Tag • #neuroscience

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The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors?

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 17 June - 11:30

The science of epigenetics suggests we can pass on trauma – but trust and compassion too

Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.

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Electrical brain stimulation can ease heartbreak, study finds

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 16 June - 12:28

Researchers say transcranial direct-current stimulation can reduce ‘love trauma syndrome’

Breaking up, as the Neil Sedaka hit goes, is hard to do. The emotional pain of a romantic split can be so severe it has its own clinical name – love trauma syndrome, or LTS.

But help could be at hand for those seeking to mend a broken heart. Research shows wearing a £400 headset for just a few minutes a day may ease the misery, negativity and depression that can accompany a failed relationship.

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The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 2 April - 04:00 · 1 minute

New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

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Keep winning tennis? You may see more images per second

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 1 April - 18:27

Elite athletes and professional gamers may have higher than average visual temporal resolution, scientists say

If you have wondered why your partner always beats you at tennis or one child always crushes the other at Fortnite, it seems there is more to it than pure physical ability.

Some people are effectively able to see more “images per second” than others, research suggests, meaning they’re innately better at spotting or tracking fast-moving objects such as tennis balls.

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Smartphone app could help detect early-onset dementia cause, study finds

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 1 April - 15:00

App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at risk

A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.

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‘Everybody has a breaking point’: how the climate crisis affects our brains

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 27 March - 05:00 · 1 minute

Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?

In late October 2012, a category 3 hurricane howled into New York City with a force that would etch its name into the annals of history . Superstorm Sandy transformed the city, inflicting more than $60bn in damage, killing dozens, and forcing 6,500 patients to be evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes. Yet in the case of one cognitive neuroscientist, the storm presented, darkly, an opportunity.

Yoko Nomura had found herself at the centre of a natural experiment. Prior to the hurricane’s unexpected visit, Nomura – who teaches in the psychology department at Queens College, CUNY, as well as in the psychiatry department of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – had meticulously assembled a research cohort of hundreds of expectant New York mothers. Her investigation, the Stress in Pregnancy study , had aimed since 2009 to explore the potential imprint of prenatal stress on the unborn. Drawing on the evolving field of epigenetics, Nomura had sought to understand the ways in which environmental stressors could spur changes in gene expression, the likes of which were already known to influence the risk of specific childhood neurobehavioural outcomes such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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Researchers force two mice to hang out and induce FOMO in a third

Ars Contributors · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 14 May, 2021 - 20:24 · 1 minute

Researchers force two mice to hang out and induce FOMO in a third

Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey )

Since its advent in 2005, a technique called optogenetics has made it vastly easier to link neural activity with behavior and to understand how neurons and brain regions are connected to each other. Neuroscientists just pick the (animal) neurons they’re interested in, genetically engineer them to express a light-responsive protein, and then stimulate them with the right type of light. This technique can be used to inhibit or excite a select subset of neurons in living, breathing, moving animals, illuminating which neural networks dictate the animals' behaviors and decisions.

Taking advantage of work done in miniaturizing the optogenetic hardware, researchers have now used optogenetics to alter the activity in parts of the brain that influence social interactions in mice. And they’ve exerted a disturbing level of control over the way the mice interact.

Going small

A big limitation for early optogenetic studies was that the wires and optical fibers required to get light into an animal’s brain also get in the animals’ way, impeding their movements and potentially skewing results. Newer implantable wireless devices were developed about five years ago, but they can only be placed near certain brain regions. They're also too tiny to accommodate many circuit components and receiver antennas, and they have to be programmed beforehand. Pity the poor would-be mind controllers who have to deal with such limited tools.

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Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing

John Timmer · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 12 May, 2021 - 17:03

Enlarge / An artist's schematic of the system. (credit: Nature)

Elon Musk's Neuralink has been making waves on the technology side of neural implants, but it hasn't yet shown how we might actually use implants. For now, demonstrating the promise of implants remains in the hands of the academic community.

This week, the academic community provided a rather impressive example of the promise of neural implants. Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand.

Dreaming is doing

Previous attempts at providing typing capabilities to paralyzed people via implants have involved giving subjects a virtual keyboard and letting them maneuver a cursor with their mind. The process is effective but slow, and it requires the user's full attention, as the subject has to track the progress of the cursor and determine when to perform the equivalent of a key press. It also requires the user to spend the time to learn how to control the system.

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A new way to plug a human brain into a computer: Via veins

WIRED · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Saturday, 31 October, 2020 - 12:10 · 1 minute

Enlarge / human brain, motherboards, chip and artificial intelligence concept and neural tech and brain computer interfaces.

The hard part of connecting a gooey, thinking brain to a cold, one-ing and zero-ing computer is getting information through your thick skull—or mine, or anyone’s. The whole point of a skull, after all, is keeping a brain safely separate from [waves hands at everything].

So if that brain isn’t yours, the only way to tell what’s going on inside it is inference. People make very educated guesses based on what that brain tells a body to do—like, if the body makes some noises that you can understand (that’s speech) or moves around in a recognizable way. That’s a problem for people trying to understand how the brain works, and an even bigger problem for people who because of injury or illness can’t move or speak. Sophisticated imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance can give you some clues. But it’d be great to have something more direct. For decades, technologists have been trying to get brains to interface with computer keyboards or robot arms, to get meat to commune with silicon.

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