Imagine that you can grow a clone with the level of intelligence below the level of a turkey or a chicken with the perfectly-exercised body. Would you consider swapping your brain with this perfect and unconscious clone? Surprisingly, many professionals would not even think twice.
Successful communication and cooperation among different members of society depends, in part, on a consistent understanding of the physical and social world. What drives this alignment in perspectives? We present evidence from two neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; N = 66 with 2,145 dyadic comparisons) and electroencephalography (EEG; N = 225 with 25,200 dyadic comparisons) to show that: the extent to which people’s neural responses are synchronized when viewing naturalistic stimuli is related to their personality profiles, and that this effect is stronger than that of similarity in gender, ethnicity and political affiliation.
Major depressive disorder is associated with altered interoception — or the ability to sense the internal state of your body. Now, new brain imaging research provides evidence that depressed individuals tend to exhibit “faulty” neural processing of gastric interoception, particularly among those with high levels of rumination. The findings have been published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
“Repetitive negative thinking (RNT), usually referred to as ‘rumination’ in persons who suffer from depression, is a very significant clinical problem,” explained study author Salvador M. Guinjoan, a principal investigator at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and associate professor at Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center at Tulsa.
“The reason is that when it is severe and persistent, RNT conditions higher chances of depression relapse and is associated with residual symptoms after treatment, is more common in persons who do not respond to treatment, and is even related to suicide. This particular communication refers to one among a series of projects in our lab attempting to understand rumination.”
Anguera, J.A., Volponi, J.J., Simon, A.J. et al. Integrated cognitive and physical fitness training enhances attention abilities in older adults. npj Aging 8, 12 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41514-022-00093-y.
The discovery could lead to potential future targeted therapies and treatments for this brain disorder.
Researchers have found two novel genes that increase an individual’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This disorder is the leading cause of dementia and has an estimated heritability —genetic factor causing variation in the population, or an inherited trait— of 70%.
Digicomphoto/iStock.
Details from the study.
Summary: Researchers have identified two new genes, ATP8B4 and ABCA1, that are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. The genes impact the brain’s immune system and cholesterol processing, leading to an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: Cardiff University.
Two new genes that raise a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease have been discovered by researchers.
Posted in computing, neuroscience
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The ability to link mind and machine has long been the realm of science fiction, but now improvements in our understanding may allow us to network brain to computer in the near future. Companies like Neurolink have begun to explore how to link our neurons to machine, and we’ll explore now such neural interfaces might function and how they might change our lives.
Neurolink Paper, “An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels”: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v1
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This new way to diagnose schizophrenia, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease and autism spectrum disorder could help improve mental health. We often think of fingerprints as the tiny ridges, whorls and arched patterns on the tip of each finger. They are heralded as special markers of human identity, even more individualized than DNA.
Physical differences in the brains of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and those who don’t have the condition could help diagnosis.
A vaccine (DCVax-L), trialed at King’s College Hospital and other centers around the world, using patients’ immune cells to target brain cancer can extend survival by many months or, in some cases, years, the final unblinded results from a phase 3 clinical trial has shown. The final results were published on Thursday, November 17 in JAMA Oncology.
This is the first time in 17 years that such significant outcomes have been achieved in a phase 3 trial for a systemic treatment in newly diagnosed glioblastoma, and the first time in 27 years that any treatment has been shown to extend survival in recurrent glioblastoma.
The vaccine is created for each patient individually by isolating specific immune cells, known as dendritic cells, from their blood. These cells are then primed with biomarkers from a sample of the patient’s tumor. When the vaccine containing the cells is injected back into the patient, it shares that information so that the body’s entire immune system recognizes and attacks the target.
