By Oshan Jarow Sometimes when I’m looking out across the northern meadow of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, or even the concrete parking lot outside my office window, I wonder if someone like Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson could have taken in the same view and seen more. I don’t mean making out blurry details or more objects in the scene. But through the lens of their minds, could they encounter the exact same world as me and yet have a richer experience? One way to answer that question, at least as a thought experiment, could be to compare the electrical activity inside our brains while gazing out upon the same scene, and running some statistical analysis designed to actually tell us whose brain activity indicates more richness. But that’s just a loopy thought experiment, right? Not exactly. One of the newest frontiers in the science of the mind is the attempt to measure consciousness’s “complexity,” or how diverse and integrated electrical activity is across the brain. Philosophers and neuroscientists alike hypothesize that more complex brain activity signifies “richer” experiences. The idea of measuring complexity stems from information theory — a mathematical approach to understanding how information is stored, communicated, and processed —which doesn’t provide wonderfully intuitive examples of what more richness actually means. Unless you’re a computer person. “If you tried to upload the content onto a hard drive, it’s how much memory you’d need to be able to store the experience you’re having,” Adam Barrett, a professor of machine learning and data science at the University of Sussex, told me. Another approach to understanding richness is to look at how it changes in different mental states. Recent studies have found that measures of complexity are lowest in patients under general anesthesia, higher in ordinary wakefulness, and higher still in psychedelic trips, which can notoriously turn even the most mundane experiences — say, my view of the parking lot outside my office window — into profound and meaningful encounters.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29049 - Posted: 12.16.2023

By Carl Zimmer Why do we grow old and die? In the 19th century, the German biologist August Weismann argued that the machinery of life inevitably wore out with time. Death had evolved “for the need of the species,” he declared. It cleared away weak, old individuals so they wouldn’t compete with young ones. That explanation never made sense to George Williams, an American evolutionary biologist. Natural selection acts only on the genes that are passed down from one generation to the next. What happens at the end of an animal’s life can have no effect on the course of evolution. It occurred to Williams that growing old might instead be an inescapable side effect of natural selection. In 1957, he proposed a new theory: Genetic mutations that increased an animal’s fertility could also cause harm late in life. Over many generations, those mutations would create a burden that would lead eventually to death. A new study, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, bolsters Williams’s theory using a trove of human DNA. Researchers found hundreds of mutations that could boost a young person’s fertility and that were linked to bodily damage later in life. Smaller studies in the past had already offered some support for Williams’s theory. In 2007, for example, a team of researchers studying a tiny worm found a pair of mutations that lengthened the creature’s life while cutting down its average number of offspring. But Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, was not satisfied with these experiments. “These are case studies,” he said. “We don’t know if in the entire genome there are lots of such mutations.” Dr. Zhang tapped into the UK Biobank, a database containing genetic material from half a million volunteers in Britain, along with information on their health and life experiences. The biobank has permitted scientists to uncover subtle links between genetic variations and thousands of traits such as high blood pressure, schizophrenia and a habit of smoking. Working with Dr. Erping Long, a medical researcher now at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr. Zhang pored over the database for information about reproduction and longevity. The scientists found that the genetic variations linked to fertility, such as the number of children a volunteer had, were also linked to a shorter life span. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 29048 - Posted: 12.16.2023

Maria Godoy What do you do when you can't get your kids to settle down to go to sleep? For a growing number of parents, the answer is melatonin. Recent research shows nearly one in five school-age children and adolescents are now using the supplement on a regular basis. Pediatricians say that's cause for alarm. "It is terrifying to me that this amount of an unregulated product is being utilized," says Dr. Cora Collette Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington. Melatonin is a hormone produced by your brain that helps regulate sleep-wake cycles. It's also sold as a dietary supplement and is widely used as a sleep aid. Sponsor Message Lauren Hartstein, a postdoctoral researcher who studies sleep in early childhood at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says she first got an inkling of melatonin's growing use in children and adolescents while screening families to participate in research. "All of a sudden last year, we noticed that there was a big uptick in the number of parents who were regularly giving [their kids] melatonin," Hartstein says. Hartstein and her colleagues wanted to learn more about just how widely melatonin is being used in kids. So they surveyed the parents of nearly 1,000 children between the ages of 1 to 14 across the country. She was surprised by just how many kids are taking the supplement. "Nearly 6% of preschoolers, [ages] 1 to 4, had taken it, and that number jumped significantly higher to 18% and 19% for school-age children and pre-teens," she says. As Hartstein and her co-authors recently reported in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, most of the kids that were using melatonin had been on it for a year or longer. And 1 in 4 kids were taking it every single night. © 2023 npr

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 29047 - Posted: 12.16.2023

By Tosin Thompson Last month saw the first-ever approval of a gene therapy that uses the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool, a treatment for the blood conditions sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia that works by precisely cutting out a faulty gene in people’s stem cells. Now, researchers in search of new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease are hoping to deploy similar strategies against forms of the disease that are caused by genetic mutations. Although there are now some treatments that slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, these often don’t benefit people who are in the later stages or who have mutations that raise the risk of the disease. “CRISPR therapies could potentially be a one-and-done cure, which no other drug can match,” says Subhojit Roy, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. But he adds that there is a long way to go before these therapies could be deployed against such a complex condition. “Cutting and pasting a gene is much harder to do in the brain using current technology.” Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, a health issue of global concern. More than 55 million people are affected by dementia, and this figure is projected to nearly triple by 2050. “We do not fully understand how the brain works, which makes the challenge of understanding and treating brain diseases like Alzheimer’s very difficult,” says Tara Spires-Jones, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Much of Alzheimer’s research is driven by the amyloid hypothesis, the idea that the build-up of amyloid-β proteins in the brain, which eventually form clumps called plaques, is the main cause of the disease. Amyloid plaques trigger another brain protein, called tau, to clump together and spread inside neurons. It is usually well into this process that symptoms such as memory loss start to appear. Usually, the more tau is present, the more severe the symptoms are. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29046 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Roberta McLain Dreams have fascinated people for millennia, yet we struggle to understand their purpose. Some theories suggest dreams help us deal with emotions, solve problems or manage hidden desires. Others postulate that they clean up brain waste, make memories stronger or deduce the meaning of random brain activity. A more recent theory suggests nighttime dreams protect visual areas of the brain from being co-opted during sleep by other sensory functions, such as hearing or touch. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed the idea that dreaming is necessary to safeguard the visual cortex—the part of the brain responsible for processing vision. Eagleman’s theory takes into account that the human brain is highly adaptive, with certain areas able to take on new tasks, an ability called neuroplasticity. He argues that neurons compete for survival. The brain, Eagleman explains, distributes its resources by “implementing a do-or-die competition” for brain territory in which sensory areas “gain or lose neural territory when inputs slow, stop or shift.” Experiences over a lifetime reshape the map of the brain. “Just like neighboring nations, neurons stake out their territory and chronically defend them,” he says. Eagleman points to children who have had half their brain removed because of severe health problems and then regain normal function. The remaining brain reorganizes itself and takes over the roles of the missing sections. Similarly, people who lose sight or hearing show heightened sensitivity in the remaining senses because the region of the brain normally used by the lost sense is taken over by other senses. Reorganization can happen fast. Studies published in 2007 and 2008 by Lotfi Merabet of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues showed just how quickly this takeover can happen. The 2008 study, in which subjects were blindfolded, revealed that the seizing of an idle area by other senses begins in as little as 90 minutes. And other studies found that this can occur within 45 minutes. When we sleep, we can smell, hear and feel, but visual information is absent—except during REM sleep. © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 29045 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Gina Kolata Dr. Edward Lewis, a pediatrician in Rochester, N.Y., has seen hundreds of children with obesity over the years in his medical practice. He finally may have a treatment for their medical condition — the powerful weight loss drug Wegovy. But that does not mean Dr. Lewis is prescribing it. Nor are most other pediatricians. “I am reluctant to prescribe medications we don’t use on a day-to-day basis,” Dr. Lewis said. And, he added, he is disinclined to use “a medicine that is a relative newcomer to the scene in kids.” Regulators and medical groups have all said that these drugs are appropriate for children as young as 12. But like Dr. Lewis, many pediatricians hesitate to prescribe Wegovy to young people, fearful that too little is known about long term effects, and mindful of past cases when problems emerged years after a drug was approved. Twenty-two percent of adolescents age 12 to 19 have obesity. Research shows that most are unlikely to ever overcome the condition — advice to diet and exercise usually has not helped. The reason, obesity researchers say, is that obesity is not caused by a lack of will power. Instead, it is a chronic disease characterized by an overwhelming desire to eat. Of particular concern to doctors are the 6 percent of children and adolescents with severe obesity, which is defined as having a body mass index at or above 120 percent of the 95th percentile for height and weight. “We are not talking about kids who are mildly overweight,” said Susan Yanovski, co-director of the office of obesity research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Such extreme obesity in adolescents, she said, often has “a really severe course.” These teenagers develop diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney failure and eye damage much earlier than adults with obesity. “It is terrifying,” Dr. Yanovski added. The seriousness of health outcomes for obese teenagers motivated the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend weight loss drugs like Wegovy for adolescents in January, after the Food and Drug Administration approved it for people age 12 and older. When that happened, experts in obesity medicine were elated, knowing full well the scope of the problem. “We said, Wow, we finally have something we can offer,” Dr. Yanovski said. Still, drugs like Wegovy are new, and the impediments to using them are snowballing. Doctors also worry about the dearth of data on long-term safety. And those who want to prescribe Wegovy say that they are beset by roadblocks put up by health insurers along with severe and continuing drug shortages. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 29044 - Posted: 12.13.2023

Perspective by Michael Varnum and Ian Hohm A growing body of research in psychology and related fields suggests that winter brings some profound changes in how people think, feel and behave. The natural and cultural changes that come with winter often occur simultaneously, making it challenging to tease apart the causes underlying these seasonal swings. Live well every day with tips and guidance on food, fitness and mental health, delivered to your inbox every Thursday. We recently conducted an extensive survey of these findings with research colleagues Alexandra Wormley, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, and Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Wintertime blues and a long winter’s nap Do you find yourself feeling down in the winter months? You’re not alone. As the days grow shorter, the American Psychiatric Association estimates that about 5 percent of Americans will experience a form of depression known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. People experiencing SAD tend to have feelings of hopelessness, decreased motivation to take part in activities they generally enjoy, and lethargy. Even those who don’t meet the clinical threshold for this disorder may see increases in anxiety and depressive symptoms. Scientists link SAD and more general increases in depression in the winter to decreased exposure to sunlight, which leads to lower levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Consistent with the idea that sunlight plays a key role, SAD tends to be more common in more northern regions of the world, such as Scandinavia and Alaska, where the days are shortest and the winters longest. Humans, special as we may be, are not unique in showing some of these seasonally linked changes. For instance, our primate relative the Rhesus macaque shows seasonal declines in mood.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 29043 - Posted: 12.13.2023

A new study shows male zebra finches must sing every day to keep their vocal muscles in shape. Females prefer the songs of males that did their daily vocal workout. Sponsor Message ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Why do songbirds sing so much? Well, a new study suggests they have to to stay in shape. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel. ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: A few years ago, I was out at dawn in South Carolina low country, a mix of swamp and trees draped in Spanish moss. (SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING) DANIEL: The sound of birdsong filled the air. It's the same in lots of places. Once the light of day switches on, songbirds launch their serenade. IRIS ADAM: I mean, why birds sing is relatively well-answered. DANIEL: Iris Adam is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern Denmark. ADAM: For many songbirds, males sing to impress a female and attract them as mate. And also, birds sing to defend their territory. DANIEL: But Adam says these reasons don't explain why songbirds sing so darn much. ADAM: There's an insane drive to sing. DANIEL: For some, it's hours every day. That's a lot of energy. Plus, singing can be dangerous. ADAM: As soon as you sing, you reveal yourself - like, where you are, that you even exist, where your territory is. All of that immediately is out in the open for predators, for everybody. DANIEL: Why take that risk? Adam wondered whether the answer might lie in the muscles that produce birdsong and if those muscles require regular exercise. So she designed a series of experiments on zebra finches, little Australian songbirds with striped heads and a bloom of orange on their cheeks. One of Adam's first experiments involved taking males and severing the connection between their brains and their singing muscles. ADAM: Already after two days, they had lost some of their performance. And after three weeks, they were back to the same level when they were juveniles and never had sung before. DANIEL: Next, she left the finches intact but prevented them from singing for a week by keeping them in the dark almost around the clock. ADAM: The first two or three days, it's quite easy. But the longer the experiment goes, the more they are like, I need to sing. And so then you need to tell them, like, stop. You can't sing. DANIEL: After a week, the birds' singing muscles lost half their strength. But does that impact what the resulting song sounds like? Here's a male before the seven days of darkness. © 2023 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 29042 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Anil Oza Krista Lisdahl has been studying cannabis use among adolescents for two decades, and what she sees makes her worried for her teenage son. “I see the data coming in, I know that he is going to come across it,” she says. As a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, she sees plenty of young people who have come into contact with the drug to varying degrees, from trying it once at a party to using potent preparations of it daily. The encounters have become more frequent as efforts to legalize cannabis for recreational use intensify around the world. In some of her studies, around one-third of adolescents who regularly use cannabis show signs of a cannabis use disorder — that is, they can’t stop using the drug despite negative impacts on their lives. But she wants more conclusive evidence when it comes to talking about the drug and its risks to young people, including her son. Deciding what to say is difficult, however. Anti-drug messaging campaigns have dwindled, and young people are forced to consider sometimes-conflicting messages on risks in a culture that increasingly paints cannabis and other formerly illicit drugs as harmless or potentially therapeutic. “Teenagers are pretty smart, and they see that adults use cannabis,” Lisdahl says. That makes blanket warnings and prohibitions practically useless. It’s now a decade since the drug was officially legalized for recreational use by adults aged 18 and older in Uruguay, and aged 21 and older in the states of Colorado and Washington. Many other states and countries have followed, and researchers are desperately trying to get a handle on how usage patterns are changing as a result; how the drug impacts brain development; and how cannabis use correlates with mental-health conditions such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. The data so far don’t tell clear stories: young people don’t seem to be using in greater numbers than before legalization, but there seem to be trends towards more problematic use. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29041 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Sabrina Malhi Cannabis use is associated with a greater risk of an unhealthy pregnancy outcomes, especially low birth weight, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. While the study did not identity why cannabis use might have these effects, it underscores the potentially damaging impact of the substance on fetal health, the authors say. Many pregnant people use cannabis to help manage symptoms, including nausea and pain. The prevalence of the drug has surged in the past decade as more states have legalized its use for medicine or recreation, and many people believe it is relatively safe. But the impact cannabis has on pregnancy has been understudied. For the new study, researchers analyzed urine samples from more than 9,000 pregnant people between 2010 and 2013 to determine whether cannabis was used at any point during pregnancy, at how many weeks of gestation it was used and the amount. The team measured THC, the psychoactive substance in cannabis, at three different periods roughly tracking with trimesters and used that data to calculate total cannabis exposure throughout the entire pregnancy. Their findings were published in JAMA on Tuesday. The authors determined that pregnant people who used cannabis experienced unfavorable birth outcomes at rates of 25.9 percent, compared with 17.4 percent among those who did not use cannabis. Low birth weight and cannabis use had the strongest association out of all the adverse outcomes, the study found. Low birth weight is defined as weighing less than 5 lbs., 8 ounces at birth. This can lead to a range of health complications and long-term risks, including an increased likelihood of chronic conditions later in life. Experts say the study adds to a growing body of evidence that no amount of cannabis is safe during pregnancy.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29040 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Yasemin Saplakoglu Erin Calipari comes from a basketball family. Her father, John Calipari, has coached college and professional basketball since 1998, leading six teams to the NCAA Final Four, and her brother coaches men’s basketball at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she now works. But when she joined her college team as an undergraduate, she realized her strengths lay elsewhere. “I was fine. I wasn’t great,” she said. “It was pretty clear to me a couple years in that it was not a career path.” Off the court, as a biology major she gravitated toward hormones and neurotransmitters. She grew fascinated with the neurobiology of how and why drugs such as cocaine and opioids are addictive, as she learned about the effects of ecstasy on the serotonin system. “I thought drugs were so cool because they hijack the brain,” she said. “Drugs essentially take the normal systems we have in our body and drive them in a way that makes you want to take drugs again.” After pursuing graduate work in neuroscience, in 2017 Calipari set up her lab at Vanderbilt to explore how addiction is connected to the ways the brain learns and makes decisions. “Deciding what to do and what not to do is really fundamental to everything we do,” Calipari said. “You put your hand on a hot stove, you learn really quickly not to do that again.” Addiction can diminish a person’s ability to learn that drug use is hurting them, and also their ability to learn anything at all. Her world still collides with sports, for instance when she gives talks to athletes about the dangers of substance use. Athletes can be vulnerable to addiction when they are prescribed pain medicines, such as opioids, for injuries. There is a risk of dependence if opioids are taken for long periods of time, even when patients follow doctors’ orders — a fact that has led to a nationwide public health emergency. Tennessee is an epicenter of the opioid epidemic. In 2022, Nashville had the second-highest rate of overdose deaths in the country. All Rights Reserved © 2023

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29039 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Amitha Kalaichandran In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had several questions around definitions and criteria to include, such as “brain fog” often experienced by those with long Covid. My intuition piqued, and I began to wonder about the similarities between these neurological symptoms and those experienced by people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. As a medical journalist with clinical and epidemiological experience, I found the possible connection and its implications impossible to ignore. We know that three years of potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2, in combination with the shift in social patterns (including work-from-home and social isolation), has impacted several aspects of neurocognition, as detailed in a recent report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. A 2021 systematic review found persistent neuropsychiatric symptoms in Covid-19 survivors, and a 2021 paper in the journal JAMA Network Open found that executive functioning, processing speed, memory, and recall were impacted in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. Long Covid may indeed be linked to developing chronic neurocognitive issues, and even dementia may be accelerated. The virus might impact the frontal lobe, the area that governs executive function — which involves how we make decisions and plan, use our working memory, and control impulses. In October, a paper in Cell reported that long Covid brain fog could be traced to serotonin depletion driven by immune system proteins called viral-associated interferons. Similarly, the symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are believed to be rooted structurally in the frontal lobe and possibly from a naturally low level of the neurotransmitter dopamine, with contributions from norepinephrine, serotonin, and GABA. This helps explain why people with ADHD, who experience inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, among other symptoms, may seek higher levels of stimulation: to activate the release of dopamine. However, a deficit in serotonin can also trigger ADHD. The same neurotransmitter, when depleted, may be responsible for brain fog in long Covid.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 29038 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Carolyn Wilke Newborn bottlenose dolphins sport a row of hairs along the tops of their jaws. But once the animals are weaned, the whiskers fall out. “Everybody thought these structures are vestigial — so without any function,” said Guido Dehnhardt, a marine mammal zoologist at the University of Rostock in Germany. But Dr. Dehnhardt and his colleagues have discovered that the pits left by those hairs can perceive electricity with enough sensitivity that they may help the dolphins snag fish or navigate the ocean. The team reported its findings Thursday in The Journal of Experimental Biology. Dr. Dehnhardt first studied the whisker pits of a different species, the Guiana dolphin. He expected to find the typical structures of hair follicles, but those were missing. Yet the pits were loaded with nerve endings. He and his colleagues realized that the hairless follicles looked like the electricity-sensing structures on sharks and found that one Guiana dolphin responded to electrical signals. They wondered whether other toothed cetaceans, including bottlenose dolphins, could also sense electricity. For the new study, the researchers trained two bottlenose dolphins to rest their jaws, or rostrums, on a platform and swim away anytime they experienced a sensory cue like a sound or a flash of light. If they didn’t detect one of these signals, the dolphins were to stay put. “It’s basically the same as when we go to the doctor’s and do a hearing test — we have to press a button as soon as we hear a sound,” said Tim Hüttner, a biologist at the Nuremberg Zoo in Germany and a study co-author. Once trained, the dolphins also received electrical signals. “The dolphins responded correctly on the first trial,” Dr. Hüttner said. The animals were able to transfer what they had learned, revealing that they could also detect electric fields. Further study showed that the dolphins’ sensitivity to electricity was similar to that of the platypus, which is thought to use its electrical sense for foraging. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 29037 - Posted: 12.09.2023

Sydney E. Smith When most people hear about electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, it typically conjures terrifying images of cruel, outdated and pseudo-medical procedures. Formerly known as electroshock therapy, this perception of ECT as dangerous and ineffective has been reinforced in pop culture for decades – think the 1962 novel-turned-Oscar-winning film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” where an unruly patient is subjected to ECT as punishment by a tyrannical nurse. Despite this stigma, ECT is a highly effective treatment for depression – up to 80% of patients experience at least a 50% reduction in symptom severity. For one of the most disabling illnesses around the world, I think it’s surprising that ECT is rarely used to treat depression. Contributing to the stigma around ECT, psychiatrists still don’t know exactly how it heals a depressed person’s brain. ECT involves using highly controlled doses of electricity to induce a brief seizure under anesthesia. Often, the best description you’ll hear from a physician on why that brief seizure can alleviate depression symptoms is that ECT “resets” the brain – an answer that can be fuzzy and unsettling to some. As a data-obsessed neuroscientist, I was also dissatisfied with this explanation. In our newly published research, my colleagues and I in the lab of Bradley Voytek at UC San Diego discovered that ECT might work by resetting the brain’s electrical background noise. To study how ECT treats depression, my team and I used a device called an electroencephalogram, or EEG. It measures the brain’s electrical activity – or brain waves – via electrodes placed on the scalp. You can think of brain waves as music played by an orchestra. Orchestral music is the sum of many instruments together, much like EEG readings are the sum of the electrical activity of millions of brain cells. © 2010–2023, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29036 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Siddhant Pusdekar In the deepest stage of sleep, slow waves of electrical activity travel through your brain. They help consolidate memories and flush out the buildup of unwanted chemicals, getting you ready for the day. This midnight orchestra is responsible for many of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, such as improved attention, mood and energy levels. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently found that for some people, these waves could also serve as early warning signs of diabetes. The results, published in July in Cell Reports Medicine, suggest that getting a restful sleep may help control high blood sugar. People with type 2 diabetes are unable to metabolize sugar, leading to a damaging excess concentration in the blood. The approximately 515 million people globally with type 2 diabetes can manage blood sugar through diet, exercise and medications such as insulin. But researchers and clinicians have observed that quality of sleep seems to influence blood sugar, too. “We have known that something magic happens during sleep,” says New York University neuroscientist Gyorgy Buzsaki about the links between sleep and metabolism. Yet the mechanism behind that relationship has been a mystery, he says. To investigate, the July study’s co-lead author Raphael Vallat, then a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley, analyzed blood glucose and sleep measurements from two large independent public datasets. In the first analysis, Vallat and his colleagues examined sleep patterns measured from polysomnography, a standard assessment that doctors recommend for people with sleep problems. The procedure, typically conducted at night, involves placing a bunch of wires on different parts of the head to record activity in specific brain regions. The ends of the wires act like “microphones” that “hear” brain waves, explains Vyoma Shah, a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and co-lead author of the paper. Squiggles of different shapes and sizes on the polysomnography graphs represent the ebbs and flows of electrical activity in people’s head as they sleep throughout the night. It is only a surface-level view, however. © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 29035 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Amanda Gefter On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. It had a band around its leg, but where it came from, or was meant to be headed, no one could say. While management debated what to do, a maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla. The 78-year-old inventor quickly volunteered to take in the homeless pigeon. “Dr. Tesla … dropped work on a new electrical project, lest his charge require some little attention,” reported The New York Times. “The man who recently announced the discovery of an electrical death-beam, powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a swoop, carefully spread towels on his window ledge and set down a little cup of seed.” Nikola Tesla—the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil—had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. In the dark, he’d sound a low whistle, and from the gloom, hordes of pigeons would flock to the old man, perching on his outstretched arms. He was known to keep baskets in his room as nests, along with caches of homemade seed mix, and to leave his windows perpetually open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and, from his holding cell in the 34th Street precinct, had to convince the officers that he was—or had been—one of the most famous inventors in the world. It had been years since he’d produced a successful invention. He was gaunt and broke—living off of debt and good graces—having been kicked out of a string of hotels, a trail of pigeon droppings and unpaid rent in his wake. He had no family or close friends, except for the birds. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29034 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Carl Zimmer Traumatic brain injuries have left more than five million Americans permanently disabled. They have trouble focusing on even simple tasks and often have to quit jobs or drop out of school. A study published on Monday has offered them a glimpse of hope. Five people with moderate to severe brain injuries had electrodes implanted in their heads. As the electrodes stimulated their brains, their performance on cognitive tests improved. If the results hold up in larger clinical trials, the implants could become the first effective therapy for chronic brain injuries, the researchers said. “This is the first evidence that you can move the dial for this problem,” said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who led the study. Gina Arata, one of the volunteers who received the implant, was 22 when a car crash left her with fatigue, memory problems and uncontrollable emotions. She abandoned her plans for law school and lived with her parents in Modesto, Calif., unable to keep down a job. In 2018, 18 years after the crash, Ms. Arata received the implant. Her life has changed profoundly, she said. “I can be a normal human being and have a conversation,” she said. “It’s kind of amazing how I’ve seen myself improve.” Dr. Schiff and his colleagues designed the trial based on years of research on the structure of the brain. Those studies suggested that our ability to focus on tasks depends on a network of brain regions that are linked to each other by long branches of neurons. The regions send signals to each other, creating a feedback loop that keeps the whole network active. Sudden jostling of the brain — in a car crash or a fall, for example — can break some of the long-distance connections in the network and lead people to fall into a coma, Dr. Schiff and his colleagues have hypothesized. During recovery, the network may be able to power itself back up. But if the brain is severely damaged, it may not fully rebound. Dr. Schiff and his colleagues pinpointed a structure deep inside the brain as a crucial hub in the network. Known as the central lateral nucleus, it is a thin sheet of neurons about the size and shape of an almond shell. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 29033 - Posted: 12.06.2023

By Esther Landhuis Dropping an ice crystal into a bottle of near-frozen water produces a dramatic effect: very quickly, the liquid crystallizes into a block of ice. At the molecular level, an ice crystal has a distinct shape—a lattice structure. As incoming water molecules reshape to join the lattice, the crystal grows. Some researchers think an analogous process underlies Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses. According to this theory, these diseases begin when a particular protein misfolds, or fails to assume the proper shape for its intended role. That misshapen molecule ensnares normal versions of the protein, causing them to similarly misfold, and over time, these rogue proteins clump into toxic clusters that spread through the brain. In mad cow disease—a brain disorder in cattle that can spread to people who eat meat from ill animals —the toxic proteins, called prions, ravage the mind quickly, leading to dementia and death within months. Prion diseases are rare. About 350 cases of the most common type, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are reported each year in the U.S. By comparison, each year, nearly 500,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which develops more gradually. Plaques made up of abnormal beta-amyloid proteins can accumulate in the brain for years or even decades before a person notices signs of mental decline. While the time lines for toxicity differ, “the mechanism of misfolding is the same,” says Mathias Jucker, a neuroscientist at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Just as all of the water in a bottle freezes after a “‘misfolded’ water molecule” slips into the vessel, if “you have one misfolded protein, all the other ones will take the same shape.” The idea that many diseases could arise from a common prionlike process raises an intriguing and troubling question: Under certain circumstances, could neurodegenerative disorders be transmitted from person to person? © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Prions
Link ID: 29032 - Posted: 12.06.2023

Saga Briggs Trauma is not merely a phenomenon of the mind but also a condition physically embedded in the body, often eluding our conscious awareness and affecting our overall health. That was the main argument in psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, which quickly became a modern classic among trauma researchers, clinicians, and survivors. The book shifted how many in the West view psychiatric illness, which was often viewed solely through a psychological or neurochemical lens, and it sparked new interest in more holistic treatments for trauma that had long been considered alternative: yoga, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), the performing arts, and psychedelics, to name a few. But what does it really mean for the body to “keep the score”? Is it biologically possible for the viscera to actually store and release trauma? In his book, van der Kolk writes: “The body keeps the score. If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.” Can the body “keep score”? Recently, neuroscientists have expressed skepticism over the notion that the body can “keep score” of anything. In a 2023 Big Think video, Lisa Feldman Barrett argued that everything, including trauma, is in our heads, and that “the brain keeps the score and the body is the scorecard.” In her view, everything we experience is constructed by the brain, which learns to predict how we will feel based on past experiences, issues, and sensations that seem to come from our body but actually come from our brain. “When you feel your heart beating, you are not feeling it in your chest, you are feeling it in your brain,” she said. “Your body is always sending sensory signals to the brain, of course, but emotions are made in the brain, not in the body. They are experienced in the brain, like everything else you experience, not in the body. If you experience a trauma, you experience it in your brain.”

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 29031 - Posted: 12.06.2023

By Ellen Barry At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. A group of researchers at Yale University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai set out to find empirical evidence of those differences. The team conducted brain scans of 28 people with PTSD while they listened to recorded narrations of their own memories. Some of the recorded memories were neutral, some were simply “sad,” and some were traumatic. The brain scans found clear differences, the researchers reported in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories — of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks — the hippocampus was not involved. “What it tells us is that the brain is in a different state in the two memories,” said Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and one of the authors of the study. She noted that therapies for PTSD often sought to help people organize their memory so they can view it as distant from the present. “Now we find something that potentially can explain it in the brain,” she said. “The brain doesn’t look like it’s in a state of memory; it looks like it is a state of present experience.” Indeed, the authors conclude in the paper, “traumatic memories are not experienced as © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 29030 - Posted: 12.02.2023