Summary: Findings shed light on how plastic and stable neural populations are able to co-exist in the brain.
Source: University of Cambridge.
Our brains are highly skilled at learning patterns in the world and making sense of them. The brain continually learns and adapts throughout our lives, and even the neurons supporting learned behaviors, such as the daily walk to work, are constantly changing.
Supplement companies often market nootropics like they’re some kind of new scientific discovery. However, human beings have been using nootropics to boost mental performance for millennia. What’s different now is that scientists actually understand how nootropics work, and which ones have synergistic interactions with each other.
This new understanding is what helped TruBrain create Brain Food.
Brain Food is a nutritional supplement that has been methodically engineered by TruBrain’s team of scientists to create the biological conditions necessary for peak cognitive performance. Like a lot of other nootropic supplements, Brain Food contains the so-called “everyman stack” of caffeine and l-theanine, a combo humans have been taking for thousands of years in the form of green tea.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine say that they were able to treat depression in patients by stimulating their brains with magnets.
In a study published on Friday 0, the researchers found that nearly 80 percent of patients had experienced remission of their depression after the procedure, which is called Stanford neuromodulation therapy (SNT). The technique is a modified form of transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and works by delivering high doses of magnetic pulses into a patient’s brain with a device containing magnetic coils placed outside of their skull.
The treatment takes just five days and is customized to each patient based on an MRI scan which shortens the typical timeline of rTMS treatment from a span of weeks into days.
Pager, a nine year old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink.
Want to monitor the brain of a running tiger?
First, catch the tiger.
Then attach Bio-FlatScope, the latest iteration of lensless microscopy being developed at Rice University.
That particular use is fanciful but not far-fetched, according to Jacob Robinson, an electrical and computer engineer at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering who led the recent effort to test Bio-FlatScope in living creatures.
NIH-funded study identifies brain cells that form boundaries between discrete events.
Researchers have identified two types of cells in our brains that are involved in organizing discrete memories based on when they occurred. This finding improves our understanding of how the human brain forms memories and could have implications in memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and published in Nature Neuroscience.
“This work is transformative in how the researchers studied the way the human brain thinks,” said Jim Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the NIH BRAIN Initiative. “It brings to human neuroscience an approach used previously in non-human primates and rodents by recording directly from neurons that are generating thoughts.”
One of the especially promising therapies to appear in the realm of anti-aging research involves a set of molecules known as Yamanaka factors, which scientists have deployed to rejuvenate aging cells, trigger muscle regeneration and tackle glaucoma. New research at the Salk Institute has sought to build on these short-term and specific use cases by demonstrating how these molecules can reverse signs of aging in middle-aged and elderly mice, with no evidence of health problems following the extended treatment.
The Yamanaka factors at the center of this study are a set of four reprogramming molecules that can reset the molecular clock found in the cells of the body. They do so by returning unique patterns of chemicals known as epigenetic markers, which evolve through aging, to their original states.
This approach has been used to convert adult cells back into stem cells, that can then differentiate into different cell types. The Salk Institute team has previously used the approach to reverse signs of aging in mice with a premature aging disease, and improve the function of tissues found in the heart and brain. Separately, Stanford University scientists last year used the technique to give elderly mice the muscle strength of younger mice.
A scientist opens a laptop in front of a patient. On screen, a boy, tied to a fleet of balloons, fades in. As he rises into the air, the scene cuts abruptly to an office, where a man sits in front of his boss. A question then appears: “Was anyone in the video wearing a tie?”
Jie Zheng, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, had flown to Los Angeles to show the video to this patient, who has a severe seizure disorder. Like with the 18 other patients who were part of the study, neurosurgeons had placed electrodes in the patient’s brain to pinpoint what had been causing their seizures. Zheng and a group of scientists in a federally funded BRAIN Initiative consortium used this opportune moment to find neurons involved in the creation of memories. While subjects watched clips from movies and answered questions that tested their memory of the videos, the electrical activity of their brains was monitored.
Over three years, the work — a collaboration between researchers at Cedars-Sinai in L.A., Boston Children’s, and the University of Toronto — led to the discovery of two new groups of brain cells: boundary and event cells. The researchers theorized that these neurons are involved in cleaving experiences into distinct events that humans can better remember. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, may pave the way for new treatments for memory disorders, the authors said.
One group of mice received regular doses of the Yamanaka factors from the time they were 15 months old until 22 months, approximately equivalent to age 50 through 70 in humans. Another group was treated from 12 through 22 months, approximately age 35 to 70 in humans. And a third group was treated for just one month at age 25 months, similar to age 80 in humans.
LA JOLLA—(March 7, 2022) Age may be just a number, but it’s a number that often carries unwanted side effects, from brittle bones and weaker muscles to increased risks of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute, in collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, have shown that they can safely and effectively reverse the aging process in middle-aged and elderly mice by partially resetting their cells to more youthful states.
“We are elated that we can use this approach across the life span to slow down aging in normal animals. The technique is both safe and effective in mice,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, co-corresponding author and a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory. “In addition to tackling age-related diseases, this approach may provide the biomedical community with a new tool to restore tissue and organismal health by improving cell function and resilience in different disease situations, such as neurodegenerative diseases.”