Lifeboat Foundation

In a remote part of the Amazon, anthropologists and neuroscientists are learning about life and health without an “embarrassment of riches.”

A major impediment to treating the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma has been that the most potent chemotherapy can’t permeate the blood-brain barrier to reach the aggressive brain tumor.

But now Northwestern Medicine scientists report results of the first in-human clinical trial in which they used a novel, skull-implantable ultrasound device to open the blood-brain barrier and repeatedly permeate large, critical regions of the human brain to deliver chemotherapy that was injected intravenously.

Continue reading “Chemotherapy drug reaches brain in humans for first time” »

Many people who have come close to death or have been resuscitated report a similar experience: Their lives flash before their eyes, memorable moments replay, and they may undergo an out-of-body experience, sensing they’re looking at themselves from elsewhere in the room. Now, a small study mapping the brain activity of four people while they were dying shows a burst of activity in their brains after their hearts stop.

The authors say the finding, published today in the, may explain how a person’s brain could replay conscious memories even after the heart has stopped. It “suggests we are identifying a marker of lucid consciousness,” says Sam Parnia, a pulmonologist at New York University Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the study.

Although death has historically been medically defined as the moment when the heart irreversibly stops beating, recent studies have suggested brain activity in many animals and humans can continue for seconds to hours. In 2013, for instance, University of Michigan neurologist Jimo Borjigin and team found that rats’ brains showed signs of consciousness up to 30 seconds after their hearts had stopped beating. “We have this binary concept of life and death that is ancient and outdated,” Parnia says.

Applying machine learning models, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to data collected passively from wearable devices can identify a patient’s degree of resilience and well-being, according to investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

The findings, reported in the May 2 issue of JAMIA Open, support wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch, as a way to monitor and assess psychological states remotely without requiring the completion of mental health questionnaires.

The paper, titled “A machine learning approach to determine resilience utilizing wearable device data: analysis of an observational cohort,” points out that resilience, or an individual’s ability to overcome difficulty, is an important stress mitigator, reduces morbidity, and improves chronic disease management.

“Our study may be as good as it will ever get for finding neural signatures of near-death consciousness,” said the study’s senior author.

Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness.

Furthermore, the activity was detected in the so-called hot zone of neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the junction between the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes in the back of the brain. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.

Technophobia is an extreme fear of technology. People with technophobia may fear the power of artificial intelligence, robots or computers.

Technophobia is more than resistance to learning new technology. Rather, people with the condition may obsess over technology. Or, they may go to great lengths to avoid incorporating technology into their lives.

Technophobia is not a clinical diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Still, as technology has expanded rapidly in recent years, some clinicians treat technophobia like a specific phobia. Specific phobias are irrational fears of a particular situation, object, animal or interaction. The fear isn’t in proportion to the actual danger.

Is mind reading possible? An age-old question with multiple unproven answers. Those who study psychology often claim that they can understand what the other person is saying as they study mental processes, brain functions, and behaviour, but even they can be 100 per cent accurate.

A study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, attempts to address it as scientists have said that they have come up with a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence.

The study titled — “Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings” — noted that the system won’t replicate each word but it reconstructs the brief of what a person hears or imagines. The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Defining computational neuroscience The evolution of computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience in the twenty-first century Some examples of computational neuroscience The SpiNNaker supercomputer Frontiers in computational neuroscience References Further reading

The human brain is a complex and unfathomable supercomputer. How it works is one of the ultimate mysteries of our time. Scientists working in the exciting field of computational neuroscience seek to unravel this mystery and, in the process, help solve problems in diverse research fields, from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to psychiatry.

Computational neuroscience is a highly interdisciplinary and thriving branch of neuroscience that uses computational simulations and mathematical models to develop our understanding of the brain. Here we look at: what computational neuroscience is, how it has grown over the last thirty years, what its applications are, and where it is going.