Summary: Tau-tangles trigger the inflammatory activation of microglia via the NF-κB pathway. Inhibiting the microglia NF-κB signaling pulled the immune cells out of their inflammatory state and reversed learning and memory problems in tau-based Alzheimer’s mouse models.
Source: Weill Cornell Medicine.
Inhibiting an important signaling pathway in brain-resident immune cells may calm brain inflammation and thereby slow the disease process in Alzheimer’s and some other neurodegenerative diseases, suggests a study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.
A man left in a completely locked-in state by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has been able to communicate with his family and carers thanks to an implant. The device helped the patient, who was unable to move any muscles or even open his eyes, contact the outside world using only his brain activity.
Rapid neurodegeneration
In the last decade, combinations of brain implants and brain-computer interfaces (BCI) have enabled people with severe brain injuries or neurodegeneration to regain communicative ability. The new study, published in Nature Communications by an international research team, is the first to be used successfully in a patient with such severe neurodegeneration.
The condition stays with you for life once diagnosed, but treatments and specialists can help to manage the condition and its symptoms.
Experts are still unsure exactly what triggers the condition that affects more than 130,000 people in the UK.
According to the MS Society, people are most likely to find out they have MS in their thirties, forties and fifties in Britain, and the condition affects almost three times as many women as men.
Understanding how we use our brain to make decisions is a daunting task, given our brain’s extensive webs of neural wiring and circuitry. Now, JAX researchers Erik Bloss and Kourtney Graham are using a surprising tool to investigate goal-directed behaviors: the rabies virus.
The “secret code” the brain uses to create a key type of memory has finally been cracked.
This type of memory, called working memory, is what allows people to temporarily hold on to and manipulate information for short periods of time. You use working memory, for example, when you look up a phone number and then briefly remember the sequence of digits in order to dial, or when you ask a friend for directions to a restaurant and then keep track of the turns as you drive there.
Summary: People with depression who responded to psilocybin therapy showed an increase in brain connectivity for up to three weeks following treatment. The increased brain connectivity was correlated with self-reported improvements in depression symptoms.
Source: Imperial College London.
Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, helps to “open up” depressed people’s brains, even after use, enabling brain regions to talk more freely to one another.
In a small trial, immune cells that fight the Epstein-Barr virus have stopped the progression of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune condition that can lead to symptoms, such as difficulty walking, that worsen over time.
Summary: Researchers identified a genetic correlation between blood biomarkers and a range of mental health disorders. The study provides evidence some substance measures within the blood may be involved in the cause of mental illnesses. For example, immune system proteins may be involved in the development of depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia.
Source: The Conversation.
Mental health disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia show links to biological markers detected in routine blood tests, according to our new study of genetic, biochemical and psychiatric data from almost a million people.
*Based on The Cybernetic Theory of Mind eBook series (2022) by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov, available on Amazon:
as well as his magnum opus The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020), available as eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook on Amazon:
“You can’t explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. The best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism… It is consciousness that assigns measurement values to entangled quantum states (qubits-to-digits of qualia, if you will). If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The Mind-Body dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now, rather unsuccessfully, to explain how mind emerges from matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the hard problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that matter emerges from mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: Despite our common human intuitions, Mind over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.
From the Digital Physics perspective, particles of matter are pixels, or voxels if you prefer, on the screen of our perception. Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns, evolution of your core self, ‘non-local’ consciousness instantiating into the phenomenal mind for the duration of a lifetime.
