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Category: neuroscience – Page 57

A new USC-led study has found that mild cognitive impairment is associated with blood vessel dysfunction in the brain’s temporal lobes, the region responsible for memory.

This vascular issue was observed in individuals both with and without amyloid buildup in the brain, indicating that microvascular dysfunction could serve as an early biomarker for dementia and a potential target for treatment.

The study, conducted by researchers from several universities, was published in the journal Neurology.

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The complexity of the human brain—86 billion neurons strong with more than 100 trillion connections—enables abstract thinking, language acquisition, advanced reasoning and problem-solving, and the capacity for creativity and social interaction. Understanding how differences in brain signaling and dynamics produce unique cognition and behavior in individuals has long been a goal of neuroscience research, yet many phenomena remain unexplained.

A study from neuroscientists and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis addresses this knowledge gap with a new method to create personalized brain models, which offer insights into individual neural dynamics. Led by ShiNung Ching, associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Todd Braver, professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences, the work, published Jan. 17 in PNAS, introduces a novel framework that will allow the researchers to create individualized brain models based on detailed data from noninvasive, high-temporal resolution brain scans. Such personalized models have applications in research and clinical settings, where they could support advances in neuroscience and treatment of neurological conditions.

“This research is motivated by our need to understand person-to-person variation in brain dynamics,” said first author Matthew Singh, who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow with Braver and Ching at WashU and is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We’re not explaining the full range of biophysical mechanisms at work in the , but we are able to shed light on why healthy individuals have different brain dynamics with our new modeling framework, which gives us insights into brain mechanics and testable predictions of brain phenomena.”

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Our brains evolved to help us rapidly learn new things. But anyone who has put in hours of practice to perfect their tennis serve, only to reach a plateau, can attest that our brains aren’t infinitely flexible. New work shows that patterns of neural activity over time — the temporal dynamics of neural populations — cannot change rapidly, suggesting that neural activity dynamics may both reflect and constrain how the brain performs computations.

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Neural tissue engineering is premised on the integration of engineered living tissue with the host nervous system to directly restore lost function or to augment regenerative capacity following nervous system injury or neurodegenerative disease. Disconnection of axon pathways – the long-distance fibers connecting specialized regions of the central nervous system or relaying peripheral signals – is a common feature of many neurological disorders and injury. However, functional axonal regeneration rarely occurs due to extreme distances to targets, absence of directed guidance, and the presence of inhibitory factors in the central nervous system, resulting in devastating effects on cognitive and sensorimotor function.

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In recent years, biomedical devices have proven to be able to target also different neurological disorders. Given the rapid ageing of the population and the increase of invalidating diseases affecting the central nervous system, there is a growing demand for biomedical devices of immediate clinical use. However, to reach useful therapeutic results, these tools need a multidisciplinary approach and a continuous dialogue between neuroscience and engineering, a field that is named neuroengineering. This is because it is fundamental to understand how to read and perturb the neural code in order to produce a significant clinical outcome.

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Researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have developed brain organoids — 3D, brain-like structures grown from human stem cells — that show organized waves of activity similar to those found in living human brains.

Then, while studying organoids grown from stem cells derived from patients with the neurological disorder Rett syndrome, the scientists were able to observe patterns of electrical activity resembling seizures, a hallmark of the condition.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, broadens the list of brain conditions that can be studied in organoids and further illustrates the value of these human cell–based models in investigating the underlying causes of diseases and testing potential therapies.

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A new stroke-healing gel created by UCLA researchers helped regrow neurons and blood vessels in mice whose brains had been damaged by strokes. The finding is reported May 21 in Nature Materials.

“We tested this in laboratory mice to determine if it would repair the brain and lead to recovery in a model of stroke,” said Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. “The study indicated that new brain tissue can be regenerated in what was previously just an inactive brain scar after stroke.”

The results suggest that such an approach could some day be used to treat people who have had a stroke, said Tatiana Segura, a former professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA who collaborated on the research. Segura is now a professor at Duke University.

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Brain cells receive sensory inputs from the outside world and send signals throughout the body telling organs and muscles what to do. Although neurons comprise only 10% of brain cells, their functional and genomic integrity must be maintained over a lifetime. Most dividing cells in the body have well-defined checkpoint mechanisms to sense and correct DNA damage during DNA replication.

Neurons, however, do not divide. For this reason, they are at greater risk of accumulating damage and must develop alternative repair pathways to avoid dysfunction. Scientists do not understand how neuronal DNA damage is controlled in the absence of replication checkpoints.

A recent study led by Cynthia McMurray and Aris Polyzos in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division addressed this knowledge gap, shedding light on how DNA damage and repair occur in the brain. Their results suggest that DNA damage itself serves as the checkpoint, limiting the accumulation of genomic errors in cells during natural aging.

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A serious knock to the head may also deliver an insidious blow to the human immune system – a one-two punch that could reawaken dormant viruses in the body, potentially contributing to neurodegenerative disease.

A study using stem cell ‘mini brains’ has shown that a herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infection already ‘arrested’ by the immune system can shake off its shackles when brain tissue is injured.

“We thought, what would happen if we subjected the brain tissue model to a physical disruption, something akin to a concussion?” says biomedical engineer Dana Cairns from Tufts University in the US.

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Even so, many wonder: If the universe is at bottom deterministic (via stable laws of physics), how do these quantum-like phenomena arise, and could they show up in something as large and complex as the human brain?

Quantum-Prime Computing is a new theoretical framework offering a surprising twist: it posits that prime numbers — often celebrated as the “building blocks” of integers — can give rise to “quantum-like” behavior in a purely mathematical or classical environment. The kicker? This might not only shift how we view computation but also hint at new ways to understand the brain and the nature of consciousness.

Below, we explore why prime numbers are so special, how they can host quantum-like states, and what that might mean for free will, consciousness, and the future of computational science.

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