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Category: neuroscience

Video games might modestly sharpen your memory and other cognitive skills, review suggests

Because video games are a regular part of many people’s everyday lives, researchers have spent a lot of time trying to determine whether they are beneficial or detrimental to brain health. A new study, published in Acta Psychologica, has compiled 20 years of research on how video games affect cognitive abilities into a single systematic review and meta-analysis. This comprehensive study indicates that video games may provide some helpful cognitive benefits to gamers.

On the face of it, it might seem like video games fall into the “brain rot” category of entertainment, similar to endless social media scrolling or watching television. Yet most gamers would agree that video games involve at least some degree of skill, and many researchers would agree, too.

In fact, the interactive nature of video games has positioned them as a potential tool for cognitive training, helping to exercise core mental skills like memory, attention, self-control, spatial reasoning and broader problem-solving.

What’s at the center of Claude’s mind?

Out of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible — thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.

Anthropic found a strikingly similar divide inside their AI model, Claude.

Their experiments were inspired by a leading theory in neuroscience: the global workspace theory. It holds that a thought becomes consciously accessible when it enters a shared “workspace” that’s broadcast across the brain.

They found a set of representations in Claude’s neural activity that play a similar role.

Antibiotics reverse damage caused to blood stem cells by chronic Salmonella

2 Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, UCSF, San Francisco, California, USA.

3Department of Computational Biology, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA.

4Department of Neurological Surgery, Malnati Brain Tumor Institute of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

PET scans reveal stage-linked tau signal in Huntington’s disease brains

A study conducted by the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau) and Hospital de Sant Pau has identified for the first time in living individuals a brain pattern related to the tau protein that changes according to the stage of Huntington’s disease. This discovery opens the door both to the use of new biomarkers for monitoring the disease and to the development of treatments for a condition for which no therapeutic options are currently available.

Using positron emission tomography—a molecular neuroimaging technique known as PET—and the second-generation radiotracer [¹⁸F]PI-2620, the researchers demonstrated that this signal can already be detected in some mutation carriers who have not yet developed clinically manifest disease and that, as the disease progresses, the signal increases and spreads according to an organized anatomical distribution.

The study, published in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, provides new insights into the biological processes that occur between the genetic alteration responsible for the disease and the onset of its motor, cognitive and neuropsychiatric manifestations.

Schizophrenia And Bipolar Disorder Share 70% of Their Genetic Roots, Landmark Study Finds

Researchers are beginning to realize that even vastly different psychiatric disorders can share startlingly similar genetic roots.

In February last year, scientists revealed their discovery that eight different psychiatric conditions all shared a common genetic basis.

Another team then published a follow-up study in Nature in December – the largest of its kind to date.

Brain tumor vaccine links mutation targeting to eight-year survival gains

A novel vaccination strategy against certain malignant brain tumors could fundamentally improve treatment for patients. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Mannheim University Medical Center, Heidelberg University Hospital and numerous partner institutions have published encouraging long-term results from a clinical trial involving a vaccine that activates the immune system against a common genetic mutation in these tumors.

Gliomas are usually incurable brain tumors that are difficult to remove completely through surgery. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are also effective only to a limited extent. These tumors often share a key characteristic: In most cases, the cancer cells carry a common genetic mutation. An identical genetic error causes a specific amino acid to be substituted in the IDH1 enzyme. This results in a novel protein structure—a so-called neoepitope. What makes this special is that the neoepitope drives tumor growth and, at the same time, is recognized as foreign by the patient’s immune system, making it an ideal target for immunotherapies.

The research team from Heidelberg/Mannheim and Tübingen developed a peptide vaccine that specifically trains the immune system to recognize and fight tumor cells with this mutation. The vaccine was tested for safety and efficacy in a phase 1 clinical trial (NOA 16) involving 33 patients with newly diagnosed high-grade astrocytomas, the most common form of glioma. The patients received the vaccine in addition to standard therapy consisting of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. The work is published in the journal Nature Cancer.

How to Survive the Ultimate Cosmic Doomsday

What happens when the laws of the universe turn against existence itself?
In this cinematic 4K documentary, we journey through a hierarchy of cosmic catastrophes that challenge the survival of any civilization, from the localized death of planets to the absolute collapse of physical laws.

▶A Film by: Scienshell Studio.

In a universe governed by deep time and immense forces, disaster is not a matter of if, but when. From worlds frozen in perpetual schizophrenia by tidal locking to the ultimate recollapse of space-time, civilizations must either evolve to engineer the cosmos or face total eradication.

But as the scale of destruction grows, the line between technology and natural law begins to blur. For those who survive the end of the universe, reality itself becomes a blank canvas.

In this video, you’ll discover:
00:00 Introduction.
02:35 Tidally Locked Worlds and Planetary Accelerators.
05:35 Stellar Storms and Planetary Shield.
08:43 Supernovae and Star Lifting.
11:53 Supermassive Black Holes and The Space Nomads.
14:54 Interstellar Interceptors: The Predator and the Prey.
17:08 The Inflaton Field and The Big Crunch.
21:01 Higgs Field Decay: The Death of Matter and Gravity.
22:31 Beyond Physics: Civillization with godly powers.

▶ About This Video.

Continue reading “How to Survive the Ultimate Cosmic Doomsday” | >

The brain’s language network is more extensive than previously thought

For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of the cerebellum, hippocampus and cerebral cortex, and they make up about 5% of the total volume of the adult brain—about the size of a large strawberry.

“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

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