Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2016

Nearly 100 previously unidentified brain areas revealed by examination of the cerebral cortex.

Summary: 3,6’-dithiopomalidomide (DP), an anti-inflammatory drug candidate, protected mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease against cognitive decline by reducing neuroinflammation.

Source: NIH

An anti-inflammatory drug candidate, known as 3,6’-dithiopomalidomide (DP), designed by researchers at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), protected lab mice against cognitive decline by reducing brain inflammation.

A study published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience has revealed that the human brain’s structures operate in up to 11 dimensions.

The dimensions are not understood as the classic definition of a dimension, which most of us understand, the Blue Brain Project explains.

Continue reading “Scientists Reveal a Multidimensional Universe Inside the Human Brain” »

While watching a fearful memory take shape in the brain of a living fish, neuroscientists see an unexpected level of rewiring occur in the synaptic connections.

Could 2 B vitamins help those suffering with Huntington’s Disease?

T he Huntington’s disease (HD) community has recently experienced setbacks, but a new research report may reignite hope, from an unexpected source: the vitamin thiamine (B1), with help from biotin (B7). The investigators, from several institutions in Spain and UCLA, write in Science Translational Medicine, “Together, these results demonstrate a thiamine deficiency in HD brain and suggest that individuals with HD might benefit from thiamine and/or biotin supplementation therapy.”

Health care providers may suggest certain supplements for HD patients, based perhaps on a deficiency (vitamins C, B12, E) in the blood, or for general health. But the new findings are different. The researchers didn’t set out to detect a vitamin deficiency, but instead probed the messaging within cells in the HD brain, which led them to a biochemical juncture that revealed the thiamine/biotin connection.

Continue reading “What might explain Huntington’s Disease?” »

According to the research program’s abstract:

“The specific aim of the research program was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggered electrical stimulation of the brain. The report describes such a system which depends for its effectiveness on two properties of electrical stimulation delivered to certain deep lying structures of the dog brain: the well-known reward effect, and a tendency for such stimulation to initiate and maintain locomotion in a direction which is accompanied by the continued delivery of stimulation. Experiments on the parameters of stimulation are described, in addition to an experiment on the ability of a conventional reinforcer, food, to disrupt ongoing, free field behavior under the control of rewarding brain stimulation. Finally, supporting research employing albino rats is summarized. (Author)”

One document was released by the CIA in late 2018 after a FOIA request by The Black Vault. The document, redacted in some parts with details missing, highlighted the research of creating remote control dogs using implants on the brain. The record’s release was specifically highlighted by Newsweek, which as a result, was picked up by many other outlets.

Circa 2021

It sounds like a party trick: scientists can now look at the brain activity of a tiny worm and tell you which chemical the animal smelled a few seconds before. But the findings of a new study, led by Salk Associate Professor Sreekanth Chalasani, are more than just a novelty; they help the scientists better understand how the brain functions and integrates information.

Circa 2020 Simulation of the human brain.

Computer simulation of the human brain at an individual neuron resolution is an ultimate goal of computational neuroscience. The Japanese flagship supercomputer, K, provides unprecedented computational capability toward this goal. The cerebellum contains 80% of the neurons in the whole brain. Therefore, computer simulation of the human-scale cerebellum will be a challenge for modern supercomputers. In this study, we built a human-scale spiking network model of the cerebellum, composed of 68 billion spiking neurons, on the K computer. As a benchmark, we performed a computer simulation of a cerebellum-dependent eye movement task known as the optokinetic response. We succeeded in reproducing plausible neuronal activity patterns that are observed experimentally in animals. The model was built on dedicated neural network simulation software called MONET (Millefeuille-like Organization NEural neTwork), which calculates layered sheet types of neural networks with parallelization by tile partitioning. To examine the scalability of the MONET simulator, we repeatedly performed simulations while changing the number of compute nodes from 1,024 to 82,944 and measured the computational time. We observed a good weak-scaling property for our cerebellar network model. Using all 82,944 nodes, we succeeded in simulating a human-scale cerebellum for the first time, although the simulation was 578 times slower than the wall clock time. These results suggest that the K computer is already capable of creating a simulation of a human-scale cerebellar model with the aid of the MONET simulator.

Computer simulation of the whole human brain is an ambitious challenge in the field of computational neuroscience and high-performance computing (Izhikevich, 2005; Izhikevich and Edelman, 2008; Amunts et al., 2016). The human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons. While the cerebral cortex occupies 82% of the brain mass, it contains only 19% (16 billion) of all neurons. The cerebellum, which occupies only 10% of the brain mass, contains 80% (69 billion) of all neurons (Herculano-Houzel, 2009). Thus, we could say that 80% of human-scale whole brain simulation will be accomplished when a human-scale cerebellum is built and simulated on a computer. The human cerebellum plays crucial roles not only in motor control and learning (Ito, 1984, 2000) but also in cognitive tasks (Ito, 2012; Buckner, 2013). In particular, the human cerebellum seems to be involved in human-specific tasks, such as bipedal locomotion, natural language processing, and use of tools (Lieberman, 2014).