Two new papers document progress in neuroprosthetic technology that lets people feel the shape and movement of objects moving over the “skin” of a bionic hand.
Category: neuroscience – Page 303
Building sentence structure may be language-specific, brain activity study finds
Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute and Radboud University in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based on a strategy for predicting what comes next rather than a “wait-and-see” approach, showing that strategies may differ across languages.
While listening to spoken language, people need to link abstract knowledge of grammar to the words they actually hear. Theories on how people build grammatical structure in real time are often based on English. In sentences such as “I have watched a documentary,” the noun “documentary” immediately follows the verb. However, in Dutch sentences, the word order may be reversed: “Ik heb een documentaire gezien” (“I have a documentary watched.”).
“To find out whether speakers of different languages build grammatical structure in the same way, it is important to look at languages that differ from English in such interesting respects,” says first author Cas Coopmans. “Findings based on English may not generalize to languages that have different grammatical properties, such as Dutch.”
Drawing a line from the gut microbiome to inflammation and depression
It’s become increasingly clear that the gut microbiome can affect human health, including mental health. Which bacterial species influence the development of disease and how they do so, however, is only just starting to be unraveled.
For instance, some studies have found compelling links between one species of gut bacteria, Morganella morganii, and major depressive disorder. But until now, no one could tell whether this bacterium somehow helps drive the disorder, the disorder alters the microbiome, or something else is at play.
Harvard Medical School researchers have now pinpointed a biologic mechanism that strengthens the evidence that M. morganii influences brain health and provides a plausible explanation for how it does so.
Brain network model can predict when people will feel surprised
Surprise is a key human emotion that is typically felt when something that we are witnessing or experiencing differs from our expectations. This natural human response to the unexpected has been the focus of numerous psychology studies, which uncovered some of its underlying neural processes.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a brain network model that can predict people’s surprise. In a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour, they showed that this model generalized well across various tasks, predicting the surprise of individuals who were performing a task or watching different videos containing unexpected elements.
The study carried out by these researchers builds on previous research focusing on surprise. Earlier work found that humans experience surprise when reality clashes with their expectations in many different situations. Some of these past works discovered patterns of brain activity associated with each specific experience of surprise.
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Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to go under NHS trial
In future, doctors hope the technology could revolutionise the treatment of conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD and epilepsy by rebalancing disrupted patterns of brain activity.
Jacques Carolan, Aria’s programme director, said: “Neurotechnologies can help a much broader range of people than we thought. Helping with treatment resistant depression, epilepsy, addiction, eating disorders, that is the huge opportunity here. We are at a turning point in both the conditions we hope we can treat and the new types of technologies emerging to do that.”
The trial follows rapid advances in brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology, with Elon Musk’s company Neuralink launching a clinical trial in paralysis patients last year and another study restoring communication to stroke patients by translating their thoughts directly into speech.
