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Category: neuroscience – Page 683

History tells us that games are an inseparable facet of humanity, and mainly for good reasons. Advocates of video games laud their pros: they help develop problem-solving skills, socialize, relieve stress, and exercise the mind and body—all at the same time! However, games also have a dark side: the potential for addiction. The explosive growth of the video game industry has spawned all sorts of games targeting different groups of people. This includes digital adaptations of popular board games like chess, but also extends to gambling-type games like online casinos and betting on horse races. While virtually all engaging forms of entertainment lend themselves to addictive behavior under specific circumstances, some video games are more commonly associated with addiction than others. But what exactly makes these games so potentially addictive?

This is a difficult question to answer because it deals directly with aspects of the human , and the inner workings of the mind are mostly a mystery. However, there may be a way to answer it by leveraging what we do know about the physical world and its laws. At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, Professor Hiroyuki Iida and colleagues have been pioneering a methodology called “motion in mind” that could help us understand what draws us towards games and makes us want to keep reaching for the console.

Their approach is centered around modeling the underlying mechanisms that operate in the mind when playing games through an analogy with actual physical models of motion. For example, the concepts of potential energy, forces, and momentum from are considered to be analogous to objective and/or subjective -related aspects, including pacing of the game, randomness, and fairness. In their latest study published in IEEE Access, Professor Iida and Assistant Professor Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid, also from JAIST, linked their “motion in mind” model with the concepts of engagement and addiction in various types of games from the perceived experience of the player and their behaviors.

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Tokyo (AFP)

Paralysed from the neck down, the man stares intently at a screen. As he imagines handwriting letters, they appear before him as typed text thanks to a new brain implant.

The 65-year-old is “typing” at a speed similar to his peers tapping on a smartphone, using a device that could one day help paralysed people communicate quickly and easily.

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As researchers learn more about the brain, it has become clear that responsive neurostimulation is becoming increasingly effective at probing neural circuit function and treating neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. But current approaches to designing a fully implantable and biocompatible device able to make such interventions have major limitations: their resolution isn’t high enough and most require large, bulky components that make implantation difficult with risk of complications.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Dion Khodagholy, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has come up with a new approach that shows great promise to improve such devices. Building on their earlier work to develop smaller, more efficient conformable bioelectronic transistors and materials, the researchers orchestrated their devices to create implantable circuits that enable allow reading and manipulation of brain circuits. Their multiplex-then-amplify (MTA) system requires only one amplifier per multiplexer, in contrast to that need an equal number of amplifiers as number of channels.

“It is critical to be able to detect and intervene to treat brain-disorder-related symptoms, such as epileptic seizures, in real time,” said Khodagholy, a leader in bio-and neuroelectronics design. “Not only is our system much smaller and more flexible than current devices, but it also enables simultaneous stimulation of arbitrary waveforms on multiple independent channels, so it is much more versatile.

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As the digital revolution has now become mainstream, quantum computing and quantum communication are rising in the consciousness of the field. The enhanced measurement technologies enabled by quantum phenomena, and the possibility of scientific progress using new methods, are of particular interest to researchers around the world.

Recently two researchers at Tampere University, Assistant Professor Robert Fickler and Doctoral Researcher Markus Hiekkamäki, demonstrated that two– interference can be controlled in a near-perfect way using the spatial shape of the photon. Their findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.

“Our report shows how a complex light-shaping method can be used to make two quanta of light interfere with each other in a novel and easily tuneable way,” explains Markus Hiekkamäki.

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Stress management.

Everyone faces stress occasionally, whether in school, at work, or during a global pandemic. However, some cannot cope as well as others. In a few cases, the cause is genetic. In humans, mutations in the OPHN1 gene cause a rare X-linked disease that includes poor stress tolerance. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Linda Van Aelst seeks to understand factors that cause specific individuals to respond poorly to stress. She and her lab studied the mouse gene Ophn1, an analog of the human gene, which plays a critical role in developing brain cell connections, memories, and stress tolerance. When Ophn1 was removed in a specific part of the brain, mice expressed depression-like helpless behaviors. The researchers found three ways to reverse this effect.

To test for stress, the researchers put mice into a two-room cage with a door in between. Normal mice escape from the room that gives them a light shock on their feet. But animals lacking Ophn1 sit helplessly in that room without trying to leave. Van Aelst wanted to figure out why.

Her lab developed a way to delete the Ophn1 gene in different brain regions. They found that removing Ophn1 from the prelimbic region of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), an area known to influence behavioral responses and emotion, induced the helpless phenotype. Then the team figured out which brain circuit was disrupted by deleting Ophn1, creating overactivity in the brain region and ultimately the helpless phenotype.

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Autistic people tend to switch between images more slowly than non-autistic people do, a previous study shows. And they spend more time seeing a combination of the two images.

Children with genetic conditions linked to autism perform atypically on a test of binocular rivalry, according to a new unpublished study.

Researchers presented the work virtually today at the 2021 International Society for Autism Research annual meetin g. (Links to abstracts may work only for registered conference attendees.)

Binocular rivalry is what happens when a person’s eyes each receive a different input. Most people gradually shift between perceiving one image and then the other as their eyes compete for dominance over the neural circuits involved.

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After doubling its sample size, the largest study of genetic data from autistic people has identified 255 genes associated with the condition, an increase of more than 40 genes since the researchers’ 2019 update; 71 of the genes rise above a stringent statistical bar the team had not previously used. The new analysis also adds data from people with developmental delay or schizophrenia and considers multiple types of mutations.

“It’s a really significant step forward in what we do,” said Kyle Satterstrom, a computational biologist in Mark Daly’s lab at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Satterstrom presented the findings virtually on Tuesday at the 2021 International Society for Autism Research annual meeting. (Links to abstracts may work only for registered conference attendees.)

The team’s previous analyses used data from the Autism Sequencing Consortium, which enrolls families through their doctors. The researchers mainly scoured the genetic data to find rare, non-inherited mutations linked to autism.

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