Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk has set his sights upon how humans interact with the digital world. While we have a horizon with respect to input — output production is limited.

In Brief:

• The Multiple Sclerosis Foundation estimates that more than 400,000 people in the United States and about 2.5 million people around the world have MS.
• A new drug, Ocrelizumab, is the first known drug shown to work against the primary progressive form of MS by altering the immune system to slow damage to the brain.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable and potentially disabling disease that cripples the central nervous system. It’s a widespread neurological condition that hits young adults, usually between the ages of 20 and 40, caused by an immune system disorder that mistakes a part of the brain as a hostile foreign object and attacks it. Though there are treatments available, particularly for its second state, multiple sclerosis remains incurable.

Neuroscientists at the University of Bristol are a step closer to understanding how the connections in our brain which control our episodic memory work in sync to make some memories stronger than others. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a previously unsuspected division of memory function in the pathways between two areas of the brain, and suggest that certain subnetworks within the brain work separately, to enhance the distinctiveness of memories.

The team studied the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex—two regions of the brain critical to memory function—as damage in these areas can induce severe memory loss.

Both areas are connected by a complex network of direct and indirect pathways, and the challenge has been until now, how to identify the precise routes through which these brain regions interact in memory formation.

A “smart” needle with an embedded camera is helping doctors perform safer brain surgery.

The device was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and uses a tiny camera to identify at-risk blood vessels.

Continue reading “Internet of Things smart needle probes the brain during surgery” »

In Brief

• By mimicking the way neurons fire in the hippocampus during natural memory creation, a brain implant was used to successfully plant memories in the brains of rats.
• Though human implementation is far off, this breakthrough in cracking the hippocampus’ mathematical “memory code” has very important implications for health and research.

Memories are the faintest, most ethereal wisps of our neurophysiology — somehow, the firing of delicate synapses and the activation of neurons combine to produce the things we remember. The sum of our memories make us who we are; they are us, in every way, and without them we cease to be.

Continue reading “A New Device Could Make Memory Implants a Reality” »

January 20, 2017 — Researchers have developed a high-resolution, interactive anatomic brain-mapping atlas they say can overcome the limitations of functional MRI (fMRI) and expand the modality’s value to conventional MR brain imaging and standard MRI applications.

The Gibby-Cvetko atlas is designed to segment the brain into finite anatomic regions with a resolution of 1 mm or less to correct for variations in the brain sizes of patients and better delineate the location of cortical structures and skull morphology.

“Having a high-resolution, interactive, quantitative brain atlas that we warp to fit the patient and run inside a PACS improves accuracy and speed of reading fMRI studies,” said co-developer Dr. Wendell Gibby, an adjunct professor of radiology at the University of California, San Diego. “It is a big step toward routine utilization of fMRI in clinical practice.”

Continue reading “Brain atlas advances MRI exploration” »

Most premature deaths in Mumbai and Delhi over two decades were caused by stroke (a medical condition that occurs when blood supply to the brain is cut off), due to inhalation of ultrafine suspended particles, revealed a study by the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay (IITB).

The three-member IITB team attributed 35.3% premature deaths to cerebrovascular disease – arteries supplying blood to the brain is affected – as a result of being exposed to high levels of particulate matter of size less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) between 1991 and 2015. Additionally, premature deaths due to ischemic heart disease (it falls under the group of cardiovascular diseases) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) stood at 33.3% and 22.9% during the same period.

A dangerous pollutant, PM2.5 can lodge deep into the lungs and cardiovascular system, giving rise to a host of problems from damage to lung tissue, sneezing, asthma attacks, migraines, headaches to even cancer and heart attacks. The elderly, children, and those with chronic lung disease, influenza, or asthma, are especially sensitive to the effects of PM2.5.

Continue reading “In Mumbai: 35.3% premature deaths were results of stroke because of air pollution ” »

It underscores the fact that not all minds that wander are lost. University of British Columbia philosopher Evan Thompson, author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, says the DMN’s mental meanderings are “the baseline state of you as a cognitive system.” It’s tremendously pragmatic: being able to remember the past, plan for the future, and happen upon creative insights are all essential tools for navigating life. While he was hesitant to mix the word “suffering,” which is so loaded in ancient Asian religious traditions, with the “default mode,” which is of a contemporary neural vintage, the two connect in the way that suffering arises when people concretize the fleeting swirls of thought, especially around conceptions of self. Still, he says, there’s “particular kind of stickiness” that can come when DMN activity grows overly self-centered.

Default-mode content involves an image of self, one that’s easy to become attached to. These self-conceptions are “affectively charged,” he says; they carry lots of emotional weight. “We constantly think that it’s not just another thought, that [the image of self] is something real, not just an mental image.”

Precise memory, rather than general memory, is critical for knowing details such as the specific color, shape and location of a building you are looking for, rather than simply knowing the part of town it’s in. This type of memory is crucial for normal functioning, and it is often lost in people with serious memory disorders.

“We show that it is possible to target the portion of the brain responsible for this type of memory and to improve it,” said lead author Joel Voss, assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “People with brain injuries have problems with precise memory as do individuals with dementia, and so our findings could be useful in developing new treatments for these conditions.”

By stimulating the brain network responsible for spatial memory with powerful electromagnets, scientists improved the precision of people’s memory for identifying locations. This benefit lasted a full 24 hours after receiving stimulation and corresponded to changes in brain activity.