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Category: neuroscience – Page 690

Space Station Astronauts Stay Fit With Floating Badminton Match

If you had a few hundred experiments to manage during your days in space, how would you blow off steam in your spare time?

A badminton match was the activity of choice for International Space Station astronauts and spaceflight participants during the holidays. You can catch a short video of the activities of several crew members of Expedition 66 below; make sure to rotate it so you can watch the crew members working in 360 degrees.

The module they are using is the Japanese Kibo module, which is a common location for crews to conduct press conferences. The Kibo module also has a little more space for physical activities than some of the other ones, especially since there are no laptops or delicate experiments crowding the walls.

Space agencies around the world ask their astronauts to exercise for about 90 minutes to two hours a day, which does everything from keeping their bones and muscles secure for Earth living again, to providing mental well-being.

While the match was all in good fun, professional astronauts have a long-term goal of studying medicine on the International Space Station, both to prepare for long-duration missions to the moon and also to help seniors on Earth.

Full Story:

Researchers Identify Biomarker for Depression and Antidepressant Response

Summary: Researchers have identified a novel biomarker for depression and antidepressant response. The biomarker can be identified and monitored through blood samples.

Source: University of Illinois.

Researchers are one step closer to developing a blood test that provides a simple biochemical hallmark for depression and reveals the efficacy of drug therapy in individual patients.

In Brain Waves, Scientists See Neurons Juggle Possible Futures

Decisions, decisions. All of us are constantly faced with conscious and unconscious choices. Not just about what to wear, what to eat or how to spend a weekend, but about which hand to use when picking up a pencil, or whether to shift our weight in a chair. To make even trivial decisions, our brains sift through a pile of “what ifs” and weigh the hypotheticals. Even for choices that seem automatic—jumping out of the way of a speeding car, for instance—the brain can very quickly extrapolate from past experiences to make predictions and guide behavior.

In a paper published in January 2020, in Cell, a team of researchers in California peered into the brains of rats on the cusp of making a decision and watched their neurons rapidly play out the competing choices available to them. The mechanism they described might underlie not just decision-making, but also animals’ ability to envision more abstract possibilities—something akin to imagination.

The group, led by the neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, investigated the activity of cells in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped brain region known to play crucial roles both in navigation and in the storage and retrieval of memories. They gave extra attention to neurons called place cells, nicknamed “the brain’s GPS” because they mentally map an animal’s location as it moves through space.

2021 in Review: Unsupervised Brain Models

We’re in a golden age of merging AI and neuroscience. No longer tied to conventional publication venues with year-long turnaround times, our field is moving at record speed. As 2021 draws to a close, I wanted to take some time to zoom out and review a recent trend in neuro-AI, the move toward unsupervised learning to explain representations in different brain areasfootnote.

One of the most robust findings in neuro-AI is that artificial neural networks trained to perform ecologically relevant tasks match single neurons and ensemble signals in the brain. The canonical example is the ventral stream, where DNNs trained for object recognition on ImageNet match representations in IT (Khaligh-Razavi & Kriegeskorte, 2014, Yamins et al. 2014). Supervised, task-optimized networks link two important forms of explanation: ecological relevance and accounting for neural activity. They answer the teleological question: what is a brain region for?

However, as Jess Thompson points out, these are far from the only forms of explanation. In particular, task-optimized networks are generally not considered biologically plausible. Conventional ImageNet training uses 1M images. For a human infant to get this level of supervision, they would have to receive a new supervised label every 5 seconds (e.g. the parent points at a duck and says “duck”) for 3 hours a day, for more than a year. And for a non-human primate or a mouse? Thus, the search for biologically plausible networks which match the human brain is still on.

Neuroscientists uncover a sensory “gateway” in the brain

The anterior insular cortex requires more understanding in its role for human cognition and consciousness. But the next time you notice a cyclist who came out of nowhere or a dog that’s about to round the corner, you can thank your anterior insular cortex for it.

INVERSE is counting down the 20 science discoveries that made us say “WTF” in 2021. This is #2. Read the original story here.

Yale scientists restore cellular function in 32 dead pig brains

As a control, other brains received either a fake solution or no solution at all. None revived brain activity and deteriorated as normal.

The researchers hope the technology can enhance our ability to study the brain and its cellular functions. One of the main avenues of such studies would be brain disorders and diseases. This could point the way to developing new of treatments for the likes of brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and neurodegenerative conditions.

As we have long suspected: Evidence for Mycelial intelligence

“The fungus in these experiments showed spatial recognition, memory and intelligence. It’s a conscious organism.”

Article: https://psyche.co/ideas/the-fungal-mind-on-the-evidence-for-…telligence.
(Clickable links at PaulStamets.com)

Nicholas P Money is a professor of biology and Western programme director at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

(See also my book wherein I postulated that mycelium has a consciousness: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.)

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878614621000246

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