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Category: Neuroscience

Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion

Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion

Science reports: In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. As a leading federal ambassador to the research community and a chief adviser to NIA Director Richard Hodes, Masliah would…

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Humanity’s newest brain gains are most at risk from ageing

Humanity’s newest brain gains are most at risk from ageing

Nature reports:In the more than six million years since people and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor, human brains have rapidly amassed tissue that helps decision-making and self-control. But the same regions are also the most at risk of deterioration during ageing, finds a study that compared images of chimp brains with scans of human brains. Previous studies have shown that regions of the human brain that are the last to mature, such as parts of the frontal lobe, are…

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How our longest nerve orchestrates the mind-body connection

How our longest nerve orchestrates the mind-body connection

R. Douglas Fields writes: It is late at night. You are alone and wandering empty streets in search of your parked car when you hear footsteps creeping up from behind. Your heart pounds, your blood pressure skyrockets. Goose bumps appear on your arms, sweat on your palms. Your stomach knots and your muscles coil, ready to sprint or fight. Now imagine the same scene, but without any of the body’s innate responses to an external threat. Would you still feel…

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Sleep deprivation alters connections in the brain, mouse study finds

Sleep deprivation alters connections in the brain, mouse study finds

Science reports: Lack of sleep wreaks havoc on the brain, making us worse learners and disrupting our memory, among other insults. Now, a study in mice suggests some of these effects could stem from changes in how brain cells are connected to one another. In a paper published today in Current Biology, researchers show that just hours of sleep deprivation reduce how many different types of synapses—the places where neurons meet—there are in brain regions associated with learning and memory….

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What happens in a mind that can’t ‘see’ mental images

What happens in a mind that can’t ‘see’ mental images

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein realized she didn’t have a mind’s eye. The vision scientist was sitting in a seminar room, listening to a scientific talk, when the presenter asked the audience to imagine an apple. Shomstein closed her eyes and did so. Then, the presenter asked the crowd to open their eyes and rate how vividly they saw the apple in their mind. Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually see an apple. She…

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How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

Darshana Narayanan writes: Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech. Babies communicate as soon…

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Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode the meaning of words

Ultra-detailed brain map shows neurons that encode the meaning of words

Nature reports: By eavesdropping on the brains of living people, scientists have created the highest-resolution map yet of the neurons that encode the meanings of various words. The results hint that, across individuals, the brain uses the same standard categories to classify words — helping us to turn sound into sense. The study is based on words only in English. But it’s a step along the way to working out how the brain stores words in its language library, says…

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Is conscious AI possible?

Is conscious AI possible?

Andrew Maynard writes: It seems that barely a week goes by these days where there isn’t some degree of speculation that the current crop of large language models, novel AI systems, or even the internet, are showing signs of consciousness. These are usually met with a good dose of skepticism. But under the surface there’s often a surprisingly strong conflation between advanced artificial intelligence and conscious machines — to the extent that much of the current wave of AI acceleration…

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‘Time cells’ in the brain could be more crucial than we ever realized

‘Time cells’ in the brain could be more crucial than we ever realized

Science Alert reports: When it comes to how we experience, interact with, and navigate our world, timing is everything. And new research in mice suggests a specific set of cells is fundamental to the way we learn complex behaviors that rely on timing. The discovery by a team at the University of Utah in the US could eventually help detect onset of neurodegenerative diseases that affect time perception, like Alzheimer’s. To create a memory for your own personal archives, your…

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The human brain’s complexity teeters at the edge of chaos, physicists say

The human brain’s complexity teeters at the edge of chaos, physicists say

Science Alert reports: The human brain is said to be the most complex object in the known Universe. Its 89 billion neurons each have around 7,000 connections on average, and the physical structure of all those entities may be balanced precariously on a knife’s edge, according to a new study. Two physicists at Northwestern University in the US – Helen Ansell and István Kovács – have now used statistical physics to explain the complexity seen in a highly detailed 3D…

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Brain connections reset during first half of sleep

Brain connections reset during first half of sleep

PsyPost reports: A recent study has provided new insights into the complex role of sleep in brain function. Conducted on zebrafish, the research revealed that during the first half of a night’s sleep, the brain weakens the new connections between neurons formed while awake. However, this process does not continue into the second half of the night, leaving open questions about the latter stage’s purpose. Published in the journal Nature, the study supports the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis, which suggests sleep…

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Babies in the womb exposed to two languages hear speech differently when born

Babies in the womb exposed to two languages hear speech differently when born

PsyPost reports: Researchers have shown for the first time that newborns of monolingual mothers respond differently to playback of a carefully selected sound stimulus than newborns of bilingual mothers. The findings suggest that bilingual newborns are sensitive to a wider range of acoustic variation of speech, at the cost of being less selectively tuned in to any single language. These results underscore the importance of prenatal exposure for learning about speech. It’s well established that babies in the womb hear…

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Biological puzzles abound in an up-close look at a human brain

Biological puzzles abound in an up-close look at a human brain

Researchers have generated a nanoscale-resolution reconstruction of a millimeter-scale fragment of human cerebral cortex, giving an unprecedented view into the structural organization of brain tissue at the supracellular, cellular, and subcellular levels. https://t.co/AO946Lnsir pic.twitter.com/UeacNkEbym — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) May 26, 2024 Science News reports: It’s a bit like seeing a world in a grain of sand. Except the view, in this case, is the exquisite detail inside a bit of human brain about half the size of a grain of…

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Electric ‘ripples’ in the resting brain tag memories for storage

Electric ‘ripples’ in the resting brain tag memories for storage

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan. He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than others, just as you remember only some experiences from your past. Now, as a professor of neuroscience at New…

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The heart sends messages to the brain

The heart sends messages to the brain

Science News reports: Everyone knows that the brain influences the heart. Stressful thoughts can set the heart pounding, sometimes with such deep force that we worry people can hear it. Anxiety can trigger the irregular skittering of atrial fibrillation. In more extreme and rarer cases, emotional turmoil from a shock — the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, an intense argument — can trigger a syndrome that mimics a heart attack. But not everyone knows that the heart…

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Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness

Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness

Live Science reports: Optical illusions play on the brain’s biases, tricking it into perceiving images differently than how they really are. And now, in mice, scientists have harnessed an optical illusion to reveal hidden insights into how the brain processes visual information. The research focused on the neon-color-spreading illusion, which incorporates patterns of thin lines on a solid background. Parts of these lines are a different color — such as lime green, in the example above — and the brain…

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