TransBrain translates brain phenotypes between mouse and human via homology mapping, thus making it possible to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about the mouse brain and gain insights into the human brain.
Category: neuroscience – Page 2
A hormone can access the brain by ‘hitchhiking’ on extracellular vesicles, researchers discover
Researchers at Touro University Nevada have discovered that tiny particles in the blood, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), are a major player in how a group of hormones are shuttled through the body. Physical exercise can stimulate this process.
The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, open the door to deeper understanding of hormone circulation and access to the brain, how exercise may trigger changes in energy balance, mental health, and immune function, and circulation of certain drugs.
Blood and other body fluids are teeming with EVs—tiny particles that exist outside of cells. EVs transmit signals from cell-to-cell within tissues and a long distance across organ systems by delivering biological cargo such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids into cells. They also remove cell waste.
Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health
The treatment was unusual in that alongside talk therapy, May underwent several sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber: a dark, soundproof room where she floated in a shallow pool of water heated to match the temperature of her skin and saturated with Epsom salts to make her more buoyant. The goal was to blunt May’s external senses, enabling her to feel from within—focusing on the steady thudding of her heart, the gentle flow of air in and out of her lungs, and other internal bodily signals.
The ability to connect with the body’s inner signals is called interoception. Some people are better at it than others, and one’s aptitude for it may change. Life events can also bolster or damage a person’s interoceptive skills. Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues think a disrupted interoception system might be one of the driving forces behind anorexia nervosa. So they decided to repurpose a decades-old therapy called flotation-REST (for “reduced environmental stimulation therapy”) and launched a trial with it in 2018. They. hypothesized that in people with anorexia and some other disorders, an underreliance on internal signals may lead to an overreliance on external ones, such as how one looks in the mirror, that ultimately causes distorted body image, one of the key factors underlying these conditions. “When they’re in the float environment, they experience internal signals more strongly,” Khalsa says. “And having that experience may then confer a different understanding of the brain-body relationship that they have.”
Disruptions in interoception may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health ailments.
By Diana Kwon edited by Jeanna Bryner.
Biology-inspired brain model matches animal learning and reveals overlooked neuron activity
A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology has not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive activity by a group of neurons that researchers working with animals to perform the same task had not noticed in their data before, reports a team of scientists at Dartmouth College, MIT, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The Brain’s Best Defense Against Aging Could Be Your New Favorite Hobby
Getting older means losing things. Some are fine, like any f**ks you have left to give or your tolerance for cheap tequila. Others, like the ability to follow a conversation in a loud room, hit harder.
But scientists now think there’s a way to fight back. And it might start at a piano bench.
Researchers publishing in PLOS Biology found that older adults who have played music for decades have brains that function more like those of someone half their age, at least when it comes to understanding speech in loud environments. In brain scans, they showed cleaner, more focused activity while listening to spoken syllables buried in background noise. Their brains weren’t scrambling. They already knew what to do.