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Category: neuroscience – Page 371

Study finds pleasurable music and ‘chills’ predict music-induced hypoalgesia

Music for pain relief and anxiety. I think somewhere else I read it helps heal brain injuries.

Further, subject-preferred music appears to induce a superior effect in relieving pain. This can be approached by allowing participants to select the most pleasant music from a prespecified list of songs or listen to their favorite music during the study. Nevertheless, the richness of emotions, meanings, and associations involved when listening to favorite music is poorly understood, especially regarding pain relief.

About the study

In the present study, researchers evaluated which subjective aspects of listening to relaxing and favorite music were crucial for hypoalgesia. Sixty-three healthy individuals, aged 21.3, on average, participated in this study. A thermal contact probe was used to induce painful thermal stimuli on the inner forearm surface.

Brain implant lets man with locked-in syndrome share thoughts

“To our knowledge, ours is the first study to achieve communication by someone who has no remaining voluntary movement.” — Jonas Zimmermann, a Wyss Center neuroscientist. Watch it here: https://www.freethink.com/health/locked-in-syndrome Freethink.

A man with total locked-in syndrome has used a brain-computer interface to spell out sentences with his mind.

Approaching and avoiding ‘bad’ decisions are linked with different neural communication patterns

Human decision-making has been the focus of countless neuroscience studies, which try to identify the neural circuits and brain regions that support different types of decisions. Some of these research efforts focus on the choices humans make while gambling and taking risks, yet the neural underpinnings of these choices have not yet been fully elucidated.

Researchers at University of Louisville carried out a study aimed at better understanding the patterns in neural network communication associated with ‘bad’ decisions made while gambling. Their paper, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, shows that different types of ‘bad’ decisions made while gambling, namely avoidant and approach decisions, are associated with distinct neural communication patterns.

“Our recent work follows a line of research that examines how humans approach rewarding and punishing situations in the environment,” Brendan Depue and Siraj Lyons, the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress.

Scientists discover “anxiety gene” in the brain — and a natural way to turn it off

A UK-led team of researchers restrained mice for 6 hours to induce a stress response and then analyzed the rodents’ brains on a molecular level.⁠

This led to the discovery of increased levels of five microRNAs (miRNAs) — small molecules that help determine which genes in a cell are expressed and which aren’t — in the amygdala, the brain region implicated in anxiety. When the researchers took a closer look at the miRNA that reached the highest levels, miR-483-5p, they saw that it suppressed the expression of the Pgap2 gene — and that this suppression appeared to provide stress relief and reduce anxiety-related behavior.⁠

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The discovery of an “anxiety gene” — and a natural way to turn it off — in the brains of mice could lead to new treatments for anxiety disorders, which are the most common type of mental illness in the world.

The challenge: While anyone can experience worry or dread, people with anxiety disorders experience those feelings pervasively and often for no identifiable reason.

Medications can relieve the symptoms of anxiety, but because we don’t really know what is going on in the brains of people with anxiety, finding the right drug or combination of drugs can be a time-consuming process of trial and error.

Continue reading “Scientists discover “anxiety gene” in the brain — and a natural way to turn it off” | >

Mapping Time and Space: Neurons Decode Human Existence Dimensions

Summary: Researchers unveil how neurons in the brain depict time and space, fundamental to human consciousness.

Utilizing special depth electrodes, they studied patients undergoing treatment for epilepsy, revealing “place cells” for spatial awareness and “time cells” for temporal comprehension.

One study showed these cells operate independently yet concurrently during navigation tasks. Another found certain neurons maintained regular temporal patterns regardless of external stimuli speed.

FSS #11 Biotech, Neurotech and AI: Opportunities and Risks

The convergence of Biotechnology, Neurotechnology, and Artificial Intelligence has major implications for the future of humanity. This talk explores the long-term opportunities inherent to these fields by surveying emerging breakthroughs and their potential applications. Whether we can enjoy the benefits of these technologies depends on us: Can we overcome the institutional challenges that are slowing down progress without exacerbating civilizational risks that come along with powerful technological progress?

About the speaker: Allison Duettmann is the president and CEO of Foresight Institute. She directs the Intelligent Cooperation, Molecular Machines, Biotech & Health Extension, Neurotech, and Space Programs, Fellowships, Prizes, and Tech Trees, and shares this work with the public. She founded Existentialhope.com, co-edited Superintelligence: Coordination & Strategy, co-authored Gaming the Future, and co-initiated The Longevity Prize. She advises companies and projects, such as Cosmica, and The Roots of Progress Fellowship, and is on the Executive Committee of the Biomarker Consortium. She holds an MS in Philosophy & Public Policy from the London School of Economics, focusing on AI Safety.

Scientists monitored the brains of 4 dying patients. Here’s what they found

Within seconds of the withdrawal of life support, two of the patients exhibited a surge of neurophysiological activity characterized by changes in several different brain wave “bands,” at both the local and global levels. Freethink.

Researchers found a surge of neurophysiological activity in the dying human brain, including in regions associated with conscious processing.

The brain may learn about the world the same way some computational models do

To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain.

How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised learning.” This type of machine learning, originally developed as a way to create more efficient models for computer vision, allows computational models to learn about visual scenes based solely on the similarities and differences between them, with no labels or other information.

A pair of studies from researchers at the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT offers new evidence supporting this hypothesis. The researchers found that when they trained models known as neural networks using a particular type of self-supervised learning, the resulting models generated activity patterns very similar to those seen in the brains of animals that were performing the same tasks as the models.