Kindness. Just saying the word—such warmth in its enunciation—draws a smile. Equal parts curiosity, integrity, inclusivity, and intentionality, it’s truly the most underrated behavior of all these days. We need to broach cultivation and dissemination of this behavior—and really, virtue and value—so much more in our communities, workplaces, and schools.

Never underestimate its potential impact on the lives of people both within and outside of your bubble.

Art and science in beautiful conversation!

Here’s a 30-something Santiago Ramón y Cajal hanging out in his library:

For more, check out this article or visit the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota before May 21.

Images courtesy of Instituto Cajal del Consjo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid

Now it’s official #PhDlife #UdeS #gaiternation

My text books came in! Getting ready to be the walking talking dictionary of EEG and NIRS imaging analysis.

neurosciencestuff:

Scientists produce strongest evidence yet of schizophrenia’s causes

An international team of scientists led by Cardiff researchers has provided the strongest evidence yet of what causes schizophrenia - a condition that affects around 1% of the global population.

Published in the journal Neuron, their work presents strong evidence that disruption of a delicate chemical balance in the brain is heavily implicated in the disorder.

In the largest ever study of its kind, the team found that disease-linked mutations disrupt specific sets of genes contributing to excitatory and inhibitory signalling, the balance of which plays a crucial role in healthy brain development and function.

The breakthrough builds on two landmark studies led by members of the Cardiff team, published last year in the journal Nature.

“We’re finally starting to understand what goes wrong in schizophrenia,” says lead author Dr Andrew Pocklington from the University’s MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics.

“Our study marks a significant step towards understanding the biology underpinning schizophrenia, which is an incredibly complex condition and has up until very recently kept scientists largely mystified as to its origins.

“We now have what we hope is a pretty sizeable piece of the jigsaw puzzle that will help us develop a coherent model of the disease, while helping us to rule out some of the alternatives.

"A reliable model of disease is urgently needed to direct future efforts in developing new treatments, which haven’t really improved a great deal since the 1970s.”

Professor Hugh Perry, who chairs the Medical Research Council Neuroscience and Mental Health Board said: “This work builds on our understanding of the genetic causes of schizophrenia - unravelling how a combination of genetic faults can disrupt the chemical balance of the brain.

"Scientists in the UK, as part of an international consortium, are uncovering the genetic causes of a range of mental health issues, such as schizophrenia.

"In the future, this work could lead to new ways of predicting an individual’s risk of developing schizophrenia and form the basis of new targeted treatments that are based on an individual’s genetic makeup.”

A healthy brain is able to function properly thanks to a precise balance between chemical signals that excite and inhibit nerve cell activity. Researchers studying psychiatric disorders have previously suspected that disruption of this balance contributes to schizophrenia.

The first evidence that schizophrenia mutations interfere with excitatory signalling was uncovered in 2011 by the same team, based at the University’s MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics.

This paper not only confirms their previous findings, but also provides the first strong genetic evidence that disruption of inhibitory signalling contributes to the disorder.

To reach their conclusions scientists compared the genetic data of 11,355 patients with schizophrenia against a control group of 16,416 people without the condition.

They looked for types of mutation known as copy number variants (CNVs), mutations in which large stretches of DNA are either deleted or duplicated.

Comparing the CNVs found in people with schizophrenia to those found in unaffected people, the team was able to show that the mutations in individuals with the disorder tended to disrupt genes involved in specific aspects of brain function.

The disease-causing effects of CNVs are also suspected to be involved in other neurodevelopmental disorders such as intellectual disability, Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD.

Around 635,000 people in the UK will at some stage in their lives be affected by schizophrenia.
The estimated cost of schizophrenia and psychosis to society is around £11.8 billion a year.

The symptoms of schizophrenia can be extremely disruptive, and have a large impact on a person’s ability to carry out everyday tasks, such as going to work, maintaining relationships and caring for themselves or others.

neurosciencestuff:

Researchers pinpoint epicenter of brain’s predictive ability

In recent years, sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered the human brain works on pre­dic­tions, con­trary to the pre­vi­ously accepted theory that it reacts to the sen­sa­tions it picks up from the out­side world. Experts say humans’ reac­tions are in fact the body adjusting to pre­dic­tions the brain is making based on the state of our body the last time it was in a sim­ilar situation.

Now, Dis­tin­guished Uni­ver­sity Pro­fessor Lisa Feldman Bar­rett at North­eastern has reported finding the epi­center of those predictions.

In an article pub­lished in Nature Reviews Neu­ro­science last week, Bar­rett con­tends that limbic tissue, which also helps to create emo­tions, is at the top of the brain’s pre­dic­tion hier­archy. She co-​​authored the paper with W. Kyle Sim­mons, of the Lau­reate Insti­tute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“The unique con­tri­bu­tion of our paper is to show that limbic tissue, because of its struc­ture and the way the neu­rons are orga­nized, is pre­dicting,” Bar­rett said. “It is directing the pre­dic­tions to every­where else in the cortex, and that makes it very powerful.”

For example, when a person is instructed to imagine a red apple in his or her mind’s eye, Bar­rett explained that limbic parts of the brain send pre­dic­tions to visual neu­rons and cause them to fire in dif­ferent pat­terns so the person can “see” a red apple.

Bar­rett is a fac­ulty member in the Depart­ment of Psy­chology and is director of the Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Affec­tive Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­tory. A pio­neer in the psy­chology of emo­tion and affec­tive neu­ro­science, she has chal­lenged the foun­da­tion of affec­tive sci­ence by showing that people are the archi­tects of their own emo­tional experiences.

In the Nature paper, Bar­rett sum­ma­rized research on the cel­lular com­po­si­tion of limbic tissue, which shows that limbic regions of the brain send but do not receive pre­dic­tions. This means that limbic regions direct pro­cessing in the brain. They don’t react to stim­u­la­tion from the out­side world. This is ironic, Bar­rett argues, because when sci­en­tists used to believe that limbic regions of the brain were the home of emo­tion, they were seen as mainly reac­tive to the world.

Common sense tells you that seeing is believing, but really the brain is built for things to work the other way around: you see (and hear and smell and taste) what you believe. And believing is largely based on feeling. In her paper, Bar­rett shows that your brain is not wired to be a reac­tive organ. It’s wired to ask the ques­tion: “The last time I was in a sit­u­a­tion like this, what sen­sa­tions did I encounter, and how did I act?” And the sen­sa­tions that seem to matter most are the ones that are inside your own body, which are called “interoceptions.”

“What your brain is trying to do is guess what the sen­sa­tion means and what’s causing the sen­sa­tions so it can figure out what to do about them,” Bar­rett said. “Your brain is trying to put together thoughts, feel­ings, and per­cep­tions so they arrive as needed, not a second afterwards.”

mindblowingscience:

This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person

When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.”

Antico doesn’t just perceive these colors because she’s an artist who paints in the impressionist style. She’s also a tetrachromat, which means that she has more receptors in her eyes to absorb color. The difference lies in Antico’s cones, structures in the eyes that are calibrated to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain. The average person has three cones, which enables him to see about one million colors. But Antico has four cones, so her eyes are capable of picking up dimensions and nuances of color—an estimated 100 million of them—that the average person cannot. “It’s shocking to me how little color people are seeing,” she said.

Although tetrachromats have more receptors in their eyes, their brains are wired the same way as a person with normal vision. So how can a brain like Antico’s change to see more colors? Like anything else, practice makes perfect, even when it comes to neural pathways. 

For years, researchers weren’t sure tetrachromacy existed. If it did, they stipulated, it could only be found in women. This is because of the genes behind color vision. People who have regular color vision have three cones, tuned to the wavelengths of red, green, and blue. These are connected to the X chromosome—men have one, but women have two. Mutations in the X chromosome cause a person to perceive more or less color, which is why men more commonly have congenital colorblindness than women (if their one X chromosome has a mutation). But the theory stood that if a woman received two mutated X chromosomes, she could have four cones instead of the usual three.

Continue Reading.

neurosciencestuff:

Brain reward circuits respond differently to 2 kinds of sugar

The brain responds differently to two kinds of sugar, according to a report today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Phoenix Arizona. The study suggests that fructose heightens the response of brain reward circuits to food cues, promoting feeding behavior.

Currently, roughly two out of three U.S. adults are overweight and one out of three is obese. Changes in lifestyle and dietary intake during the past quarter century are thought to be the main culprits, with the increase in fructose consumption of particular concern. Fructose is the simple sugar found in fruit, but it is added to many foods as a “refined sugar” in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. By comparison, glucose, the primary energy source for the body, is usually produced through the breakdown of complex carbohydrates. Fructose ingestion produces smaller increases in circulating satiety hormones than glucose ingestion. Further, administration of fructose directly into the brain provokes feeding in rodents, whereas glucose administered this way promotes satiety, or the feeling of being full. Preliminary studies in people have also shown that glucose reduces activity in the hypothalamus, an event that is associated with metabolic satiety, whereas fructose does not.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Kathleen Page at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) and her colleagues in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern California extended this work. They examined brain responses and motivation to eat when research volunteers viewed images of food (like chocolate cake) after they drank a beverage containing either glucose or fructose. The participants were 24 young men and women, 16 to 25 years of age. They viewed images of food during fMRI scans of their brains and reported how much they wanted to eat. The food cues produced activation in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain’s “reward circuit”, and increased the desire for food. Activation in the nucleus accumbens was greater after consuming the fructose drink compared to the glucose drink. The fructose drink also resulted in greater ratings of hunger and motivation to eat compared to the glucose drink. These neural and behavioral responses to high-calorie food stimuli could promote eating, and more so after consuming fructose compared to glucose.

These studies have important public health implications in a society that is inundated with high-sugar foods and tantalizing food stimuli. They suggest that consumption of fructose may promote overeating.

Studio Smack - Branded Dreams: The Future of advertising

We’re not there yet. Guess that’s the best way to describe the status of nascent technologies like neurotech-brain-reading-devices and inception methods, memory implants and memory augmentation at the moment without the use of hype and buzzwords a la: “it will disrupt the way we live”or“this tech will change everything blabla”.

But how to talk about emerging technologies, socio-technological trends and changing societal patterns in a nutritious way? One of the best mix methods approaches for a broader audience is to research possible implications of emerging technologies and visualize them in a discussion-ready format for a broader audience.

In this case: If we know how to hack our brains and mix it with typical advertising and marketing strategies, what are possible outcomes? Studio Smack has created a great visual scifi prototype (and/or design fiction with flaws) for a postnormal world, that should spark discussions with contrasting points about the implications of neurotechnologies:

We see ads everyday and everywhere. They have become part of our life. While some people try to avoid seeing ads, advertisers keep finding new ways to reach us. However they are unable to reach us when we sleep. Our dreams are the last safe and add-free place so it seems.

But what happens when advertisers have the possibility to enter our dreams? Based on recent developments in brain science and technology this might be possible in the near future.

Chapeau! Great work.

[Studio Smack][via nextnature]

In case you missed it, I uploaded a video on why we have difficulty remembering our early childhood! Click here to watch ♡

Brain Typogram by Aaron Kuehn 

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The Easter Brainy is hiding brains for the big hunt!