A "window to the brain" implant which would allow doctors to see through the skull and possibly treat patients has been devised by US researchers. It uses a see-through version of the same material used for hip implants. The team at University of California, Riverside, say it could allow lasers to be fired into the brain to treat neurological disorders. The implant was reported in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine. The researchers say emerging laser-treatments in stroke and cancer care and brain imaging require access to the brain. However, they are limited as a part of the skull needs to be removed and replaced each time a treatment is performed. Instead the team of scientists have devised a transparent implant that would replace a small section of the skull. They have converted a material - yttria-stabilized zirconia that is used in some ceramic hip implants and dental crowns - to make it transparent. They argue the material would be safe to implant, but would also provide a window onto the brain. Professor of mechanical engineering, Guillermo Aguilar, said: "This is a case of a science fiction sounding idea becoming science fact, with strong potential for positive impact on patients. BBC © 2013

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18604 - Posted: 09.04.2013

by Adam Gopnik Good myths turn on simple pairs— God and Lucifer, Sun and Moon, Jerry and George—and so an author who makes a vital duo is rewarded with a long-lived audience. No one in 1900 would have thought it possible that a century later more people would read Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories than anything of George Meredith’s, but we do. And so Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek,” despite the silly plots and the cardboard-seeming sets, persists in its many versions because it captures a deep and abiding divide. Mr. Spock speaks for the rational, analytic self who assumes that the mind is a mechanism and that everything it does is logical, Captain Kirk for the belief that what governs our life is not only irrational but inexplicable, and the better for being so. The division has had new energy in our time: we care most about a person who is like a thinking machine at a moment when we have begun to have machines that think. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, is not only a Romantic, like so many other heroes, but a Romantic on a starship in a vacuum in deep space. When your entire body is every day dissolved, reënergized, and sent down to a new planet, and you still believe in the ineffable human spirit, you have really earned the right to be a soul man. Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it. © 2013 Condé Nast.

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 18602 - Posted: 09.03.2013

Erika Check Hayden US behavioural researchers have been handed a dubious distinction — they are more likely than their colleagues in other parts of the world to exaggerate findings, according to a study published today. The research highlights the importance of unconscious biases that might affect research integrity, says Brian Martinson, a social scientist at the HealthPartners Institute for Education and Research in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was not involved with the study. “The take-home here is that the ‘bad guy/good guy’ narrative — the idea that we only need to worry about the monsters out there who are making up data — is naive,” Martinson says.

 The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, was conducted by John Ioannidis, a physician at Stanford University in California, and Daniele Fanelli, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The pair examined 82 meta-analyses in genetics and psychiatry that collectively combined results from 1,174 individual studies. The researchers compared meta-analyses of studies based on non-behavioural parameters, such as physiological measurements, to those based on behavioural parameters, such as progression of dementia or depression.

 The researchers then determined how well the strength of an observed result or effect reported in a given study agreed with that of the meta-analysis in which the study was included. They found that, worldwide, behavioural studies were more likely than non-behavioural studies to report ‘extreme effects’ — findings that deviated from the overall effects reported by the meta-analyses.
 And US-based behavioural researchers were more likely than behavioural researchers elsewhere to report extreme effects that deviated in favour of their starting hypotheses.

 © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 18568 - Posted: 08.27.2013

By Laura Sanders Despite the adage, there actually is such a thing as bad publicity, a fact that brain scientists have lately discovered. A couple of high-profile opinion pieces in the New York Times have questioned the usefulness of neuroscience, claiming, as columnist David Brooks did in June, that studying brain activity will never reveal the mind. Or that neuroscience is a pesky distraction from solving real social problems, as scholar Benjamin Fong wrote on August 11. Let’s start with Brooks. Some of his complaints about brain scans, with their colorful blobs lighting up active parts of the brain, are quite legitimate. Functional MRI studies are notoriously difficult to make sense of. In fact, this powerful technology has been used to find brain activity in a dead salmon. Dubious fMRI studies do trickle into the hands of sensationalistic journalists, medical hucksters and marketers, who twist the results into self-serving sound bites. All true. But Brooks’ essay conflates the entire field of neuroscience with some bad seeds. Some studies should never have been done, others mislead people, waste resources and sensationalize their results. But for every one of those studies, countless others tell us something important about how the human brain works. Serious scientists use a huge variety of techniques — yes, even fMRI — responsibly, and interpret their results cautiously. Judging the whole enterprise of neuroscience by its weakest studies is disingenuous. There is bad science, just like there’s bad food, bad music and bad TV. Trashing all brain research because a tiny bit of it stinks is like throwing your new flat screen off a balcony because you accidentally turned on Jersey Shore. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 18564 - Posted: 08.27.2013

By: George Will, Washington Post PRINCETON, N.J. — Fifty years from now, when Malia and Sasha are grandmothers, their father’s presidency might seem most consequential because of a small sum — $100 million —for studying something small. “As humans,” Barack Obama said when announcing the initiative to study the brain, “we can identify galaxies light-years away ... but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.” Actually, understanding the brain will be a resounding success without unlocking the essential mystery, which is: How does matter become conscious of itself? Or should we say, how does it become — or acquire — consciousness? Just trying to describe this subject takes scientists onto intellectual terrain long occupied by philosophers. Those whose field is the philosophy of mind will learn from scientists such as Princeton’s David Tank, aleader of the BRAIN Initiative, which aims at understanding how brain regions and cells work together, moment to moment, throughout our lives. If, as is said, a physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms, thena neuroscientist like Tank is a brain cell’s way of knowing about brain cells. Each of us has about 100 billion of those, each of which communicates with an average of 10,000 other nerve cells. The goal of neuroscientists is to discover how these neural conversations give rise to a thought, a memory ora decision. And to understand how the brain functions, from which we may understand disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy. © 2013 Forum Communications Co.

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18560 - Posted: 08.26.2013

By Scicurious There are lots of challenges when it comes to studying the brain, but one of the biggest is that it’s very hard to see. Aside from being, you know, inside your skull, the many electrical and chemical signals which the brain uses are impossible to see with the naked eye. We have ways to look at neurons and how they convey information. For example, to record the electrical signals from a single neuron, you can piece it with a tiny electrode, to get access inside the membrane (electrophysiology). You can then stimulate the neuron to fire, or record as it fires spontaneously. For techniques like optogenetics, you can insert a gene into the neuron that makes it fire (or not) in response to light. When you shine the light, you can make the neuron fire. So you can make a neuron fire, or see a neuron fire. With things like voltammetry, we can see neurotransmitters, chemicals as they are released from a neuron and sent as signals on to other neurons. Techniques like these have made huge strides in what we understand about neurons and how they work. But…you can only do this for a few neurons at a time. This becomes a problem, because the brain does not work as one neuron at a time. Instead, neurons organize into networks, A neuron fires, which impinges upon many more neurons, all of which will react in different ways, depending on what input they receive and when. Often many neurons have to fire to get a result, often it’s a single specific pattern of neurons. An ideal technique would be one where we could see neurons fire spontaneously, in real time, and then see where those signals GO, to actually see a network in action. And where we could see it…without taking the brain out first. It looks like that technique might be here. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 18496 - Posted: 08.13.2013

By Neuroskeptic Thanks to newly-developed “super-resolution” microscopy techniques, a group of French neuroscientists have discovered a remarkable world of complexity on a tiny scale. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Deepak Nair colleagues report that: Super-Resolution Imaging Reveals That AMPA Receptors Inside Synapses Are Dynamically Organized in Nanodomains Regulated by PSD95 Neurons communicate with each other via chemical synapses. Here, two cells almost touch each other, and one of them can release a messenger molecule (neurotransmitter) which activates proteins (receptors) on the receiving (postsynaptic) neuron, thus conveying information. Here’s part of a single cell: the synapses are where the little ‘spines’ or ‘bulbs’ meet those present on another cell (not pictured).Until now, it’s been believed that within a synapse, receptors are just randomly distributed over the postsynaptic cell membrane. However, Nair et al’s work reveals an unsuspected level of organization. It turns out that receptors – or at least AMPA receptors, the only kind they looked at – are in fact clustered together into structures the authors dub nanodomains. Each nanodomain contains about 20 receptors, and is about 70 nanometers across. This is small. It’s roughly the size of a virus, and about 1/1000th the width of a human hair. When I saw this picture, it didn’t call to mind anything else I’d ever seen in neuroscience. Rather, it reminded me of the Hubble Deep Field images of distant galaxies… and funnily enough, one of the proteins that plays a secondary role in this paper is called stargazin.

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18492 - Posted: 08.12.2013

By Daniel Engber Brain-bashing, once an idle pastime of the science commentariat, went mainstream in June. At the beginning of the month, Slate contributor Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld published Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, a well-informed attack on the extravagances of “neurocentrist” thought. We’re living in dangerous era, they warn in the book’s introduction. “Naïve media, slick neuroentrepreneurs, and even an occasional overzealous neuroscientist exaggerate the capacity of scans to reveal the contents of our minds, exalt brain physiology as inherently the most valuable level of explanation for understanding behavior, and rush to apply underdeveloped, if dazzling, science for commercial and forensic use.” In the United Kingdom, the neuro-gadfly Raymond Tallis—whose own attack on popular brain science, Aping Mankind, came out in 2011—added to the early-summer beat-down, complaining in the Observer that “studies that locate irreducibly social phenomena … in the function or dysfunction of bits of our brains are conceptually misconceived.” By mid-June, these sharp rebukes made their way into the mind of David Brooks, a long-time dabbler in neural data who proposed not long ago that “brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” Brooks read Brainwashed and became a convert to its cause: “From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by [neuroscience] and sometimes go off to extremes,” he wrote in a recent column with the headline “Beyond the Brain.” Then he gave the following advice: “The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.” © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18424 - Posted: 07.30.2013

By Simon Makin One common complaint about psychiatry is its subjective nature: it lacks definitive tests for many diseases. So the idea of diagnosing disorders using only brain scans holds great appeal. A paper published recently in PLOS ONE describes such a system, although it was presented only as an initial proof of concept. News reports, however, trumpeted the advent of “objective” psychiatric diagnoses. The paper used data from several earlier studies, in which researchers outlined key brain regions in MRI scans of people with bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia or Tourette's syndrome; people with low or high risk of developing major depressive disorder; and a healthy group. The scans were also labeled with the disorder or depression risk level of the original study participant. In the new study, scientists divided the scans randomly into two sets, one to build the diagnostic system and the other to test it. Their software then grouped the scans in the first set by the shape of various regions. Each group was labeled with the most common diagnosis found within it. During testing, the system analyzed the shapes of brain regions in each test scan and assigned it to the group it most resembled. The scientists checked its work by comparing the new labels on the test scans with the original clinical diagnoses. They repeated the procedure several times with different randomly generated sets. When the system chose between two disorders or one ailment and a clean bill of health, its accuracy was nearly perfect. When deciding among three alternatives, it did much worse. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 18404 - Posted: 07.23.2013

Alison Abbott When neurobiologist Bill Newsome got a phone call from Francis Collins in March, his first reaction was one of dismay. The director of the US National Institutes of Health had contacted him out of the blue to ask if he would co-chair a rapid planning effort for a ten-year assault on how the brain works. To Newsome, that sounded like the sort of thankless, amorphous and onerous task that would ruin a good summer. But after turning it over in his mind for 24 hours, his dismay gave way to enthusiasm. “The timing is right,” says Newsome, who is based at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. He accepted the task. “The brain is the intellectual excitement for the twenty-first century.” It helped that the request for the brain onslaught was actually coming from Collins's ultimate boss — US President Barack Obama. Just two weeks after that call, on 2 April, Obama announced a US$100-million initial investment to launch the BRAIN Initiative, a research effort expected to eventually cost perhaps ten times that amount. The European Commission has equal ambitions. On 28 January, it announced that it would launch the flagship Human Brain Project with a 2013 budget of €54 million (US$69 million), and contribute to its projected billion-euro funding over the next ten years (see Nature 482, 456–458; 2012). Although the aims of the two projects differ, both are, in effect, bold bids for the neuroscientist's ultimate challenge: to work out exactly how the billions of neurons and trillions of connections, or synapses, in the human brain organize themselves into working neural circuits that allow us to fall in love, go to war, solve mathematical theorems or write poetry. What's more, researchers want to understand the ways in which brain circuitry changes — through the constant growth and retreat of synapses — as life rolls by. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18382 - Posted: 07.18.2013

by Douglas Heaven Toss a stone into a pool and it leaves ripples long after it sinks. Ideas and experiences have a similar affect on our brains: short bouts of intense neural activity leave ripples in the brain's background activity that can still be detected 24 hours later. The finding effectively opens a window into a person's recent past. Previous studies have shown that it is possible to use brain activity to detect simple thoughts or words, and even what image someone is looking at. But this is the first time activity from the past has been observed. Even when you are doing nothing, the brain is busy. Cut off from external stimuli and left to "idle", the brain enters a resting state. "You would expect it to quieten down," says Rafael Malach at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. But instead, the brain just switches gear, producing patterns of activity that are slower but no less noisy. "The activity is very organised, very rich and very consistent," says Malach. But what it means is largely a mystery. Malach and his colleagues wondered whether the activity might in fact be a kind of echo. Could it tell us something about what the brain had been up to previously? "It might be a window into the previous day's activity," says Malach. To test the idea, the team compared fMRI scans of 20 people taken before, during and after a period of intense cognitive activity. They focused on a region of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is linked to decision-making and volition. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18326 - Posted: 06.29.2013

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham A new initiative aims to invent new technologies for understanding the brain

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18322 - Posted: 06.29.2013

Helen Shen An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety (see video at bottom). The atlas, called ‘BigBrain’, shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies. “The quality of those maps is analogous to what cartographers of the Earth offered as their best versions back in the seventeenth century,” says David Van Essen, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, who was not involved in the study. He says that the new and improved set of anatomical guideposts could allow researchers to merge different types of data — such as gene expression, neuroanatomy and neural activity — more precisely onto specific regions of the brain. The brain is comprised of a heterogeneous network of neurons of different sizes and with shapes that vary from triangular to round, packed more or less tightly in different areas. BigBrain reveals variations in neuronal distribution in the layers of the cerebral cortex and across brain regions — differences that are thought to relate to distinct functional units. The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 1 trillion bytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18296 - Posted: 06.22.2013

By Roland Pease BBC News "I'm a neuroengineer, and one of my goals is building brains." Prof Steven Potter was disarmingly understated as he introduced himself. It's not that tissue engineering is unusual. Nor even that doing it with neural cells should be an issue. If heart cells or skin cells can be reprogrammed, why not neurons? But "building brains" had been my flip way of labelling an intriguing, indeed unnerving, branch of science: the neurophysiology of disembodied brain-cell cultures. It was not a term I was expecting a serious scientist to turn to, as I set out on making "Build Me a Brain" for BBC Radio 4's Frontiers Programme. Yet Steven Potter, professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, is insistent that words like "brain" and "mind" belong to his endeavour. "One of the ways in which I differ from a lot of neuroscientists is to believe that there's a spectrum of minds. There isn't some point where the mind suddenly is there," he said. "I think that there is a different amount of mind in different animals. And even in you, whether you've had your coffee or not, whether you're asleep or awake. "There are always different levels of how much mind you have. So you could carry it all the way down to the cultured network, there is still some sort of proto-mind in there." BBC © 2013

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18279 - Posted: 06.15.2013

By Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld By now you’ve seen the pretty pictures: Color-drenched brain scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and college sophomores choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media—and even some neuroscientists, it seems—love to invoke the neural foundations of human behavior to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff financial fiasco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the sexual indiscretions of politicians, conservatives’ dismissal of global warming, and even an obsession with self-tanning. Brains are big on campus, too. Take a map of any major university, and you can trace the march of neuroscience from research labs and medical centers into schools of law and business and departments of economics and philosophy. In recent years, neuroscience has merged with a host of other disciplines, spawning such new areas of study as neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing, and neurofinance. Add to this the birth of neuroaesthetics, neurohistory, neuroliterature, neuromusicology, neuropolitics, and neurotheology. The brain has even wandered into such unlikely redoubts as English departments, where professors debate whether scanning subjects’ brains as they read passages from Jane Austen novels represents (a) a fertile inquiry into the power of literature or (b) a desperate attempt to inject novelty into a field that has exhausted its romance with psychoanalysis and postmodernism. Brains are in demand. Once the largely exclusive province of neuroscientists and neurologists, the brain has now entered the popular mainstream. As a newly minted cultural artifact, the brain is portrayed in paintings, sculptures, and tapestries and put on display in museums and galleries. © 2013 The Associated Press

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18250 - Posted: 06.10.2013

by David Robson NO CREVICE of the human experience is safe. Our deepest fears and desires, our pasts and our futures – all have been revealed, and all in the form of colourful images that look like lava bubbling under the skull. That, at least, is the popular conception of neuroscience – and it's worth big money. The USMovie Camera and the European Union are throwing billions of dollars at two new projects to map the human brain. Yet there is also a growing anxiety that many of neuroscience's findings don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not just sensational headlines reporting a "dark patch" in a psychopath's brain, there are now serious concerns that some of the methods themselves are flawed. The intrepid outsider needs expert guidance through this rocky terrain – and there's no better place to start than Brainwashed by Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld. Satel, a practising psychiatrist, and Lilienfeld, a clinical psychologist, are terrific sherpas. They are clear-sighted, considered and forgiving of the novice's ignorance. Their first stop is the fMRI scan – a staple of much brain research. Worryingly, the statistical techniques used to construct the images sometimes create a mirage of activity where none should exist. They have a telling example: one research team watching a salmon in an fMRI scanner as images of human faces were flashed at it saw its brain spark into life in certain shots – even though it was dead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 18222 - Posted: 06.04.2013

Rebecca J. Rosen What would you draw if somebody told you to draw a neuron? According to a new study, your sketch will depend on how much science education you have, but not in the way you'd expect. In the image above, the top row -- those detailed, labeled, neat renderings -- are the work of undergraduates. The bottom row, with their janky, sparse lines, come from the leaders of neuroscience research laboratories. That martini-glass looking thing over there on the left? That's a neuron, as drawn by a professional scientist. The middle row, some intermediary step, shows drawings from postdocs and graduate students. These drawings come from a new study published in the journal Science Education. Its authors, a team at King's College London led by education professor David Hay, found that nearly every single undergraduate student they studied (all but three of 126) faithfully reproduced textbook-style neurons, something akin to a canonical image from an 1899 book detailing the brain, which, the authors say, "has enjoyed an unusually pervasive influence." These drawings are "typified by a multipolar cell body and truncated, feathery dendritic processes around a clearly demarcated nucleus." Many of the drawings were annotated. For the "trainee scientists" -- those in PhD programs or completing a postdoc -- the neurons appeared more like what would be seen in a microscope image. Nuclei were excluded, the number of dendrites was reduced, and orientation was inconsistent -- all characterizing neurons as you would see them "in nature" not in the pages of a textbook. © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 14: Attention and Consciousness
Link ID: 18218 - Posted: 06.03.2013

Kerri Smith When Karl Deisseroth moved into his first lab in 2004, he found himself replacing a high-profile tenant: Nobel-prizewinning physicist Steven Chu. “His name was still on the door when I moved in,” says Deisseroth, a neuroscientist, of the basement space at Stanford University in California. The legacy has had its benefits. When chemistry student Feng Zhang dropped by looking for Chu, Deisseroth convinced him to stick around. “I don't think he knew who I was. But he got interested enough.” Deisseroth is now a major name in science himself. He is associated with two blockbuster techniques that allow researchers to show how intricate circuits in the brain create patterns of behaviour. The development of the methods, he says, came from a desire to understand mechanisms that give rise to psychiatric disease — and from the paucity of techniques to do so. “It was extremely clear that for fundamental advances in these domains I would have to spend time developing new tools,” says Deisseroth. His measured tone and laid-back demeanour belie the frenzy that his lab's techniques are generating in neuroscience. First came optogenetics1, which involves inserting light-sensitive proteins from algae into neurons, allowing researchers to switch the cells on and off with light. Deisseroth developed the method shortly after starting his lab, working with Zhang and Edward Boyden, a close collaborator at the time. Optogenetics has since been adopted by scientists around the world to explore everything from the functions of neuron subtypes to the circuits altered in depression or autism. Deisseroth has lost count of how many groups are using it. “We sent clones to thousands of laboratories,” he says. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 18210 - Posted: 05.30.2013

By Stan Alcorn After decades languishing in jars in the closet of an animal lab at the University of Texas, approximately 90 brains removed from mental patients are finally being documented--by a photographer and by college freshmen. Photographer Adam Voorhes found the collection a few years ago when he came to Dr. Tim Schallert's lab at UT Austin in search of a brain to help illustrate a Scientific American article. "It was something about `protecting your brain' or `barriers for the brain,'" Voorhes told me. "They wanted to photograph a human brain in like a bell jar or a case or armor. Anything to show a brain being protected." Voorhes got the normal brain he needed, and was about to take it back to his studio to photograph, when Dr. Schallert asked if he wanted to see some more abnormal brains. Voorhes described being led through an animal research facility to a storage closet with one wall lined with chemicals, and another wall lined with jars full of brains unlike any he had ever seen before. "Some of them are huge, some of them are really tiny. There was one that had no wrinkles at all," he said. "I don't even know how to explain it." The brains had been amassed over the course of 30 years by a medical pathologist at the Austin State Hospital, who preserved them after routine autopsies. When they were discovered in the mid-1980s, they were the subject of a high-profile battle , as institutions vied to house and study them. "Harvard Scientists Lose Minds: University of Texas Wins Brain Collection" ran one headline. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18205 - Posted: 05.30.2013

By Gary Stix The Obama administration’s Big Brain project—$100 million for a map of some sort of what lies beneath the skull—has captured the attention of the entire field of neuroscience. The magnitude of the cash infusion can’t help but draw notice, eliciting both huzzahs mixed with gripes that the whole effort might sap support for other perhaps equally worthy neuro-related endeavors. The Brain Activity Map Project—or the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—is intended to give researchers tools to elicit the real-time functioning of neural circuits, providing a better picture of what happens in the brain when immersed in thought or when brain cells are beset by a degenerative condition like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Current technologies are either too slow or lack the resolution to achieve these goals. One strength of the organizers—perhaps a portent of good things to come—is that they don’t seem to mind opening themselves to public critiques. At a planning meeting earlier this month, George Whitesides, the eminent Harvard chemist and veteran of big government ventures in support of nanotechnology, weighed in on how the project appeared to an informed outsider. Edited excerpting of some of his comments follows. This posting is a bit long, but Whitesides is eloquent and it’s worth reading what he has to say because his views apply to any large-scale sci-tech foray. Whitesides began his talk after listening to a steady cavalcade of big-name neuroscientists furnish their personal wish lists for the program: ultrasound to induce focal lesions, more fruit fly studies to find computational nervous system primitives, more studies on zebra fish, studies on wholly new types of model organisms, avoiding too much emphasis on practical applications and so on. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP7e: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 18200 - Posted: 05.30.2013