By Brooke Jarvis Deirdre Barrett’s body was in bed, but her mind was in a library. The library was inside a very old house, with glowing oil lamps and shelves of beautiful leatherbound books. At first it felt snug and secure and timeless, exactly the sort of place an academic like Barrett, who teaches in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School and edits the scientific journal Dreaming, might find inviting. But as the dream went on, she remembered later, “I became less able to focus on the library and more overwhelmed by the unseen horror outside.” Beyond the windows of the softly lit library, “a terrible plague was ravaging the world.” When Barrett woke up, it was mid-March of 2020. She had been reading about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan since it began to make headlines, and she wondered, as she often did when she read about events in the news, how this one might be showing up in the dreams of the people who were experiencing it: residents on lockdown in China, overwhelmed doctors and nurses in Italy. The dreamlife of collective catastrophe was something she had studied repeatedly during her academic career — analyzing, for example, the dreams of Kuwaitis after the Iraqi invasion and those of British officers held prisoner by the Nazis during World War II, to see how the dreams compared with one another and with dreams from calmer times. As a child, Barrett was fascinated by her own dreams, which were often vivid. They tended to stay with her well after she woke up, making nights feel like a time for slipping in and out of new worlds and adventures, often ones she’d read about but was now able to interact with and inhabit fully. When she grew up, she decided, she would become a writer of fiction; many of the early stories she wrote were set not just in worlds that she imagined, but also in and out of the various dream worlds of her characters. She was deeply curious about the dream lives of other people: When she started writing for her high school newspaper, she occasionally asked her sources if they’d had dreams related to whatever she was interviewing them about. Dreams were a window, albeit a very strange one, into the way that other people and their minds worked. In college Barrett decided that fiction was not her future (though she did develop a practice of making visual art about what she saw and felt while sleeping). What she wanted was to be a scientist who studied what happened inside dreams. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28060 - Posted: 11.03.2021

Julia F. Taylor Eating disorders began to spike among young people shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts believe the increase occurred due to disruptions in daily living, emotional distress and more time spent on social media – which research has shown can lead to lower self-esteem and negative body image. One peer-reviewed study indicates that eating disorder diagnoses increased 15% in 2020 among people under 30 compared to previous years. Other studies have suggested that patients who already had an eating disorder diagnosis got worse during the pandemic. The researchers reported an increase in eating disorder symptoms along with anxiety and depression. Eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and other specified feeding and eating disorders such as atypical anorexia. The peak age of onset is 15-25 years old, but individuals can develop eating disorders at any age. Don’t let yourself be misled. Understand issues with help from experts We are a physician and a psychotherapist who specialize in treating eating disorders in teens and young adults. We’ve seen the increased demand for eating disorder services in our own clinic. While eating disorders have historically been underdiagnosed in certain groups – specifically males, racial/ethnic minorities, and people who are higher-weight, LGBTQ or from poorer backgrounds – the recent COVID-related increase in patients presenting for care has reinforced that no group is immune from them. Here are three groups of young people who are often overlooked when it comes to eating disorders. 1. Adolescent boys and young men Historical research on diagnosing eating disorders has focused on females. This has made it harder for doctors, families and patients to recognize eating disorders in males. For example, adolescent boys may be more prone to focus on muscle strength and steroid use – indicators that are not captured in traditional, female-focused screening tools and diagnostic criteria. H © 2010–2021, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 28059 - Posted: 11.03.2021

Jordana Cepelewicz Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it’s often difficult to comprehend how much information the brain’s auditory system needs to process and disentangle. It has to take incoming sounds and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive: a friend’s voice, a dog barking, the pitter-patter of rain. It has to extricate relevant sounds from background noise. It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic meaning, while also distinguishing between those voices and assessing them for pitch, tone and other qualities. According to traditional models of neural processing, when we hear sounds, our auditory system extracts simple features from them that then get combined into increasingly complex and abstract representations. This process allows the brain to turn the sound of someone speaking, for instance, into phonemes, then syllables, and eventually words. But in a paper published in Cell in August, a team of researchers challenged that model, reporting instead that the auditory system often processes sound and speech simultaneously and in parallel. The findings suggest that how the brain makes sense of speech diverges dramatically from scientists’ expectations, with the signals from the ear branching into distinct brain pathways at a surprisingly early stage in processing — sometimes even bypassing a brain region thought to be a crucial stepping-stone in building representations of complex sounds.

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 28058 - Posted: 10.30.2021

By Emily Anthes The brain of a fruit fly is the size of a poppy seed and about as easy to overlook. “Most people, I think, don’t even think of the fly as having a brain,” said Vivek Jayaraman, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. “But, of course, flies lead quite rich lives.” Flies are capable of sophisticated behaviors, including navigating diverse landscapes, tussling with rivals and serenading potential mates. And their speck-size brains are tremendously complex, containing some 100,000 neurons and tens of millions of connections, or synapses, between them. Since 2014, a team of scientists at Janelia, in collaboration with researchers at Google, have been mapping these neurons and synapses in an effort to create a comprehensive wiring diagram, also known as a connectome, of the fruit fly brain. The work, which is continuing, is time-consuming and expensive, even with the help of state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms. But the data they have released so far is stunning in its detail, composing an atlas of tens of thousands of gnarled neurons in many crucial areas of the fly brain. And now, in an enormous new paper, being published on Tuesday in the journal eLife, neuroscientists are beginning to show what they can do with it. By analyzing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain — the central complex, which plays an important role in navigation — Dr. Jayaraman and his colleagues identified dozens of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world. The work could ultimately help provide insight into how all kinds of animal brains, including our own, process a flood of sensory information and translate it into appropriate action. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Evolution
Link ID: 28057 - Posted: 10.30.2021

A new study re-emphasises the fact that oversleeping can be harmful for us – and especially for older people Says who? Says Brendan P Lucey, MD. Who? Associate professor of neurology and director of the Washington University Sleep Medicine Center. And lead author of a new study at Washington University School of Medicine (which is neither in Washington DC nor Washington state but St Louis, Missouri, confusingly). Here we go, a new study: what does it say? That it is, in fact, possible to have too much of a good thing. And if that good thing is sleep, how much is too much? Possibly anything over seven and a half hours a night. What?! What about my beauty sleep? Eight hours, absolute minimum. The study monitored 100 older adults, in their mid to late 70s. I am awake now, so tell me what they found. That there’s an association between less than five and a half hours’ sleep and, more surprisingly, more than seven and a half hours’ sleep and reduced cognitive performance for older adults. So how much is right for the over-75s? The “sweet spot” is somewhere in the middle range, between five and a half and seven and a half hours’ kip. What else is associated with cognitive decline in older people? Alzheimer’s is the main cause, contributing to around 70% of dementia cases. “It’s been challenging to determine how sleep and different stages of Alzheimer’s disease are related,” said Lucey. “But that’s what you need to know to start designing interventions.” © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28056 - Posted: 10.30.2021

By Emily Anthes The brain of a fruit fly is the size of a poppy seed and about as easy to overlook. “Most people, I think, don’t even think of the fly as having a brain,” said Vivek Jayaraman, a neuroscientist at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia. “But, of course, flies lead quite rich lives.” Flies are capable of sophisticated behaviors, including navigating diverse landscapes, tussling with rivals and serenading potential mates. And their speck-size brains are tremendously complex, containing some 100,000 neurons and tens of millions of connections, or synapses, between them. Since 2014, a team of scientists at Janelia, in collaboration with researchers at Google, have been mapping these neurons and synapses in an effort to create a comprehensive wiring diagram, also known as a connectome, of the fruit fly brain. The work, which is continuing, is time-consuming and expensive, even with the help of state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms. But the data they have released so far is stunning in its detail, composing an atlas of tens of thousands of gnarled neurons in many crucial areas of the fly brain. And now, in an enormous new paper, being published on Tuesday in the journal eLife, neuroscientists are beginning to show what they can do with it. By analyzing the connectome of just a small part of the fly brain — the central complex, which plays an important role in navigation — Dr. Jayaraman and his colleagues identified dozens of new neuron types and pinpointed neural circuits that appear to help flies make their way through the world. The work could ultimately help provide insight into how all kinds of animal brains, including our own, process a flood of sensory information and translate it into appropriate action. It is also a proof of principle for the young field of modern connectomics, which was built on the promise that constructing detailed diagrams of the brain’s wiring would pay scientific dividends. “It’s really extraordinary,” Dr. Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, said of the new paper. “I think anyone who looks at it will say connectomics is a tool that we need in neuroscience — full stop.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Evolution
Link ID: 28055 - Posted: 10.27.2021

Jordana Cepelewicz Hearing is so effortless for most of us that it’s often difficult to comprehend how much information the brain’s auditory system needs to process and disentangle. It has to take incoming sounds and transform them into the acoustic objects that we perceive: a friend’s voice, a dog barking, the pitter-patter of rain. It has to extricate relevant sounds from background noise. It has to determine that a word spoken by two different people has the same linguistic meaning, while also distinguishing between those voices and assessing them for pitch, tone and other qualities. According to traditional models of neural processing, when we hear sounds, our auditory system extracts simple features from them that then get combined into increasingly complex and abstract representations. This process allows the brain to turn the sound of someone speaking, for instance, into phonemes, then syllables, and eventually words. But in a paper published in Cell in August, a team of researchers challenged that model, reporting instead that the auditory system often processes sound and speech simultaneously and in parallel. The findings suggest that how the brain makes sense of speech diverges dramatically from scientists’ expectations, with the signals from the ear branching into distinct brain pathways at a surprisingly early stage in processing — sometimes even bypassing a brain region thought to be a crucial stepping-stone in building representations of complex sounds. Simons Foundation All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 28054 - Posted: 10.27.2021

Sirin Kale Claudia*, a sailor from Lichfield in her late 30s, is not Italian. She has never been to Italy. She has no Italian family or friends. And she has no idea why a belligerent Italian couple have taken over her inner voice, duking it out in Claudia’s brain while she sits back and listens. “I have no idea where this has come from,” says Claudia, apologetically. “It’s probably offensive to Italians.” The couple are like the family in the Dolmio pasta sauce adverts: flamboyant, portly, prone to waving their hands and shouting. If Claudia has a big decision to make in her life, the Italians take over. “They passionately argue either side,” Claudia says. “It’s really useful because I let them do the work, so I don’t get stressed out by it.” These disagreements always take place in a kitchen, surrounded by food. Claudia hasn’t given the Italians names – yet. But they did help Claudia make a major life decision, encouraging her to quit her job as a scientist two years ago and fulfil a lifelong dream of running away to sea. “They were chatting non-stop before I handed in my notice,” Claudia sighs. “I’d wake up and they’d be arguing. I’d be driving to work and they’d be arguing. It was exhausting, to be honest.” The woman was in favour of Claudia going, but her husband was wary. “He’d be saying: ‘It’s a stable job!’ And she’d go: ‘Let her enjoy life!’” The woman prevailed, and Claudia left to work on a flotilla in Greece (although she’s now back in the UK temporarily, due to Covid). She’s much happier, even if she did have to have neurolinguistic programming to get the shouting to calm down. “They’re quieter now,” Claudia says with relief. “Less shouting. They just bicker.” Most of us have an inner voice: that constant presence that tells you to “Watch out” or “Buy shampoo” or “Urgh, this guy’s a creep”. For many of us, this voice sounds much like our own, or at least how we think we sound. But for some people, their inner voice isn’t a straightforward monologue that reproaches, counsels and reminds. Their inner voice is a squabbling Italian couple, say, or a calm-faced interviewer with their hands folded on their lap. Or it’s a taste, feeling, sensation or colour. In some cases, there isn’t a voice at all, just silence. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 28053 - Posted: 10.27.2021

Bill Chappell A former science teacher who's been blind for 16 years became able to see letters, discern objects' edges — and even play a Maggie Simpson video game — thanks to a visual prosthesis that includes a camera and a brain implant, according to American and Spanish researchers who collaborated on the project. The test subject had the implant for six months and experienced no disruptions to her brain activity or other health complications, according to an abstract of the study that was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study furthers what it calls a "long-held dream of scientists," to impart a rudimentary form of sight to blind people by sending information directly to the brain's visual cortex. "These results are very exciting because they demonstrate both safety and efficacy," said one of the lead researchers, Eduardo Fernández of Miguel Hernández University, in a statement. "We have taken a significant step forward, showing the potential of these types of devices to restore functional vision for people who have lost their vision." In the experiment, a neurosurgeon implanted a microelectrode array into the visual cortex of Berna Gómez, a former teacher who has been blind for more than 16 years. The implant was then paired with a video camera mounted in the center of a pair of glasses. After a training period, Gómez was able to decipher visual information that was fed from the camera directly to her brain. The training included a video game that helped Gómez learn how to interpret the signals coming from the electrodes. In the game, a screen suddenly shows an image of Maggie Simpson holding a gun, in either her left or right hand. The player must correctly select which hand holds the weapon; using input from the array, Gómez learned how to succeed in that task. At the time of the study, Gómez was 57 years old. Because of her participation, including her ability to give clinically precise feedback to the scientists, Gómez was named as a co-author of the study. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 28052 - Posted: 10.27.2021

Catherine Offord Earlier this year, Brian Butterworth decided to figure out how many numbers the average person encounters in a day. He picked a Saturday for his self-experiment—as a cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus at University College London, Butterworth works with numbers, so a typical weekday wouldn’t have been fair. He went about his day as usual, but kept track of how frequently he saw or heard a number, whether that was a symbol, such as 4 or 5, or a word such as “four” or “five.” He flicked through the newspaper, listened to the radio, popped out for a bit of shopping (taking special note of price tags and car license plates), and then, at last, sat down to calculate a grand total. “Would you like to take a guess?” he asks me when we speak over Zoom a couple of weeks later. I hazard that it’s well into the hundreds, but admit I’ve never thought about it before. He says: “I reckoned that I experienced about a thousand numbers an hour. A thousand numbers an hour is sixteen thousand numbers a day, is about five or six million a year. . . . That’s an awful lot of numbers.” Butterworth didn’t conduct his thought experiment just to satisfy his own curiosity. He’s including the calculation in an upcoming book, Can Fish Count?, slated for publication next year. In it, he argues that humans and other animals are constantly exposed to and make use of numbers—not just in the form of symbols and words, but as quantities of objects, of events, and of abstract concepts. Butterworth is one of several researchers who believe that the human brain can be thought of as having a “sense” for number, and that we, like our evolutionary ancestors, are neurologically hardwired to perceive all sorts of quantities in our environments, whether that serves for selecting the bush with more fruit on it, recognizing when a few predators on the horizon become too many, or telling from a show of hands when a consensus has been reached. © 1986–2021 The Scientist.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 28051 - Posted: 10.27.2021

Nicola Davis They have fluffy ears, a penetrating stare and a penchant for monogamy. But it turns out that indris – a large, critically endangered species of lemur – have an even more fascinating trait: an unexpected sense of rhythm. Indri indri are known for their distinctive singing, a sound not unlike a set of bagpipes being stepped on. The creatures often strike up a song with members of their family either in duets or choruses, featuring sounds from roars to wails. Now scientists say they have analysed the songs of 39 indris living in the rainforest of Madagascar, revealing that – like humans – the creatures employ what are known as categorical rhythms. These rhythms are essentially distinctive and predictable patterns of intervals between the onset of notes. For example in a 1:1 rhythm, all the intervals are of equal length, while a 1:2 rhythm has some twice as long as those before or after – like the opening bars of We Will Rock You by Queen. “They are quite predictable [patterns], because the next note is going to come either one unit or two whole units after the previous note,” said Dr Andrea Ravignani, co-author of the research from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. While the 1:1 rhythms have previously been identified in certain songbirds, the team say their results are the first time categorical rhythms have been identified in a non-human mammal. “The evidence is even stronger than in birds,” said Ravignani. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 28050 - Posted: 10.27.2021

By Kate Conger, Kellen Browning and Erin Woo A 27-year-old YouTube star, prodded by her millions of followers with concerns about her health. A 19-year-old TikTok creator who features posts about being skinny. Teen communities throughout the internet, cleverly naming and culling their discussions to avoid detection. They present a nearly intractable problem for social media companies under pressure to do something about material on their services that many people believe is causing harm, particularly to teenagers. Those concerns came into sharp focus in recent weeks in a pair of Senate subcommittee hearings: the first featuring a Facebook executive defending her company, and the second featuring a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower who bluntly argued that her former employer’s products drove some young people toward eating disorders. The hearings were prompted in part by a Wall Street Journal article that detailed how internal Facebook research showed Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, can make body image issues worse for some young people. On Tuesday, executives from YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat are scheduled to testify before a Senate subcommittee about the effects of their products on children. They are expected to face questions about how they moderate content that might encourage disordered eating, and how their algorithms might promote such content. “Big Tech’s exploiting these powerful algorithms and design features is reckless and heedless, and needs to change,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut and the chair of the subcommittee, said in a statement. “They seize on the insecurities of children, including eating disorders, simply to make more money.” But what exactly can be done about that content — and why people create it in the first place — may defy easy answers. If creators say they don’t intend to glamorize eating disorders, should their claims be taken at face value? Or should the companies listen to users complaining about them? © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Attention
Link ID: 28049 - Posted: 10.23.2021

By Brianna Randall Inside the Big Sky Ketamine Care clinic in Missoula, Montana, a woman relaxes in a leather recliner as soothing classical music pipes through the speakers. She watches nature scenes flicker across a TV screen as a low dose of ketamine drips into her arm for 40 minutes. A nurse monitors vitals and sits beside the woman as her mind drifts — and hopefully heals. The Montana business is just one example of the recent boom in ketamine treatment, which uses a sedative also known as an animal tranquilizer or a club drug nicknamed “Special K.” This alternative therapy option for treating mood disorders has grown in popularity as patients and medical providers look to fast-acting options for the 264 million people worldwide who suffer from depression. It’s the only legal psychedelic currently available in the U.S., though psilocybin was recently legalized for therapy in Oregon. Providers and many researchers say ketamine can alleviate anxiety or depression symptoms, including suicidality, in a matter of hours; commonly prescribed oral antidepressants, like Zoloft or Prozac, on the other hand, often take weeks before they kick-in. Still, along with its promise in psychiatric treatment, ketamine faces cultural distrust and lingering questions, especially surrounding its main side effect: feeling high, or a dissociated sense that you are separate from your mind, body and surroundings. Scientists still don’t know the exact pathways by which ketamine alleviates mood disorders, but recent research about how ketamine works in the brain — as well as how best to use it in clinical settings — may help overcome some of the distrust. © 2021 Kalmbach Media Co.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28048 - Posted: 10.23.2021

Infants who sleep longer through the night and with fewer interruptions may be less likely to become overweight during their first six months of life, according to a study published in the journal SLEEP(link is external). While the research only showed a link – not a cause-effect relationship – between infants’ sleep and weight, the findings suggest that newborns can reap some of the same health benefits that others get from consistent, quality shut-eye. The research emerged from the Rise and SHINE (Sleep Health in Infancy & Early Childhood) study, which analyzes ways sleep may influence a newborn’s growth and development. The five-year study is being supported in part by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. “What is particularly interesting about this research is that the sleep-obesity association we see across the lifespan appears in infancy and may be predictive of future health outcomes,” said Marishka K. Brown, Ph.D., director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, located within the NHLBI. Brown noted that multiple studies have shown links between good sleep and improved health. For children, this includes a reduced risk of developing obesity and diabetes, while supporting development, learning, and behavior. In the current study, researchers observed 298 newborns and found that for every hourly increase in nighttime sleep, measured between 7 p.m. and 8 a.m., the infants were 26% less likely to become overweight. Likewise, for each reduction in nighttime awakening, they were 16% less likely to become overweight.

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 28047 - Posted: 10.23.2021

By James Gallagher An innovative type of medicine - called gene silencing - is set to be used on the NHS for people who live in crippling pain. The drug treats acute intermittent porphyria, which runs in families and can leave people unable to work or have a normal life. Clinical trials have shown severe symptoms were cut by 74% with the drug. While porphyria is rare, experts say the field of gene silencing has the potential to revolutionise medicine. Sisters Liz Gill and Sue Burrell have both had their lives turned around by gene silencing. Before treatment, Liz, from County Durham, remembers the trauma of living in "total pain" and, at its worst, she spent two years paralysed in hospital. Younger sister Sue says she "lost it all overnight" when she was suddenly in and out of hospital, made redundant and did know whether her partner would stick with her (he did). "It was scary," she tells me. Both became used to taking potent opioid painkillers on a daily basis. But even morphine could not block the pain during a severe attack that needed hospital treatment. Gene silencing gets to the root-cause of the sisters' disease rather than just managing their symptoms. Their porphyria leads to a build-up of toxic proteins in the body, that cause the physical pain. Gene silencing "mutes" a set of genetic instructions to block that protein production. Both had been taking the therapy as part of a clinical trial and are still getting monthly injections. © 2021 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 28046 - Posted: 10.23.2021

For years, Theresa Babb blamed herself for her obesity. "It was always my fault," she told The Current. "Who else's fault would it be?" She says she spent thousands of dollars trying to lose weight, even going so far as to try commercial weight-loss programs like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. She also sought medical help from health-care providers, but she found some of them weren't willing to discuss her weight with her aside beyond uttering clichés about eating less or working out more. "I don't understand why a health-care professional would be afraid of talking to somebody or be uncomfortable about talking with a patient about health," she said. Nothing seemed to work for Babb, and she said she felt like a "failure" for not succeeding. That was until she met obesity specialist Dr. Laura Reardon two years ago. "One of the very first things that Dr. Reardon said to me … was 'It's not your fault,'" she said. "And it was hearing those words for the first time in my life that changed everything for me." According to Statistics Canada data from 2018, 7.3 million Canadian adults reported heights and weights classified as obese. Another 9.9 million Canadian adults were classified as overweight. Combined, these numbers represent 63.1 per cent of the Canadian adult population. Reardon said Babb's journey is one shared with millions of Canadians. "A lot of patients who come to see me probably have experiences like lots of the people out there, which is they've tried everything," she said. "They've gone to all these commercial weight loss programs. They've hired personal trainers. They've gone to the gym." ©2021 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28045 - Posted: 10.23.2021

Allison Whitten Every time a human or machine learns how to get better at a task, a trail of evidence is left behind. A sequence of physical changes — to cells in a brain or to numerical values in an algorithm — underlie the improved performance. But how the system figures out exactly what changes to make is no small feat. It’s called the credit assignment problem, in which a brain or artificial intelligence system must pinpoint which pieces in its pipeline are responsible for errors and then make the necessary changes. Put more simply: It’s a blame game to find who’s at fault. AI engineers solved the credit assignment problem for machines with a powerful algorithm called backpropagation, popularized in 1986 with the work of Geoffrey Hinton, David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams. It’s now the workhorse that powers learning in the most successful AI systems, known as deep neural networks, which have hidden layers of artificial “neurons” between their input and output layers. And now, in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience in May, scientists may finally have found an equivalent for living brains that could work in real time. A team of researchers led by Richard Naud of the University of Ottawa and Blake Richards of McGill University and the Mila AI Institute in Quebec revealed a new model of the brain’s learning algorithm that can mimic the backpropagation process. It appears so realistic that experimental neuroscientists have taken notice and are now interested in studying real neurons to find out whether the brain is actually doing it. Simons Foundation All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28044 - Posted: 10.20.2021

by Angie Voyles Askham The gut microbiome is having a moment. An explosion of research over the past decade has delved into a possible connection between the microbiome and brain conditions, including autism. Once-fringe microbial treatments for autism, such as fecal transplants and probiotic pills, are receiving serious scientific attention and funding. It’s still an open question, however, whether the microbiome has a direct effect on autism traits. The most promising data supporting this idea involve altering a mouse’s gut flora, but it is not clear exactly what the mechanism is or if this work translates to people. And the evidence from human studies linking microbes to autism is thin, if a 2021 review of the literature is any guide. Adding to the uncertainty, new unpublished data from one of the largest human studies yet suggests that the link between an atypical gut microbiome and autism is driven solely by a difference in diet. At least four small firms are spearheading early-stage trials of ‘bug as drug’ treatments for autism-associated traits. But until those trials play out, the role of the microbiome in autism is far from clear, says Gaspar Taroncher-Oldenburg, a consultant on microbiome research for the Simons Foundation, Spectrum’s parent organization. “There’s no denying that the microbiome is part of the [autism] conversation,” Taroncher-Oldenburg says. “But it’s a very complex conversation, and we’re only starting to scratch the surface.” A potential connection between the gut microbiome and autism first surfaced in the 1990s, after parents reported changes in their autistic children’s behavior when the children took antibiotics, which kill some gut bacteria. A 2000 study following up on this idea showed that 8 of 10 autistic children taking an antibiotic had temporary improvements in their speech and sociability. Later work associated an atypical gut microbiome with unusual social behaviors in mice. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 28043 - Posted: 10.20.2021

Bill Chappell People with mild or moderate hearing loss could soon be able to buy hearing aids without a medical exam or special fitting, under a new rule being proposed by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency says 37.5 million American adults have difficulty hearing. "Today's move by FDA takes us one step closer to the goal of making hearing aids more accessible and affordable for the tens of millions of people who experience mild to moderate hearing loss," Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said as he announced the proposed rule on Tuesday. There is no timeline yet for when consumers might be able to buy an FDA-regulated over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid. The proposed rule is now up for 90 days of public comment. The Hearing Loss Association of America, a consumer advocacy group, welcomed the proposal. "This is one step closer to seeing OTC hearing devices on the market," Barbara Kelley, the group's executive director, said in an email to NPR. "We hope adults will be encouraged to take that important first step toward good hearing health." Advocates and lawmakers have been calling for OTC hearing aids for years, including in a big push in 2017, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and co-sponsor Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the bipartisan Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act. The legislators are now praising the FDA's move. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 28042 - Posted: 10.20.2021

Jordana Cepelewicz Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2014, and many scientists think the code could be a key component of how the brain handles other abstract forms of information. Yet lab animals in a box with a flat floor only need to navigate through two dimensions, and researchers are now finding that extending the lessons of that situation to the real world is full of challenges and pitfalls. In a pair of studies recently published in Nature and Nature Neuroscience, scientists working with bats and rats showed — to their surprise — that the brain encodes 3D spaces very differently from 2D ones, employing a mechanism that they are still struggling to describe and understand. “We expected something else entirely,” said Nachum Ulanovsky, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who led the work in Nature and has studied neural representations of 3D spaces for more than 10 years. “We had to reboot our thinking.” The findings suggest that neuroscientists might need to reconsider what they thought they knew about how the brain encodes natural environments and how animals navigate those spaces. The work also hints at the possibility that other cognitive processes, including memory, might operate very differently than researchers have come to believe. Simons Foundation All Rights Reserved © 2021

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28041 - Posted: 10.16.2021