The veteran US philosopher renowned for his theories of consciousness is an intriguing figure but too prone to ‘professorial preening’.
Category: neuroscience – Page 280
Repost, but if you know someone’s dealing with such, the information can help you and them. The suppressing of it can not help anyone.
Alzheimer’s disease varies widely in its age of onset, presentation, and severity. Recently, the SORL1 gene has received increased attention since variations in this gene have been associated with both early-and late-onset Alzheimer’s. However, little is known about how damage to SORL1 leads to disease.
Using stem cells from patients with Alzheimer’s, investigators from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital found that loss of normal SORL1 function leads to a reduction in two key proteins known to be involved in Alzheimer’s and which play an essential role in the neurons of healthy individuals.
Their results, published in Cell Reports, suggest a potential strategy for Alzheimer’s disease treatment, especially for patients not responsive to existing therapies.
Tiny, brainless jellyfish just did something that on the surface may seem impossible: the adorable creatures showed evidence of learning.
Even with just 1,000 neurons active at a time and no central brain, Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) can learn from experience, researchers argue in a new paper published September 22 in the journal Current Biology. The results aren’t surprising, say several scientists not involved in the project, but are a reminder for people to think more broadly about learning.
“If you’re an animal and have to navigate the world, you have to learn cues and consequences. Otherwise you’re dead, and you can’t reproduce,” says Christie Sahley, a… More.
Human scientists—used to the benefits of a centralized, complex brain—have been underestimating what a simple nerve network can do.
Hey and we are back … this is Max Flow and we will get to know more about the information limitations of psyche.
Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update we read on social media, every tweet or text message we get from a friend, is competing for resources in our brains.
With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life. Our focus is short and erratic, our decision-making abilities go out the window and a list of unfinished projects begins to pile up.
Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on.
Will AI make us crazy?
Posted in health, neuroscience, robotics/AI
Coverage of the risks and benefits of AI have paid scant attention to how chatbots might affect public health at a time when depression, suicide, anxiety, and mental illness are epidemic in the United States. But mental health experts and the healthcare industry view AI mostly as a promising tool, rather than a potential threat to mental health.
Summary: Scientists made a novel discovery using zebrafish with a genetic mutation. These ‘deep-blind’ fish lack connections between the retina and brain yet retain functional brain circuits.
Remarkably, despite their inability to see, direct brain stimulation through optogenetics triggers normal visual behavior. This suggests that much of the zebrafish brain’s wiring is innate and doesn’t rely heavily on visual experience.
Hospital nurseries routinely place soft bands around the tiny wrists of newborns that hold important identifying information such as name, sex, mother, and birth date. Researchers at Rockefeller University are taking the same approach with newborn brain cells—but these neonates will keep their ID tags for life, so that scientists can track how they grow and mature, as a means for better understanding the brain’s aging process.
As described in a new paper in Cell, the new method developed by Rockefeller geneticist Junyue Cao and his colleagues is called TrackerSci (pronounced “sky”). This low-cost, high-throughput approach has already revealed that while newborn cells continue to be produced through life, the kinds of cells being produced greatly vary in different ages. This groundbreaking work, led by co-first authors Ziyu Lu and Melissa Zhang from Cao’s lab, promises to influence not only the study of the brain but also broader aspects of aging and disease across the human body.
“The cell is the basic functional unit of our body, so changes to the cell essentially underlie virtually every disease and the aging process,” says Cao, head of the Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics. “If we can systematically characterize the different cells and their dynamics using this novel technique, we may get a panoramic view of the mechanisms of many diseases and the enigma of aging.”
Early-life stress (ELS) is one of the strongest lifetime risk factors for depression, anxiety, suicide, and other psychiatric disorders, particularly after facing additional stressful events later in life. Human and animal studies demonstrate that ELS sensitizes individuals to subsequent stress. However, the neurobiological basis of such stress sensitization remains largely unexplored. We hypothesized that ELS-induced stress sensitization would be detectable at the level of neuronal ensembles, such that cells activated by ELS would be more reactive to adult stress. To test this, we leveraged transgenic mice to genetically tag, track, and manipulate experience-activated neurons. We found that in both male and female mice, ELS-activated neurons within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), and to a lesser extent the medial prefrontal cortex, were preferentially reactivated by adult stress. To test whether reactivation of ELS-activated ensembles in the NAc contributes to stress hypersensitivity, we expressed hM4Dis receptor in control or ELS-activated neurons of pups and chemogenetically inhibited their activity during experience of adult stress. Inhibition of ELS-activated NAc neurons, but not control-tagged neurons, ameliorated social avoidance behavior following chronic social defeat stress in males. These data provide evidence that ELS-induced stress hypersensitivity is encoded at the level of corticolimbic neuronal ensembles.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Early-life stress enhances sensitivity to stress later in life, yet the mechanisms of such stress sensitization are largely unknown. Here, we show that neuronal ensembles in corticolimbic brain regions remain hypersensitive to stress across the life span, and quieting these ensembles during experience of adult stress rescues stress hypersensitivity.
Changes to short, repetitive sequences in the genome have been linked to diseases like autism and schizophrenia. New revelations about how such changes increase and decrease gene expression may provide insight into these and other disorders.
Pat Bennett’s prescription is a bit more complicated than “Take a couple of aspirins and call me in the morning.” But a quartet of baby-aspirin-sized sensors implanted in her brain are aimed at addressing a condition that’s frustrated her and others: the loss of the ability to speak intelligibly. The devices transmit signals from a couple of speech-related regions in Bennett’s brain to state-of-the-art software that decodes her brain activity and converts it to text displayed on a computer screen.
Bennett, now 68, is a former human resources director and onetime equestrian who jogged daily. In 2012, she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks neurons controlling movement, causing physical weakness and eventual paralysis.
Our brains remember how to formulate words even if the muscles responsible for saying them out loud are incapacitated. A brain-computer hookup is making the dream of restoring speech a reality.