Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience

A supersensitive dopamine detector can help in the early diagnosis of several disorders that result in too much or too little dopamine, according to a group led by Penn State and including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and universities in China and Japan.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that can be used to diagnose disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

“If you can develop a very sensitive, yet simple-to-use and portable, detector that can identify a wide range of dopamine concentration, for instance in sweat, that could help in non-invasive monitoring of an individual’s health,” said Aida Ebrahimi, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State, and a corresponding author on a paper published Aug. 7 in Science Advances.

Read more | >

Just like a nostalgic grandparent flipping through old photo albums, our brains constantly replay memories from past events in our lives as we sleep.

It may seem overly sentimental at first, but our minds aren’t just looking to reminisce and remember the good times. All of that brain activity while dreaming serves to strengthen and preserve existing memories, all while simultaneously finding some room for any new memories we may have made over the previous day.

Those are the main findings from a fascinating new study just released by the University of California, San Diego that investigated neural activity during sleep. The research team at UCSD says that no memory is set in stone within our minds; any memory can be lost, and sleep is when our minds rejuvenate old memories via replay and refine/make room for new memories.

Read more | >

An intriguing new study, from a team of Swiss researchers, has revealed neural activity during REM sleep in a particular region of the brain known to affect appetite and feeding behaviors significantly influences waking eating patterns.

Despite a hefty volume of robust study, REM sleep is still a mysterious and unique sleep phase. Named after the rapid eye movements that occur in all mammals during this sleep phase, it has also been referred to as paradoxical sleep, due to the strange similarity in brain activity between waking states and REM sleep.

The new research homed in on a brain region called the lateral hypothalamus. This tiny brain region, found in all mammals, is known to play a fundamental role in food intake, compulsive behavior, and a number of other physiological processes.

Read more | >

It’s also worth noting that some water already naturally contains low amounts of lithium. And in research published last week in The British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists from a cohort of U.K. universities identified a link that naturally-present lithium and lower suicide rates.

Therefore, they suggest, more lives could be saved by putting the drug in high-risk communities’ water supplies.

“In these unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent increase in the incidence of mental health conditions, accessing ways to improve community mental health and reduce the incidence of anxiety, depression and suicide is ever more important,” Anjum Memon, lead author and epidemiology chair at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said in a press release.

Read more | >

“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems.” –Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs

Why It’s Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel’s neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year.

Read more | >

Consuming a single dose of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca can result in lasting changes in higher-order cognitive brain networks, according to a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Ayahuasca, a concoction used for centuries by indigenous Amazon tribes, contains the powerful psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors. The brew is typically prepared using leaves from the Psychotria viridis shrub and the bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.

The new neuroimaging research suggests that ayahuasca may produce long-lasting effects on mood by altering the functional connectivity of the brain’s salience and default mode networks.

Read more | >

With these new findings scientists can potentially better understand the subtle changes that can occur in genes and brain circuits that can lead to mental health disorders such as anxiety and autism spectrum disorders.

Although physically very different, research has found that the brains of flies, mice and humans are similar in how they form and how they function. Data has shown that the that underlie the brain development of insects and mammals are very similar but this can be interpreted in two different ways, where some believe it provides evidence of one single ancestor for both mammals and insects and others think it could support the theory that brains evolved multiple times independently.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this collaborative study between King’s College London, University of Arizona, University of Leuven and Leibniz Institute DSMZ has provided strong evidence that the mechanisms that regulate genetic activity required for the formation of brain areas important to control behavior, is the same for insects and mammals.

Read more | >

Our brains have an upper limit on how much they can process at once due to a constant but limited energy supply, according to a new UCL study using a brain imaging method that measures cellular metabolism.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that paying attention can change how the brain allocates its limited energy; as the brain uses more energy in processing what we attend to, less energy is supplied to processing outside our attention focus.

Explaining the research, senior author Professor Nilli Lavie (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience) said: It takes a lot of energy to run the human brain. We know that the brain constantly uses around 20% of our metabolic energy, even while we rest our mind, and yet it’s widely believed that this constant but limited supply of energy does not increase when there is more for our mind to process.

Read more | >

SAN CARLOS, Calif., Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — ZAP Surgical Systems, Inc. today announced an agreement with Bonifatius Hospital in Lingen, Germany to acquire ZAP-X® stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) technology.

SRS is a well-known and effective procedure for non-invasively treating select brain tumors and brain metastases. However, significant acquisition and radiation shielding costs of historical SRS systems have limited widespread access to this potentially life-saving therapy. Consequently, scarce availability of SRS treatment has remained heavily concentrated in large urban hospitals.

Read more | >