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Category: neuroscience – Page 388

A team of scientists recently aimed to better understand consciousness and its pathologies by studying the neural activity of patients with disorders of consciousness and healthy volunteers using brain imaging technology. They identified two crucial brain circuits implicated in consciousness. The results of the study have been published in Human Brain Mapping.

Consciousness is a complex and subjective experience, and there is still much debate among scientists and philosophers about its nature and origin. However, in clinical settings, doctors treating patients with severe brain injuries and disorders of consciousness need to find ways to help their patients, regardless of the exact definition of consciousness. The authors of the new study sought to better understand the mechanisms behind the pathological loss of consciousness and its recovery, as well as to have reliable ways to assess the state of the patients.

“In recent years, many studies have tried to objectively assess levels of consciousness using various neuroimaging techniques. While these studies have improved how we diagnose patients with disorders of consciousness, they haven’t fully explained how consciousness comes about,” explained study author Jitka Annen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege.

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Click image for animation of DBS for post-stroke rehabilitation

A first-in-human trial of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for post-stroke rehabilitation patients by Cleveland Clinic researchers has shown that using DBS to target the dentate nucleus – which regulates fine-control of voluntary movements, cognition, language, and sensory functions in the brain – is safe and feasible.

The EDEN trial (Electrical Stimulation of the Dentate Nucleus for Upper Extremity Hemiparesis Due to Ischemic Stroke) also shows that the majority of participants (nine out of 12) demonstrated improvements in both motor impairment and function. Importantly, the study found that participants with at least minimal preservation of distal motor function at enrollment showed gains that almost tripled their initial scores.

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New work led by researchers at the University of Exeter, King’s College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Liverpool has found that women who had at least one contact with mental health services in the seven years prior to their pregnancy were at increased risk of preterm birth.

The study, “Obstetric and neonatal outcomes in pregnant women with and without a history of specialist mental care: a national population-based cohort study using linked routinely collected data in England,” published in Lancet Psychiatry, analyzed data from more than two million , and found that one in 10 women who had used mental health services before their pregnancy had a , compared to one in 15 in those who had not.

Researchers also found that women who had used mental health services faced a higher risk of giving birth to a baby that was small for its gestational age, increasing from 65 per 1,000 births in women who had not used mental health services to 75 per 1,000 births in women who had.

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We’re seeing major advancements in tech that can decode brain signals, interpreting neural activity to reveal what’s on someone’s mind, what they want to say, or – in the case of a new study – which song they’re listening to.

US researchers have been able to reconstruct a “recognizable version” of a Pink Floyd song based on the pulses of activity moving through a specific part of the brain’s temporal lobe in volunteers as they listened to the hit Another Brick in the Wall Part 1.

While the tune in question did go through some initial processing into a spectrogram form to be more compatible with the brain’s audio processing techniques, the reverse process is impressive in terms of its fidelity.

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Blood vessels form the transportation network within our bodies. They are streets where red and white blood cells drive. They are the delivery system to oxygenate our brain and other vital organs and muscles. There are other highways in our bodies such as our nervous and lymphatic systems, but blood vessels are the ones that are central to healthy heart function and keeping our brain supplied with oxygen. When blood vessels are compromised we can suffer a stroke, heart attack, aneurysm or die.

When usual causes of heart attacks are blocked coronary arteries. The coronary arteries supply blood and oxygen to the heart. When partially blocked people experience symptoms like angina. When blocked they can suffer a myocardial infarction, the fancy name for a heart attack.

Today, harvested blood vessel grafts from human donors or the patient are used for bypassing coronary blood vessel blockages. But researchers at the University of Melbourne believe that fabricated blood vessel tissue that can be shaped to any need would be an effective substitute for existing grafts. The team in its search for a graft alternative has combined a variety of materials and living tissue with a fabrication technique to create complex blood vessels that can serve multiple purposes.

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M3GAN wasn’t malicious. It followed its programming, but without any care or respect for other beings—ultimately including Cady. In a sense, as it engaged with the physical world, M3GAN became an AI sociopath.

Sociopathic AI isn’t just a topic explored in Hollywood. To Dr. Leonardo Christov-Moore at the University of Southern California and colleagues, it’s high time we build artificial empathy into AI—and nip any antisocial behaviors in the bud.

In an essay published last week in Science Robotics, the team argued for a neuroscience perspective to embed empathy into lines of code. The key is to add “gut instincts” for survival—for example, the need to avoid physical pain. With a sense of how it may be “hurt,” an AI agent could then map that knowledge onto others. It’s similar to the way humans gauge each others’ feelings: I understand and feel your pain because I’ve been there before.

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