Bollmann et al. track reactivated CA1 assemblies representing spatial memories during 16–20 h of sleep/rest. Assemblies initially reflect recently learned spatial memories but are gradually transformed into those seen during the memory recall session following rest. Whereas slow-wave sleep accelerates the assembly drift, REM epochs counteract it.
As they age, some people find it harder to understand speech in noisy environments. Now, University at Buffalo researchers have identified the area in the brain, called the insula, that shows significant changes in people who struggle with speech in noise.
The findings, published in the journal Brain and Language, contribute to the growing link between hearing loss and cognitive impairment leading to dementia. Previous research has separately established connections between hearing difficulties and dementia, as well as insula abnormalities and cognitive decline.
The insulae are two complicated structures that interact with the brain’s frontal lobe, which is responsible for higher-level cognitive function. The insulae integrate sensory, emotional and cognitive information.
Since the dawn of philosophy, thinkers from Plato to Kant have considered how beauty affects human experience, and whether it has the power to transform our state of mind.
Now, a new study from the University of Cambridge suggests that stopping to contemplate the beauty of artistic objects in a gallery or museum boosts our ability to think in abstract ways and consider the “bigger picture” when it comes to our lives.
Researchers say the findings offer empirical evidence that engaging with artistic beauty helps us escape the “mental trappings of daily life,” such as current anxieties and to-do lists, and induce “psychological distancing”: the process of zooming out on your thoughts to gain clarity.
Due to the prevalence of chronic pain worldwide, there is an urgent need to improve pain management strategies. While opioid drugs have long been used to treat chronic pain, their use is severely limited by adverse effects and abuse liability. Neurostimulation techniques have emerged as a promising option for chronic pain that is refractory to other treatments. While different neurostimulation strategies have been applied to many neural structures implicated in pain processing, there is variability in efficacy between patients, underscoring the need to optimize neurostimulation techniques for use in pain management. This optimization requires a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying neurostimulation-induced pain relief. Here, we discuss the most commonly used neurostimulation techniques for treating chronic pain. We present evidence that neurostimulation-induced analgesia is in part driven by the release of endogenous opioids and that this endogenous opioid release is a common endpoint between different methods of neurostimulation. Finally, we introduce technological and clinical innovations that are being explored to optimize neurostimulation techniques for the treatment of pain, including multidisciplinary efforts between neuroscience research and clinical treatment that may refine the efficacy of neurostimulation based on its underlying mechanisms.
Over 20% of people worldwide suffer from chronic pain disorders (Goldberg and McGee, 2011). In response to an unmet need for effective pain management, opioid drugs have been widely adopted. Opioid drugs harness the body’s endogenous opioid receptors, which are dispersed throughout the central and peripheral nervous system to modulate pain perception. While prescription opioids often provide effective pain relief, they have undesirable and potentially dangerous side effects including abuse liability and respiratory depression. Their contribution to the ongoing opioid epidemic and the enormous negative impact of chronic pain underscore the need for safe and effective pain therapies (Manchikanti et al., 2012). Neurostimulation therapies are potential alternatives for managing medically refractory pain. However, these therapies are hampered by inconsistent pain relief across patients and diminishing analgesic effects over time (Kumar K. et al., 1998).
Two thousand years before the Inca empire dominated the Andes, a lesser-known society known as the Chavín Phenomenon shared common art, architecture, and materials throughout modern-day Peru. Through agricultural innovations, craft production, and trade, Chavín shaped a growing social order and laid the foundations for a hierarchical society among the high peaks.
But one of their most powerful tools wasn’t farming. It was access to altered states of consciousness.
That’s according to a new study that uncovered the earliest-known direct evidence of the use of psychoactive plants in the Peruvian Andes. A team of archaeologists from the University of Florida, Stanford University and South American institutions discovered ancient snuff tubes carved from hollow bones at the heart of monumental stone structures at Chavín de Huántar, a prehistoric ceremonial site in the mountains of Peru.
Recent discoveries of glymphatics and meningeal lymphatics have redefined our understanding of CNS immunosurveillance. Kim and Kipnis illustrate how the clearance of brain-derived antigens creates an “immune code” that, when presented by meningeal antigen-presenting cells, instructs T cells to safeguard neural homeostasis. They review how inflammation, aging, and neurodegeneration disrupt this finely tuned process and highlight emerging therapeutic opportunities.
From birth to the last moments of life, the human brain is known to change and evolve significantly, both in terms of its physical organization (i.e., structural connectivity) and the coordination between different brain regions (i.e., functional connectivity). Mapping and understanding the brain’s evolution over time is of crucial importance, as it could also shed light on differences in the brains of individuals who develop various mental health disorders or experience an aging-related cognitive decline.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University and other institutes in China recently carried out a large-scale study to gather new insights into how the brain’s functional connectivity of humans worldwide changes over the course of their lifespan. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, unveils patterns in the evolution of the brain that could inform future research focusing on a wide range of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders.
“Functional connectivity of the human brain changes through life,” wrote Lianglong Sun, Tengda Zhao and their colleagues in their paper. “We assemble task-free functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 33,250 individuals at 32 weeks of postmenstrual age to 80 years from 132 global sites.”
Many behavioral studies suggest that using landmarks to navigate through large-scale spaces—known as map-based navigation—is not established until around age 12.
A neuroscience study at Emory University counters that assumption. Through experiments combining brain scans and a virtual environment the researchers dubbed Tiny Town, they showed that five-year-olds have a brain system that supports map-based navigation.
The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the finding, the first neural evidence that this cognitive ability is in place in such young children.
