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Category: Neuroscience

People vary in how well they recognize, match or categorize the things they see – an ability researchers call ‘o’

People vary in how well they recognize, match or categorize the things they see – an ability researchers call ‘o’

Some people are inherently better at tasks like reading X-rays. SDI Productions/E+ via Getty Images By Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University and Jason Chow, Vanderbilt University Like snowflakes, no two people are exactly the same. You’re probably used to the idea that people differ substantially in personality and in cognitive abilities – skills like problem-solving or remembering information. In contrast, there’s a widely held intuition that people vary far less in their ability to recognize, match or categorize objects. Many everyday…

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How the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

How the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

Sofia Quaglia writes: Humans are not the only creatures that show a refined grasp of social norms. If a group of adult male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) find themselves sitting around a turning table set with food, they will display an ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ ethos of reciprocity. One monkey will offer another one a piece of fruit and, what’s more, will expect the gesture to be reciprocated. If the offer isn’t forthcoming, the first monkey is…

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The brain has a ‘low-power mode’ that blunts our senses

The brain has a ‘low-power mode’ that blunts our senses

Allison Whitten writes: When our phones and computers run out of power, their glowing screens go dark and they die a sort of digital death. But switch them to low-power mode to conserve energy, and they cut expendable operations to keep basic processes humming along until their batteries can be recharged. Our energy-intensive brain needs to keep its lights on too. Brain cells depend primarily on steady deliveries of the sugar glucose, which they convert to adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to…

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Why the mind is more than a machine

Why the mind is more than a machine

Bobby Azarian writes: Before Kurt Gödel, logicians and mathematicians believed that all statements about numbers — and reality more generally — were either true or false, and that there must be a rule-based way of determining which category a specific statement belonged to. According to this logic, mathematical proof is the true source of knowledge. The Pythagorean theorem, for example, is a mathematical conjecture that is true: It has been proved formally, and in more ways than one. With many…

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Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

Video: Covid and the brain — a neurological health crisis

  Brain fog. Memory lapses. Difficulties focusing or sustaining attention. All these cognitive issues have plagued some who have otherwise recovered from a bout of Covid-19. In this video, Stanford neurologist Michelle Monje describes her work showing how even mild respiratory infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus may lead to lingering problems with the brain. Monje, who has long treated and studied cancer patients with similar symptoms following chemotherapy, says that the damage isn’t necessarily caused by the virus itself. Instead,…

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Brain-signal proteins evolved before animals did

Brain-signal proteins evolved before animals did

Viviane Callier writes: Our human brains can seem like a crowning achievement of evolution, but the roots of that achievement run deep: The modern brain arose from hundreds of millions of years of incremental advances in complexity. Evolutionary biologists have traced that progress back through the branch of the animal family tree that includes all creatures with central nervous systems, the bilaterians, but it is clear that fundamental elements of the nervous system existed much earlier. How much earlier has…

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How a special immune system protects the brain

How a special immune system protects the brain

Nature reports: The brain is the body’s sovereign, and receives protection in keeping with its high status. Its cells are long-lived and shelter inside a fearsome fortification called the blood–brain barrier. For a long time, scientists thought that the brain was completely cut off from the chaos of the rest of the body — especially its eager defence system, a mass of immune cells that battle infections and whose actions could threaten a ruler caught in the crossfire. In the…

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Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Science Alert reports: A shortcut between the skull and the brain could be a possible way for the human immune system to bypass the blood-brain barrier. Researchers recently discovered a series of tiny channels in mice and human skulls, and in mice at least, these little pathways represent an unexpected source of brain immunity. Previously, scientists assumed that the immune system connects with the brain by slipping through a kind of neurological customs gate – a barrier separating blood channels…

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Why your white matter matters

Why your white matter matters

The brain’s neural network, which includes both gray and white matter. Pasieka/Science Photo Library via Getty Images By Christopher Filley, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Who has not contemplated how a memory is formed, a sentence generated, a sunset appreciated, a creative act performed or a heinous crime committed? The human brain is a three-pound organ that remains largely an enigma. But most people have heard of the brain’s gray matter, which is needed for cognitive functions such as…

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Why the father of neuroscience, toward the end of his career, preferred to study ants

Why the father of neuroscience, toward the end of his career, preferred to study ants

Benjamin Ehrlich writes: In 1914, when World War I broke out, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the most influential neuroscientist in the world—the man who discovered brain cells, later termed neurons— published only one article, by far his lowest output ever. “The horrendous European war of 1914 was for my scientific activity a very rude blow,” Cajal recalled. “It altered my health, already somewhat disturbed, and it cooled, for the first time, my enthusiasm for investigation.” Cajal’s tertulia, or café social…

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Could gut microbes regulate appetite and body temperature?

Could gut microbes regulate appetite and body temperature?

Science reports: With more microbes than cells in our body, it’s not surprising that bacteria and other invisible “guests” influence our metabolism, immune system, and even our behavior. Now, researchers studying mice have worked out how bacteria in the mammalian gut can ping the brain to regulate an animal’s appetite and body temperature—and it involves the same molecular pathway the immune system uses to detect bacterial pathogens. “It’s quite an important finding,” says Antoine Adamantidis, a neuroscientist at the University…

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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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