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Category: Neuroscience

Can brain scans reveal behavior? Bombshell study says not yet

Can brain scans reveal behavior? Bombshell study says not yet

Nature reports: In 2019, neuroscientist Scott Marek was asked to contribute a paper to a journal that focuses on child development. Previous studies had shown that differences in brain function between children were linked with performance in intelligence tests. So Marek decided to examine this trend in 2,000 kids. Brain-imaging data sets had been swelling in size. To show that this growth was making studies more reliable, Marek, based at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (WashU), and his colleagues…

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Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses wasn’t much to look at, resembling an amoeba more than anything else: a flattened multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither head nor tail. It moved on thousands of cilia that blanketed its underside to form…

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I feel, therefore I am

I feel, therefore I am

Antonio Damasio writes: In the beginning was not the word; that much is clear. Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. Not that the universe of the living was ever simple, quite the contrary. It was complex from its inception, four billion years ago. But living organisms then took several paths. In the branch of life history that led to us, I like to imagine three distinct and consecutive evolutionary stages….

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The inner lives of farmed animals

The inner lives of farmed animals

Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…

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Can lab-grown brain organoids be ‘conscious’? Scientists may soon find out

Can lab-grown brain organoids be ‘conscious’? Scientists may soon find out

Anil Seth writes: In 2022 we will see brain organoids displaying dynamics that bear comparison with the complex activity patterns indicative of consciousness in humans. This will require us to rethink what counts as a brain signature of “consciousness” and will raise serious ethical issues about brainlike structures grown in the lab. Brain organoids are tiny, lab-grown bundles of neurons, derived from human stem cells, that display various properties of the developing human brain. In medicine, they provide much-needed biological…

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A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut

A stable sense of self is rooted in the lungs, heart and gut

Alessandro Monti writes: Think back to a recent episode in which you felt as if you were being true to yourself. How would you describe what you did? Perhaps you would say that you ‘trusted your guts’ or ‘followed your heart’, rather than ‘thinking with your head’. You might also assume that these idioms involving the guts or the heart belong to an outdated folklore – that they are a poetic rather than a scientific expression of what’s happening when…

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New brain maps can predict behaviors

New brain maps can predict behaviors

Monique Brouillette writes: Last summer a group of Harvard University neuroscientists and Google engineers released the first wiring diagram of a piece of the human brain. The tissue, about the size of a pinhead, had been preserved, stained with heavy metals, cut into 5,000 slices and imaged under an electron microscope. This cubic millimeter of tissue accounts for only one-millionth of the entire human brain. Yet the vast trove of data depicting it comprises 1.4 petabytes’ worth of brightly colored…

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To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions

To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions

Anil Ananthaswamy writes: How our brain, a three-pound mass of tissue encased within a bony skull, creates perceptions from sensations is a long-standing mystery. Abundant evidence and decades of sustained research suggest that the brain cannot simply be assembling sensory information, as though it were putting together a jigsaw puzzle, to perceive its surroundings. This is borne out by the fact that the brain can construct a scene based on the light entering our eyes, even when the incoming information…

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The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses

The brain can recall and reawaken past immune responses

Esther Landhuis writes: Dogs that habitually hear a bell at chow time become classically conditioned to drool at the mere chime, as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed in the 1890s: Their brains learn to associate the bell with food and instruct the salivary glands to respond accordingly. More than a century later, in a paper published today in Cell, the neuroimmunologist Asya Rolls has shown that a similar kind of conditioning extends to immune responses. Using state-of-the-art genetic tools in…

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Being, feeling, and knowing: Our path to consciousness

Being, feeling, and knowing: Our path to consciousness

Antonio Damasio writes: The history of living organisms began 4 billion years ago. In the phylogenetic branch that led to us, I see three evolutionary stages. A first stage is marked by being; a second is dominated by feeling; and a third is defined by knowing. Curiously, in each contemporary human, something can be gleaned akin to those same three stages, and they emerge in the same sequence. Being, feeling, and knowing arise from separate anatomical and physiological systems that…

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Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Imagination: It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Philip Ball writes: ‘To me,’ wrote William Blake in 1799, ‘this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination.’ The imagination, he later added, ‘is not a state: it is the human existence itself.’ Blake, a painter as well as a poet, created images that acquire their power not only from a certain naive artistic technique, but because they are striving to transcend it – to convey a vision of the world beyond superficial appearances, which only imagination…

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The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

The brain processes speech in parallel with other sounds

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it’s often difficult to comprehend how much information the brain’s auditory system needs to process and disentangle. It has to take incoming sounds and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive: a friend’s voice, a dog barking, the pitter-patter of rain. It has to extricate relevant sounds from background noise. It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic…

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The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

Pamela Lyon writes: In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual…

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Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Allison Whitten writes: Every time a human or machine learns how to get better at a task, a trail of evidence is left behind. A sequence of physical changes — to cells in a brain or to numerical values in an algorithm — underlie the improved performance. But how the system figures out exactly what changes to make is no small feat. It’s called the credit assignment problem, in which a brain or artificial intelligence system must pinpoint which pieces…

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How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was…

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How the world’s biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience

How the world’s biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience

Nature reports: Imagine looking at Earth from space and being able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works. From the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny…

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