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Category: neuroscience – Page 689

A light touch: Changing the way we treat traumatic brain injury

Contrary to popular perception, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is not the reserve of car accidents and punishing contact sports; it’s surprisingly common. Up to 50 million new cases of traumatic brain injury are registered each year worldwide. Notably, 80% of TBI occurs in low-to middle-income countries, and it is also the leading cause of death and disability in young adults. Overall, the global economic burden of TBI is estimated at 400 billion USD.

Minimising the devastating effects of TBI doesn’t rely solely on reducing the risk of an injury; it’s also essential to improve treatment after one has happened. For that, physiological real-time monitoring of vital signals is critical. One inventor has made it his mission to create devices that can do this accurately, easily, anywhere, and what’s more, they are also non-invasive.

Professor Arminas Ragauskas is a founder and director of the Health Telematics Science Institute at Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, which develops innovative industrial and physiological measurement and process monitoring technologies. He is particularly known for his work on non-invasive intracranial pressure and cerebral blood flow autoregulation measurement devices. He was also the national coordinator of the CENTER-TBI project, funded by the European Commission and the EU industry, with a budget of 40 million EUR, and focused European efforts to advance the care of patients with traumatic brain injury.

Watch: Scientists create fascinating “brain movies” using neuroimaging data

Have you ever imagined listening to the brain’s activity as it unfolds in real-time? Researchers from Columbia University have pioneered a technique that transforms complex neuroimaging data into a captivating audiovisual experience, akin to watching a movie with a musical soundtrack. This novel approach allows scientists to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the brain’s intricate workings, offering fresh insights into its behavior during various tasks.

The details of their work have been published in the journal PLOS One.

The motivation behind this study stems from a growing challenge in neuroscience: the vast amount of data generated by advanced brain imaging techniques. Technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and wide-field optical mapping (WFOM) capture the dynamic, multi-dimensional activities of the brain, revealing patterns of neurons firing and blood flow changes.

Brain Activity Now Watchable and Listenable

Summary: Researchers developed an innovated a technique to convert complex neuroimaging data into audiovisual formats. By transforming brain activity and blood flow data from behaviors like running or grooming in mice into synchronized piano and violin sounds, accompanied by video, they offer an intuitive approach to explore the brain’s intricate workings.

This method not only makes it easier to identify patterns in large datasets but also enhances the understanding of the dynamic relationship between neuronal activity and behavior. The toolkit represents a significant step forward in neuroscientific research, enabling scientists to intuitively screen and interpret vast amounts of brain data.

A Boost in Dopamine During Adolescence Permanently Amplifies Impulsivity and Aggression

Drugs blocking dopamine transporters may be harmful for healthy teens but helpful for those with pathological dopamine hypofunction.

In a breakthrough finding researchers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center identified a sensitive developmental period during adolescence that impacts adult impulsivity, aggression, and dopamine function in mice.

As organisms grow from embryo to adult, they pass through sensitive time periods where developmental trajectories are influenced by environmental factors. These windows of plasticity often allow organisms to adapt to their surroundings through evolutionarily selected mechanisms.

NASA Sponsored Researcher Suggests It Might Be Possible to Change the Laws of Physics

In an extremely cosmic–brain take, University of Rochester astrophysics professor Adam Frank suggests that a civilization could advance so much that it could eventually tinker with the fundamental laws of physics.

It’s a mind-bending proposition that ventures far beyond the conventional framework of scientific understanding, a reminder that perhaps we should dare to think outside the box — especially as we continue our search for extraterrestrial civilizations.

If a civilization were to be able to change the laws of physics, “the very nature of energy itself, with established rules like energy conservation, would be subject to revision within the scope of engineering,” Frank, who is part of the NASA-sponsored Categorizing Atmospheric Technosignatures program, wrote in an essay for Big Think.

Traumatic Brain Injury Forges New Neural Pathways

Tufts University School of Medicine researchers developed imaging technology that records neuronal activity throughout the brain during the first weeks of recovery. They discovered that a head injury serious enough to affect brain function, such as that caused by a car accident or sudden fall, leads to changes in the brain beyond the site of impact. In an animal model of traumatic brain injury, the researchers found that both hemispheres work together to forge new neural pathways in an attempt to replicate those that were lost.

Their findings are published in Cerebral Cortex in an article titled, “Traumatic brain injury disrupts state-dependent functional cortical connectivity in a mouse model.”

“Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of death in young people and can cause cognitive and motor dysfunction and disruptions in functional connectivity between brain regions,” wrote the researchers. “In human TBI patients and rodent models of TBI, functional connectivity is decreased after injury. Recovery of connectivity after TBI is associated with improved cognition and memory, suggesting an important link between connectivity and functional outcome. We examined widespread alterations in functional connectivity following TBI using simultaneous widefield mesoscale GCaMP7c calcium imaging and electrocorticography (ECoG) in mice injured using the controlled cortical impact (CCI) model of TBI.”