Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 23

The Thermodynamics of Mind

To not only survive, but also thrive, the brain must efficiently orchestrate distributed computation across space and time. This requires hierarchical organisation facilitating fast information transfer and processing at the lowest possible metabolic cost. Quantifying brain hierarchy is difficult but can be estimated from the asymmetry of information flow. Thermodynamics has successfully characterised hierarchy in many other complex systems. Here, we propose the ‘Thermodynamics of Mind’ framework as a natural way to quantify hierarchical brain orchestration and its underlying mechanisms. This has already provided novel insights into the orchestration of hierarchy in brain states including movie watching, where the hierarchy of the brain is flatter than during rest. Overall, this framework holds great promise for revealing the orchestration of cognition.

Is consciousness more fundamental to reality than quantum physics?

The idea that everything that exists can be built from the bottom up has long held sway among physicists. Now, a new kind of science is under construction that centres conscious experience – and might unravel the universe’s biggest mysteries.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Scientists Discover a Key Difference in Brains That Resist Alzheimer’s

The brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s usually lead to a severe loss of memory and cognitive abilities, but not always.

Now, a new study led by a team at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) helps explain why.

Based on postmortem brain research, around 20 to 30 percent of older adults are thought to have asymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease (ASYMAD). Their brains have the characteristic buildup of misfolded amyloid-beta and tau proteins, but they show no detrimental mental effects.

Medicine’s next leap: Delivering gene therapies exactly where they’re needed

A quiet revolution is underway in modern medicine: Drug development is aiming to move from managing disease to correcting it through RNA and gene-editing therapies. But delivering these treatments safely and precisely to the right cells remains a major hurdle—especially in hard-to-target organs like the brain and kidneys.

Now, researchers led by a University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine team offer highly compelling evidence that an elegant, nature-inspired solution lies in ultra-tiny, bubble-like structures called small extracellular vesicles (sEVs). These metabolic messengers, refined over millions of years of evolution, carry RNA—a nucleic acid that is a chemical cousin of DNA—and other molecules between cells.

In a nutshell, the research team’s new findings show that not all sEVs are alike: their cell of origin determines where they travel, with certain vesicles naturally targeting specific tissues in the body.

Group averages obscure how an individual’s brain controls behavior, study finds

Studying cognition by averaging data from many people’s brain scans hides how individuals use their brains, new Stanford Medicine research has shown. In particular, children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks show distinct patterns of brain activity when their data is analyzed individually, rather than as part of a group of kids with mixed abilities. The findings, which have implications for understanding how the brain works in such conditions as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, will be published April 27 in Nature Communications.

“Investigating how dynamics unfold within individual brains can provide significant insights into the neuroscience of individual differences and help us tackle questions that cannot be answered using conventional approaches,” said Percy Mistry, Ph.D., a research scholar in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and a lead author of the study.

Mistry shares lead authorship with Nicholas Branigan, MS, a research data analyst in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The senior author is Vinod Menon, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the Rachael L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD, Professor.

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