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Category: neuroscience – Page 165

UCLA Health researchers have identified a process that memories while reducing metabolic costs, even during sleep. This efficient memory is found in a brain region essential for learning and memory, which is also where Alzheimer’s disease originates.

The discovery is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Does this sound familiar: You go to the kitchen to fetch something, but when you get there, you forget what you wanted. This is your working memory failing. Working memory is defined as remembering some information for a short period while you go about doing other things. We use working memory virtually all the time. Alzheimer’s and dementia patients have working memory deficits and it also shows up in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Hence, considerable effort has been devoted to understanding the mechanisms by which the vast networks of neurons in the brain create working memory.

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Perceiving something—anything—in your surroundings is to become aware of what your senses are detecting. Now, Columbia University neuroscientists have identified, for the first time, brain-cell circuitry in fruit flies that converts raw sensory signals into color perceptions that can guide behavior.

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“It is nonsensical to say that an LLM has feelings,” Hagendorff says. “It is nonsensical to say that it is self-aware or that it has intentions. But I don’t think it is nonsensical to say that these machines are able to learn or to deceive.”

Brain scans

Other researchers are taking tips from neuroscience to explore the inner workings of LLMs. To examine how chatbots deceive, Andy Zou, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his collaborators interrogated LLMs and looked at the activation of their ‘neurons’. “What we do here is similar to performing a neuroimaging scan for humans,” Zou says. It’s also a bit like designing a lie detector.

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Currently, treatments are largely limited to symptomatic relief rather than addressing the underlying disease progression. Given this gap in treatment options, there is a significant need for new therapies that can protect brain cells and potentially reverse damage.

Cannabinol (CBN), a compound derived from the cannabis plant, has emerged as a candidate for such treatments due to its neuroprotective properties, which are evident without the psychoactive effects associated with other cannabinoids like THC.

Previous studies indicated that CBN could help preserve mitochondrial function in brain cells, an essential factor for cell survival and energy production. Mitochondrial dysfunction is a common feature in several neurodegenerative diseases, often leading to cell death. By focusing on CBN and its derivatives, researchers aimed to develop new pharmacological strategies to prevent or mitigate the cellular mechanisms that lead to neurodegeneration.

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A collaborative effort between Harvard and Google has led to a breakthrough in brain science, producing an extensive 3D map of a tiny segment of human brain, revealing complex neural interactions and laying the groundwork for mapping an entire mouse brain.

A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something enormous.

A Harvard team led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and newly appointed dean of science, has co-created with Google researchers the largest synaptic-resolution, 3D reconstruction of a piece of human brain to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of neural connections in a piece of human temporal cortex about half the size of a rice grain.

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Engineers at MIT have developed a groundbreaking method for detecting bioluminescent light within the brain.

By modifying the brain’s blood vessels to express a specific protein, they induced dilation in response to light exposure.

The approach enabled researchers to visualize the dilation using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), facilitating precise localization of light sources within the brain.

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