After a year of lockdown, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly, or remember what happened when. Neuroscientists and behavioural experts explain why.
Category: neuroscience – Page 701
The reality is Benny and Josh both have Canavan disease, a fatal inherited brain disorder. They are buckled into wheelchairs, don’t speak, and can’t control their limbs.
On Thursday, April 8, in Dayton, Ohio, Landsman and his family rolled the older boy, Benny, into a hospital where over several hours, neurosurgeons drilled bore holes into his skull and injected trillions of viral particles carrying the correct version of a gene his body is missing.
Controversy has shrouded the once-common plasticizer BPA since studies started to highlight its links to a whole range of adverse health effects in humans, but recent research has also shown that its substitutes mightn’t be all that safe either. A new study has investigated how these compounds impact nerve cells in the adult brain, with the authors finding that they likely permanently disrupt signal transmission, and also interfere with neural circuits involved in perception.
BPA, or bisphenol A, is a chemical that has been commonly used in food, beverage and other types of packaging for decades, but experts have grown increasingly concerned that it can leech into these consumables and impact human health in ways ranging from endocrine dysfunction to cancer. This came on the back of scientific studies revealing such links dating back to the 1990s, which in turn saw the rise of “BPA-free” plastics as a safer alternative.
One of those alternatives is bisphenol S (BPS), and while it allows plastic manufacturers to slap a BPA-free label on their packaging, more and more research is demonstrating that it mightn’t be much better for us. As just one example, a study last year showed through experiments on mice that just like BPA, BPS can alter the expression of genes in the placenta and likely fundamentally disrupt fetal brain development.
A recent study explored whether working memory training can reduce anxiety associated with a particular stressor — exam time. While working memory training did not appear to reduce test anxiety among students, perceived success during the training tasks did. The findings were published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.
People who suffer from anxiety show deficits in working memory function. Working memory is a brain system that allows us to hold on to certain information and use it to guide our decisions and behavior. Scholars have found evidence to suggest that interventions that improve working memory also improve anxiety symptoms.
Little is known about how motivation might affect the success of working memory training on anxiety reduction. The authors of the new study elected to explore this topic among a sample of college students experiencing a particularly stressful season of the academic year — exam time.
Inverse spoke to Andrew Schwartz, a University of Pittsburgh neurobiologist who helped pioneer BCI technology — and he says that Neuralink seems to be bragging about things that scientists, himself included, could do decades ago.
Neuralink made a huge production out of something researchers have been able to do for decades.
In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, a team led by USC Stem Cell scientist Michael Bonaguidi, Ph.D., demonstrates that neural stem cells—the stem cells of the nervous system—age rapidly.
“There is chronological aging, and there is biological aging, and they are not the same thing,” said Bonaguidi, an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Gerontology and Biomedical Engineering at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “We’re interested in the biological aging of neural stem cells, which are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of time. This has implications for the normal cognitive decline that most of us experience as we grow older, as well as for dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and brain injury.”
In the study, first author Albina Ibrayeva, a Ph.D. candidate in the Bonaguidi Lab in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, joined her colleagues in looking at the brains of young, middle-aged and old mice.
The researchers managed to do this by detecting a failure in the immune system of the brain which can be used against the deadly cancer.
Elon Musk’s brain-chip Neuralink company is working on technology that could improve the lives of those with paralysis.
Aging is maleable and can be intervened to slow down and even reverse it.
Several experiments in animal models have shown that certain gene therapies as well as interventions via partial cellular reprograming can significantly extend healthspan and lifespan in mice and other model organisms.
An article published on December 30, 2020 in Fortune magazine, reaches the following conclusions:
* Without treatments to slow or reverse aspects of biological aging, an aging population means we are in for a health care cost tsunami.
* The most exciting opportunity for such an improvement in health productivity is to understand and address the biology of aging.
* There is promising scientific research on reversing aspects of aging, some of which is not far from clinical application.
* While all this research represents thrilling progress, we invest far too little in research that could help us go further in understanding and treating aging.
World leaders, like anyone else, mostly die of age related diseases which in the end means dying of aging itself.
Let’s bring world leaders to the quest of solving aging.
Links of interest:
“Cracking the code of biological aging could solve America’s health care crisis”. https://fortune.com/2020/12/30/anti-aging-research-health-care-spending-biden/
“Reversing aging: We can turn back cognitive decline in mice. Will the same techniques work on humans?”. https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2021/02/17/reversing-agin…on-humans/
Neuralink, co-founded by Elon Musk in 2016, has revealed a macaque with chips embedded on each side of its brain, playing a mind-controlled version of the 1972 video game, Pong.
Although established in 2016, Neuralink remained secretive about its work until July 2019, when Musk presented his concept for a new brain–machine interface (BMI). Not only would this help physically diseased or injured people, Musk believed it could also treat mental illness – and even be used by healthy individuals who might wish to enhance themselves.
A prototype in August 2020 demonstrated the Neuralink technology in a pig. This coin-sized chip, featuring a read/write link, contained 1024 channels with a wireless megabit data rate and all-day battery life. Brain signals conveying the pig’s sense of smell could be seen in real time. The FDA had by then approved it as a breakthrough device, allowing use in limited human trials under the US federal guidelines for testing medical devices.