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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.
#synchronize #brain #music #fMRI - neurosciencenews.com

Loneliness alters your brain's social network: Feeling disconnected from others is reflected by how the brain represents relationships -- ScienceDaily

Thinking about someone from each category corresponded to a different activity pattern in the mPFC: one for the self, one for the social network (both friends and acquaintances), and one for celebrities. The closer the relationship, the more the pattern resembled the pattern seen when thinking about the self. These brain patterns differed for lonelier individuals. Activity related to thinking about the self was more different from activity related to thinking about others, while the activity from thinking about others was more similar across social categories. In other words, lonelier people have a "lonelier" neural representation of their relationships.
#networks #fMRI #socializing #solitude - sciencedaily.com

Two-person-together MRI scans on couples investigates how touching is perceived in the brain: An MRI in each other's arms shows how physical contact alters the brains of couples -- ScienceDaily

"During social interaction, people's brains are literally synchronised. The associated mental imitation of other people's movements is probably one of the basic mechanisms of social interaction. The new technology now developed will provide totally new opportunities for studying the brain mechanisms of social interaction," says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from Turku PET Centre.
#synchronize #fMRI - sciencedaily.com

Study locates brain areas for understanding metaphors in healthy and schizophrenic people -- ScienceDaily

They found that compared to controls, the patient group showed increased brain activity in certain areas, but lower brain activity in others. For example, the healthy group showed brain activation in the prefrontal cortex (near the front of the brain) and left amygdala (at the centre of the brain, near the top of the brain stem), implying that these are the brain areas where metaphors are normally processed. Instead, schizophrenia patients showed a decreased activation in the temporal suculus (an area ascending from the low central brain towards the back of the head). Researcher Martin Jáni, from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland said: "Previous researchers studied brain areas that are connected to impaired metaphor understanding in schizophrenia, so comparing metaphors with literal statements. However, by adding the absurd punchline, we were able to explore the stage at which the deficit occurs. We also used everyday metaphors, which would be easily understood.
#fMRI #metaphors #schizophrenia - sciencedaily.com

Memories are strengthened via brainwaves produced during sleep, new study shows: Researchers use medical imaging to map areas involved in recalling learned information while we slumber -- ScienceDaily

The researchers found that during spindles of the learning night, the regions of the brain that were instrumental in processing faces were reactivated. They also observed that the regions in the brain involved in memory -- especially the hippocampus -- were more active during spindles in the subjects who remembered the task better after sleep. This reactivation during sleep spindles of the regions involved in learning and memory "falls in line with the theory that during sleep, you are strengthening memories by transferring information from the hippocampus to the regions of the cortex that are important for the consolidation of that specific type of information," he says.
#synchronize #brain #memory #fMRI #eeg - sciencedaily.com

Train your brain, change your brain - ScienceBlog.com

With this technique, the magnetic resonance equipment helps individuals to have access to their own brain activity in real time and quickly gain control over it. Thirty-six healthy subjects participated in the study in which the goal was to increase the activity of brain regions involved in hand movements. However, instead of actually move their hand, participants were asked to only imagine the movement, in total rest. Nineteen of them received the real brain training and the remaining seventeen were trained with placebo neurofeedback, for comparisons purposes. Immediately before and after the brain training, which lasted around 30 minutes, their neural networks were scanned in order to investigate the impact of the neurofeedback (or placebo) on brain wiring and communication, also known as structural and functional connectivity, respectively. The results show that the corpus callosum – the major cerebral bridge that connects the right and left hemispheres – exhibited increased integrity, and the neural network controlling the movements of the body became strengthened. It seems that the whole system became more robust. Likewise, the training also had a positive impact on the default mode network, a brain network which is impaired after stroke, Parkinson’s and depression, for example. These changes were not observed in the control group.
#depression #fMRI #plasticity #biofeedback #corpus-callosum - scienceblog.com

A new way by which the human brain marks time: Novel findings may further understanding of age-related dementia -- ScienceDaily

In the UCI study, participants sat with their heads inside a high-resolution fMRI scanner while watching the TV show and then viewing still frames from the episode, one at a time. The researchers found that when subjects had more precise answers to questions about what time certain events occurred, they activated a brain network involving the lateral entorhinal cortex and the perirhinal cortex. The team had previously shown that these regions, which surround the hippocampus, are associated with memories of objects or items but not their spatial location. Until now, little had been known about how this network might process and store information about time. "The field of neuroscience has focused extensively on understanding how we encode and store information about space, but time has always been a mystery," said Yassa, a professor of neurobiology & behavior. "This study and the Moser team's study represent the first cross-species evidence for a potential role of the lateral entorhinal cortex in storing and retrieving information about when experiences happen." "Space and time have always been intricately linked, and the common wisdom in our field was that the mechanisms involved in one probably supported the other as well," added Maria Montchal, a graduate student in Yassa's lab who led the research. "But our results suggest otherwise."
#memory #hippocampus #fMRI - sciencedaily.com

Brains of people with schizophrenia-related disorders aren't all the same: New study supports the use of a data-driven approach to identify novel biomarkers -- ScienceDaily

"We know that, on average, people with schizophrenia have more social impairment than people in the general population," says senior author Dr. Aristotle Voineskos in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. "But we needed to take an agnostic approach and let the data tell us what the brain-behavioural profiles of our study participants looked like. It turned out that the relationship between brain function and social behaviour had nothing to do with conventional diagnostic categories in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)." Most brain research in the mental health field compares a disease group to a non-disease or "healthy" group to search for biomarkers, a biological measure of mental health symptoms. This search for biomarkers has been elusive. This multi-site research study -- which included 179 participants recruited at CAMH in Toronto, Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore -- calls that paradigm into question because people with the same mental illness may not show the same biological patterns. The study, which involved participants completing a facial imitation task while undergoing functional MRI brain scans, found three "activation profiles," says first author Dr. Colin Hawco, also of CAMH. These can be described as typical, over-activated and de-activated profiles.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #brain #fMRI #schizophrenia #socializing #dsm #biomarkers - sciencedaily.com

MRI technique shows unique signatures of concussion in rugby players -- ScienceDaily

The authors point out that there is growing evidence of persistent changes in the brain that last well beyond clinical recovery and clearance to return to play. This study confirmed those findings showing clear brain changes in both structure and function that persisted six-months after injury. They also showed that these persistent brain changes related to concussion history, even in healthy athletes. "We were able to show evidence of prior concussion history through this method," said Menon who is also a scientist at Robarts Research Institute and the director of the Western Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping. "This component correlates directly with the number of previous concussions that an athlete has had. This hasn't been shown before."
#brain #fMRI #concussions - sciencedaily.com

Your Brain on Imagination: It's a Lot Like Reality - Neuroscience News

For the study, 68 healthy participants were trained to associate a sound with an uncomfortable, but not painful, electric shock. Then, they were divided into three groups and either exposed to the same threatening sound, asked to “play the sound in their head,” or asked to imagine pleasant bird and rain sounds – all without experiencing further shocks. The researchers measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Sensors on the skin measured how the body responded. In the groups that imagined and heard the threatening sounds, brain activity was remarkably similar, with the auditory cortex (which processes sound), the nucleus accumens (which processes fear) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (associated with risk and aversion) all lighting up. After repeated exposure without the accompanying shock, the subjects in both the real and imagined threat groups experienced what is known as “extinction,” where the formerly fear-inducing stimulus no longer ignited a fear response.
#anxiety #fMRI #CBT - neurosciencenews.com

Editing Consciousness: How Bereaved People Control Their Thoughts Without Knowing It - Neuroscience News

HomeArtificial Intelligence Editing Consciousness: How Bereaved People Control Their Thoughts Without Knowing It Neuroscience NewsDecember 10, 2018 Artificial Intelligencedeep learningFeaturedmachine learningNeuroscienceneurotechOpen Neuroscience ArticlesPsychology7 min read Summary: Using machine learning to analyze fMRI brain scans of grieving people, researchers shed light on how unconscious suppression occurs. Source: Columbia University. People who are grieving a major loss, such as the death of a spouse or a child, use different coping mechanisms to carry on with their lives. Psychologists have been able to track different approaches, which can reflect different clinical outcomes. One approach that is not usually successful is avoidant grief, a state in which people suffering from grief show marked, effortful, repeated, and often unsuccessful attempts to stop themselves from thinking about their loss. While researchers have shown that avoidant grievers consciously monitor their external environment in order to avoid reminders of their loss, no one has yet been able to show whether these grievers also monitor their mental state unconsciously, trying to block any thoughts of loss from rising to their conscious state. A new collaborative study between Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center published online December 7 in SCAN: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience demonstrates that avoidant grievers do unconsciously monitor and block the contents of their mind-wandering, a discovery that could lead to more effective psychiatric treatment for bereaved people. The researchers, who studied 29 bereaved subjects, are the first to show how this unconscious thought suppression occurs. They tracked ongoing processes of mental control as loss-related thoughts came in and out of conscious awareness during a 10-minute period of mind-wandering. Co-directed by Paul Sajda, professor of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and radiology, and John J. Mann, Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology), the researchers used a new approach to track the interactions between mental processes: a machine-learning approach to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) called “neural decoding,” which establishes a neural pattern or fingerprint that can be used to determine when a given mental process is happening. “The major challenge of our study was to be able ‘look under the hood’ of a person’s natural mind-wandering state to see what underlying processes were actually controlling their experience,” says Noam Schneck, lead author of the study, a postdoctoral fellow in Sajda’s lab and now assistant professor of clinical medical psychology (in psychiatry) at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry/ New York State Psychiatric Institute. “No one has done this kind of work before, showing this type of consistent control of one mental process–thinking about loss–by another–selective attention–as it happens spontaneously and unconsciously. These findings are significant because they open the door to building a fuller picture of the unconscious mind. We know that the experiences we have arise as a combination of constantly interacting networks. Now we have shown this interaction as it happens naturalistically as well as the way it controls experiences.” The team recorded fMRI from people who had lost a first-degree relative (a spouse or partner) within the last 14 months. The subjects performed a modified Stroop task, a test widely used in psychology to measure a person’s ability to control the contents of attention, and a separate task presenting pictures and stories of the deceased. Using machine learning, the team then trained respective neural fingerprints for attentional control based on the Stroop task and mental representation of the deceased based on the pictures and stories. The team observed spontaneous fluctuations in these processes that occurred during a neutral mind-wandering fMRI task. They discovered that those with more avoidant grief engaged their attentional control process to block representations of the deceased from conscious awareness. The brain networks respectively involved in controlling attention towards the deceased (red) and representing the deceased (blue). During a 10-minute period of mind-wandering, avoidant grievers engaged the control network to block representations activated in the representation network from reaching consciousness. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Noam Schneck/Columbia Engineering. “Our findings show that avoidant grief involves attentional control to reduce the likelihood that deceased-related representations reach full conscious awareness,” says Schneck. “Even though they are not aware of it, avoidant grievers actively control their mental state so that spontaneous thoughts of loss do not enter their consciousness. This kind of tailoring of mind-wandering likely exhausts mental energy and leads to time periods when the thoughts actually do break through. It is like an ineffective pop-up blocker that runs in the background of your computer. You might not be aware that it’s there but it slows down the overall operating speed and eventually breaks down and the pop ups get through.” The researchers suggest that one treatment goal for avoidant grievers may be to relax the conscious and unconscious mental controls that they maintain over their thinking of the loss. Since this control and monitoring happens outside of conscious awareness, this would be challenging to do, but training in mindfulness and acceptance may help some people relax both their conscious and unconscious mental controls.
#fMRI #death #grief #avoidance #denial - neurosciencenews.com

Regret is a gambler's curse, neuroscientists say: After placing a bet, gamblers' thought processes focus on regret about past bets -- ScienceDaily

"Right after making a choice and right before finding out about the outcome, the brain is replaying and revisiting nearly every feature of what happened during the previous decision," said senior author Ming Hsu, an associate professor in the Haas School of Business and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. "Instead of 'I just gambled but maybe I shouldn't have,' it is, 'Last round I gambled and that was a really good choice.' Or, 'I played it safe last time but should have gone for it.'"
#fMRI #prefrontal-cortex #loss #gambling - sciencedaily.com

Breakthrough brain research could yield new treatments for depression -- ScienceDaily

According to Shanechi, for clinical practitioners, a powerful decoding tool would provide the means to clearly delineate, in real time, the network of brain regions that support emotional behavior. "Our goal is to create a technology that helps clinicians obtain a more accurate map of what is happening in a depressed brain at a particular moment in time and a way to understand what the brain signal is telling us about mood. This will allow us to obtain a more objective assessment of mood over time to guide the course of treatment for a given patient," Shanechi said. "For example, if we know the mood at a given time, we can use it to decide whether or how electrical stimulation should be delivered to the brain at that moment to regulate unhealthy, debilitating extremes of emotion. This technology opens the possibility of new personalized therapies for neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety for millions who are not responsive to traditional treatments."
#depression #connectome #fMRI #metaphors - sciencedaily.com

Brain folding provides researchers with an accurate marker to predict psychosis -- ScienceDaily

The researchers looked specifically at the structural relationship in the brain determined by the way that the brain is folded inside the skull, also known as gyrification. "The human brain is not the largest of the mammals -- elephants and dolphins have larger brains than we do, but our brain is much more folded than other species' brains, and that is because it is the most economical way to send signals across a constantly busy system," said Dr. Palaniyappan, noting that this folding pattern is mostly developed by the time a person is two years old.
#psychosis #fMRI #gyrification - sciencedaily.com

Towards greater MRI sensitivity by harnessing quantum hyperpolarization -- ScienceDaily

"The superconducting magnets that produce these fields are also the reason MRI scanners cost millions of dollars, as the magnets need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures," Professor Hollenberg said. "Clearly a disruptive approach is needed, so we look to using quantum technology to produce a greater signal intensity of certain molecular targets at the atomic level."
#fMRI - sciencedaily.com

How would the brain process alien music? -- ScienceDaily

In language and music, dependencies are conceptual threads that bind two things together. Non-local dependencies bind non-adjacent items. For example, in pop music, the second instance of a verse, following a chorus, would have a non-local dependency with the first instance of the verse. Experientially, it is clear to us that we are hearing a sequence that we have heard before. According to Cheung, composers use such devices to build up our expectations and elicit strong emotional responses to the music. But how does the brain recognize these patterns and what does this have to do with Paul Broca?
#synchronize #music #fMRI - sciencedaily.com

Towards an unconscious neural reinforcement intervention for common fears -- ScienceDaily

That is, these researchers can tell if a participant's brain is 'unconsciously' thinking of a snake (which happens every now and then without our awareness), based on images acquired using conventional fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging, a measurement available in many hospitals). By giving the participant a small amount of monetary reward whenever this happens, the snake is thus associated with a positive feeling, thereby eventually becomes less frightening and unpleasant.
#fMRI #emotion #theranostics - sciencedaily.com

OCD treatment could someday start with a brain scan -- ScienceDaily

Using a functional MRI machine, or fMRI, the researchers scanned the brains of 42 people with OCD, ages 18 to 60, before and after four weeks of intensive, daily cognitive behavioral therapy. Researchers specifically analyzed how different areas of the brain activate in sync with each other -- a property called functional connectivity -- during a period of rest. Functional MRI does this by measuring blood flow in the brain, which correlates with neurons' activity levels. In addition, the scientists assessed the severity of participants' OCD symptoms before and after the treatment, using a scaled system in which a lower score indicates less severe or less frequent symptoms.
#stress #fMRI #CBT - sciencedaily.com

Do You Believe It? Verbal Suggestions Influence the Clinical and Neural Effects of Escitalopram in Social Anxiety Disorder: A Randomized Trial - EBioMedicine

Using truthful or deceiving verbal instructions, we tested how expectancies influence SSRI efficacy in social anxiety disorder. The number of responders was more than three times higher after open administration of escitalopram 20 mg compared to covert administration of the drug presented as “active placebo” in a cover story. Correct vs. incorrect information about the SSRI also yielded different neural changes in brain areas involved in emotion-cognition interactions.
#medicalindustrialcomplex #placebo #fMRI #SSRI - ebiomedicine.com

Neurofeedback shows promise in treating tinnitus -- ScienceDaily

The participants then participated in the fMRI-neurofeedback training phase while inside the MRI scanner. They received white noise through their earplugs and were able to view the activity in their primary auditory cortex as a bar on a screen. Each fMRI-neurofeedback training run contained eight blocks separated into a 30-second "relax" period followed by a 30-second "lower" period. Participants were instructed to watch the bar during the relax period and actively attempt to lower it by decreasing primary auditory cortex activity during the lower phase. The researchers gave the participants techniques to help them do this, such as trying to divert attention from sound to other sensations like touch and sight. "Many focused on breathing because it gave them a feeling of control," Dr. Sherwood said. "By diverting their attention away from sound, the participants' auditory cortex activity went down, and the signal we were measuring also went down." A control group of nine individuals were provided sham neurofeedback -- they performed the same tasks as the other group, but the feedback came not from them but from a random participant. By performing the exact same procedures with both groups using either real or sham neurofeedback, the researchers were able to distinguish the effect of real neurofeedback on control of the primary auditory cortex. The study represents the first time fMRI-neurofeedback training has been applied to demonstrate that there is a significant relationship between control of the primary auditory cortex and attentional processes. This is important to therapeutic development, Sherwood said, as the neural mechanisms of tinnitus are unknown but likely related to attention.
#fMRI #tinnitus #neurofeedback - sciencedaily.com

Brains of one-handed people suggest new organization theory -- ScienceDaily

"We found that the traditional hand area" -- which, Makin notes, takes up a rather sizable portion of the brain -- "gets used up by a multitude of body parts in congenital one-handers. Interestingly, these body parts that get to benefit from increased representation in the freed-up brain territory are those used by the one-handers in daily life to substitute for their missing-hand function -- say when having to open a bottle of water." Whether Makin's theory on brain organization corresponding to function instead of body parts pans out or not, the findings reveal remarkable brain plasticity. Her hope is to find a way to encourage the brain to represent and control artificial body parts, such as a prosthetic arm, using the brain area that would have controlled the missing hand.
#brain #fMRI #plasticity - sciencedaily.com

The brain's spontaneous activity and its psychopathological symptoms - "Spatiotemporal binding and integration". - PubMed - NCBI

I here suggest to conceive the brain's spontaneous activity in spatiotemporal terms that is, by various mechanisms that are based on its spatial, i.e., functional connectivity, and temporal, i.e., fluctuations in different frequencies, features. I here point out two such spatiotemporal mechanisms, i.e., "spatiotemporal binding and integration". Alterations in the resting state's spatial and temporal features lead to abnormal "spatiotemporal binding and integration" which results in abnormal contents in cognition as in the various psychopathological symptoms. This, together with concrete empirical evidence, is demonstrated in depression and schizophrenia.
#depression #synchronize #connectome #fMRI #waves - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future : Nature Communications

Here we tested the hypotheses that the hippocampus retrieves representations of the topological structure of the environment when new paths are entered in order to support goal-directed navigation and the lateral PFC performs path-planning via a BFS mechanism. We combined a graph-theoretic analysis of the city streets of London with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from participants navigating a film simulation of London’s streets. Our analysis reveals that the right posterior hippocampus specifically tracks the changes in the local connections in the street network, the right anterior hippocampus tracks changes in the global properties of the streets and the bilateral lateral prefrontal activity scales with the demands of a BFS. These responses were only present when long-term memory of the environment was required to guide navigation.
#memory #paleopsychiatry #maps #hippocampus #fMRI #london - nature.com

The Human Connectome Project: 180 zones per hemisphere

The researchers report that they’ve found a total of 180 distinct areas per hemisphere, regions which are bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography.
#paleopsychiatry #psychosis #connectome #fMRI - extremetech.com

Groundbreaking fMRI study finds 4 distinct neurological subtypes of depression - ExtremeTech

We found that, superimposed on this shared pathological core, distinct patterns of abnormal functional connectivity differentiated the four biotypes and were associated with specific clinical-symptom profiles. For example, as compared to controls, reduced connectivity in frontoamygdala networks, which regulate fear-related behavior and reappraisal of negative emotional stimuli, was most severe in biotypes 1 and 4, which were characterized in part by increased anxiety. By contrast, hyperconnectivity in thalamic and frontostriatal networks, which support reward processing, adaptive motor control and action initiation, were especially pronounced in biotypes 3 and 4 and were associated with increased anhedonia and psychomotor retardation. And reduced connectivity in anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal areas supporting motivation and incentive-salience evaluation was most severe in biotypes 1 and 2, which were characterized partly by increased anergia and fatigue.
#depression #paleopsychiatry #anxiety #fMRI #amygdala #neurotypes #limbic - extremetech.com

Perceptually relevant remapping of human somatotopy in 24 hours. - PubMed - NCBI

Experience-dependent reorganisation of functional maps in the cerebral cortex is well described in the primary sensory cortices. However, there is relatively little evidence for such cortical reorganisation over the short-term. Using human somatosensory cortex as a model, we investigated the effects of a 24-hour gluing manipulation in which the right index and right middle fingers (digits 2 & 3) were adjoined with surgical glue. Somatotopic representations, assessed with two 7 tesla fMRI protocols, revealed rapid off-target reorganisation in the non-manipulated fingers following gluing, with the representation of the ring finger (digit 4) shifted towards the little finger (digit 5) and away from the middle finger (digit 3). These shifts were also evident in two behavioural tasks conducted in an independent cohort, showing reduced sensitivity for discriminating the temporal order of stimuli to the ring and little fingers, and increased substitution errors across this pair on a speeded reaction time task.
#neurons #fMRI #plasticity - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov