Lifeboat Foundation

It’s also worth noting that some water already naturally contains low amounts of lithium. And in research published last week in The British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists from a cohort of U.K. universities identified a link that naturally-present lithium and lower suicide rates.

Therefore, they suggest, more lives could be saved by putting the drug in high-risk communities’ water supplies.

“In these unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent increase in the incidence of mental health conditions, accessing ways to improve community mental health and reduce the incidence of anxiety, depression and suicide is ever more important,” Anjum Memon, lead author and epidemiology chair at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said in a press release.

“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems.” –Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs

Why It’s Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel’s neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year.

Consuming a single dose of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca can result in lasting changes in higher-order cognitive brain networks, according to a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Ayahuasca, a concoction used for centuries by indigenous Amazon tribes, contains the powerful psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. The brew is typically prepared using leaves from the Psychotria viridis shrub and the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.

The new neuroimaging research suggests that ayahuasca may produce long-lasting effects on mood by altering the functional connectivity of the brain’s salience and default mode networks.

With these new findings scientists can potentially better understand the subtle changes that can occur in genes and brain circuits that can lead to mental health disorders such as anxiety and autism spectrum disorders.

Although physically very different, research has found that the brains of flies, mice and humans are similar in how they form and how they function. Data has shown that the genetic mechanisms that underlie the brain development of insects and mammals are very similar but this can be interpreted in two different ways, where some believe it provides evidence of one single ancestor for both mammals and insects and others think it could support the theory that brains evolved multiple times independently.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this collaborative study between King’s College London, University of Arizona, University of Leuven and Leibniz Institute DSMZ has provided strong evidence that the mechanisms that regulate genetic activity required for the formation of brain areas important to control behavior, is the same for insects and mammals.

Our brains have an upper limit on how much they can process at once due to a constant but limited energy supply, according to a new UCL study using a brain imaging method that measures cellular metabolism.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that paying attention can change how the brain allocates its limited energy; as the brain uses more energy in processing what we attend to, less energy is supplied to processing outside our attention focus.

Explaining the research, senior author Professor Nilli Lavie (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: It takes a lot of energy to run the human brain. We know that the brain constantly uses around 20% of our metabolic energy, even while we rest our mind, and yet it’s widely believed that this constant but limited supply of energy does not increase when there is more for our mind to process.

SAN CARLOS, Calif., Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — ZAP Surgical Systems, Inc. today announced an agreement with Bonifatius Hospital in Lingen, Germany to acquire ZAP-X® stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) technology.

SRS is a well-known and effective procedure for non-invasively treating select brain tumors and brain metastases. However, significant acquisition and radiation shielding costs of historical SRS systems have limited widespread access to this potentially life-saving therapy. Consequently, scarce availability of SRS treatment has remained heavily concentrated in large urban hospitals.

If you think you control your own thoughts and decisions, think again. Recent research reveals that unconscious thoughts give birth to our mental imagery and personal choices.

Summary: Repetitive transcranial memory stimulation applied to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex modifies the negative effects of fear memories. The findings could have implications for the treatment of PTSD.

Source: University of Bologna

A research group from the University of Bologna has succeeded in modifying the negative effect of a returning memory that triggers fear, and developed a new non-invasive experimental protocol. The result of this study, published in the journal Current Biology, is an innovative protocol that combines fear conditioning—a stimulus associated with something unpleasant that induces a negative memory—and the neurostimulation of a specific site of the prefrontal cortex.

When we say someone has a quick mind, it may be in part thanks to our expanded cerebellum that distinguishes human brains from those of macaque monkeys, for example.

Sometimes referred to by its Latin translation as the ‘“little brain”’, the cerebellum is located close to the brainstem and sits under the cortex in the hindbrain. New research at San Diego State University, however, calls the “little” terminology into question.

Continue reading “‘Little brain’ or cerebellum not so little after all” »