Our Hiding Consciousness

The neuron, the specialized cell type that makes up much of our brains, is at the center of today’s neuroscience. Neuroscientists explain perception, memory, cognition and even consciousness itself as products of billions of these tiny neurons busily firing their tiny “spikes” of voltage inside our brain.

These energetic spikes not only convey things like pain and other sensory information to our conscious mind, but they are also in theory able to explain every detail of our complex consciousness.

At least in principle. The details of this “neural code” have yet to be worked out.

While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings.

In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all or none” nature of neural firing—similar to how today’s computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness—to little avail.     READ MORE...

The Code of Consciousness

Source: Ruslana Remennikova with her permission

Since the beginning of human civilization, history has shown a correlation between sound and cognitive, mental, and physical wellness.1 In most experiences, sound is part of a larger context. In terms of physics, a sound is composed of a waveform called frequency expressed in Hertz (Hz), a standard international measurement. Although frequency is used as a measurement in electromagnetic radiation, computing, and other electrical technologies, for sound, one Hz is equal to one completed cycle per second or the number of times a sound wave repeats itself in one second. Frequency is the overlap of vibration and synchronization in the fields of neuroscience, biochemistry, physics, and sonics.


When an object is in motion, its oscillating movement is a vibration. Frequency is the measure of how many times per second that motion repeats. For instance, when a harp string is plucked (e.g. the A above middle C musical note), its vibrating movement emits a frequency of 440 Hz. The musical note vibrates at a frequency of 440 Hertz or 440 regular back and forths per second.  READ MORE...

Neuroscience Breakthrough

See-through 3D model that shows the axon (red), medium spinal motor neuron (green), and astrocyte converging at the synapse (yellow). Credit: Center for Translational Neuromedicine, University of Rochester and University of Copenhagen





Scientists have created one of the most detailed 3D images of the synapse, the important juncture where neurons communicate with each other through an exchange of chemical signals. These nanometer-scale models will help scientists better understand and study neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s disease and schizophrenia.

The new study appears in the journal PNAS and was authored by a team led by Steve Goldman, MD, Ph.D., co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen. The findings represent a significant technical achievement that allows researchers to study the different cells that converge at individual synapses at a level of detail not previously achievable.

“It is one thing to understand the structure of the synapse from the literature, but it is another to see the precise geometry of interactions between individual cells with your own eyes,” said Abdellatif Benraiss, Ph.D., a research associate professor in the Center for Translational Neuromedicine and co-author of the study. “The ability to measure these extremely small environments is a young field, and holds the potential to advance our understanding of a number of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases in which synaptic function is disturbed.”

The researchers used the new technique to compare the brains of healthy mice to mice carrying the mutant gene that causes Huntington’s disease. Prior research in Goldman’s lab has shown that dysfunctional astrocytes play a key role in the disease. Astrocytes are members of a family of support cells in the brain called glia and help maintain the proper chemical environment at the synapse.

The researchers focused on synapses that involve medium spiny motor neurons, the progressive loss of these cells is a hallmark of Huntington’s disease. The researchers first had to identify synapses hidden within the tangle of the three different cells that converge at the site: the pre-synaptic axon from a distant neuron; its target, the post-synaptic medium spiny motor neuron; and the fiber processes of a neighboring astrocyte.   READ MORE...

There is no SELF

Western philosophy typically conceptualizes the self as a stable, controlling entity, comparable to a pilot, while Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism argue that the self is an illusion, a byproduct of our thought processes. 

Modern neuroscience provides evidence that aligns with the Eastern view, revealing that the left hemisphere of the brain constantly creates narratives to interpret reality, leading to a mistaken identification with these self-narratives.

This false sense of self, which is often equated with the incessant internal dialogue, contributes significantly to human mental suffering.

The brain-powered individual, which is variously called the self, the ego, the mind, or “me,” lies at the center of Western thought. In the worldview of the West, we herald the greatest thinkers as world-changers. 

There is no more concise example of this than philosopher René Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “I think, therefore I am.” But who is this? Let’s take a closer look at the thinker, or the “me,” we all take for granted.

Western view: The self is a pilot

This “I” is for most of us the first thing that pops into our minds when we think about who we are. The “I” represents the idea of our individual self, the one that sits between the ears and behind the eyes and is “piloting” the body. 

The “pilot” is in charge, it doesn’t change very much, and it feels to us like the thing that brings our thoughts and feelings to life. It observes, makes decisions, and carries out actions — just like the pilot of an airplane.

This I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions. The pilot self feels like it is running the show. It is stable and continuous. 

It is also in control of our physical body; for example, this self understands that it is “my body.” But unlike our physical body, it does not perceive itself as changing, ending (except, perhaps for atheists, in bodily death), or being influenced by anything other than itself.   READ MORE...

How Emotionally Intelligent People Rewire their Minds

Emily's a passionate entrepreneur who's doing a lot of things right. But she's also a workaholic.

Emily has every intention of closing shop on Friday and spending the weekend with her family. But a potential client asked for a meeting this Saturday, and she couldn't say no. Sunday won't be a day off either, since she's trying to meet a deadline on a major project.

A similar scene repeats itself week after week, month after month.

Emily's always exhausted. She knows overwork causes here to get irritated easily. And she feels terrible every time she misses her son's soccer games.

Still, she can't unplug from her business. She finds it impossible to say no. No matter how hard she tries, she can't seem to break that bad habit.

Whether or not you face a similar situation, you can likely relate to Emily's struggle. You might feel like you're a victim of your brain's emotional programming, and there's nothing you can do to change it.

But is that true?

If you feel like Emily, you might benefit from a technique I learned from a psychologist some years ago. It's based on principles of emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage your emotions.

I like to call it the rule of rewiring.

What is the rule of rewiring, and how can it help you rewire your brain and exchange bad habits for better ones?

Before we answer that question, let's learn a little about how habits work.

Change the way you think--using neuroscience
It's a common misconception that the adult brain is static or otherwise fixed in form and function. But as scientists have discovered in recent years, the brain has a remarkable property called neuroplasticity.

This plasticity means that you have some amount of control over your brain's programming. Through a combination of concentrated thoughts and purposeful actions, you can rewire your brain and exert greater control over your emotional reactions and tendencies.  READ MORE...

Counter Brain Aging

Summary: Using whole-brain virtual models, researchers simulate the effects of non-invasive neurostimulation on the aging brain. The computational models shed light on the dynamics of brain changes as a result of aging.

Source: Human Brain Project

Human Brain Project researchers have used whole-brain virtual models to simulate what happens when neurostimulation is applied to aging human brains.

These models provide new insight into how the dynamics of a healthy brain change as it grows old, and crucially, could help identify new targets and strategies for therapeutic neurostimulation.

As the brain ages, it “reorganizes” itself: its neurodynamics and the connections between neurons change dramatically, often resulting in a decrease of cognitive functions. Noninvasive brain stimulation techniques, such as applying electrical or magnetic currents, have recently emerged as possible treatments for neurological and degenerative disorders, contrasting and mitigating the natural effects of aging.

However, large scale experimental studies on healthy human brains have obvious ethical implications. A group of Spanish researchers, led by Gustavo Deco from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, were able to overcome these limitations with the help of modeling and simulation.

Their study was published in Cerebral Cortex and used neuroimaging data of 620 healthy adults, collected during previous research – half of them aged over 65 years, the other half below 65 years.

The team looked for key differences between the brain states of the two groups, and identified a brain state similar to the so-called “rich club” region, a network of 12 brain hubs well connected with each other.  READ MORE...

Brain Cancer and Mitochondria

 
One in Five Brain Cancers Fueled by Overactive Mitochondria

A new study has found that up to 20% of glioblastomas—an aggressive brain cancer—are fueled by overactive mitochondria and may be treatable with drugs currently in clinical trials.

Mitochondria are responsible for creating the energy that fuels all cells. Though they are usually less efficient at producing energy in cancer, tumor cells in this newly identified type of glioblastoma rely on the extra energy provided by overactive mitochondria to survive.

The study, by cancer scientists at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, was published in Nature Cancer.

The study also found that drugs that inhibit mitochondria—including a currently available drug and an experimental compound that are being tested in clinical trials—had a powerful anti-tumor effect on human brain cancer cells with overactive mitochondria. (Follow-up, unpublished work found that the same drugs are also active against mitochondrial tumors in glioblastomas growing in mice).

Such drugs are being tested in patients who have a rare gene fusion—previously discovered by the same researchers—that also sends mitochondria into overdrive.

“We can now expand these clinical trials to a much larger group of patients, because we can identify patients with mitochondria-driven tumors, regardless of the underlying genetics,” says Antonio Iavarone, MD, professor of neurology, who led the study with Anna Lasorella, MD, professor of pediatrics. Both are members of Columbia’s Institute for Cancer Genetics.

Study finds four types of brain cancer

The study found that all brain cancers fall into one of four groups, including the mitochondrial subtype.

By classifying brain cancers based on their core biological features, and not just genetic alterations or cell biomarkers, the researchers have gained new insights into what drives each subtype and the prognosis for patients.

“Existing classifications for brain cancer are not informative. They don’t predict outcomes; they don’t tell us which treatments will work best,” Lasorella says.

The importance of an accurate classification system is best illustrated by the example of breast cancer. Breast cancers have very well-defined subtypes that led to the development of therapies that target the key hallmarks, such as estrogen receptors or HER2, that sustain specific subtypes.

“We feel that one of the reasons therapeutic progress in brain cancer has been so slow is because we don't have a good way to classify these tumors,” Iavarone says.

Glioblastoma is the most common—and most lethal—primary brain tumor in adults. Median survival for individuals with glioblastoma is only 15 months.

The new study showed that glioblastoma can be classified in four biological groups. Two of them recapitulate functions active in the normal brain, either stem cells or neurons, respectively. The two other groups include mitochondrial tumors and a group of tumors with multiple metabolic activities (“plurimetabolic”) that are highly resistant to current therapies.

Patients with the mitochondrial tumors had a slightly better prognosis—and lived for a few more months—than patients with the other three types.

“We are excited about the mitochondrial group, because we have drugs for that group in clinical trials already,” Lasorella says, “but the classification now gives us ideas about how to target these other three and we are starting to investigate these more intensely.”

“We’re going beyond one mutation, one drug concept,” she says. “Sometimes it’s possible to get a response that way. But it’s time to target tumors based on the commonalities of their core biology, which can be caused by multiple different genetic combinations.”

Single-cell analyses opens new view of brain cancer
The new findings were only possible by utilizing recent advances in single-cell analyses, which allowed the scientists to understand—cell by cell—the biological activity of thousands of cells from a single tumor.

Overall, the scientists characterized the biological properties of 17,367 individual cells from 36 different tumors.

In addition to analyzing each cell’s genetic mutations and levels of gene activity, the researchers looked at other modifications made to the cells’ genomes and the proteins and noncoding RNAs made by each cell.

Using the data, the researchers devised a computational approach to identify core biological processes, or pathways, in the cells rather than the more common approach of identifying gene signatures. “In this way, we can classify each individual tumor cell based on the real biology that sustains them,” Iavarone says.

Most tumors, the researchers found, were dominated by cells from one of the four subtypes, with a smattering of cells from the other three.

Applying same techniques to other cancers
Lasorella and Iavarone are now applying the same techniques to multiple different aggressive cancers.

This “pan-cancer” approach, they say, should identify commonalities among different types of cancer regardless of the tumor’s origin. If such common pathways exist, drugs that treat mitochondrial brain cancer may also be able to treat mitochondrial types of lung cancer, for example.

“When we classify based on the cell’s core biological activities, which all cells rely on to survive and thrive, we may find that cancers share more in common than was previously apparent by just looking at their genes,” Lasorella says.

Hear What We Want to Hear

Humans depend on their senses to perceive the world, themselves and each other. Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality. During the last 20 years, neuroscience research has revealed that the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.

A team of neuroscientists of TU Dresden headed by Prof Katharina von Kriegstein presents new findings that show that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.

For their study, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses of 19 participants while they were listening to sequences of sounds. The participants were instructed to find which of the sounds in the sequence deviated from the others. Then, the participants’ expectations were manipulated so that they would expect the deviant sound in certain positions of the sequences. The neuroscientists examined the responses elicited by the deviant sounds in the two principal nuclei of the subcortical pathway responsible for auditory processing: the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate body. Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.

These results can be best interpreted in the context of predictive coding, a general theory of sensory processing that describes perception as a process of hypothesis testing. Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.

Dr Alejandro Tabas, first author of the publication, states on the findings: "Our subjective beliefs on the physical world have a decisive role on how we perceive reality. Decades of research in neuroscience had already shown that the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that is most developed in humans and apes, scans the sensory world by testing these beliefs against the actual sensory information. We have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."

These new results open up new ways for neuroscientists studying sensory processing in humans towards the subcortical pathways. Perhaps due to the axiomatic belief that subjectivity is inherently human, and the fact that the cerebral cortex is the major point of divergence between the human and other mammal's brains, little attention has been paid before to the role that subjective beliefs could have on subcortical sensory representations.

Given the importance that predictions have on daily life, impairments on how expectations are transmitted to the subcortical pathway could have profound repercussion in cognition. Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception. The new results could provide with a unified explanation of why individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the perception of speech, and provide clinical neuroscientists with a new set of hypotheses on the origin of other neural disorders related to sensory processing.

Adult Brains

(Image caption: A 3-D animated image showing our synapse phagocytosis reporter in mouse hippocampus. Presynapses in green, astrocytes in white, and microglia in blue. Phagocytosed presynapses by glia were shown in red.)


Astrocytes Eat Connections to Maintain Plasticity in Adult Brains
Developing brains constantly sprout new neuronal connections called synapses as they learn and remember. Important connections — the ones that are repeatedly introduced, such as how to avoid danger — are nurtured and reinforced, while connections deemed unnecessary are pruned away. Adult brains undergo similar pruning, but it was unclear how or why synapses in the adult brain get eliminated.

Now, a team of KAIST researchers has found the mechanism underlying plasticity and, potentially, neurological disorders in adult brains. They published their findings in Nature.

“Our findings have profound implications for our understanding of how neural circuits change during learning and memory, as well as in diseases,” said paper author Won-Suk Chung, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at KAIST. “Changes in synapse number have strong association with the prevalence of various neurological disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, frontotemporal dementia, and several forms of seizures.”

Gray matter in the brain contains microglia and astrocytes, two complementary cells that, among other things, support neurons and synapses. Microglial are a frontline immunity defense, responsible for eating pathogens and dead cells, and astrocytes are star-shaped cells that help structure the brain and maintain homeostasis by helping to control signaling between neurons. According to Professor Chung, it is generally thought that microglial eat synapses as part of its clean-up effort in a process known as phagocytosis.

“Using novel tools, we show that, for the first time, it is astrocytes and not microglia that constantly eliminate excessive and unnecessary adult excitatory synaptic connections in response to neuronal activity,” Professor Chung said. “Our paper challenges the general consensus in this field that microglia are the primary synapse phagocytes that control synapse numbers in the brain.”

Professor Chung and his team developed a molecular sensor to detect synapse elimination by glial cells and quantified how often and by which type of cell synapses were eliminated. They also deployed it in a mouse model without MEGF10, the gene that allows astrocytes to eliminate synapses. Adult animals with this defective astrocytic phagocytosis had unusually increased excitatory synapse numbers in the hippocampus. Through a collaboration with Dr. Hyungju Park at KBRI, they showed that these increased excitatory synapses are functionally impaired, which cause defective learning and memory formation in MEGF10 deleted animals.

“Through this process, we show that, at least in the adult hippocampal CA1 region, astrocytes are the major player in eliminating synapses, and this astrocytic function is essential for controlling synapse number and plasticity,” Chung said.

Professor Chung noted that researchers are only beginning to understand how synapse elimination affects maturation and homeostasis in the brain. In his group’s preliminary data in other brain regions, it appears that each region has different rates of synaptic elimination by astrocytes. They suspect a variety of internal and external factors are influencing how astrocytes modulate each regional circuit, and plan to elucidate these variables.

“Our long-term goal is understanding how astrocyte-mediated synapse turnover affects the initiation and progression of various neurological disorders,” Professor Chung said. “It is intriguing to postulate that modulating astrocytic phagocytosis to restore synaptic connectivity may be a novel strategy in treating various brain disorders.”

Religion and Brains

Religion and neurology often seem at odds; an extension of the questionable chasm separating spirituality and science. Indeed, in attempting to explain religious faith, neuroscientists have often sought to highlight subtle differences in brain structure that might confirm a deficiency here or reduction there.

A new, preregistered study out of the Netherlands, published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, sought to test prominent hypotheses in the literature relating brain structure to religious experience by way of a high-powered (i.e., having a large sample size), methodologically robust study on religiosity and structural brain differences.

The need for this, according to the authors, stems from myriad methodological inconsistencies in previous research, including small sample sizes, improperly validated testing tasks, and conceptual confusion regarding the structures being measured.

Thus, while the authors readily admit that brain connectivity measures may provide a more nuanced and accurate picture of the brain-religion relation, their primary aim was to “establish the (absence of the) relation between religiosity and structural brain differences at a level of methodological and statistical rigor that we hope will set a new standard for future studies.”

In other words: to dispel notions of the most basic and simplistic relations between brain structure and religious experience, paving the way for more sophisticated approaches.

Three theories were put to test.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...