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Category: neuroscience – Page 415

Brain Gains: Scientists Discover How To Replicate the Cognitive Benefits of Exercise

An injection of a specific blood factor can replicate exercise’s brain benefits, offering potential treatments for age-related cognitive decline.

Pre-clinical trials by University of Queensland scientists have found that an injection of a specific blood factor can replicate the benefits of exercise in the brain.

Dr. Odette Leiter and Dr. Tara Walker from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led a team that discovered platelets, the tiny blood cells critical for blood clotting, secrete a protein that rejuvenates neurons in aged mice in a similar way to physical exercise.

Virtual reality study reveals link between sense of presence and cognitive abilities

A study published in Scientific Reports has shed light on the intricate relationship between the sense of presence in virtual reality (VR) environments and cognitive abilities. The study, titled “The role of sense of presence in expressing cognitive abilities in a virtual reality task: an initial validation study,” was conducted by a team of researchers coordinated by Dr. Andrea Chirico and marks a significant advancement in our understanding of how immersive technologies can influence cognitive functions.

The research team, which includes Prof. Antonio Giordano, Prof. Fabio Lucidi (Sapienza University of Rome), Dr. Luigi De Pietro (CNR ICAR, Italy), and others, set out to investigate the extent to which the sense of presence—the feeling of being “inside” a —impacts an individual’s cognitive performance. By employing advanced VR technology and designing a range of tasks to test cognitive abilities, the researchers were able to gather valuable insights.

One of the key findings of the study is that a stronger sense of presence is positively correlated with enhanced cognitive abilities. Participants who reported a heightened feeling of presence in the virtual tasks demonstrated improved performance in various cognitive domains. These domains include memory, attention, problem-solving, and decision-making.

Paralysis can rob people of their ability to speak. Now researchers hope to give it back

That early experience drove his professional interest in helping people communicate.

Now, Henderson’s an author on one of two papers published Wednesday showing substantial advances toward enabling speech in people injured by stroke, accident or disease.

Although still very early in development, these so-called brain-computer interfaces are five times better than previous generations of the technology at “reading” brainwaves and translating them into synthesized speech. The successes suggest it will someday be possible to restore nearly normal communication ability to people like Henderson’s late father.

Neuroscience Breakthrough — New Images Capture Unseen Details of the Synapse

Scientists have created one of the most detailed 3D images of the synapse.

A synapse is a specialized junction between nerve cells that allows for the transfer of electrical or chemical signals, through the release of neurotransmitters by the presynaptic neuron and the binding of receptors on the postsynaptic neuron. It plays a key role in communication between neurons and in various physiological processes including perception, movement, and memory.

Mind-Blown: Mathematical Rule Discovered Behind the Distribution of Neurons in Our Brains

Human Brain Project researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Cologne (Germany) have uncovered how neuron densities are distributed across and within cortical areas in the mammalian brain. They have unveiled a fundamental organizational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities.

Numbers of neurons and their spatial arrangement play a crucial role in shaping the brain’s structure and function. Yet, despite the wealth of available cytoarchitectonic data, the statistical distributions of neuron densities remain largely undescribed. The new Human Brain Project (HBP) study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, advances our understanding of the organization of mammalian brains.

Analyzing the datasets and the lognormal distribution.

Ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities in mammalian cerebral cortex

Abstract. Numbers of neurons and their spatial variation are fundamental organizational features of the brain. Despite the large corpus of cytoarchitectonic data available in the literature, the statistical distributions of neuron densities within and across brain areas remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we show that neuron densities are compatible with a lognormal distribution across cortical areas in several mammalian species, and find that this also holds true within cortical areas. A minimal model of noisy cell division, in combination with distributed proliferation times, can account for the coexistence of lognormal distributions within and across cortical areas. Our findings uncover a new organizational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities, which adds to a long list of lognormal variables in the brain.

Scientists discover a previously unknown way cells break down proteins

Short-lived proteins control gene expression in cells to carry out a number of vital tasks, from helping the brain form connections to helping the body mount an immune defense. These proteins are made in the nucleus and are quickly destroyed once they’ve done their job.

Despite their importance, the process by which these proteins get broken down and removed from cells once they are no longer needed has eluded scientists for decades—until now.

In a cross-departmental collaboration, researchers from Harvard Medical School identified a protein called midnolin that plays a key role in degrading many short-lived nuclear proteins. The study shows that midnolin does so by directly grabbing the proteins and pulling them into the cellular waste-disposal system, called the proteasome, where they are destroyed.