. For his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018. While this therapy proved effective in other cancers such as melanoma, it was unclear its effect in glioblastoma. The researchers at SALK recently published their findings on the effect of anti-CTLA-4 on glioblastoma.

The study published in Immunity by Dr. Susan Kaech and colleagues at SALK demonstrated prolonged survival of mice with glioblastoma after treatment with anti-CTLA-4. They also discovered that the treatment was largely dependent on CD4+ T cells, which aid in activating other cells, and not CD8+ T cells, which directly kill the tumor. More specifically, CD4+ T cells were found to infiltrate the brain and trigger other immune cells, like microglia to destroy cancerous cells. In Kaech’s work, the lab significantly shrunk the glioblastoma in mice and in some cases completely eradicated it.

Karl Friston shows that different global brain theories all describe principles by which the brain optimizes value and surprise. He discusses how these brain theories fit into the free-energy framework, suggesting that this framework might provide a unified account of brain function.

Can you recognize someone you haven’t seen in years, but forget what you had for breakfast yesterday? Our brains constantly rearrange their circuitry to remember familiar faces or learn new skills, but the molecular basis of this process isn’t well understood. Today, scientists report that sulfate groups on complex sugar molecules called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) affect “plasticity” in the brains of mice. Determining how GAGs function could help us understand how memory and learning work in humans, and provide ways to repair neural connectivity after injuries.

The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The sugars that sweeten fruits, candies or cakes are actually just a few simple varieties of the many types of sugars that exist. When strung together, they can make a wide array of complex sugars. GAGs are formed by then attaching other chemical structures, including sulfate groups.

Exactly how, and how much, the unconscious processing of information influences our behavior has always been one of the most controversial questions in psychology. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud popularized the idea that our behaviors are driven by thoughts, feelings, and memories hidden deep within the unconscious mind — an idea that became hugely popular, but that was eventually dismissed as unscientific.

Modern neuroscience tells us that we are completely unaware of most brain activity, but that unconscious processing does indeed influence behavior; nevertheless, certain effects, such as unconscious semantic “priming,” have been called into question, leading some to conclude that the extent of unconscious processing is limited.

A recent brain scanning study now shows that unconsciously processed visual information is distributed to a wider network of brain regions involved in higher-order cognitive tasks. The results contribute to the debate over the extent to which unconscious information processing influence the brain and behavior and led the authors of the study to revise one of the leading theories of consciousness.

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