A Yale researcher told Newsweek one newly identified Parkinson’s target is already being tested in trials.
Category: neuroscience
Social media likes may have a bigger influence on people with depression
One of the first things many people do after posting on social media is check how many likes they have and who has liked their content. This habit can be an instant mood booster when a post is popular.
People who are depressed may also show a stronger behavioral response to receiving likes, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Researchers discovered that the more likes their posts received in one day, the more likely they were to post the following day. This runs contrary to previous studies that suggested individuals with depression are less responsive to positive feedback.
Scientists and citizens are more persuasive than government and industry in mobilizing action, study finds
In environmental, health and technology crises, Americans are more persuaded to take action by scientists and public consensus than by leaders in government and industry, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at Boston College and Princeton University.
Across four studies involving roughly 55,000 individuals, Americans revealed they were especially influenced when both scientists and ordinary citizens supported a solution, said Boston College Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Gregg Sparkman, senior author of the study.
“What surprised us was how consistently the combined voice of scientists and ordinary citizens mattered across issues and partisans, even when governments and companies opposed action,” said Sparkman. “Americans were still encouraged to act when scientists and ordinary citizens jointly expressed support for solutions.”
Brains of teens with autism ‘tune in’ less to unfamiliar voices, study finds
Like other teenagers, teens on the autism spectrum are itching to exercise their social muscles. They hope for new friends, fun with people who share their interests, maybe even a romantic relationship.
“Adolescence is a moment of opportunity for these kids,” said Daniel Abrams, Ph.D., clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine. “They want to build friendships.”
But spreading their social wings is challenging for teens with autism. A new Stanford Medicine-led study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sheds light on a key factor: how the brains of teenagers with autism handle the sounds of unfamiliar voices. Unlike neurotypical teenagers, the reward centers in autistic teens’ brains don’t become increasingly responsive to strangers’ voices as they mature, the research found.
Can We Re-grow You?
For all of medical history, we’ve tried to persuade sick cells to behave better. What if instead we just swapped them out? Can we insert new brain cells grown from your own skin cells? And what does any of this have to do with sending one’s own cells into space, or rescuing animals on the very brink of extinction? Today Eagleman talks with stem cell biologist Jeanne Loring about the exciting next horizons.
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A blood protein can flag dementia risk decades before symptoms appear
Forgetting the name of a loved one may be one of the first signs people notice of dementia, but it’s rarely the first warning sign your brain gives. Changes in the brain that lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia start showing up decades before symptoms arrive, and the chemicals at work inside the body can often tip us off to these changes well ahead of time.
A recent study found that a blood protein called GDF15, which is released when cells are under stress, could serve as one of the earliest warning signs of dementia. After tracking more than half a million people for 15–25 years, researchers discovered that those with higher GDF15 levels before age 55 were significantly more likely to develop dementia later in life. Finding that protein in the blood was a much stronger predictor of vascular dementia than Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia.
This opens the possibility that a simple blood test in midlife, one that checks for GDF15, could help doctors flag who is at higher risk of dementia decades down the line. The findings are published in Science Advances.
Israeli research offers new hope for overcoming one of the deadliest brain cancers
The researchers then tested BA-101 together with temozolomide and found that the combination was more effective than either treatment alone. In experiments using mouse models, the combined therapy significantly reduced tumor growth, suggesting that targeting the cancer cells’ resistance mechanism could make existing chemotherapy more powerful.
“Temozolomide resistance remains one of the biggest obstacles in treating glioblastoma,” said Amal. “Our findings suggest that targeting nitrosative stress can restore the tumor’s sensitivity to treatment. While additional studies are needed before this approach can reach patients, these results open an exciting new direction for developing more effective therapies against one of the deadliest cancers.”
The researchers said their findings could point to a new approach in cancer treatment: instead of replacing existing drugs, future therapies could focus on blocking the mechanisms that allow tumors to resist them. If further studies confirm the findings, disabling these survival pathways could allow treatments that have become less effective to regain their ability to attack cancer cells.
The cortical column as a tuned receiver: a network mechanism for temporal-interference stimulation
Temporal-interference (TI) stimulation promises what other non-invasive methods cannot: focal, steerable stimulation deep in the brain, produced where two high-frequency currents overlap and their amplitudes beat at a low difference frequency. Yet a puzzle sits at its core. An amplitude-modulated field carries no power at that beat frequency, so no passive, linear part of a neuron can follow it; recovering the beat requires a nonlinearity, usually sought in single-cell ion channels. Here we show that the recovery, and its tuning, are properties of the neural population rather than the single cell. In a neural mass—the $ $$104$-neuron unit that generates the EEG—the firing-rate nonlinearity acts as a square-law detector that demodulates the beat, while the recurrent synaptic network, poised near a Hopf bifurcation, resonantly amplifies the recovered rhythm at its own natural frequency. Detection is inherited from the single neuron; the sharp, frequency-selective amplification is emergent—set by how near the network sits to criticality, and tunable by its own connectivity. Demonstrated in a heuristic cortical column and in an exact next-generation mean field, the mechanism reproduces TI’s known behavior: it is independent of the carrier once the membrane polarization is matched, largest when the beat matches a region’s intrinsic rhythm, and—because the resonance amplifies oscillatory timing far more than mean rate—locks spike timing without changing firing rate, as observed in vivo. Because the gain depends on brain state, TI efficacy should be as much a property of the brain as of the device: the cortical column behaves as a tuned AM radio receiver.: temporal interference; transcranial stimulation; neural mass model; amplitude demodulation; Hopf bifurcation; cross-frequency coupling; Jansen–Rit; LaNMM.
The same sounds are mapped similarly in the human and mouse brain, study finds
While exploring the world around them, both humans and other animals continuously interpret information they pick up with their sight, hearing, touch and other senses. Neuroscience research suggests that the brain does not individually process every single sensory experience, but rather organizes information into mental models known as internal representations.
Internal representations can help recognize familiar patterns or relationships between different stimuli and experiences. While many past studies have explored the role of these perceptual “maps,” fewer have looked at how stimuli are represented in the brains of different species and how they influence learning and decision-making.
Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recently carried out experiments aimed at better understanding how humans and mice perceive, mentally represent and distinguish the same sounds. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that sounds are organized similarly in the human and mouse brain, but also that auditory maps tend to remain surprisingly stable during learning and decision-making.