Summary: NAA, a compound in the brain, plays a key role in emotional agency and flexibility in healthy people.
Source: Brown University.
A new study is the first to reveal specific brain compounds that signal emotional wellness in healthy people.
Category: neuroscience – Page 672
A pair of monkeys were able to “see” and recognize individual letter shapes generated by arrays of electrodes implanted in their brains – without using their eyes. Previously, sight-restoring implants were placed in the retina, but these new implants were placed in the visual cortex. They achieved the highest resolution yet for such technology.
The research took place at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). The scientists wanted to develop a way to restore sight for people whose optic nerves were damaged and couldn’t benefit from retina implants. The team, led by Pieter Roelfsema, created a brain implant made of needle-like electrodes 1.5 millimeters in length. They placed it on the animals’ visual cortex, partially restoring its sight.
The visual cortex is like a cinema screen in our skull, with each area on its surface mapping to the visual field. Placing a patch of electrodes on the surface that activate like pixels will make a person “see” whatever points get activated. For example, if an L-shaped pattern of electrodes in contact with the visual cortex is activated, they will see a pixelated L.
Dr. Nicole Prause, PhD is an American neuroscientist researching human sexual behavior, addiction, and the physiology of sexual response. She is also the founder of Liberos LLC, an independent research institute and biotechnology company.
Dr. Prause obtained her doctorate in 2007 at Indiana University Bloomington, with joint supervision by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, with her areas of concentration being neuroscience and statistics. Her clinical internship, in neuro-psychological assessment and behavioral medicine, was with the VA Boston Healthcare System’s Psychology Internship Training Program. Her research fellowship was in couples’ treatment of alcoholism was at Harvard University.
Dr. Prause became a tenure track faculty member at Idaho State University at the age of 29. After three years there, she accepted a position as a Research Scientist at the Mind Research Network, a neuro-imaging facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
In 2012, Dr. Prause was elected a full member of the International Academy of Sex Research and accepted a position as a Research Scientist on faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in the David Geffen School of Medicine. While there, she was promoted to Associate Research Scientist in 2014.
Dr. Prause founded Liberos LLC in 2015 and she continues to practice as licensed psychologist in California.
This is another example of how autism is now being used as an advantage in business. What people previously saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength. 😃
Gordon Douglas struggled to find work because of his “differences”. Now his neurodiversity is making him a sought-after employee.
An experimental drug reversed age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in old mice after just a few doses, according to a study by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
The drug, ISRIB, has previously been shown in other studies to restore normal cognitive function in mice after traumatic brain injury, enhance memory in healthy mice and mice with Down syndrome, as well as prevent noise-related hearing loss.
Summary: Astrocytes, not microglia, are responsible for constantly eliminate unnecessary and excessive adult synaptic connections in response to brain activity.
Source: KAIST
Developing brains constantly sprout new neuronal connections called synapses as they learn and remember. Important connections — the ones that are repeatedly introduced, such as how to avoid danger — are nurtured and reinforced, while connections deemed unnecessary are pruned away. Adult brains undergo similar pruning, but it was unclear how or why synapses in the adult brain get eliminated.
Summary: A brain network consisting of the thalamus, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyri was implicated in the loss, and return, of consciousness under both anesthetic and natural sleep.
Source: SfN
The loss and return of consciousness is linked to the same network of brain regions for both sleep and anesthesia, according to new research published in Journal of Neuroscience.
This doesn’t sound good. 😃
The scientists put hundreds of participants through memory and cognitive tasks as well as brain scans, according to the research, published last month in the journal World Psychiatry.
Joseph Firth, the Western Sydney University scientist who led the project, described in a press release how the internet’s design is changing both the structure and abilities of the human brain.
The “limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the Internet encourages us towards constantly holding a divided attention,” said Firth, “which then in turn may decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.”
People born without a corpus callosum do not have a bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres. Neuroscientists from UNIGE have shown how the brain manages to adapt.
One in 4000 people is born without a corpus callosum, a brain structure consisting of neural fibers that are used to transfer information from one hemisphere to the other. A quarter of these individuals do not have any symptoms, while the remainder either have low intelligence quotients or suffer from severe cognitive disorders. In a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) discovered that when the neuronal fibers that act as a bridge between the hemispheres are missing, the brain reorganizes itself and creates an impressive number of connections inside each hemisphere. These create more intra-hemispheric connections than in a healthy brain, indicating that plasticity mechanisms are involved. It is thought that these mechanisms enable the brain to compensate for the losses by recreating connections to other brain regions using alternative neural pathways.
The corpus callosum develops in utero between the tenth and twentieth week of gestation. Agenesis of the corpus callosum is a congenital brain malformation in which this brain structure fails to develop, resulting in one out of 4000 babies born without a corpus callosum. When it is missing, nothing replaces this structure measuring about ten centimeters, with the exception of cerebrospinal fluid. This means that the information transmitted from one hemisphere to the other can no longer be conveyed by the neuronal projections from the corpus callosum. “Their role in a healthy brain,” begins Vanessa Siffredi, a researcher in UNIGE’s Faculty of Medicine, “is to ensure the functioning of various cognitive and sensorimotor functions.” Surprisingly, 25% of people with this malformation have no visible signs; 50% have average intelligence quotients and learning difficulties; and the remaining 25% suffer from severe cognitive disorders.
Jason Asbahr.
Reese Jones
New research suggests that electrophysiological brain signals associated with neural plasticity could help explain the rapid, antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine. The findings, European Neuropsychopharmacology, indicate that ketamine could reverse insensitivity to prediction error in depression.
In other words, the drug may help to alleviate depression by making it easier for patients to update their model of reality.
“Ketamine is exciting because of its potential to both treat, and better understand depression. This is largely because ketamine doesn’t work the way ordinary antidepressants do – its primary mechanism isn’t to increase monoamines in the brain like serotonin, and so ketamine gives us new insight into other potential mechanisms underlying depression,” said lead researcher Rachael Sumner, a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Auckland School of Pharmacy.