A new study locates the brain’s symbolic engine for compositional generalization within the ventral premotor cortex.
Category: neuroscience – Page 23
Optimize Brain Health And Longevity: Tommy Wood, MD, PhD
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Surprising cellular dynamics of the aging brain
Scheidemantel et al. address the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease by integrating comprehensive multi-omics data from over 1,300 aged individuals, revealing coordinated molecular mechanisms across brain systems. The findings provide crucial insights into age-related traits and disease pathways, paving the way for potential therapeutic strategies.
Consciousness Is the Only Thing That Truly Exists, Scientist Says
He compares our working minds to a flying kite, where the kite is the brain and the wind is consciousness as a fundamental part of reality. “The kite has to be built from the right materials in the right configuration with the right tether, but its flight depends entirely on the wind,” Reggente says.
A radio makes another good analogy, Reggente explains.
“[The radio] doesn’t produce the broadcast, it receives and transduces a signal that’s already present,” he says. “But unlike a radio, the brain isn’t merely reproducing that signal with high fidelity—it’s interacting with it. And that interaction is what gives rise to our particular subjective experience.”
Capsida’s Trailblazing Moment: What the Field Owes the Next BBB Program
An insightful perspective on what biological factors may have been the cause of a patient’s death after receiving a blood-brain-barrier crossing AAV treatment. It’s crucial for the field to think about this carefully as we move forward.
Brief disclosure: I am a named inventor on patents and author on publications related to AAV capsid engineering and CNS gene delivery, developed during my time at the Broad Institute. I now operate independently. This post does not represent any prior employer, current advisory client, or collaborator. The mechanistic analysis presented here is my own scientific interpretation of publicly available data. Full disclosures at the bottom.
Mesocorticostriatal Reinforcement Learning of State Representation and Value with Implications for the Mechanisms of Schizophrenia
Mesocorticostriatal dopamine projections are crucial for value learning, motivational control, and cognitive functions. However, while dopamine’s role in value learning as reward-prediction-error (RPE) has been much understood, precise roles in motivational control and cognitive functions remain more elusive. Computationally, this corresponds to that while the operation of mesostriatal dopamine could be minimally described by simple reinforcement learning (RL) models with one-dimensional reward/RPE and fixed state representation, how reward-specific motivational control can be achieved through heterogeneous dopamine responses, and how sophisticated cortical state representation can be formed through mesocortical dopamine, cannot be captured by such simple models.
Bed Nucleus of Stria Terminalis Enkephalin Neurons Contribute to Depletion-Induced Salt Appetite
The overconsumption of sodium contributes to a wide range of detrimental health conditions. Thus, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of the neural mechanisms driving sodium appetite. Here, we combined neuroanatomic, transgenic, behavioral, and chemogenetic approaches to investigate the role of bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) enkephalin neurons (BNSTENK) in sodium appetite in male and female pENK-Cre mice. Our results demonstrate that Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons regulates salt consumption following sodium depletion but does not impact upon taste preference when replete. Further, Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons had no effect on deprivation-induced food or water intake or anxiety-like behavior.
The Scientist Who Plans To End Aging Forever — Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey believes aging isn’t inevitable — it’s a solvable engineering problem. In this conversation, we explore why society treats aging as untouchable, how “longevity escape velocity” could allow us to live indefinitely, and why reversing damage—not slowing it—is the future of medicine. He breaks down how our medical system profits from sickness, and how progress is slowed by fear and outdated norms. The end of aging as we know it is coming and it’s happening faster than you think. #preventativehealth #preventativecare #aging #health #medicine.
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Timestamps:
00:00 How We Understand Aging.
06:01 How Aubrey Found His Work.
10:42 Longevity Escape Velocity.
12:45 Not Being Controlled.
15:11 Investor-Humanitarian Structure.
16:51 Balancing Work With Publicity.
17:26 Aubrey’s Current Work.
27:36 Getting Pushback & The Medical System.
33:11 Shifting To Preventative Care.
36:14 What Has & Hasn’t Changed.
41:52 Consciousness & Aging.
46:00 How To Popularize Ideas.
48:10 The Future Of Aubrey’s Work.
50:58 Connect With Aubrey de Grey.