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Category: Neuroscience

All living cells could have the molecular machinery for a magnetic ‘sixth sense’

All living cells could have the molecular machinery for a magnetic ‘sixth sense’

Science Alert reports: Every animal on Earth may house the molecular machinery to sense magnetic fields, even those organisms that don’t navigate or migrate using this mysterious ‘sixth sense’. Scientists working on fruit flies have now identified a ubiquitous molecule in all living cells that can respond to magnetic sensitivity if it is present in high enough amounts or if other molecules assist it. The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than…

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Gene expression in neurons solves a brain evolution puzzle

Gene expression in neurons solves a brain evolution puzzle

Allison Whitten writes: The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such a complex brain region evolved. The brains of reptiles seemed to offer a clue. Not only are reptiles the closest living relatives…

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The neurological impact of losing social status

The neurological impact of losing social status

Science reports: When two male mice meet in a confined space, the rules of engagement are clear: The lower ranking mouse must yield. But when these norms go out the window—say, when researchers rig such an encounter to favor the weakling—it sends the higher ranking male into a depressionlike spiral. That’s the conclusion of a new neuroimaging study that reveals how the mouse brain responds to an unexpected loss of social status, which has been shown to be a major…

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How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: Your gut is a bustling and thriving alien colony. They number in their trillions and include thousands of different species. Many of these microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya, were here long before humans, have evolved alongside us and now outnumber our own cells many times over. Indeed, as John Cryan, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, rather strikingly put it in a TEDx talk: “When you go to the…

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How the brain distinguishes memories from perceptions

How the brain distinguishes memories from perceptions

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling, an associate professor…

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The brain uses calculus to control fast movements

The brain uses calculus to control fast movements

Kevin Hartnett writes: A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of lights ahead. Through training, the mouse has learned that if it stops at the lights and holds that position for 1.5 seconds, it will receive a reward — a small drink of water. Then it can rush to another set of lights to receive another reward. This setup…

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Finding language in the brain

Finding language in the brain

Giosuè Baggio writes: What exactly is language? At first thought, it’s a continuous flow of sounds we hear, sounds we make, scribbles on paper or on a screen, movements of our hands, and expressions on our faces. But if we pause for a moment, we find that behind this rich experiential display is something different: the smaller and larger building blocks of a Lego-like game of construction, with parts of words, words, phrases, sentences, and larger structures still. We can…

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The science of color perception

The science of color perception

Nicola Jones writes: What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people see the world — both between individuals and between different cultural groups. A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about…

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Study suggests spins of ‘brain water’ could mean our minds use quantum computation

Study suggests spins of ‘brain water’ could mean our minds use quantum computation

Science Alert reports: In the ongoing work to realize the full potential of quantum computing, scientists could perhaps try peering into our own brains to see what’s possible: A new study suggests that the brain actually has a lot in common with a quantum computer. The findings could teach us a lot about the functions of neurons as well as the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. The research might explain, for example, why our brains are still able to outperform supercomputers…

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Machine learning highlights a hidden order in scents

Machine learning highlights a hidden order in scents

Allison Parshall writes: Alex Wiltschko began collecting perfumes as a teenager. His first bottle was Azzaro Pour Homme, a timeless cologne he spotted on the shelf at a T.J. Maxx department store. He recognized the name from Perfumes: The Guide, a book whose poetic descriptions of aroma had kick-started his obsession. Enchanted, he saved up his allowance to add to his collection. “I ended up going absolutely down the rabbit hole,” he said. More recently, as an olfactory neuroscientist for…

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How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

How blindsight answers the hard problem of consciousness

Nicholas Humphrey writes: The cover of New Scientist magazine 50 years ago showed a picture of a rhesus monkey, with the headline ‘A Blind Monkey That Sees Everything’. The monkey, named Helen, was part of a study into the neuropsychology of vision, led by Lawrence (Larry) Weiskrantz in the psychology laboratory at the University of Cambridge. In 1965, he had surgically removed the primary visual cortex at the back of Helen’s brain. Following the operation, Helen appeared to be quite…

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A good memory or a bad one? One brain molecule decides

A good memory or a bad one? One brain molecule decides

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: You’re on the vacation of a lifetime in Kenya, traversing the savanna on safari, with the tour guide pointing out elephants to your right and lions to your left. Years later, you walk into a florist’s shop in your hometown and smell something like the flowers on the jackalberry trees that dotted the landscape. When you close your eyes, the store disappears and you’re back in the Land Rover. Inhaling deeply, you smile at the happy memory….

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Octopus brains are nothing like ours — yet we have much in common

Octopus brains are nothing like ours — yet we have much in common

James Bridle writes: It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to…

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‘Life hates surprises’: Can an ambitious theory unify biology, neuroscience and psychology?

‘Life hates surprises’: Can an ambitious theory unify biology, neuroscience and psychology?

Shutterstock By Ross Pain, Australian National University; Michael David Kirchhoff, University of Wollongong, and Stephen Francis Mann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology In the early 1990s, British neuroscientist Karl Friston was poring over brain scans. The scans produced terabytes of digital output, and Friston had to find new techniques to sort and classify the massive flows of data. Along the way he had a revelation. The techniques he was using might be similar to what the brain itself was…

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This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

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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Perineuronal nets play unexpected role in chronic pain

Perineuronal nets play unexpected role in chronic pain

R. Douglas Fields writes: Neuroscientists, being interested in how brains work, naturally focus on neurons, the cells that can convey elements of sense and thought to each other via electrical impulses. But equally worthy of study is a substance that’s between them — a viscous coating on the outside of these neurons. Roughly equivalent to the cartilage in our noses and joints, the stuff clings like a fishing net to some of our neurons, inspiring the name perineuronal nets (PNNs)….

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