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Category: neuroscience

A new form of magnetic brain stimulation rapidly relieved symptoms of severe depression in 90% of participants in a small study conducted by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment. The researchers are optimistic the second trial will prove to be similarly effective in treating people whose condition hasn’t improved with medication, talk therapy or other forms of electromagnetic stimulation.

The treatment is called Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or SAINT. It is a form of , which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of . The researchers reported that the therapy improves on current FDA-approved protocols by increasing the number of magnetic pulses, speeding up the pace of the treatment and targeting the pulses according to each individual’s neurocircuitry.

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The brain is steadily engaged in thought. These internal communications are also usually bombarded with external sensory events. Hence, the impact of the two neuronal processes need to be permanently fine-tuned to avoid their imbalance. A team of scientists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) has now revealed the role of the neurotransmitter serotonin in this mechanism. They discovered that distinct serotonergic receptor types control the gain of both streams of information in a separable manner. Their findings may facilitate new concepts of diagnosis and therapies for neuronal disorders related to malfunction of the serotonin system. The study is published online in the open access journal eLife on 7 April 2020.

Impacting on different streams of information in the brain

Dr. Dirk Jancke, head of the Optical Imaging Group at the Institute of Neural Computation, says, “Imagine sitting with your family at dinner, and a heated debate is going on about how to properly organize some internal affairs. Suddenly, the phone starts ringing; you are picking up while family discussion goes on. In order to understand the calling party correctly, the crowd in the back must speak lower or the caller needs to speak up. Thus, the loudness of each internal background conversation and external call need to be properly adjusted to ensure non-interfered, separable information transfer.” As in this anecdote, comparable processes involve .

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Advanced stages of dementia typically follow a series of muted symptoms patients might mistake for less serious conditions, like stress or sleep deprivation. In fact, according to a new study conducted by researchers from Duke University, many of us evidence one of the premiere red flags associated with the illness almost every day.

“There has been a misperception that financial difficulty may occur only in the late stages of dementia, but this can happen early, and the changes can be subtle,” explained senior author P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS, a professor of psychiatry and geriatrics at Duke University, in a media release.

The new paper, published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, examines the cross-sectional relationship between dementia and financial management skills in the elderly. The strength of the report’s findings highlights how limited the diagnostic scope has been up until very recently.

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New research provides evidence that the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms can affect brain processes related to emotional functioning long after the substance has left one’s body. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, shed new light on the long-term effects of psilocybin.

Rather than examining the brain while it’s under the influence of psilocybin, the researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were interested in the enduring impact of the substance.

“Nearly all psychedelic imaging studies have been conducted during acute effects of psychedelic drugs. While acute effects of psychedelics on the brain are of course incredibly interesting, the enduring effects of psychedelic drugs on brain function have great untapped value in helping us to understand more about the brain, affect, and the treatment of psychiatric disorders,” said Frederick S. Barrett (@FredBarrettPhD), an assistant professor and the corresponding author of the study.

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That vision may have come a step closer after researchers at the University of California, San Francisco demonstrated that they could translate brain signals into complete sentences with error rates as low as three percent, which is below the threshold for professional speech transcription.

While we’ve been able to decode parts of speech from brain signals for around a decade, so far most of the solutions have been a long way from consistently translating intelligible sentences. Last year, researchers used a novel approach that achieved some of the best results so far by using brain signals to animate a simulated vocal tract, but only 70 percent of the words were intelligible.

The key to the improved performance achieved by the authors of the new paper in Nature Neuroscience was their realization that there were strong parallels between translating brain signals to text and machine translation between languages using neural networks, which is now highly accurate for many languages.

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Research involving bowhead whales has suggested that it may one day be possible to extend the human lifespan to 200 years.

From the demigods of Greek mythology to the superheroes of 20th century comic books, we’ve been intrigued by the idea of human enhancement for quite a while, but we’ve also worried about negative consequences. Both in the Greek myths and modern comics and television, each enhanced human has been flawed in some way.

In the area of lifespan enhancement, for instance, Tithonus, though granted eternal life, shrunk and shriveled into a grasshopper, because his immortal girlfriend Eos, forgot to ask Zeus to give him eternal youth. Achilles, while super strong and agile, had a weak spot at the back of his heal, and Superman would lose his power if exposed to “kryptonite”. As for Khan’s people, their physical superiority, both physical and mental, made them overly ambitious, causing a third world war that nearly destroyed humanity in the Star Trek backstory.

Using genetic modification, nanotechnology, bionics, reconstructive surgery, hormones, drugs or any combination of these approaches, real-life human enhancement is looking ever more achievable. As with the fictional examples, the idea of enhancement being a double-edged sword will surely remain part of the discussion. At the same time, though, because enhancement means mastering and manipulating human physiology and the basis of consciousness and self-awareness, the road to enhancement will be paved with advances beneficial to the sick and the disabled. This point must be at center stage when we weigh the pluses and minuses in various enhancement categories, especially physical capability, mental function, and lifespan.

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The implications of split-brain research have been widely debated. Scientists and philosophers have long argued over what is known as the mind-body quandary, the relationship between our mind and the physical brain. Some scientists saw the work of Sperry and others as supporting the notion that the brain operates almost entirely mechanically, and that consciousness, reasoning and free will have almost no effect. But Sperry strongly felt otherwise…

What this meant to Sperry was that free will, and responsibility, were no illusion. “It is possible to see today,” he believed, “an objective, explanatory model of brain function that neither contradicts nor degrades but rather affirms age-old humanist values, ideals, and meaning in human endeavor.”

It’s fair to say that the true significance of the split-brain experiments goes far beyond the significance of the lateralization of the brain; it also points to the immaterial nature of the mind.

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The human cerebral cortex is important for cognition, and it is of interest to see how genetic variants affect its structure. Grasby et al. combined genetic data with brain magnetic resonance imaging from more than 50,000 people to generate a genome-wide analysis of how human genetic variation influences human cortical surface area and thickness. From this analysis, they identified variants associated with cortical structure, some of which affect signaling and gene expression. They observed overlap between genetic loci affecting cortical structure, brain development, and neuropsychiatric disease, and the correlation between these phenotypes is of interest for further study.

Science, this issue p. eaay6690.

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