Good readers exhibit distinct brain traits, including a larger left anterior temporal lobe and thicker left Heschl’s gyrus, supporting phonological and meaning processing. Reading reshapes these areas, highlighting the brain’s adaptability and the importance of literacy.
Summary: A new study has identified three psychological profiles that influence brain health, cognitive decline, and dementia risk in aging adults. Profiles with high protective traits, like purpose and openness, show better cognition and brain integrity, while those with low protective traits or high negative traits face accelerated brain atrophy and mental health issues.
Researchers emphasize comprehensive psychological assessments to tailor interventions, like therapies that enhance life purpose or reduce distress symptoms. These findings pave the way for personalized strategies to prevent cognitive decline and support brain health in adulthood and aging.
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The researcher, who teaches at Columbia University, has been promoting the new National Center for Neurotechnology in his native Spain. The institute will manufacture devices capable of tapping the human mind and modifying it.
Novel magnetic nanodiscs could provide a much less invasive way of stimulating parts of the brain, paving the way for stimulation therapies without implants or genetic modification, MIT researchers report.
The scientists envision that the tiny discs, which are about 250 nanometers across (about 1/500 the width of a human hair), would be injected directly into the desired location in the brain. From there, they could be activated at any time simply by applying a magnetic field outside the body. The new particles could quickly find applications in biomedical research, and eventually, after sufficient testing, might be applied to clinical uses.
The development of these nanoparticles is described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, in a paper by Polina Anikeeva, a professor in MIT’s departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, graduate student Ye Ji Kim, and 17 others at MIT and in Germany.
Most of us assume reality is made up of physical matter. In line with this, scientists have built ever larger machines to identify the ultimate particles. Instead of getting closer to the most elementary bits in the universe, the particle zoo has got ever more complex and seemingly less like material stuff at all. Is there a danger that the very idea of an ultimate foundation to reality is a profound mistake? Some have proposed that instead of material, the ultimate foundation is to be found in consciousness, information, or even mathematics. But such proposals are no closer to identifying ultimate elements than particle physicists. Should we give up the attempt to uncover an ultimate foundation to the universe? Is our inability to find an ultimate foundation a limitation of language, or of our capacity to make sense of the world, or is it to do with the nature of reality itself?
A new USC-led study has found that mild cognitive impairment is associated with blood vessel dysfunction in the brain’s temporal lobes, the region responsible for memory.
This vascular issue was observed in individuals both with and without amyloid buildup in the brain, indicating that microvascular dysfunction could serve as an early biomarker for dementia and a potential target for treatment.
The study, conducted by researchers from several universities, was published in the journal Neurology.
The complexity of the human brain—86 billion neurons strong with more than 100 trillion connections—enables abstract thinking, language acquisition, advanced reasoning and problem-solving, and the capacity for creativity and social interaction. Understanding how differences in brain signaling and dynamics produce unique cognition and behavior in individuals has long been a goal of neuroscience research, yet many phenomena remain unexplained.
A study from neuroscientists and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis addresses this knowledge gap with a new method to create personalized brain models, which offer insights into individual neural dynamics. Led by ShiNung Ching, associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Todd Braver, professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in Arts & Sciences, the work, published Jan. 17 in PNAS, introduces a novel framework that will allow the researchers to create individualized brain models based on detailed data from noninvasive, high-temporal resolution brain scans. Such personalized models have applications in research and clinical settings, where they could support advances in neuroscience and treatment of neurological conditions.
“This research is motivated by our need to understand person-to-person variation in brain dynamics,” said first author Matthew Singh, who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow with Braver and Ching at WashU and is now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We’re not explaining the full range of biophysical mechanisms at work in the human brain, but we are able to shed light on why healthy individuals have different brain dynamics with our new modeling framework, which gives us insights into brain mechanics and testable predictions of brain phenomena.”
Our brains evolved to help us rapidly learn new things. But anyone who has put in hours of practice to perfect their tennis serve, only to reach a plateau, can attest that our brains aren’t infinitely flexible. New work shows that patterns of neural activity over time — the temporal dynamics of neural populations — cannot change rapidly, suggesting that neural activity dynamics may both reflect and constrain how the brain performs computations.
Neural tissue engineering is premised on the integration of engineered living tissue with the host nervous system to directly restore lost function or to augment regenerative capacity following nervous system injury or neurodegenerative disease. Disconnection of axon pathways – the long-distance fibers connecting specialized regions of the central nervous system or relaying peripheral signals – is a common feature of many neurological disorders and injury. However, functional axonal regeneration rarely occurs due to extreme distances to targets, absence of directed guidance, and the presence of inhibitory factors in the central nervous system, resulting in devastating effects on cognitive and sensorimotor function.
In recent years, biomedical devices have proven to be able to target also different neurological disorders. Given the rapid ageing of the population and the increase of invalidating diseases affecting the central nervous system, there is a growing demand for biomedical devices of immediate clinical use. However, to reach useful therapeutic results, these tools need a multidisciplinary approach and a continuous dialogue between neuroscience and engineering, a field that is named neuroengineering. This is because it is fundamental to understand how to read and perturb the neural code in order to produce a significant clinical outcome.
