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Category: Neuroscience

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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Who dreams?

Who dreams?

Antonio Zadra writes: My fascination with dream characters began while I was in college. That’s when, in the midst of a dream in which I knew I was dreaming (a ‘lucid dream’), I had my first encounter with an older gentleman, who tried to convince me that, actually, my experience wasn’t a dream. Over the next two decades, this man appeared in several other of my lucid as well as non-lucid dreams. He always maintained he was real, one time…

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Ant colonies resemble neural networks when making decisions

Ant colonies resemble neural networks when making decisions

ZME Science reports: New research from the Rockefeller University suggests that colonies of ants make decisions collectively, with outcomes dependent both on the magnitude of the stressor requiring a decision as well as the size of the ant group. The findings suggest that ants combine sensory information about their environment with parameters of their colony to arrive at a group response. Most interestingly of all, this process is similar to the way neural networks make decisions. “We pioneered an approach…

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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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