Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience

While our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy.

The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with “fine” or “good.” But if someone followed up about a specific event — “How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?” — suddenly, we refine our “good” or “fine” responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.

In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re “good” but feel awful about how the meeting went. How then could we be “good” overall? Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its predictions of it.

Enter quantum cognition : A team of researchers has determined that while our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy. In quantum physics, examining a particle’s state changes the state of the particle — so too, the “observation effect” influences how we think about the idea we are considering.

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We take a somewhat humorous look at the messaging and the comfort stories people tell themselves to distract themselves from seeing why age-related diseases and dying from them is a problem that needs solving.

Here’s what might be considered a paradox: right now, the Facebook page of Death Cafe—a place where you go to talk about death—is a rather lively place, whereas pages about life extension are comparatively rather dead places. This screenshot shows the activity of a Death Cafe post:

There is no doubt that the subscribers of the Death Cafe page are quite engaged, but if the average message that the page aims at conveying is the same as in the text snippet above, then there is no paradox at all. The core of that message is “don’t worry, death is nothing to fear” (which, incidentally, implies you don’t have to engage in any extra effort to prevent death), whereas the core message of a life extension page is, “death is a problem, but hey—with some effort, we can beat it. Maybe.” That’s a bit like a kiosk giving candy away for free right next to another kiosk that first serves you overcooked broccoli and then says that you might get a nice present decades from now, assuming that you work hard enough for it—where do you think most people would flock to? Exactly.

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Bottle feeding infants is associated with left-handedness, according to a new study.

The study finds that the prevalence of left-handedness is lower among breastfed infants as compared to bottle-fed infants. The researchers identified this finding in about 60,000 mother-infant pairs and they accounted for known risk factors for handedness.

The results provide further insight into the development of complex brain functions which ultimately determine which side of the batter box the infant likely will choose.

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Intracranial hemorrhage can be a devastating complication associated with needle biopsies of the brain. Hemorrhage can occur to vessels located adjacent to the biopsy needle as tissue is aspirated into the needle and removed. No intraoperative technology exists to reliably identify blood vessels that are at risk of damage. To address this problem, we developed an “imaging needle” that can visualize nearby blood vessels in real time. The imaging needle contains a miniaturized optical coherence tomography probe that allows differentiation of blood flow and tissue. In 11 patients, we were able to intraoperatively detect blood vessels (diameter, 500 μm) with a sensitivity of 91.2% and a specificity of 97.7%. This is the first reported use of an optical coherence tomography needle probe in human brain in vivo. These results suggest that imaging needles may serve as a valuable tool in a range of neurosurgical needle interventions.

Stereotactic brain biopsies are a minimally invasive procedure used to obtain samples of intracranial tissue for diagnostic purposes, most commonly related to brain tumors. Approximately 80,000 new cases of primary brain tumor are diagnosed, and 14,000 brain biopsies are performed each year in the United States (1, 2). Hemorrhage is the most frequent and devastating complication associated with this procedure. Perioperative hemorrhage is associated with rates of transient and permanent morbidity of 1.7 to 8.5% and 1.4 to 4.8%, respectively, and mortality rates of 0.6 to 2.8% (3–7).

The standard clinical practice is to identify blood vessels at risk of injury on preoperative imaging, using either contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or x-ray computed tomography. Frameless stereotactic navigation techniques, guided by preoperative imaging, are then used to direct the biopsy needle trajectory to sample the target lesion, while avoiding vasculature or eloquent brain tissue (8).

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Two Nature papers show that it is possible to make T cells that target some of the few neoantigens expressed by glioblastomas and that T- cell responses can be boosted in cancers. This News & Views discusses the findings.

Clinical trials reveal that personalized vaccines can boost immune-cell responses to brain tumours that don’t usually respond to immunotherapy. The findings also point to how to improve such treatments. Personalized vaccines boost immune responses targeting brain tumours.

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In a new #Stanford study explaining the cellular mechanisms behind cognitive impairment from chemotherapy, scientists have demonstrated that a widely used chemotherapy drug, #methotrexate, causes a complex set of problems in three major cell types within the brain’s white matter. The study also identifies a potential remedy.

In a new study explaining the cellular mechanisms behind cognitive impairment from chemotherapy, scientists have demonstrated that a widely used chemotherapy drug, methotrexate, causes a complex set of problems in three major cell types within the brain’s white matter. The study also identifies a potential remedy.

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By the time he was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, Luke Simons, now 83, had already watched his wife and his longtime business partner struggle with cancer. His wife had chemo for her breast cancer 20 years ago. His business partner with multiple myeloma died 5 years ago. “I was obviously aware of what it could do,” he says of cancer. And of chemo, “my God, that can be just horrible what that can do to you.”

As soon as he got the diagnosis, Simons’ doctor at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (where his wife is on the board) told him about how president Jimmy Carter’s metastatic melanoma had just become undetectable after taking Merck’s new drug Keytruda, which enables a person’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. The doctor gave Simons the option of Keytruda, and he took it.

After his first dose, Simons developed pneumonitis, which he aptly describes as a “fever in my lungs,” that made his doctor question whether to continue the treatment. He did, and the cancer that had spread to Simons’ brain and pancreas is not showing up on scans, three years later.

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A new study has discovered that patients with high blood pressure and abnormalities in the periventricular white matter in the brain showed signs of cognitive impairment despite taking medication to lower their blood pressure.

High blood pressure has been linked to an increased risk for dementia, but what’s unclear is what kinds of subtle negative changes take place in the brain that may affect cognitive function, according to researchers. Finding new ways to detect minor types of cognitive impairment may help determine who is at risk for early-stage dementia, they noted.

In the study, researchers looked at 345 men and women with a median age of 65 who had high blood pressure.

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