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Category: neuroscience – Page 419

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba have discovered a connection between the risk of functional disability or death in older adults and the distance they are willing to walk or cycle to reach common destinations (such as a friend’s house or a supermarket).

As they age, physical or cognitive decline can make it difficult for some older adults to navigate their community, affecting their quality of life and becoming a burden on society. However, a recent study by researchers at the University of Tsukuba demonstrates that a willingness to travel longer distances by walking or cycling may help reduce the risk of early functional disability and mortality.

A recent study published in Health and Place presents a model linking death and functional disability rates in older adults to the distances they are willing to travel on foot or bicycle for common community trips. The research found that older adults who were only comfortable with short distances – such as 500 meters or less for walking, or 1 kilometer or less for cycling – faced higher risks of functional disability and death.

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Sending a jolt of electricity through a person’s brain can do remarkable things. You only have to watch the videos of people with Parkinson’s disease who have electrodes implanted in their brains. They can go from struggling to walk to confidently striding across a room literally at the flick of a switch.

Stimulating certain parts of the brain can bring people in and out of consciousness. Even handheld devices that deliver gentle pulses to the brain can help older people remember things.

Implants that track and optimize our brain activity are on the way.

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The results from Katcher’s latest study will be written up when Sima dies, but data gathered so far suggests that eight rats that received placebo infusions of saline lived for 34 to 38 months, while eight that received a purified and concentrated form of blood plasma, called E5, lived for 38 to 47 months. They also had improved grip strength. Rats normally live for two to three years, though a contender for the oldest ever is a brown rat that survived on a restricted calorie diet for 4.6 years.

“The real point of our experiments is not so much to extend lifespan, but to extend youthspan, to rejuvenate people, to make their golden years really potentially golden years, instead of years of pain and decrepitude,” Katcher said. “But the fact is, if you manage to do that, you also manage to lengthen life and that’s not a bad side-effect.”

Results from such small studies are tentative at best, but some scientists believe the work, and similar efforts by others, has potential. A preliminary study from a collaboration between Katcher and experts at the University of California in Los Angeles found that infusions of young blood plasma wound back the biological clock on rat liver, blood, heart and a brain region called the hypothalamus. Commenting on the work in 2020, Prof David Sinclair, a leading expert on ageing at Harvard medical school, said if the finding held up, “rejuvenation of the body may become commonplace within our lifetimes”.

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For all of the unparalleled, parallel-processing, still-indistinguishable-from-magic wizardry packed into the three pounds of an adult human brain, it obeys the same rule as the other living tissue it controls: Oxygen is a must.

So it was with a touch of irony that Evgeny Tsymbal offered his explanation for a technological wonder—movable, data-covered walls mere atoms wide—that may eventually help computers behave more like a brain.

“There was unambiguous evidence that oxygen vacancies are responsible for this,” said Tsymbal, George Holmes University Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

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Injury to the spinal cord often leads life changing disability, with decreased or complete loss of sensation and movement below the site of injury. From drugs to transplantation, there are many scientific advances aiming to restore function following spinal cord injury.

One promising approach is the use of stem cell derived neurons to replace those damaged. New research from the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine and Centre for Neurodevelopment at King’s College London hopes to improve on this approach by providing pure populations of neurons made from stem cells.

The spinal cord is a delicate structure, with neurons carry messages from your brain to the rest of your body to allow movement and sensation. Integral to this system are interneurons, or the cells that relay information between your brain and other neurons. Research has previously shown that transplanting a class of interneurons, ventral spinal interneurons, to treat spinal cord injury in animal models provides promising recovery of sensory and motor function.

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I am proud to announce that today came out probably my most important scientific paper. I propose a whole new paradigm in neuroscience. To understand the mind, synapses are not so important any more. Instead, critical are some other type of proteins on the neural membrane. These proteins have the capability to transiently select subnetworks that will be functional in the next few seconds or minutes. The paradigm proposes that cognition emerges from those transient subnetwork selections (and not from network computations of the classical, so-called connectionist paradigm). The proteins in question are metabotropic receptor and G protein-gated ion channels. Simply put, we think with those proteins. A result of a thought is a new state of network pathways, not the activity of neurons.

One can download the paper here:

Perhaps the most important question posed by brain research is: How the brain gives rise to the mind. To answer this question, we have primarily relied on the connectionist paradigm: The brain’s entire knowledge and thinking skills are thought to be stored in the connections; and the mental operations are executed by network computations. I propose here an alternative paradigm: Our knowledge and skills are stored in metabotropic receptors (MRs) and the G protein-gated ion channels (GPGICs). Here, mental operations are assumed to be executed by the functions of MRs and GPGICs. As GPGICs have the capacity to close or open branches of dendritic trees and axon terminals, their states transiently re-route neural activity throughout the nervous system. First, MRs detect ligands that signal the need to activate GPGICs. Next, GPGICs transiently select a subnetwork within the brain. The process of selecting this new subnetwork is what constitutes a mental operation – be it in a form of directed attention, perception or making a decision. Synaptic connections and network computations play only a secondary role, supporting MRs and GPGICs. According to this new paradigm, the mind emerges within the brain as the function of MRs and GPGICs whose primary function is to continually select the pathways over which neural activity will be allowed to pass. It is argued that MRs and GPGICs solve the scaling problem of intelligence from which the connectionism paradigm suffers.

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