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Psychedelics Sync Neurons: A Glimpse into Consciousness & Psychosis - Neuroscience News
“A Polish researcher had observed similar waves after giving rats the anesthetic ketamine. The ketamine was given at a low dose so that the rats were conscious, and the equivalent dose in a human causes psychedelic experiences.
“The waves they saw were in more cognitive regions of the brain than in the rats with Parkinson’s, and the frequency was higher, but that still made us consider whether there were links between the two phenomena.
“Perhaps excessive brain waves in the motor regions of the brain cause motor symptoms, while excessive waves in cognitive regions give cognitive symptoms,” says Pär Halje, researcher in neurophysiology at Lund University.
The research indicated that gluten, when added to the diet of mice, caused inflammation in the hypothalamic region of the brain.
Mice models are deemed valuable for studying human physiology due to similarities in various systems, suggesting potential implications for humans.
While the exact reason for the inflammation is still unknown, one theory suggests that indigestible components of gluten may trigger an immune response similar to that seen in celiac patients.
Repetitive heading may increase risk of cognitive impairment in later life - FA study | Reuters
"... those who recalled that they typically headed the ball 6-15 times in a match were found to be 2.71 times more likely to score below the test threshold in the cognitive status assessment than ... (footballers) who typically headed the ball 0-5 times."
The Brain Works Like a Resonance Chamber - Neuroscience News
“If we could find that the spatial patterns oscillate, this would provide evidence supporting the resonance hypothesis” says Joana Cabral, first author of the study, from the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute of the University of Minho and a visiting scientist in Shemesh’s lab since 2019.
So what the team did was to speed up image acquisition, and they discovered that the signals in distant brain regions actually oscillate together in time.
“These oscillatory patterns look like a higher-dimensional analogue of resonance modes in musical instruments; they are akin to reverberations, to echoes inside the brain”, says Cabral.
“Our data show that the complex spatial patterns are a result of transiently and independently oscillating underlying modes, just like individual instruments participate in creating a more complex piece in an orchestra”, says Shemesh.
Brain ripples may help bind information across the human cortex: Ubiquitous bursts of brain waves appear to synchronize disparate and distant elements of memory, unifying them upon recollection -- ScienceDaily
The UC San Diego team, led by Halgren, found that ripples also occur in all areas of the human cortex, in waking as well as sleep. The ripples were brief, lasting roughly one-tenth of a second, and had a consistent narrow frequency close to 90 cycles per second. The authors calculated that a typical brief ripple event may involve approximately 5,000 small modules becoming active simultaneously, distributed across the cortical surface.
This work is part of the doctoral thesis in neurosciences by first author Charles W. Dickey.
"Remarkably, the ripples co-occurred and synchronized across all lobes and between both hemispheres, even at long distances," said Dickey. "Cortical neurons increased firing during ripples, at the ripple rhythm, potentially supporting interaction between distant locations.
"There were more co-occurrences preceding successful memory recall. All of which suggests that distributed, cortical co-ripples promote the integration of different elements that may comprise a particular experiential memory."
Anesthetic drastically diverts the travels of brain waves -- ScienceDaily
Imagine the conscious brain as a sea roiling with the collisions and dispersals of waves of different sizes and shapes, swirling around and flowing across in many different directions. Now imagine that an ocean liner lumbers through, flattening everything that trails behind with its powerful, parting wake. A new study finds that unconsciousness induced by the commonly used drug propofol has something like that metaphorical effect on higher frequency brain waves, appearing to sweep them aside and, as an apparent consequence, sweeping consciousness away as well.
More alcohol, less brain: Association begins with an average of just one drink a day -- ScienceDaily
But according to a new study, alcohol consumption even at levels most would consider modest -- a few beers or glasses of wine a week -- may also carry risks to the brain. An analysis of data from more than 36,000 adults, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption was associated with reductions in overall brain volume.
The link grew stronger the greater the level of alcohol consumption, the researchers showed. As an example, in 50-year-olds, as average drinking among individuals increases from one alcohol unit (about half a beer) a day to two units (a pint of beer or a glass of wine) there are associated changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Going from two to three alcohol units at the same age was like aging three and a half years. The team reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
Insulin in the brain influences dopamins levels -- ScienceDaily
Analysis of the study showed that the intranasal administration of insulin lowered dopamine levels and led to changes in the brain's network structure. "The study provides direct evidence of how and where in the brain signals triggered after eating -- such as insulin release and the reward system -- interact," said Professor Martin Heni, last author of the study, summarizing the results. "We were able to show that insulin is able to decrease dopamine levels in the striatum in normal-weight individuals. The insulin-dependent change in dopamine levels was also associated with functional connectivity changes in whoe-brain networks. Changes in this system may be an important driver of obesity and related diseases."
A diet of essential amino acids could keep dementia at bay: Consuming Amino LP7, a specific combination of essential amino acids, could inhibit the development of dementia, shows a study from Japan -- ScienceDaily
In a recent study published in Science Advances, Japanese researchers showed that a low protein diet can accelerate brain degeneration in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease. More importantly, they found that Amino LP7 -- a supplement containing seven specific amino acids -- can slow down brain degeneration and dementia development in these animals. Their work expands on previous studies, which have demonstrated the effectiveness of Amino LP7 in improving cognitive function.
Damage to white matter is linked to worse cognitive outcomes after brain injury -- ScienceDaily
The most unexpected aspect of our findings was that damage to gray matter hubs of the brain that are really interconnected with other regions didn't really tell us much about how poorly people would do on cognitive tests after brain damage. On the other hand, people with damage to the densest white matter connections did much worse on those tests," explains Justin Reber, PhD, a UI postdoctoral research fellow in psychology and first author on the study. "This is important because both scientists and clinicians often focus almost exclusively on the role of gray matter. This study is a reminder that connections between brain regions might matter just as much as those regions themselves, if not more so."
Hypnosis changes the way our brain processes information -- ScienceDaily
"In a normal waking state, different brain regions share information with each other, but during hypnosis this process is kind of fractured and the various brain regions are no longer similarly synchronised," describes researcher Henry Railo from the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at the University of Turku.
The finding shows that the brain may function quite differently during hypnosis when compared to a normal waking state. This is interesting because the extent to which hypnosis modifies neural processing has been hotly debated in the field. The new findings also help to better understand which types of changes and mechanisms may explain the experiential and behavioural alterations attributed to hypnosis, such as liability to suggestions.
The study focused on a single person who has been extensively studied earlier and been shown to react strongly to hypnotic suggestions. During hypnosis, this person can experience phenomena that are not typically possible in a normal waking state, such as vivid and controlled hallucinations.
Exercise boosts blood flow to the brain, study finds: The results add to growing evidence that exercise programs may help older adults slow the onset of memory loss and dementia -- ScienceDaily
Scientists have previously shown that lower-than-usual levels of blood flow to the brain, and stiffer blood vessels leading to the brain, are associated with MCI and dementia. Studies have also suggested that regular aerobic exercise may help improve cognition and memory in healthy older adults. However, scientists have not established whether there is a direct link between exercise, stiffer blood vessels, and brain blood flow.
"There is still a lot we don't know about the effects of exercise on cognitive decline later in life," says C. Munro Cullum, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry at UTSW and co-senior author of the study. "MCI and dementia are likely to be influenced by a complex interplay of many factors, and we think that, at least for some people, exercise is one of those factors."
In the study, Zhang, Cullum, and their colleagues followed 70 men and women aged 55 to 80 who had been diagnosed with MCI. Participants underwent cognitive exams, fitness tests, and brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Then they were randomly assigned to either follow a moderate aerobic exercise program or a stretching program for one year. The exercise program involved three to five exercise sessions a week, each with 30-40 minutes of moderate exercise such as a brisk walk.
Brain waves guide us in spotlighting surprises -- ScienceDaily
By measuring thousands of neurons along the surface, or cortex, of the brain in animals as they reacted to predictable and surprising images, the researchers observed that low frequency alpha and beta brain waves, or rhythms, originating in the brain's frontal cognitive regions tamped down neural activity associated with predictable stimuli. That paved the way for neurons in sensory regions in the back of the brain to push forward information associated with unexpected stimuli via higher-frequency gamma waves. The backflow of alpha/beta carrying inhibitory predictions typically channeled through deeper layers of the cortex, while the forward flow of excitatory gamma carrying novel stimuli propagated across superficial layers.
Re-mapping taste in the brain: New study reveals that the cortex -- ScienceDaily
An analysis of the distribution of responses over multiple spatial scales demonstrated that taste representations are distributed across the cortex, with no sign of spatial clustering or topography as would be expected with a map of the gustatory cortex corresponding specific taste sensations.
"Our findings are important because they address one of the basic organizing principles of brain function," explains Dr. Fontanini. "Topographical maps are a pervasive feature of brain organization. Demonstrating that the spatial organization of taste responses is not as simple as previously believed makes us re-evaluate the neurobiological processes underlying taste perception and taste-related brain functions."
Brain benefits of exercise can be gained with a single protein: Findings open door to drugs that could help protect the aging brain -- ScienceDaily
The new study, published July 9, 2020 in Science, showed that after mice exercise, their livers secrete a protein called Gpld1 into the blood. Levels of this protein in the blood correspond to improved cognitive function in aged mice, and a collaboration with the UCSF Memory and Aging Center found that the enzyme is also elevated in the blood of elderly humans who exercise regularly. But the researchers showed that simply increasing the amount of Gpld1 produced by the mouse liver could confer many of the same brain benefits as regular exercise.
Exercise improves memory, boosts blood flow to brain: Study: 1-year workout program shows benefits for older people at risk of dementia -- ScienceDaily
The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, documented changes in long-term memory and cerebral blood flow in 30 participants, each of them 60 or older with memory problems. Half of them underwent 12 months of aerobic exercise training; the rest did only stretching.
The exercise group showed 47 percent improvement in memory scores after one year compared with minimal change in the stretch participants. Brain imaging of the exercise group, taken while they were at rest at the beginning and end of the study, showed increased blood flow into the anterior cingulate cortex and the hippocampus -- neural regions that play important roles in memory function.
An Alcoholic Parent Can Affect How a Child's Brain Switches Tasks - Scientific American
The scans showed that individuals without FHA went through a transient period between the game task and the resting state in which some brain regions—frontal, parietal and visual areas, in particular—reconfigured the way in which they communicated with one another. People with FHA experienced fewer changes—even after the researchers controlled for factors such as age, gender, motion in the fMRI scanner, drinking and depression. “It looks like FHA impacts the mental preparation to switch from performing one task to another,” Amico says. “This could be analogous to the process of clearing the cache of your smartphone when you want it to switch faster between apps. The problem is that this ‘cache-clearing process’ might be impaired in brains with family history of alcoholism.”
In mice, alcohol dependence results in brain-wide remodeling of functional architecture -- ScienceDaily
"The neuroscience of addiction has made tremendous progress, but the focus has always been on a limited number of brain circuits and neurotransmitters, primarily dopaminergic neurons, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex," said senior author Olivier George, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
"Research groups have been fighting for years about whether 'their' brain circuit is the key to addiction. Our results confirm these regions are important, but the fact that we see such a massive remodeling of the functional brain architecture was a real shock. It's like studying the solar system and then discovering that there is an entire universe behind it. It shows that if you really want to understand the neurobiological mechanisms leading to addiction, you can't just look at a handful of brain regions, you need to look at the entire brain, you need to take a step back and consider the whole organ."
George said the findings further undermine the idea that addiction is simply a psychological condition or consequence of lifestyle. "You would be surprised at how prevalent this view remains," he said. "The brain-wide remodeling of the functional architecture observed here is not 'normal.' It is not observed in a naïve animal. It is not observed in an animal that drinks recreationally. It is only observed in animals with a history of alcohol dependence and it is massive. Such a decrease in brain modularity has been observed in numerous brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury and seizure disorders."
Brain modularity is the theory that there are functionally specialized regions in the brain responsible for different, specific cognitive processes. For example, the frontal lobes of the human brain are involved in executive functions, such as reasoning and planning, while the fusiform face area located in the lower rear of the brain is involved in recognizing faces.
Reduced modularity, said George, likely interferes with "normal neuronal activity and information processing and contributes to cognitive impairment, emotional distress and intense craving observed in mice during abstinence from alcohol."
Due to the format of the testing, George said it was not clear if the reduced modularity was permanent. "So far, we only know that it lasts at least one week into abstinence. We have not tested longer durations of abstinence, but it's one of our goals."
Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Gray Matter Volume in the Temporal, Frontal, and Cerebellar Regions in the General Population - Mayo Clinic Proceedings
Volumetric analyses revealed associations of CRF with gray matter (GM) volume and total brain volume. After multivariable adjustment, a 1–standard deviation increase in VO2peak was related to a 5.31 cm³ (95% CI, 3.27 to 7.35 cm³) higher GM volume. Whole-brain voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed significant positive relations between CRF and local GM volumes. The VO2peak was strongly associated with GM volume of the left middle temporal gyrus (228 voxels), the right hippocampal gyrus (146 voxels), the left orbitofrontal cortex (348 voxels), and the bilateral cingulate cortex (68 and 43 voxels).
Why Your Brain Needs Exercise - Scientific American
In fact, a growing body of research suggests that exercise that is cognitively stimulating may indeed benefit the brain more than exercise that does not make such cognitive demands. For example, Gerd Kempermann and his colleagues at the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden in Germany explored this possibility by comparing the growth and survival of new neurons in the mouse hippocampus after exercise alone or after exercise combined with access to a cognitively enriched environment. They found an additive effect: exercise alone was good for the hippocampus, but combining physical activity with cognitive demands in a stimulating environment was even better, leading to even more new neurons. Using the brain during and after exercise seemed to trigger enhanced neuron survival.
Lithium can reverse radiation damage after brain tumor treatment -- ScienceDaily
"We're only just beginning to understand lithium's effects on the brain's ability to repair itself," says Ola Hermanson, researcher at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. "In this study we observed that only irradiated cells are affected by lithium. Healthy cells were left relatively untouched. This is an interesting and promising result."
What your friends' brains look like when they think of you: Your brain patterns are reflected in them, study finds -- ScienceDaily
The fMRI took images of each person's brain while they completed a task similar to the one they did earlier. They rated each of their friends and themselves on 48 traits, including lonely, sad, cold, lazy, overcritical, trustworthy, enthusiastic, clumsy, fashionable, helpful, smart, punctual and nice.
As they expected from previous research, the researchers saw activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain implicated in thinking about the self and close others, as the participants thought about the personality traits of themselves and their friends.
The study found that for each participant, the combined brain activity of their friends evaluating them looked a lot like their own brain activity.
This suggests that order to accurately perceive another person, your neural representation of that person -- your patterns of brain activity for their identity -- has to essentially match the pattern in that persons' brain when they are thinking about themselves, Wagner said.
In Alzheimer's research, scientists reveal brain rhythm role -- ScienceDaily
In 2016, Tsai and colleagues showed that Alzheimer's disease model mice exposed to a light flickering at 40 Hz for an hour a day for a week had significantly less buildup of amyloid and tau proteins in the visual cortex, the brain region that processes sight, than experimental control mice did. Amyloid plaques and tangles of phosphorylated tau are both considered telltale hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.
But the study raised new questions: Could GENUS prevent memory loss? Could it prevent the loss of neurons? Does it reach other areas of the brain? And could other senses be stimulated for beneficial effect?
The new studies addressed those questions. In March, the team reported that sound stimulation reduced amyloid and tau not only in the auditory cortex, but also in the hippocampus, a crucial region for learning and memory. GENUS-exposed mice also performed significantly better on memory tests than unstimulated controls. Simultaneous light and sound, meanwhile, reduced amyloid across the cortex, including the prefrontal cortex, a locus of cognition.
Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing - ScienceBlog.com
Taking advantage of their ability to continuously track the activity of neurons for more than a week, the researchers first confirmed that network dynamics in the visual cortex are robustly tuned to criticality, even across light and dark cycles.
Next, by blocking vision in one eye, the researchers revealed that criticality was severely disrupted, more than a day before the manipulation affected the firing rates of individual neurons.
Twenty-four hours later, criticality re-emerged in the recordings — at which point individual neurons were suppressed by the visual deprivation.
How relapse happens: Opiates reduce the brain's ability to form, maintain synapses: Preclinical research was focused on revealing the molecular mechanisms behind addiction and relapse -- ScienceDaily
In experiments with rodents, the UB team determined that exposure to heroin and morphine reduced drebrin levels in the nucleus accumbens, a key part of the brain's reward pathway.
Synaptic rewiring
The researchers found that opiate exposure causes synaptic rewiring in this part of the brain, as well as a decrease in drenditic spines, the protrusions on neurons that play key roles in neuronal transmission, learning and memory.
"Opiates fundamentally change how the brain communicates with itself," Dietz said.
Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish -- ScienceDaily
The pea-sized brains, called cerebral organoids, are derived from human pluripotent stem cells. By putting them in culture that mimics the environment of brain development, the stem cells differentiate into different types of brain cells and self-organize into a 3D structure resembling the developing human brain.
Scientists have successfully grown organoids with cellular structures similar to those of human brains. However, none of the previous models developed human-like functional neural networks. Networks appear when neurons are mature and become interconnected, and they are essential for most brain activities.
"You can use brain organoids for several things, including understand normal human neurodevelopment, disease modeling, brain evolution, drug screening, and even to inform artificial intelligence," Muotri says.
Muotri and colleagues designed a better procedure to grow stem cells, including optimizing the culture medium formula. These adjustments allowed their organoids to become more mature than previous models. The team grew hundreds of organoids for 10 months and used multi-electrode arrays to monitor their neural activities.
The team began to detect bursts of brain waves from organoids at about two months. The signals were sparse and had the same frequency, a pattern seen in very immature human brains. As the organoids continued to grow, they produced brain waves at different frequencies, and the signals appeared more regularly. This suggests the organoids have further developed their neural networks.
