In this video, The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s Hanchuan Peng, Ph.D., gives an overview of Virtual Finger, a revolutionary new way to digitally navigate three-dimensional images. The new technology allows scientists to move through digital images of small structures like neurons and synapses using the flat surface of their computer screens.
Neuroscientist Sara Lazar’s talk reveals how meditation can actually change key regions of our brain, improving our memory and making us more empathetic, compassionate and resilient under stress.
Thanks to an international collaboration between universities such as Colorado State University, the Technical University of Munich and the Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, a paralyzed teen is set to open next month’s World Cup event by kicking a football while wearing a motorized exoskeleton controlled by his or her brain. The demonstration, known as the Walk Again project, will take place during the opening ceremony June 12 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Colorado State University recently published a video of its portion of the Walk Again Project, describing just how the mind-control helmet was 3D-printed layer-by-layer in order to fit the wearer’s head and connect the electrodes. This video is a fascinating glimpse into how advances in robotics and 3D printing can improve people’s lives.
A compelling presentation by American psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist, Daniel Amen, wich shows how brain health and innovation are intimately connected and that we need to create a more brain-healthy world.
Ellen Lumpkin, PhD, professor of somatosensory biology at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, explains how her lab revealed how cells in our skin help us feel fine textures and details.
Touch is the last frontier of sensory neuroscience. The cells and molecules that initiate vision—rod and cone cells and light-sensitive receptors—have been known since the early 20th century, and the senses of smell, taste, and hearing are increasingly understood. But almost nothing is known about the cells and molecules responsible for initiating our sense of touch.
This study is the first to use optogenetics—a new method that uses light as a signaling system to turn neurons on and off on demand—on skin cells to determine how they function and communicate.
The team showed that skin cells called Merkel cells can sense touch and that they work virtually hand in glove with the skin’s neurons to create what we perceive as fine details and textures.
The findings not only describe a key advance in our understanding of touch sensation, but may stimulate research into loss of sensitive-touch perception.
Several conditions—including diabetes and some cancer chemotherapy treatments, as well as normal aging—are known to reduce sensitive touch. Merkel cells begin to disappear in one’s early 20s, at the same time that tactile acuity starts to decline. “No one has tested whether the loss of Merkel cells causes loss of function with aging—it could be a coincidence—but it’s a question we’re interested in pursuing,” Dr. Lumpkin said.
In the future, these findings could inform the design of new “smart” prosthetics that restore touch sensation to limb amputees, as well as introduce new targets for treating skin diseases such as chronic itch.
“The new findings should open up the field of skin biology and reveal how sensations are initiated,” Dr. Lumpkin said. Other types of skin cells may also play a role in sensations of touch, as well as less pleasurable skin sensations, such as itch. The same optogenetics techniques that Dr. Lumpkin’s team applied to Merkel cells can now be applied to other skin cells to answer these questions.
In this short seven-minute video Stephen Gentleman, Professor of Neuropathology at the Hammersmith Hospital in London dissects a recently preserved human brain according to international protocol.The brain sections are then stored in a ‘brain tissue bank’ for further research.
The brains are donated by people who suffered from Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis (both degenerative and incurable diseases of the central nervous system), but sometimes ‘control’ samples of healthy brains (also donated) are required too for accurate comparisons.
While some viewers may find this video unsettling it is important to stress that this type of research is vital in discovering safer and more effective treatments for illnesses of mind and brain. Brain dissections may also be performed in autopsy when the cause of death is unclear.
The study, which appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is the first to provide biological evidence validating the idea that there are, in fact, positive and negative people in the world.
“It’s the first time we’ve been able to find a brain marker that really distinguishes negative thinkers from positive thinkers,” said Jason Moser, lead investigator and assistant professor of psychology.
For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. Participants were shown a masked man holding a knife to a woman’s throat, for example, and told one potential outcome was the woman breaking free and escaping.
The participants were surveyed beforehand to establish who tended to think positively and who thought negatively or worried. Sure enough, the brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that of the worriers during the experiment.
“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.”
The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the results.
Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.
“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry – that’s probably not going to help them,” he said. “So you need to take another tack and perhaps ask them to think about the problem in a different way, to use different strategies.”
Negative thinkers could also practice thinking positively, although Moser suspects it would take a lot of time and effort to even start to make a difference.
– See more at: http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2014/positive-negative-thinkers-brains-revealed/#sthash.PHIphaY2.dpuf
UC San Francisco researchers are reporting a detailed account of how speech sounds are identified by the human brain, offering an unprecedented insight into the basis of human language. The finding, they said, may add to our understanding of language disorders, including dyslexia.
inside-the-brain.com 