By Dana G. Smith About 60 to 70 percent of a person’s risk for schizophrenia depends on their genes. Most of us have some of the schizophrenia-associated genetic variants—single-letter changes in the DNA of genes scattered across our genome—and the more we have, the greater our risk. At the same time, scientists have known that complications during pregnancy, including viral infections in the mother, increase the fetus’s risk for developing schizophrenia by two-fold, but scientists have been unsure why. New research published in Nature Medicine on May 28 reveals how when these two risk factors interact, the likelihood of an individual eventually being diagnosed with schizophrenia goes up at least five-fold compared to someone with a high genetic risk alone. Daniel Weinberger, director of the Lieber Institute for Brain Development in Baltimore and team discovered that roughly a third of the genes associated with schizophrenia are in the placenta. But certain variations in the DNA of these genes only result in schizophrenia if there are complications during pregnancy. The gene variants likely affect how resilient the placenta is to stress from its environment. If the mother or baby experiences a major health complication during pregnancy, the variants could activate these genes in the placenta and induce inflammation or affect the fetus’s development, increasing the risk for schizophrenia later in life. “The placenta is the missing link between maternal risk factors that complicate pregnancies and the development of the fetal brain and the emergence of developmental behavioral disorders,” Weinberger says. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25029 - Posted: 05.29.2018

By Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Scientists working with dolphins at a marine park near Paris have attempted to measure how the animals feel about aspects of their lives in captivity. In what researchers say is the first project to examine captivity "from the animals' perspective", the team assessed what activities dolphins looked forward to most. They found that the marine mammals most keenly anticipated interacting with a familiar human. The results, they say, show that "better human-animal bonds equals better welfare". The study, published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, was part of a three-year project to measure dolphin welfare in a captive setting. Lead researcher Dr Isabella Clegg worked at Parc Astérix, a theme park with one of France's largest dolphinariums. With colleagues at the University of Paris animal behaviour lab, she designed experiments to decode dolphin behaviour - essentially looking for physical postures that indicate how the animals were feeling. "We wanted to find out what activities in captivity they like most," Dr Clegg told the BBC. To work this out, she tested three activities: a trainer coming and playing with dolphins; adding toys to the pool; and a control, which meant leaving the dolphins to their own devices. "We found a really interesting result - all dolphins look forward most to interacting with a familiar human," Dr Clegg said. The animals showed this anticipation by "spy hopping", the action of peering above the surface and looking in the direction that trainers usually approached from. The dolphins would also increase their level of activity in the pool and spend more time at the edge. "We've seen this same thing in other zoo animals and in farm animals," said Dr Clegg, adding: "Better human-animal bonds equals better welfare." © 2018 BBC.

Keyword: Animal Rights; Emotions
Link ID: 25028 - Posted: 05.29.2018

Vanessa Romo Bay mussels in Washington's Puget Sound have tested positive for trace amounts of oxycodone, providing more evidence that the opioid prescription medication is truly ubiquitous. Researchers at the Puget Sound Institute who analyzed the mussels said the discovery of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs in harbors in the Seattle and Bremerton areas is not uncommon — but the organization noted this is the first time that opioids have been found in local shellfish. "We found antibiotics, we found antidepressants, chemotherapy drugs, heart medications and also oxycodone," biologist Jennifer Lanksbury, who led the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife study, told K5 News. Scientists determined that the slew of medications are passed into the Puget Sound through discharge from wastewater treatment plants. The analysis is part of the state's biennial Puget Sound Mussel Monitoring Program, in which uncontaminated mussels are transplanted into various locations to study pollution levels. The reason mussels are the preferred test subject to track toxins in marine life is because they are filter feeders, eating microscopic plants and animals that they strain out of seawater. In the process, "they pick up all sorts of contaminants, so at any given time their body tissues record data about water quality over the previous two to four months," the institute explains. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25027 - Posted: 05.26.2018

By Matthew Hutson It's a Saturday morning in February, and Chloe, a curious 3-year-old in a striped shirt and leggings, is exploring the possibilities of a new toy. Her father, Gary Marcus, a developmental cognitive scientist at New York University (NYU) in New York City, has brought home some strips of tape designed to adhere Lego bricks to surfaces. Chloe, well-versed in Lego, is intrigued. But she has always built upward. Could she use the tape to build sideways or upside down? Marcus suggests building out from the side of a table. Ten minutes later, Chloe starts sticking the tape to the wall. "We better do it before Mama comes back," Marcus says in a singsong voice. "She won't be happy." (Spoiler: The wall paint suffers.) Implicit in Marcus's endeavor is an experiment. Could Chloe apply what she had learned about an activity to a new context? Within minutes, she has a Lego sculpture sticking out from the wall. "Papa, I did it!" she exclaims. In her adaptability, Chloe is demonstrating common sense, a kind of intelligence that, so far, computer scientists have struggled to reproduce. Marcus believes the field of artificial intelligence (AI) would do well to learn lessons from young thinkers like her. Researchers in machine learning argue that computers trained on mountains of data can learn just about anything—including common sense—with few, if any, programmed rules. These experts "have a blind spot, in my opinion," Marcus says. "It's a sociological thing, a form of physics envy, where people think that simpler is better." He says computer scientists are ignoring decades of work in the cognitive sciences and developmental psychology showing that humans have innate abilities—programmed instincts that appear at birth or in early childhood—that help us think abstractly and flexibly, like Chloe. He believes AI researchers ought to include such instincts in their programs. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25026 - Posted: 05.26.2018

By Abby Olena Activating or suppressing neuronal activity with ultrasound has shown promise both in the lab and the clinic, based on the ability to focus noninvasive, high-frequency sound waves on specific brain areas. But in mice and guinea pigs, it appears that the technique has effects that scientists didn’t expect. In two studies published today (May 24) in Neuron, researchers demonstrate that ultrasound activates the brains of rodents by stimulating an auditory response—not, as researchers had presumed, only the specific neurons where the ultrasound is focused. “These papers are a very good warning to folks who are trying to use ultrasound as a tool to manipulate brain activity,” says Raag Airan, a neuroradiologist and researcher at Stanford University Medical Center who did not participate in either study, but coauthored an accompanying commentary. “In doing these experiments going forward [the hearing component] is something that every single experimenter is going to have to think about and control,” he adds. Over the past decade, researchers have used ultrasound to elicit electrical responses from cells in culture and motor and sensory responses from the brains of rodents and primates. Clinicians have also used so-called ultrasonic neuromodulation to treat movement disorders. But the mechanism by which high frequency sound waves work to exert their influence is not well understood. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25025 - Posted: 05.26.2018

Being discharged from a hospital trauma center after receiving treatment for a traumatic brain injury (TBI) does not necessarily mean that a patient has fully recovered. TBI can lead to long-lasting physical and cognitive symptoms, but a new study in JAMA Network Open suggests that many patients may not be receiving follow-up care. Patients in the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI (link is external)) initiative, a large, long-term, NIH-funded study of patients who are treated at the emergency room for mild TBI or concussion, were surveyed about their care after hospital discharge. Follow-up care in this study referred to receiving TBI-related educational materials at discharge, a call from the hospital within two weeks after release, seeing a healthcare provider within two weeks, or seeing a healthcare provider within three months. According to the findings, 44 percent of the 831 patients who completed questionnaires 2 weeks and 3 months after sustaining TBI reported seeing a doctor or other provider within three months. Of those patients, 15 percent visited a clinic that specialized in head injury. Approximately half of the patients saw a general practitioner and close to a third reported seeing more than one type of doctor. Additionally, among the 279 patients with three or more moderate-to-severe post-concussive symptoms, 41 percent had not had a follow-up visit at three months after discharge. Approximately half of the patients were discharged without TBI educational materials.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25024 - Posted: 05.26.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar Bedtime reading with a tablet or smartphone can interfere with a good night’s sleep, some studies and many anecdotal reports suggest. Now researchers have conducted a small experiment to test the idea. Scientists had nine people spend 10 nights in a sleep laboratory. For five consecutive nights, they read before sleep with an iPad; then they read print for five nights. In both scenarios, they read in a dimly lit room until they felt ready to go to sleep. The experiment, described in Physiological Reports, found that when people used iPads instead of reading print, they selected a later bedtime and had a later sleep onset. They also had suppressed levels of melatonin, the hormone that regulates sleep, and delayed time to melatonin secretion. Periods of REM sleep — the rapid eye movements of the dreaming stage of sleep — were reduced when they used the iPad rather than printed material. The volunteers also reported feeling less sleepy in the evening, and less alert in the morning after using the electronic device. “These devices are not benign,” said a co-author of the study, Jeanne F. Duffy, a neuroscientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “They have biological effects on us. They can be bad for adults, but really bad for kids and adolescents who already don’t get enough sleep.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 25023 - Posted: 05.26.2018

By Judith Graham, You’ve turned 65 and exited middle age. What are the chances you’ll develop cognitive impairment or dementia in the years ahead? New research about “cognitive life expectancy”—how long older adults live with good versus declining brain health—shows that after age 65 men and women spend more than a dozen years in good cognitive health, on average. And, over the past decade, that time span has been expanding. By contrast, cognitive challenges arise in a more compressed time frame in later life, with mild cognitive impairment (problems with memory, decision-making or thinking skills) lasting about four years, on average, and dementia (Alzheimer’s disease or other related conditions) occurring over 1½ to two years. Even when these conditions surface, many seniors retain an overall sense of well-being, according to new research presented last month at the Population Association of America’s annual meeting. “The majority of cognitively impaired years are happy ones, not unhappy ones,” said Anthony Bardo, a co-author of that study and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky-Lexington. Recent research finds that: Most seniors don’t have cognitive impairment or dementia. Of Americans 65 and older, about 20 to 25 percent have mild cognitive impairment while about 10 percent have dementia, according to Dr. Kenneth Langa, an expert in the demography of aging and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. Risks rise with advanced age, and the portion of the population affected is significantly higher for people over 85. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25022 - Posted: 05.25.2018

By Jim Daley The organizer, a group of cells in the embryo that directs the developmental fates and morphogenesis of other embryonic cells, has been identified in human tissue for the first time, according to a study published today (May 23) in Nature. The discovery demonstrates that the organizer is evolutionarily conserved from amphibians to humans. “For many of us this was always the Holy Grail” of developmental biology, says Guillermo Oliver, the director of the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine’s Center for Vascular and Developmental Biology, who was not involved in the study. “The fact that now you can take stem cells and recapitulate those properties with the combination of actors reported here . . . is quite remarkable.” Rockefeller University embryologist Ali Brivanlou and colleagues report that when they grafted human stem cells that they’d treated with Wnt and Activin, two signaling proteins previously shown to be involved in organizer gene expression in other animals, into chick embryos, the grafted cells set off the developmental progress of the cells around them. The experiment establishes for the first time that the organizer exists in humans and that Wnt and Activin work in concert to make it possible for cells to direct embryonic development. S The search for the organizer, and with it the field of modern embryology, began nearly a century ago. Hilde Mangold, a PhD candidate in the lab of German zoologist Hans Spemann, wrote a dissertation in 1924 that described the organizer for the first time. Mangold and Spemann observed a distinct shape and morphology in some of the cells along the neural axis—the portion of the embryo that will become the central nervous system and one of the first structures to form during development—in a salamander embryo. When they grafted these cells from one embryo to another, the transplanted cells induced the formation of a second developmental axis in that embryo. Spemann would go on to receive the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery; Mangold died before then in an accident. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25021 - Posted: 05.25.2018

By GINA KOLATA The first of a new class of drugs to prevent migraines was approved last week. The medication, called Aimovig, reduces the frequency of migraines among those severely afflicted, but the drug rarely prevents these episodes altogether. One expert called it “progress but not a panacea.” Migraine is the most disabling neurological disease in the world among people under age 50, beating epilepsy, strokes and chronic back pain. Yet many who have migraines don’t realize it or ever mention their symptoms to a doctor. Migraines are not just headaches. It is diagnosed in patients only if they have had a minimum of five attacks, each lasting four to 72 hours. Each attack has to include at least two of the following symptoms: throbbing headache with pain that is moderate to severe, that worsens with activity, and is only on only one side of the head. Also, a person suffering a migraine attack is nauseated or abhors sound or noise. What about auras? Are they part of a migraine? Sometimes, but not always. About 20 percent of migraine patients get an aura before the headache. Auras involve distortions of vision. People see jagged lights or have blind spots in their visual field. But auras can take other forms as well: a prickling pins-and-needles feeling on parts of the body, speech disturbances, distortions of sounds. Some get auras without a headache or only a mild headache. Auras actually involve different areas of the brain than migraines, and it is not clear why they are linked to migraine headaches. How common are migraines? They can start in childhood, although they usually begin in adolescence or young adulthood. They strike nearly one in five women worldwide, one in 16 men and one in 11 children. One out of four households has at least one member with migraine. The condition seems to spring from a combination of genetic and environmental factors. There is nothing a person can do to reduce the odds of developing migraine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25020 - Posted: 05.25.2018

By Ashley Yeager Finding food and lighting fires might explain why humans have such big brains, researchers report yesterday (May 23) in Nature. Humans’ brains are six times as large as those of similarly sized mammals, an observation that has led scientists to ponder for decades what led to such big noodles. Studies suggest social challenges, such as cooperating to hunt, or sharing cultural knowledge spurred the expansion, but a mathematical model to explain human brain evolution finds the environment had a stronger influence. Study coauthors Mauricio González-Forero and Andy Gardner of the University of St. Andrews developed a computer model to simulate the effects of social, environmental, and cultural challenges on brain size over time. “We were expecting social challenges to be a strong promoter of brain size,” González-Forero tells New Scientist. Surprisingly, environmental challenges won out. About 60 percent of the increase in brain size over our ape ancestors came as a result of surviving in the environment, finding and caching food, for example. Another 30 percent came from banding together to survive, and the final 10 percent came from competing with other human groups, the researchers report. If left alone to survive, humans’ brains would be even bigger, according to the model, González-Forero tells The Los Angeles Times. Increasing the cooperative challenges in the model to greater than 30 percent decreased brain size, the team found. “Cooperation decreases brain size because you can rely on the brain of other individuals and you don’t need to invest in such a large and expensive brain,” González-Forero says. The Scientist

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25019 - Posted: 05.25.2018

By Emily Underwood When a 53-year-old man asked Dutch doctors to treat his obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) several years back, they suggested a new but promising surgical treatment: implanted electrodes that would stimulate deep brain tissue involved in decision-making, reward-seeking, and motivation. The treatment apparently helped him go off one of his psychiatric medications, but it came with a surprising side effect—it also seemed to improve his type 2 diabetes. Now, researchers think they know why. A new study suggests that a boost in the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in motivation and pleasure, improves the body’s ability to process sugar. This is the first time such a pathway, previously seen in mice, has been found in humans, says Mike Michaelides, a neuroscientist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the new research. That doesn’t make deep brain stimulation (DBS) realistic for most people with diabetes, but other, less invasive brain therapies that target dopamine might one day be feasible. Diabetes occurs when glucose, or sugar, in a person’s bloodstream remains in chronically high concentrations. Type 1, which typically begins in childhood, results when the immune system destroys the pancreatic cells that make insulin, the hormone that lets our cells use sugar as food. Type 2 diabetes, typically triggered by a combination of bad genes, poor eating habits, and a lack of exercise, also damages the body’s ability to produce its own insulin. As time goes on, cells are hard-pressed to remove sugar from the blood, and people require larger and larger amounts of insulin to keep their blood sugar stable. There is no cure for either disease. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 25018 - Posted: 05.24.2018

By Chris Buckley and Gardiner Harris BEIJING — An American government employee posted in southern China has signs of possible brain injury after reporting disturbing sounds and sensations, the State Department said on Wednesday, in events that seemed to draw parallels with mysterious ailments that struck American diplomats in Cuba. The State Department warning, issued through the United States Consulate in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, advised American citizens in China to seek medical help if they felt similar symptoms. But it said that no other cases had been reported. “A U.S. government employee in China recently reported subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,” the health alert said. “We do not currently know what caused the reported symptoms and we are not aware of any similar situations in China, either inside or outside of the diplomatic community.” The employee was working in Guangzhou, and “reported experiencing a variety of physical symptoms” from late 2017 until April, Jinnie Lee, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Beijing, said in an emailed response to questions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday that medical teams were heading to Guangzhou to address the issue. “The medical indications are very similar and entirely consistent with the medical indications that have taken place to Americans working in Cuba,” he said. The embassy was told on Friday “that the clinical findings of this evaluation matched mild traumatic brain injury,” according to Ms. Lee, who said she could not reveal any more details to protect the employee’s privacy. Mild traumatic brain injury can show up as headache, dizziness, nausea, poor memory and a general foggy sensation. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately answer faxed questions about the ill American, but Mr. Pompeo said the Trump administration had asked the Chinese government for assistance in an investigation, “and they have committed to honoring their commitments under the Vienna convention.” The Vienna convention requires that countries protect diplomats stationed in their nations. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Hearing
Link ID: 25017 - Posted: 05.24.2018

Anya Kamenetz "I want The Three Bears!" These days parents, caregivers and teachers have lots of options when it comes to fulfilling that request. You can read a picture book, put on a cartoon, play an audiobook, or even ask Alexa. A newly published study gives some insight into what may be happening inside young children's brains in each of those situations. And, says lead author Dr. John Hutton, there is an apparent "Goldilocks effect" — some kinds of storytelling may be "too cold" for children, while others are "too hot." And, of course, some are "just right." Hutton is a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital with a special interest in "emergent literacy" — the process of learning to read. For the study, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with stories in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. All three versions came from the Web site of Canadian author Robert Munsch. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. "We went into it with an idea in mind of what brain networks were likely to be influenced by the story," Hutton explains. One was language. One was visual perception. The third is called visual imagery. The fourth was the default mode network, which Hutton calls, "the seat of the soul, internal reflection — how something matters to you." The default mode network includes regions of the brain that appear more active when someone is not actively concentrating on a designated mental task involving the outside world. In terms of Hutton's "Goldilocks effect," here's what the researchers found: © 2018 npr

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25016 - Posted: 05.24.2018

Kelly Crowe · In a darkened room at Toronto's Krembil Research Institute, Dr. Donald Weaver is looking at a screen covered in green fluorescent dots. That's not a good thing. Those glowing green dots are exactly what this Alzheimer's researcher did not want to see. "Weeks if not months of work went into this compound and it failed," he said. "It's done." Weaver, a neurologist and chemist, was testing a compound to see if it could prevent the clumping of a protein called tau which creates distinctive tangles in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. If it had worked, it might have been a candidate for a new drug. But it didn't work, just like the thousands of others he's already tried. Failure is normal for researchers engaged in the frustrating search for drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease. "You have to be passionate," Weaver said. "This is a disease in which so many approaches have failed. You really have to deeply believe that your approach is correct just to get up every day and keep working at it." Many promising drugs have failed But after a series of high-profile drug failures over the past few years, scientists are facing the disturbing possibility that their leading theory of Alzheimer's might be fatally flawed. It's called the amyloid hypothesis, and it was an obvious target for researchers because the amyloid protein forms distinctive plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. "That led to the conclusion it must be playing a pretty important role in the disease," Weaver said. The amyloid hypothesis was first proposed in 1992, and for the past 25 years research has focused on finding compounds that clear amyloid from the brain or slow down its production. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25015 - Posted: 05.24.2018

By Darold A. Treffert How many children have “autism”? Is that number increasing? Is there an “epidemic” of autism or have we merely been continually refining it, expanding it and moving the goalposts since it was first described by Leo Kanner in 1943? I met my first child with autism in 1959, almost 60 years ago. I had the good fortune to learn about autism firsthand from Kanner himself, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and I was a medical student there. Then, in 1962, I started a Children’s Unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin, on which almost all the children were autistic. That’s also the unit on which I met my first savant. The question of autism prevalence engaged me even then. In 1970, I carried out the first U.S. study of the epidemiology of infantile autism, published in Archives of General Psychiatry. Actually, autism was then most commonly diagnosed formally as childhood schizophrenia. At that time, the Wisconsin Department of Health and Human services provided me with a printout listing all patients age 12 and under seen for evaluation or treatment and given a diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia between fiscal 1962 and 1967 in 30 community mental health and child guidance clinics; four state and county mental hospitals; three colonies NOT REAL NAMES and training schools; and the children’s treatment center, children’s diagnostic center and university hospitals. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25014 - Posted: 05.24.2018

By Dennis Normile SHANGHAI, CHINA—The nascent China Brain Project took another step toward reality last week with the launch of the Shanghai Research Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. The new center and its Beijing counterpart, launched 2 months ago, are expected to become part of an ambitious national effort to bring China to the forefront of neuroscience. But details of that 15-year project—expected to rival similar U.S. and EU efforts in scale and ambition—are still being worked out, 2 years after the government made it a priority. Preparation for the national effort “was taking quite a long time,” says Zhang Xu, a neuroscientist and executive director of the new center here. So Beijing and Shanghai got started on their own plans, he says. China’s growing research prowess and an increasing societal interest in neuroscience—triggered in part by an aging population—as well as commercial opportunities and government support are all coming together to make this “a good time for China’s brain science efforts,” Zhang says. Government planners called for brain research to be a key science and technology project in the nation’s 13th Five-Year Plan, adopted in spring 2016. The effort would have three main pillars, according to a November 2016 Neuron paper from a group that included Poo Mu-ming, director of Shanghai’s Institute of Neuroscience (ION), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It would focus on basic research on neural mechanisms underlying cognition, translational studies of neurological diseases with an emphasis on early diagnosis and intervention, and brain simulations to advance artificial intelligence and robotics. Support under the 5-year plan was just the start of a 15-year program, the group wrote. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25013 - Posted: 05.23.2018

By Christof Koch Consciousness is everything you experience. It is the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate mousse, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end. The origin and nature of these experiences, sometimes referred to as qualia, have been a mystery from the earliest days of antiquity right up to the present. Many modern analytic philosophers of mind, most prominently perhaps Daniel Dennett of Tufts University, find the existence of consciousness such an intolerable affront to what they believe should be a meaningless universe of matter and the void that they declare it to be an illusion. That is, they either deny that qualia exist or argue that they can never be meaningfully studied by science. If that assertion was true, this essay would be very short. All I would need to explain is why you, I and most everybody else is so convinced that we have feelings at all. If I have a tooth abscess, however, a sophisticated argument to persuade me that my pain is delusional will not lessen its torment one iota. As I have very little sympathy for this desperate solution to the mind-body problem, I shall move on. The majority of scholars accept consciousness as a given and seek to understand its relationship to the objective world described by science. More than a quarter of a century ago Francis Crick and I decided to set aside philosophical discussions on consciousness (which have engaged scholars since at least the time of Aristotle) and instead search for its physical footprints. What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? Once we can understand that, we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25012 - Posted: 05.23.2018

By Tanya Lewis Every few seconds a wave of electrical activity travels through the brain, like a large swell moving through the ocean. Scientists first detected these ultraslow undulations decades ago in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of people and other animals at rest—but the phenomenon was thought to be either electrical “noise” or the sum of much faster brain signals and was largely ignored. Now a study that measured these “infraslow” (less than 0.1 hertz) brain waves in mice suggests they are a distinct type of brain activity that depends on an animal’s conscious state. But big questions remain about these waves’ origin and function. An fMRI scan detects changes in blood flow that are assumed to be linked to neural activity. “When you put someone in a scanner, if you just look at the signal when you don’t ask the subject to do anything, it looks pretty noisy,” says Marcus Raichle, a professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and senior author of the new study, published in April in Neuron. “All this resting-state activity brought to the forefront: What is this fMRI signal all about?” To find out what was going on in the brain, Raichle’s team employed a combination of calcium/hemoglobin imaging, which uses fluorescent molecules to detect the activity of neurons at the cellular level, and electrophysiology, which can record signals from cells in different brain layers. They performed both measurements in awake and anesthetized mice; the awake mice were resting in tiny hammocks in a dark room. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25011 - Posted: 05.23.2018

Hartmut Wekerle Some immunologists regard the central nervous system (CNS) as a no-man’s-land, avoided by immune cells and therefore uninteresting. But, in fact, the CNS has a vigorous immune potential that remains dormant in normal conditions but is awakened after injury. The switch that controls the brain’s immune microenvironment involves non-neuronal cells called glia — not only microglia, which are sometimes called the immune cells of the CNS, but also multifunctional cells called astrocytes1. In a paper in Nature, Rothhammer et al.2 describe how these two glial cell types communicate on a molecular level to influence inflammation in the CNS, and show that this interaction is controlled remotely by microbes that inhabit the gut. A decade ago, the group that performed the current study, along with another research group, discovered3,4 an unexpected immunoregulatory role for a ligand-activated transcription factor called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR), which at the time was best known as a receptor for environmental toxins5. The two groups showed that AHR modulates the progression of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) — an autoimmune disease in mice in which the immune system becomes overactive and attacks the CNS. EAE is often used a model of multiple sclerosis (MS). Initially, the groups focused on how AHR might affect EAE by regulating pathogenic and protective subsets of immune cells outside the CNS. But it later emerged that AHR is also strongly expressed in the CNS, particularly in microglia and astrocytes6, raising the question of whether AHR in the CNS has a role in autoimmune diseases. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Obesity
Link ID: 25010 - Posted: 05.23.2018