Lifeboat Foundation

Today and going forward, billions of tiny devices will act as an extension of our brains, feelings and emotions as a natural extension of everyday life.

In addition, the mice developed interstitial pneumonia, which affects the tissue and space around the air sacs of the lungs, causing the infiltration of inflammatory cells, the thickening of the structure that separates air sacs, and blood vessel damage. Compared with young mice, older mice showed more severe lung damage and increased production of signaling molecules called cytokines. Taken together, these features recapitulate those observed in COVID-19 patients.

When the researchers administered SARS-CoV-2 into the stomach, two of the three mice showed high levels of viral RNA in the trachea and lung. The S protein was also present in lung tissue, which showed signs of inflammation. According to the authors, these findings are consistent with the observation that patients with COVID-19 sometimes experience gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, and vomiting. But 10 times the dose of SARS-CoV-2 was required to establish infection through the stomach than through the nose.

Future studies using this mouse model may shed light on how SARS-CoV-2 invades the brain and how the virus survives the gastrointestinal environment and invades the respiratory tract. “The hACE2 mice described in our manuscript provide a small animal model for understanding unexpected clinical manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans,” concluded co-senior study author Chang-Fa Fan of NIFDC. “This model will also be valuable for testing vaccines and therapeutics to combat SARS-CoV-2.”

Subtle patterns can be seen in people’s reaction times as their memories are recalled, and boosting these brainwaves could help treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Although we often think of knowledge as “knowing that” (for example, knowing that Paris is the capital of France), each of us also knows many procedures consisting of “knowing how,” such as knowing how to tie a knot or start a car. Now, a new study has found the brain programs that code the sequence of steps in performing a complex procedure.

In a just published paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to find decode the procedural information required to tie various knots with enough precision to identify which knot is being planned or performed. To reach this conclusion, Drs. Robert Mason and Marcel Just first trained a group of participants to tie seven types of knots, and then scanned their brains while they imagined tying, or actually tied the knots while they were in an MRI scanner. The main findings were that each knot had a distinctive neural signature, so the researchers could tell which knot was being tied from the sequence of brain images collected. Furthermore, the neural signatures were very similar for imagining tying a particular knot and planning to tie it.

Dr. Just said, “Tying a knot is an ancient and frequently performed human action that is the epitome of everyday procedural knowledge, making it an excellent target for investigation.”

Episodic memory requires linking events in time, a function dependent on the hippocampus. In “trace” fear conditioning, animals learn to associate a neutral cue with an aversive stimulus despite their separation in time by a delay period on the order of tens of seconds. But how this temporal association forms remains unclear. Here we use two-photon calcium imaging of neural population dynamics throughout the course of learning and show that, in contrast to previous theories, hippocampal CA1 does not generate persistent activity to bridge the delay. Instead, learning is concomitant with broad changes in the active neural population. Although neural responses were stochastic in time, cue identity could be read out from population activity over longer timescales after learning. These results question the ubiquity of seconds-long neural sequences during temporal association learning and suggest that trace fear conditioning relies on mechanisms that differ from persistent activity accounts of working memory.

Eric Klien

Simulation theory points out that we might be living in a giant computer simulation. Exponential technological growth and how far we’ve already come in so little time are big indicators that we can’t possibly imagine what the future of humanity would look like in 100 years, or better yet, 1,000 years!
Will we be able to create simulations so indistinguishable from reality that the characters will not be aware that they are being simulated? Today on Cognitive Culture, you’ll learn about why you’re not real!

Continue reading “Are We In A Simulation? | Why You Are Not Real” »

“It’s not just about the smell,” said Adrian Cheok, one of the scientists behind the experiments. “It is part of a whole, integrated virtual reality or augmented reality. So, for example, you could have a virtual dinner with your friend through the internet. You can see them in 3D and also share a glass of wine together.”

In real life, odors are transmitted when airborne molecules waft into the nose, prompting specialized nerve cells in the upper airway to fire off impulses to the brain. In the recent experiments, performed on 31 test subjects at the Imagineering Institute in the Malaysian city of Nusajaya, researchers used electrodes in the nostrils to deliver weak electrical currents above and behind the nostrils, where these neurons are found.

The researchers were able to evoke 10 different virtual odors, including fruity, woody and minty.

Researchers led by biologists at Tufts University have discovered that the brains of developing frog embryos damaged by nicotine exposure can be repaired by treatment with certain drugs called “ionoceuticals” that drive the recovery of bioelectric patterns in the embryo, followed by repair of normal anatomy, gene expression and brain function in the growing tadpole. The research, published today in Frontiers in Neuroscience, introduces intervention strategies based on restoring the bioelectric “blueprint” for embryonic development, which the researchers suggest could provide a roadmap for the exploration of therapeutic drugs to help repair birth defects.

A molecule commonly produced by gut microbes appears to improve memory in mice.

A new study is among the first to trace the molecular connections between genetics, the gut microbiome, and memory in a mouse model bred to resemble the diversity of the human population.

While tantalizing links between the gut microbiome and brain have previously been found, a team of researchers from two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories found new evidence of tangible connections between the gut and the brain. The team identified lactate, a molecule produced by all species of one gut microbe, as a key memory-boosting molecular messenger. The work was published recently in the journal BMC Microbiome.