A new study in the lab of Jason Stein, Ph.D., modeled brain development in a dish to identify cells and genes that influence infant brain growth, a trait associated with autism.
Researchers have made great strides to understand early signs of autism.
Studies have found that certain factors like genetics, sleep deprivation, excess fluid in the brain—and brain size—can increase the risk of neurodevelopmental conditions, like autism.
Scientists can finally hear the brain’s quietest messages—unlocking the hidden code behind how neurons think, decide, and remember.
Science Signaling retracted a 2017 paper that linked a specific amyloid form (amyloid-beta 56) to tau pathology after an investigation into allegations of data manipulation. Author Sylvain Lesné, PhD, who resigned from the University of Minnesota earlier this year, objected to the retraction.
Older adults who were awake more during the night performed worse on cognitive tests no matter how long they slept, data from the Einstein Aging Study showed. (Sleep Health)
Human herpesvirus 7 could be a contributing factor in multiple sclerosis (MS) etiology, a case-control study in Sweden suggested. (Brain Communications)
— News and commentary from the world of neurology and neuroscience.
A near-death experience expert insists that one’s heart stopping doesn’t have to be the end, with current medical interventions that can help patients cheat death.
In an interview with The Telegraph, associate professor of medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center Sam Parnia insisted that by and large, the medical industry is still very behind on the concepts of death and dying.
According to Parnia, studies from the last five years — including some undertaken by his own eponymous lab at NYU — have suggested that our brains remain “salvageable for not only hours, but possibly days” after death.
A new study led by Dr. Jiang Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed the first clear evidence that visual awareness acts as a “conductor” that refines the speed, precision, and neural coordination of attentional rhythmic sampling.
Published in Nature Communications on Nov. 17, this study resolves a long-standing mystery about the interplay between attention and consciousness, opening new avenues for understanding cognitive function and deficits.
In Current Biology, the Miller Lab at MIT provides new evidence that the brain recruits and controls ad hoc groups of neurons for cognitive tasks by applying brain waves to patches of the cortex.
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In a new study, MIT researchers tested their theory of Spatial Computing, which holds that the brain recruits and controls ad hoc groups of neurons for cognitive tasks by applying brain waves to patches of the cortex.
Right now, the debate about consciousness often feels frozen between two entrenched positions. On one side sits computational functionalism, which treats cognition as something you can fully explain in terms of abstract information processing: get the right functional organization (regardless of the material it runs on) and you get consciousness.
On the other hand is biological naturalism, which insists that consciousness is inseparable from the distinctive properties of living brains and bodies: biology isn’t just a vehicle for cognition, it is part of what cognition is. Each camp captures something important, but the stalemate suggests that something is missing from the picture.
In our new paper, we argue for a third path: biological computationalism. The idea is deliberately provocative but, we think, clarifying. Our core claim is that the traditional computational paradigm is broken or at least badly mismatched to how real brains operate.
“The brain is one of the most complex biological systems in the world,” says one of the senior authors. How neurons are wired together is what his group are trying to unravel – a field known as connectomics.
The author explains: “Take the liver: we know of about 40 cell types. We know how they are arranged. We know their functions. This is not true for the brain. And so, one could ask, what is the difference between the brain and the liver? If we look at a cell body in the brain and the liver, it’s not easy to distinguish the two. They both have a nucleus, an endoplasmic reticulum – they both have the same intercellular machinery, the same molecules, the same types of proteins. This is not the difference. What is really different is how the brain cells are organised and connected.”
Let’s talk numbers: in one cubic millimetre of brain tissue there are about 100 000 neurons, connected through about 700 million synapses and 4 kilometres of ‘cabling’