What is free will? And what are the key elements involved? We provide our own opinions on these questions in this article…
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Category: neuroscience – Page 702
The more people enjoy music, the more similar their brain activity is to that of the musician.
Summary: Researchers report the same subset of neurons encode actual and illusory flow motion, supporting the concept Jan Purkinje proposed 150 years ago, that “illusions contain visual truth”.
Source: SfN.
A study of humans and monkeys published in Journal of Neuroscience has found the same subset of neurons encode actual and illusory complex flow motion. This finding supports, at the level of single neurons, what the Czech scientist Jan Purkinje surmised 150 years ago: “Illusions contain visual truth.”
Microscopy and genetic studies yield a comprehensive map of the nerve cells found in the heart of a rat.
A duo of preclinical studies recently demonstrated a new way to ferry medicines past the blood-brain barrier. And other research is on the way.
A new UC San Francisco study has pinpointed a specific pattern of brain waves that underlies the ability to let go of old, irrelevant learned associations to make way for new updates. The research is the first to directly show that a particular behavior can be dependent on the precise synchronization of high-frequency brain waves in different parts of the brain, and might open a path for developing interventions for certain psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.
How the Brain Resolves Ambiguity
Posted in neuroscience
A new study sheds light on how the brain categorizes ambiguous visual images as faces or hands.
Who has heard of mitochondrial medicine?
“We know that increased rates of mtDNA mutation cause premature aging,” said Bruce Hay, Professor of biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology. “This, coupled with the fact that mutant mtDNA accumulates in key tissues such as neurons and muscle that lose function as we age, suggests that if we could reduce the amount of mutant mtDNA, we could slow or reverse important aspects of aging.”
This brings us to the second major development relevant to mitochondria in disease — that genetic technology is now at a point where the targeted removal of the problem mitochondrial genes can become the basis for clinical intervention. This is the implication of research that Hay and colleagues both at Caltech and the University of California at Los Angeles described in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.
Fixing body tissues by knocking out genes that prevent bad mitochondrial from being ousted in a timely fashion might sound like science fiction, but that’s where things are going and it’s part of a growing trend of what’s being described as mitochondrial medicine.
Using light-activated ion channels to stimulate sensory and motivational pathways, Vetere and colleagues constructed fully artificial memories in mice. Mice preferred or avoided an odor they had never smelled before, depending on the pattern of stimulation.
According to the National Autism Association, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may experience sensory hypersensitivity. A University of Minnesota Medical School researcher recently published an article in Nature Communications that illustrates why that may be true by showing the differences in visual motion perception in ASD are accompanied by weaker neural suppression in the visual cortex of the brain.