Harvard Medical School professor Michael E. Greenberg has won The 2023 Brain Prize for his decades-long research on brain plasticity, alongside University of Cambridge professor Christine E. Holt and Max Planck Institute Director Erin M. Schuman.
Our brains aren’t limited to producing just one type of brain wave at a time, but usually, one type is dominant, and the type it is can often be linked to your level of alertness: delta waves may dominate when you sleep, while gamma waves might dominate when you concentrate intensely.
The idea: Researchers have previously observed that people with Alzheimer’s — a devastating neurological disease affecting more than 6 million people in the US alone — may have weaker and less in-sync gamma waves than people who don’t have the disease.
Continue reading “MIT is testing light and sound to combat Alzheimer’s” »
Organoids are an incredible tool for research into the brain. Cerebral organoids are created by growing human stem cells in a bioreactor. They might be the key to unlocking the answers to many of our questions about the brain. We explain how they’re made and some of the discoveries they’ve helped with so far!
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✍ Script by Duranka Perera (https://www.durankaperera.com/)
✍ Thumb by “Broken” Bran — https://twitter.com/BranGSmith.
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Scientists have found evidence using neuroimaging that the native language people speak may affect the way that their brains are wired.
Researchers from Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig analyzed and compared the brain scans of native Arabic and German speakers. The languages were selected for the reason that they are significantly different.
Their results indicate the native language of an individual can influence the connectivity between areas of their brains.
Scientists transplanted human cerebral organoids (“minibrains”) into rats, to better study brain disorders. The neurons grown in vivo looked more like mature human brain cells than those grown in vitro, and they made better models of Timothy syndrome. The human minibrains formed deep connections with the rat brains, received sensory information, and drove the rat’s behavior.
More on how minibrains are grown and used, and the issue of organoid consciousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FGq7_t3Eo.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro.
0:43 Growing Organoids.
2:57 Minibrains in Science & Medicine.
4:46 Giving Minibrains Psychedelics.
5:26 Minibrains With Eyes.
6:30 Can Minibrains Feel?
7:22 Looking For Consciousness.
9:03 The Future of Minibrain Research.
10:47 Human Minibrains Grafted Onto Mice.
12:10 What’s Next?
Videography by Island Fox Media.
If a free-floating brain could feel pain or ‘wake up,’ how would we know? That’s an important ethical question — and it’s one we need to ask more often as labs around the world create new organoids, or miniature human organs. To answer it we talked to Jay Gopalakrishnan at his ‘mini brain’ lab for centrosome and cytoskeleton biology in Düsseldorf, Germany.
STUDY: https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(21)00295-2
As big pharma interest grows in bioelectronics medicine, Astellas swoops in for a startup developing wireless, grain-sized devices powered by ultrasound for CNS disease monitoring and intervention.
Analysis and insight on brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Stay updated as Singularity Hub discusses the most important trends and research related to BCIs.
