New research shows that neuroscientists can identify us from our distinct brain signatures, much like a thumbprint. Will this procedure be used someday to improve hiring procedures, reduce absenteeism or predict job performance, productivity and career success?
Summary: APOEe4, a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease risk, doesn’t appear to directly affect memory performance or brain activity in older adults without cognitive impairment. However, the gene does seem to influence brain regions and systems that older at-risk adults activate to support successful memory recall.
Source: McGill University
Researchers at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, in collaboration with the StoP-AD Center, have published a new paper in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, examining how a known genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD) influences memory and brain function in cognitively intact older adults with a family history of AD.
In the COVID-19 outbreak frenzy, several countries are considering massive fiscal stimulus packages and printing money, to blunt the concurrent crises underway: the pandemic and the unraveling economic depression.
These plans are essential, but they need to be strategic and sustainable. Because in addressing the current crises, we must avoid sowing seeds of new ones, as the stakes are incredibly high.
It is time to add a new element to the policy packages that governments are introducing, one we know but have abandoned: Universal Basic Income (UBI). It is needed as part of the package that will help us to get out of this yawning pit.
To treat the mice, the team gave them brain implants: a fiber optic that shined light onto a region called the paraventricular thalamus and blocked withdrawal symptoms. A day later, the mice no longer sought out morphine and relapse — or at least do the lab mouse version of relapsing — even after two weeks.
According to the new research, published Thursday in the journal Neuron, people relapse partially because they miss the high, but more so because the symptoms of withdrawal can often be overwhelming. By down those symptoms, the mice appear to be able to kick the habit more easily.
“Our success in preventing relapse in rodents may one day translate to an enduring treatment of opioid addiction in people,” CAS researcher Zhu Yingjie said in a press release.
We are highly sensitive to people around us. As infants, we observe our parents and teachers, and from them we learn how to walk, talk, read—and use smartphones. There seems to be no limit to the complexity of behavior we can acquire from observational learning.
But social influence goes deeper than that. We don’t just copy the behavior of people around us. We also copy their minds. As we grow older, we learn what other people think, feel, and want—and adapt to it. Our brains are really good at this—we copy computations inside the brains of others. But how does the brain distinguish between thoughts about your own mind and thoughts about the minds of others? Our new study, published in Nature Communications, brings us closer to an answer.
Our ability to copy the minds of others is hugely important. When this process goes wrong, it can contribute to various mental health problems. You might become unable to empathize with someone, or, at the other extreme, you might be so susceptible to other people’s thoughts that your own sense of “self” is volatile and fragile.
A team of researchers with interdisciplinary expertise in psychology, informatics (the application of information science to solve problems with data) and engineering along with the Vanderbilt Brain Institute (VBI) gained critical insights into one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience, identifying the location and critical nature of these neurons.”
New research on cognitive flexibility points to a small class of brain cells that support switching attention strategies when old strategies fail.
There are 86 billion neurons, or cells, in the human brain. Of these, an infinitely small portion of them handle cognitive flexibility—our ability to adjust to new environments and concepts.
A team of researchers with interdisciplinary expertise in psychology, informatics (the application of information science to solve problems with data) and engineering along with the Vanderbilt Brain Institute (VBI) gained critical insights into one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience, identifying the location and critical nature of these neurons.
The article was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) on July 13. The discovery presents an opportunity to enhance researchers’ understanding and treatment of mental illnesses rooted in cognitive flexibility.
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of cancer that begins with the brain and develops from astrocytes, star-shaped brain cells that help protect the brain from diseases in the blood and provide the brain’s neurons with nutrients, with around 12,000 cases diagnosed in the United States each year. Glioblastoma cells have more genetic abnormalities than the cells of other types of astrocytoma brain cancer. Now researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine report they have identified an oncogene responsible for this deadly cancer.
Their study, “A cytoskeleton regulator AVIL drives tumorigenesis in glioblastoma,” is published in Nature Communications and led by Hui Li, PhD, associate professor, pathology, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the UVA Cancer Center.
“Glioblastoma is a deadly cancer, with no effective therapies. Better understanding and identification of selective targets are urgently needed. We found that advillin (AVIL) is overexpressed in all the glioblastomas we tested including glioblastoma stem/initiating cells, but hardly detectable in non-neoplastic astrocytes, neural stem cells or normal brain,” the researchers wrote.
Animals have an innate preference for certain scents and tastes. Attractive scents are linked to things like good food. Less attractive scents—that of spoiled food, for example—instinctively give the animal a signal which says: “There could be danger here!” When it comes to taste, all animals have similar preferences: Sugars and fats are perceived positively, whereas a bitter taste is perceived rather negatively.
In order to be able to make such evaluations, we need signals in the brain that tell us “This is good” or “This is bad.” The dopaminergic system in the brain, better known as the reward system, plays an important role in these evaluations.
Groups of neurons in the human brain produce patterns of activity that represent information about the stimuli that one is perceiving and then convey these patterns to different brain regions via nerve cell junctions known as synapses. So far, most neuroscience studies have focused on the two primary components of neuron information processing individually (i.e., the representation of stimuli in the form of neural activity and the transmission of this information in networks that model neural interactions), rather than exploring them together.
A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recently reviewed literature investigating each of these two components, in order to develop a holistic framework that better describes how groups of neurons process information. Their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, introduces a holistic theoretical perspective that could inform future neuroscience research focusing on neural information processing.
“In the past decade or so, neuroscientists have used more sophisticated tools to understand how the brain represents things that it sees or hears in its environment,” Harang Ju and Danielle Bassett, the two researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “Some researchers studied brain representations as single patterns of brain activity, while others studied representations as changing patterns of activity. The aim of our paper was to explore how understanding the brain as a network of neural units and their connections could frame the recent developments in a way that helps push the field towards a better understanding of the dynamic nature of neural representations.”
