Lifeboat Foundation

We’ve all been there. Moments after leaving a party, your brain is suddenly filled with intrusive thoughts about what others were thinking. “Did they think I talked too much?” “Did my joke offend them?” “Were they having a good time?”

In a new Northwestern Medicine study, scientists sought to better understand how humans evolved to become so skilled at thinking about what’s happening in other peoples’ minds. The findings could have implications for one day treating psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression.

Continue reading “Overthinking what you said? It’s your ‘lizard brain’ talking to newer, advanced parts of your brain” »

While it’s well known that sleep enhances cognitive performance, the underlying neural mechanisms, particularly those related to nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, remain largely unexplored. A new study by a team of researchers at Rice University and Houston Methodist’s Center for Neural Systems Restoration and Weill Cornell Medical College, coordinated by Rice’s Valentin Dragoi, has nonetheless uncovered a key mechanism by which sleep enhances neuronal and behavioral performance, potentially changing our fundamental understanding of how sleep boosts brainpower.

The research, published in Science, reveals how NREM sleep—the lighter sleep one experiences when taking a nap, for example—fosters brain synchronization and enhances information encoding, shedding new light on this sleep stage. The researchers replicated these effects through invasive stimulation, suggesting promising possibilities for future neuromodulation therapies in humans. The implications of this discovery potentially pave the way for innovative treatments for sleep disorders and even methods to enhance cognitive and behavioral performance.

The investigation involved an examination of the neural activity in multiple brain areas in macaques while the animals performed a visual discrimination task before and after a 30-minute period of NREM sleep. Using multielectrode arrays, the researchers recorded the activity of thousands of neurons across three brain areas: the primary and midlevel visual cortices and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which are associated with visual processing and executive functions. To confirm that the macaques were in NREM sleep, researchers used polysomnography to monitor their brain and muscle activity alongside video analysis to ensure their eyes were closed and their bodies relaxed.

New research published by scientists at Kessler Foundation provides critical insights into the role of sleep in motor learning for individuals recovering from traumatic brain injury (TBI). The study sheds light on how sleep, specifically a short nap, influences brain activity associated with motor skill improvement, with implications for optimizing rehabilitation strategies.

The article, “Neural mechanisms associated with sleep-dependent enhancement of motor learning after brain injury”, was published in the Journal of Sleep Research. The study was led by Kessler Foundation researchers Anthony H. Lequerica, Ph.D., with additional authors Tien T. Tong, Ph.D., Paige Rusnock, Kai Sucich, Nancy Chiaravalloti, Ph.D., Ekaterina Dobryakova, Ph.D., and Matthew R. Ebben, Ph.D., and Patrick Chau, from Weill Cornell Medicine, New York.

The study involved 32 individuals with TBI, randomly assigned to either a sleep or wake group following training on a motor task. The sleep group had a 45-minute nap, while the wake group remained awake, watching a documentary.

In a recent publication in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Professor Frank Van Overwalle, from the Brain, Body and Cognition research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), sheds light on the often-overlooked role of the cerebellum in both motor and social-cognitive processes. His research contributes to a growing shift in the field of neuroscience, which has traditionally focused on the cerebrum.

For decades, the cerebellum was primarily associated with motor coordination. “People with cerebellar abnormalities often experience motor issues,” Van Overwalle explains. “For example, they struggle to smoothly touch their nose with a finger. These difficulties highlight the cerebellum’s essential role in refining motor movements.”

However, Van Overwalle’s research extends beyond motor functions, exploring the cerebellum’s involvement in social and cognitive abilities. His findings reveal that abnormalities in the cerebellum not only lead to motor deficits but are also linked to emotional and behavioral disorders. He references research on individuals with autism, demonstrating how non-invasive brain stimulation techniques like magnetic stimulation can improve social task performance.

Associative learning was always thought to be regulated by the cortex of the cerebellum, often referred to as the “little brain.” However, new research from a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Erasmus MC, and Champalimaud Center for the Unknown reveals that the nuclei of the cerebellum actually make a surprising contribution to this learning process.

If a teacup is steaming, you’ll wait a bit longer before drinking from it. And if your fingers get caught in the door, you’ll be more careful next time. These are forms of associative learning, where a positive or negative experience leads to learning behavior. We know that our cerebellum is important in this form of learning. But how exactly does this work?

To investigate this issue, an international team of researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal, consisting of Robin Broersen, Catarina Albergaria, Daniela Carulli, with Megan Carey, Cathrin Canto and Chris de Zeeuw as senior authors, looked at the cerebellum of mice. The work has been published in Nature Communications.

Nestled at the back of your head, the cerebellum is a brain structure that plays a pivotal role in how we learn, adapting our actions based on past experiences. Yet the precise ways in which this learning happens are still being defined.

A study led by a team at the Champalimaud Foundation brings new clarity to this debate, with a serendipitous finding of so-called “zombie neurons.” These neurons, alive but functionally altered, have helped to advance our understanding of the cerebellum’s critical teaching signals.

The word “cerebellum” means “little brain,” despite the fact that it holds more than half the brain’s neurons. It is essential for coordinating movements and balance, helping you perform everyday tasks smoothly, like walking down a crowded street, or playing sports. It is also crucial for the learning process that allows you to associate sensory cues with specific actions.

Visual systems of both humans and animals can detect life motion from the environment at the earliest stage of visual processing, research by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) uncovered.

Jointly led by scientists from the CAS Institute of Psychology and CAS Institute of Biophysics, the study also highlighted the critical role of the superior colliculus (SC) in the perception of biological motion (BM) signals, suggesting a cross-species mechanism for processing BM early in the visual stream.

Results of the study were published in Nature Communications on Nov. 7, titled “Detecting biological motion signals in human and monkey superior colliculus: a subcortical-cortical pathway for biological motion perception.”

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have uncovered a brain circuit in primates that rapidly detects faces. The findings help not only explain how primates sense and recognize faces, but could also have implications for understanding conditions such as autism, where face detection and recognition are often impaired from early childhood.

The newly discovered circuit first engages an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain called the superior colliculus, which can then trigger the eyes and head to turn for a better look. This better view enables different brain areas in the temporal cortex to engage in more complex facial recognition. The study was published in the journal Neuron.

“Quick recognition of faces is a key skill in humans and other primates,” said Richard Krauzlis, Ph.D., of NIH’s National Eye Institute (NEI) and senior author of the study.

Biological motion refers to the kinesthetic information of living beings (i.e., humans and animals). The ability of biological motion perception is crucial for the organism’s survival and social interaction. Biological motion contains multidimensional attributes, including physical, biological and social attributes. How does our brain extract each attribute from multidimensional biological motion stimuli, and what is the relationship between the processing of different attributes?

A research team led by Prof. Jiang Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of multidimensional biological motion attributes in the human brain. They used point-light displays as test stimuli, in which only the movement trajectories of a person’s major joints are represented by a set of dots. They systematically manipulated three attributes of biological motion: walking direction, gender, and emotional state.

Using multiple regression representation similarity analysis (RSA), the researchers identified the brain networks involved in the processing of these three attributes. The brain areas that encode the walking direction attribute are mainly located in the dorsal cortical areas, those that represent the gender attribute are located in the frontal and temporal lobes, and the neural representations of the emotional state attribute widely involve the dorsal and ventral cortical areas.