Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: The perceptual accuracy of visual information and its subjective interpretation use separate neural mechanisms that can be manipulated independently of each other.

Source: University of Bologna

A research group from the University of Bologna discovered the first causal evidence of the double dissociation between what we see and what we believe we see: these two different mechanisms derive from the frequency and amplitude of alpha oscillations.

Researchers have found an effective target in the brain for electrical stimulation to improve mood in people suffering from depression. As reported in the journal Current Biology on November 29, stimulation of a brain region called the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) reliably produced acute improvement in mood in patients who suffered from depression at the start of the study.

Those effects were not seen in patients without mood symptoms, suggesting that the brain stimulation works to normalize activity in mood-related neural circuitry, the researchers say.

“Stimulation induced a pattern of activity in brain regions connected to OFC that was similar to patterns seen when patients naturally experienced positive mood states,” says Vikram Rao, of the University of California, San Francisco. “Our findings suggest that OFC is a promising new stimulation target for treatment of mood disorders.”

Combining two cutting-edge techniques reveals that neurons in the prefrontal cortex are built to respond to reward or aversion, a finding with implications for treating mental illness and addictions.

The prefrontal cortex plays a mysterious yet central role in the mammalian brain. It has been linked to mood regulation, and different cells in the prefrontal cortex seem to respond to positive and negative experiences. How the prefrontal cortex governs these opposing processes of reward or aversion, however, has been largely unknown.

In a new paper published online May 26 in Cell, researchers at Stanford, led by Karl Deisseroth, have united two transformational research techniques to show how the prefrontal circuits that process positive and negative experiences are distinctly and fundamentally different from one another, both in how they function and in how they are wired to other parts of the brain.

The research could one day lead to effective touch-typing on a touchscreen with no physical buttons.

This technology has to translate images into something the human brain can understand. Click the numbers in the interactive image below to find read about how this works.

There are a whole range of conditions, some which are picked up due to the aging process and others which may be inherited, that can cause sight deterioration.

Bionic eyes work by ‘filling in the blanks’ between what the retina perceives and how it is processed in the brain’s visual cortex, that breakdown occurs in conditions which impact the retina. It is largely these conditions which bionic eyes could help treat.

To date, scientists have largely been in the dark with regard to how individual circuits operate in the highly branched networks of the brain. Mapping these networks is a complicated process, requiring precise measurement methods. For the first time, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, together with researchers from the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt and Newcastle University in England, have now functionally proven a so far poorly understood neural connection in the visual system of monkeys using optogenetic methods. To this end, individual neurons were genetically modified so that they became sensitive to a light stimulus.

For decades microstimulation was the method of choice for activating neurons – the method proved to be reliable and accurate. That is why it is also used medically for deep brain stimulation. The Tübingen-based scientists were now able to show that optogenetics, a biological technique still in its infancy, delivers comparable results.

With optogenetics it is possible to directly influence the activity of neurons by light. To do this individual neurons are genetically modified with the help of viruses to express light-sensitive ion channels in their cell membrane. Through blue light pulses delivered directly into the brain, the modified neurons can then be systematically activated.

Picture yourself hovering over an alien city with billions of blinking lights of thousands of types, with the task of figuring out which ones are connected, which way the electricity flows and how that translates into nightlife. Welcome to the deep brain.

Even in an era rapidly becoming known as the heyday of neuroscience, tracing the biochemical signaling among billions of neurons deep in the brain has remained elusive and baffling.

A team of Stanford University researchers managed to map out one such connection, buried inside the brain of a living, moving mammal as they manipulated its behavior. The feat offers an unprecedented close-up of the genesis of social behavior on a cellular level, and could offer insights into psychiatric puzzles such as autism, depression and anxiety.

In the midst of all the apparent tumult, intense emotion, and occasional reckless behavior characterizing the teenage years, the brain is, in fact, evolving and developing the neural circuits needed to keep emotions in check. Research in the June 8, 2016 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience describes how the ability to control emotions moves from one brain area to another as teens mature into adults, offering an opportunity to understand how disorders related to emotional control emerge.

“Our study opens the way for a better understanding of the neurobiology behind adolescent behavior in emotionally arousing situations,” said study author Anna Tyborowska of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. “The findings could also have important clinical implications [as] many psychiatric disorders emerge during adolescence and are characterized by problems with emotional action control.”

Previous research links the spike in sensation-seeking and impulsive behavior during adolescence to the delayed maturation of the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in reasoning, planning, and decision-making. Study authors Inge Volman, Ivan Toni, and Karin Roelofs previously demonstrated the importance of the anterior prefrontal cortex in emotional control in adults. However, it has not been clear whether and how the delayed development of the prefrontal cortex affects emotional control during adolescence.

Scientists have developed a novel computational approach that incorporates individual patients’ brain activity to calculate optimal, personalized brain stimulation treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Lazaro Sanchez-Rodriguez of the University of Calgary, Canada, and colleagues present their new framework in PLOS Computational Biology.

Electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain could help promote healthy activity in neural circuits impaired by Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition. This experimental treatment has shown some promise in clinical trials. However, all patients currently receive identical treatment protocols, potentially leading to different outcomes according to individual variations in brain signaling.

To investigate the possibility of personalized brain stimulation, Sanchez-Rodriguez and colleagues took a theoretical approach. They built a computational tool that incorporates patients’ MRI scans and physiological brain signaling measurements to calculate optimal brain stimulation signals, with the goal of delivering efficient, effective personalized treatment.