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Category: neuroscience – Page 213

Summary: A new study explores how the human brain constructs emotions, regardless of sensory input.

By analyzing brain activity in individuals with and without sensory deprivations while they experienced the film 101 Dalmatians, researchers discovered that emotions are represented in the brain through an abstract coding system that transcends sensory modalities. This system involves a distributed network, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which stores abstract representations of emotions.

The findings challenge traditional views on emotion and perception, suggesting that our emotional experiences are not solely dictated by our immediate sensory input but are instead constructed by the brain in a more abstract manner.

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ABOVE: After years of research, brain organoids now come close to mimicking endogenous brain cells. © iStock, StockSnap.

As a developmental neurobiologist at Harvard University, Paola Arlotta spends most of her time thinking about how the brain develops, how it functions, and what goes wrong in the context of neurological disease. Using human brain organoids as a model for brain development and disease research has been a game changer, providing Arlotta a novel view into brain pathologies that form in utero.

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The University of Chicago Medicine is among the first 30 institutions in the country to offer tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy for advanced melanoma, immediately activating as an authorized treatment center after federal regulators approved the treatment on February 16, 2024.

Effortless, enjoyable productivity is a state of consciousness prized and sought after by people in business, the arts, research, education and anyone else who wants to produce a stream of creative ideas and products. That’s the flow, or the sense of being “in the zone.” A new neuroimaging study from Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab is the first to reveal how the brain gets to the creative flow state.

The study is published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

The study isolated flow-related brain activity during a creative task: jazz improvisation. The findings reveal that the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control— letting go—to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.

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Anthropic announces Claude 3

The three state-of-the-art models.

Claude 3 opus, claude 3 sonnet, and claude 3 haiku.

Today, we’re announcing the Claude 3 model family, which sets new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks. The family includes three state-of-the-art models in ascending order of capability: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus.

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When listening to music, the human brain appears to be biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios—for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio).

However, the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a large-scale study led by researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and carried out in 15 countries. The study included 39 groups of participants, many of whom came from societies whose traditional contains distinctive patterns of rhythm not found in Western music.

“Our study provides the clearest evidence yet for some degree of universality in music perception and cognition, in the sense that every single group of participants that was tested exhibits biases for integer ratios. It also provides a glimpse of the variation that can occur across cultures, which can be quite substantial,” says Nori Jacoby, the study’s lead author and a former MIT postdoc, who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

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Researchers at CHU Sainte-Justine and Université de Montréal have discovered a new mechanism involved in the expression of Down syndrome, one of the main causes of intellectual disability and congenital heart defects in children. The study’s findings were published today in Current Biology.

Down (SD), also called trisomy 21 syndrome, is a genetic condition that affects approximately one in every 800 children born in Canada. In these individuals, many genes are expressed abnormally at the same time, making it difficult to determine which contribute to which differences.

Professor Jannic Boehm’s research team focused on RCAN1, a gene that is overexpressed in the brains of fetuses with Down syndrome. The team’s work provides insights into how the gene influences the way the condition manifests itself.

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Saint Louis University associate professor of health management and policy in the College for Public Health and Social Justice, SangNam Ahn, Ph.D., recently published a paper in Journal of Clinical Psychology that examines the relationship between childhood adversity, and psychiatric decline as well as adult adversity and psychiatric and cognitive decline.

His team discovered that just one instance of adversity in childhood can increase cases of mental illness later in life, and adverse events in adults can lead to a greater chance of both mental illness and cognitive decline later in life.

“Life is very complicated, very dynamic,” Ahn said. “I really wanted to highlight the importance of looking into the lasting health effect of adversity, not only childhood but also adulthood adversity on health outcomes, especially and psychiatric and cognitive health. There have been other studies before, but this is one of the first that looks into these issues comprehensively.”

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Johns Hopkins Medicine neuroscientists say they have found a new function for the SYNGAP1 gene, a DNA sequence that controls memory and learning in mammals, including mice and humans.

The finding, published in Science, may affect the development of therapies designed for children with SYNGAP1 mutations, who have a range of neurodevelopmental disorders marked by intellectual disability, autistic-like behaviors, and epilepsy.

In general, SYNGAP1, as well as other genes, control learning and memory by making proteins that regulate the strength of synapses—the connections between brain cells.

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