This is another example of how autism is now being used as an advantage in business. What people previously saw as a weakness turned out to be a strength. 😃
Gordon Douglas struggled to find work because of his “differences”. Now his neurodiversity is making him a sought-after employee.
An experimental drug reversed age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in old mice after just a few doses, according to a study by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
The drug, ISRIB, has previously been shown in other studies to restore normal cognitive function in mice after traumatic brain injury, enhance memory in healthy mice and mice with Down syndrome, as well as prevent noise-related hearing loss.
Summary: Astrocytes, not microglia, are responsible for constantly eliminate unnecessary and excessive adult synaptic connections in response to brain activity.
Source: KAIST
Developing brains constantly sprout new neuronal connections called synapses as they learn and remember. Important connections — the ones that are repeatedly introduced, such as how to avoid danger — are nurtured and reinforced, while connections deemed unnecessary are pruned away. Adult brains undergo similar pruning, but it was unclear how or why synapses in the adult brain get eliminated.
Summary: A brain network consisting of the thalamus, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyri was implicated in the loss, and return, of consciousness under both anesthetic and natural sleep.
Source: SfN
The loss and return of consciousness is linked to the same network of brain regions for both sleep and anesthesia, according to new research published in Journal of Neuroscience.
This doesn’t sound good. 😃
The scientists put hundreds of participants through memory and cognitive tasks as well as brain scans, according to the research, published last month in the journal World Psychiatry.
Joseph Firth, the Western Sydney University scientist who led the project, described in a press release how the internet’s design is changing both the structure and abilities of the human brain.
The “limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the Internet encourages us towards constantly holding a divided attention,” said Firth, “which then in turn may decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.”
People born without a corpus callosum do not have a bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres. Neuroscientists from UNIGE have shown how the brain manages to adapt.
One in 4000 people is born without a corpus callosum, a brain structure consisting of neural fibers that are used to transfer information from one hemisphere to the other. A quarter of these individuals do not have any symptoms, while the remainder either have low intelligence quotients or suffer from severe cognitive disorders. In a study published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) discovered that when the neuronal fibers that act as a bridge between the hemispheres are missing, the brain reorganizes itself and creates an impressive number of connections inside each hemisphere. These create more intra-hemispheric connections than in a healthy brain, indicating that plasticity mechanisms are involved. It is thought that these mechanisms enable the brain to compensate for the losses by recreating connections to other brain regions using alternative neural pathways.
The corpus callosum develops in utero between the tenth and twentieth week of gestation. Agenesis of the corpus callosum is a congenital brain malformation in which this brain structure fails to develop, resulting in one out of 4000 babies born without a corpus callosum. When it is missing, nothing replaces this structure measuring about ten centimeters, with the exception of cerebrospinal fluid. This means that the information transmitted from one hemisphere to the other can no longer be conveyed by the neuronal projections from the corpus callosum. “Their role in a healthy brain,” begins Vanessa Siffredi, a researcher in UNIGE’s Faculty of Medicine, “is to ensure the functioning of various cognitive and sensorimotor functions.” Surprisingly, 25% of people with this malformation have no visible signs; 50% have average intelligence quotients and learning difficulties; and the remaining 25% suffer from severe cognitive disorders.
Jason Asbahr.
Reese Jones
New research suggests that electrophysiological brain signals associated with neural plasticity could help explain the rapid, antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine. The findings, European Neuropsychopharmacology, indicate that ketamine could reverse insensitivity to prediction error in depression.
In other words, the drug may help to alleviate depression by making it easier for patients to update their model of reality.
Your dog may be the apple of your eye, but let’s be honest: she is an animal, with her own instincts and idiosyncrasies, and there are going to be times when she makes you want to tear your hair out.
However much you want to, however, new research suggests that you should never yell at or otherwise punish a mischievous mutt.
According to a study released in pre-print last year and now published in PLOS ONE, aversive training such as positive punishment and negative reinforcement can have long-term negative effects on your dog’s mental state.
A Stanford Medicine team used human stem cells to assemble a working nerve circuit connecting brain tissue to muscle tissue. The research could enable scientists to better understand neurological disorders that affect movement.
Consciousness is fundamental, pre-exists our Universe and manifests in everything that we think of as real. A brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that non-local consciousness operates at an “avatar” level during a lifetime. The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream science is still bound by the centuries-old “materialist dogma” and stuck with the “hard problem” of consciousness. If we assume that consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain activity, as some neuroscientists still presume to be true, where does it come from? #consciousness #mind #self #theology #physics
Discussion of the hard problem of consciousness with certain solutions in phenomenology, possibilities of mind-uploading and implications…