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Category: neuroscience – Page 391

As people get older, they tend to have lower levels of anxiety. But why? A new brain imaging study has found that older individuals are faster at recognizing and responding to negative emotions. The findings, published NeuroImage, go against the idea that older adults are less engaged with negative emotions due to cognitive decline or that they are better at regulating negative emotions. Instead, the results suggest that older adults may develop a more automatic way of processing negative emotions.

The study aimed to investigate the relationship between aging, trait anxiety, and changes in cognitive and affective functions. The researchers were motivated by previous findings that older adults tend to have lower susceptibility to anxiety disorders compared to younger and middle-aged adults. However, it was not clear how age-related changes in anxiety symptoms, such as worry and somatic symptoms, were related to changes in cognitive and affective processes.

“We are interested in emotion dysfunction in early dementia, including those people with subjective complaints of memory problem and mild cognitive impairment,” said study author Chiang-shan Ray Li, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine.

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In my new Newsweek Op-Ed, I tackle a primary issue many people have with trying to stop aging and death via science. Hopefully this philosophical argument will allow more resources & support into the life extension field:

Philosophers often say if humans didn’t die, we’d be bored out of our minds. This idea, called temporal scarcity, argues the finitude of death is what makes life worth living. Transhumanists, whose most urgent goal is to use science to overcome biological death, emphatically disagree.

For decades, the question of temporal scarcity has been debated and analyzed in essays and books. But an original idea transhumanists are putting forth is reinvigorating the debate. It doesn’t discount temporal scarcity in biological humans; it discounts it in what humans will likely become in the future—cyborgs and digitized consciousnesses.

The traditional temporal scarcity argument against immortality imagines the human being remaining biologically the same as it has for tens of thousands of years. Yet the human race is already augmenting the human body with radical technology. Globally, over 200,000 people already have brain implants, and Silicon Valley companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are working on trying to get millions of us to become cyborgs.

A growing number of experts even believe by the end of the century, humans will likely have the ability to upload the brain and its consciousness into a computer. In the process, digitized people will overcome biological death and engage in far more complex ways of being, including grand new designs of consciousness and selfhood.

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Summary: Researchers discovered a unique property of psychedelic drugs: their ability to reopen “critical periods” in the brain, times when the brain is highly susceptible to environmental learning signals. These periods, usually associated with skills development like language learning, are reopened by psychedelics for different lengths of time.

This breakthrough in understanding psychedelic drug function may have therapeutic implications for conditions like stroke and deafness. Further, it uncovers novel molecular mechanisms influenced by psychedelics.

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Summary: Researchers leveraged a tracking algorithm from video games to study molecules’ behavior within live brain cells.

They adapted the fast and accurate algorithm used to track bullets in combat games for use in super-resolution microscopy. The innovative approach enables scientists to observe how molecules cluster together to perform specific functions in space and time within the brain cells.

The data obtained could shed light on molecular functions’ disruption during aging and disease.

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Researchers at Scripps Research have discovered that chronic alcohol consumption can increase sensitivity to pain through two distinct molecular mechanisms: one related to alcohol intake and the other to alcohol withdrawal. This finding, published in the British Journal of Pharmacology, sheds light on the intricate relationship between alcohol and pain.

The researchers sought to better understand the relationship between chronic pain and alcohol use disorder. They wanted to investigate the underlying causes of different types of alcohol-related pain, such as alcoholic neuropathy and allodynia, and how they develop at the spinal cord level. The researchers aimed to examine the role of microglia, immune cells in the central nervous system, in the development of chronic alcohol-induced allodynia and neuropathy.

Alcoholic neuropathy refers to nerve damage caused by long-term excessive alcohol consumption. It is a type of peripheral neuropathy that affects the peripheral nerves, which are responsible for transmitting signals between the brain, spinal cord, and the rest of the body.

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A new research at the intersection of cosmology and neurobiology implies that diverse physical processes lead to similar levels of complexity and self-organization present in structures of scales.

An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies and found astounding similarities.

In their paper ‘The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web’ published in Frontiers in Physics, Franco Vazza, astrophysicist at the University of Bologna, and Alberto Feletti, neurosurgeon at the University of Verona, investigated the similarities between two of the most complex systems in existence: the cosmic web of galactic superclusters and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain.

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Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the US at over 600,000 deaths per year. Cancers that form solid tumors such as in the breast, brain, or skin are particularly hard to treat. Surgery is typically the first line of defense for patients fighting solid tumors. But surgery may not remove all , and leftover cells can mutate and spread throughout the body. A more targeted and wholistic treatment could replace the blunt approach of surgery with one that eliminates cancer from the inside using our own cells.

Dennis Discher, Robert D. Bent Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Larry Dooling provide a new approach in targeted therapies for solid tumor cancers in their study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Their therapy not only eliminates cancerous cells, but teaches the to recognize and kill them in the future.

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