Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 935

Cutting calories by 15% may help protect us against age-related diseases, suggests a new report of a landmark calorie restriction trial with adults. [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

The landmark CALERIE study reports that cutting calories by 15 percent slows down an aging metabolism and may help protect against age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, cancer and other ailments. The researchers published their results on March 22 in the journal Cell Metabolism.

The researchers found that calorie restriction decreased systemic oxidative stress, one of the nine hallmarks of aging linked to age-related diseases.

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How can we help educate the general public?

___ Why you shouldn’t bother with memory or brain health supplements (Consumer Reports): The signs of memory loss can be bewildering and scary: misplaced keys, a forgotten street name, that task you suddenly can’t remember. It’s no wonder that, according to the Nutrition Business Journal, sales of supplements touted.

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A new study has confirmed that humankind’s capacity for love and friendship sets us apart from all other species. Researchers at University of Virginia have found that humans are hardwired to empathize with those close to them at a neural level.

Interestingly, the ability to put yourselves in another person’s shoes depends drastically on whether the person is a stranger or someone you know. The study titled “Familiarity Promotes the Blurring of Self and Other in the Neural Representation of Threat” appears in the August issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscien ce.

According to researchers, the human brain puts strangers in one bin and the people we know in another compartment. People in your social network literally become entwined with your sense of self at a neural level. “With familiarity, other people become part of ourselves,” said James Coan, a psychology professor in University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences who used functional magnetic resonance imaging brain (fMRI) scans to find that people closely correlate people to whom they are attached to themselves.

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The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath. But still, they were useful for studying some of the most dramatic brain disorders, like the microcephaly caused by the Zika virus.

Then they started growing up. The simple spheres matured into 3D structures, fusing with other types of brain balls and sparking with electricity. The more like real brains they became, the more useful they were for studying complex behaviors and neurological diseases beyond the reach of animal models. And now, in their most human act yet, they’re starting to bleed.

Neural organoids don’t yet, even remotely, resemble adult brains; developmentally, they’re just pushing second trimester tissue organization. But the way Ben Waldau sees it, brain balls might be the best chance his stroke patients have at making a full recovery—and a homegrown blood supply is a big step toward that far-off goal. A blood supply carries oxygen and nutrients, allowing brain balls to grow bigger, complex networks of tissues, those that a doctor could someday use to shore up malfunctioning neurons.

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Coming soon: Advanced brain monitoring “while subjects make natural movements, including head nodding, stretching, drinking and playing a ball game.”

Credit: University of Nottingham ___ This Brain Scanner Is Way Smaller Than fMRI but Somehow 1,000% Creepier (Gizmodo): “It may look like something befitting Halloween’s Michael Myers, but the device pictured above is actually a breakthrough in neuroscience—a portable, wearable brain scanner that can monitor neural.

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In summary — “I am cautiously optimistic about the promise of tDCS; cognitive training paired with tDCS specifically could lead to improvements in attention and memory for people of all ages and make some huge changes in society. Maybe we could help to stave off cognitive decline in older adults or enhance cognitive skills, such as focus, in people such as airline pilots or soldiers, who need it the most. Still, I am happy to report that we have at least moved on from torpedo fish” smile

In 47 CE, Scri­bo­nius Largus, court physi­cian to the Roman emper­or Claudius, described in his Com­po­si­tiones a method for treat­ing chron­ic migraines: place tor­pe­do fish on the scalps of patients to ease their pain with elec­tric shocks. Largus was on the right path; our brains are com­prised of elec­tri­cal sig­nals that influ­ence how brain cells com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and in turn affect cog­ni­tive process­es such as mem­o­ry, emo­tion and attention.

The sci­ence of brain stim­u­la­tion – alter­ing elec­tri­cal sig­nals in the brain – has, need­less to say, changed in the past 2,000 years. Today we have a hand­ful of tran­scra­nial direct cur­rent stim­u­la­tion (tDCS) devices that deliv­er con­stant, low cur­rent to spe­cif­ic regions of the brain through elec­trodes on the scalp, for users rang­ing from online video-gamers to pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes and peo­ple with depres­sion. Yet cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tists are still work­ing to under­stand just how much we can influ­ence brain sig­nals and improve cog­ni­tion with these techniques.

Brain stim­u­la­tion by tDCS is non-inva­sive and inex­pen­sive. Some sci­en­tists think it increas­es the like­li­hood that neu­rons will fire, alter­ing neur­al con­nec­tions and poten­tial­ly improv­ing the cog­ni­tive skills asso­ci­at­ed with spe­cif­ic brain regions. Neur­al net­works asso­ci­at­ed with atten­tion con­trol can be tar­get­ed to improve focus in peo­ple with atten­tion deficit-hyper­ac­tiv­i­ty dis­or­der (ADHD). Or peo­ple who have a hard time remem­ber­ing shop­ping lists and phone num­bers might like to tar­get brain areas asso­ci­at­ed with short-term (also known as work­ing) mem­o­ry in order to enhance this cog­ni­tive process. How­ev­er, the effects of tDCS are incon­clu­sive across a wide body of peer-reviewed stud­ies, par­tic­u­lar­ly after a sin­gle ses­sion. In fact, some experts ques­tion whether enough elec­tri­cal stim­u­la­tion from the tech­nique is pass­ing through the scalp into the brain to alter con­nec­tions between brain cells at all.

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