Megan Lim Any parents out there will be familiar with the unique sort of misery that results when your kid has a new favorite song. They ask to hear it over and over, without regard for the rest of us. Well, it turns out that song sparrows might be better than children (and many adults, for that matter) when it comes to curating their playlists. Male sparrows, which attract females by singing, avoid tormenting their listeners with the same old tune. Instead they woo potential mates with a selection of 6 to 12 different songs. The song sparrow medley It might be hard to tell, but that audio clip contains three distinctive sparrow songs, each containing a unique signature of trills and notes. Even more impressive than the execution, though, is the way sparrows string their songs together. William Searcy, an ornithologist at the University of Miami, recently published a study in The Royal Society that analyzed patterns of song sparrow serenades. He said it would be easy for the birds to sing the first song, then the second, then the third and fourth. "But that's not what song sparrows are doing. They're not going through in a set order. They're varying the order from cycle to cycle, and that's more complicated," he said. In other words, rather than sing the same playlist every time, they hit shuffle. "What we're arguing is what they do is keep in memory the whole past cycle so they know what to sing next," Searcy said. The researchers are not sure why male sparrows shuffle their songs. But past work has shown that females prefer hearing a wider range of tunes, so maybe a new setlist keeps females interested. © 2022 npr

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 28181 - Posted: 02.02.2022

By Andrea Gawrylewski In 2016 a panel of physicists, a cosmologist and a philosopher gathered at the American Museum of Natural History to discuss an idea seemingly befitting science fiction: Are we living in a computer simulation? How exactly the flesh and blood of our brain is able to formulate an aware, self-examining mind capable of critical thought remains a mystery. Perhaps the answer eludes us because, the panel mused, we are the avatars of a higher species’ simulation and simply unable to discover the truth. As intriguing a hypothesis as it is, neuroscience has learned enough about our consciousness to counter such a fantastical possibility. Newly mapped networks within the human brain show regions that fire in concert to create cognition. Zapping the brain with magnetic pulses while recording neural activity might soon detect conscious thought, which could be especially useful for patients who are awake but unable to communicate or respond to external stimuli. These discoveries chip away at the isolating experience of humanity and the idea that a person can never truly know whether anyone but oneself is truly conscious. To some extent, we exist in our own bubbles of subjective experience. A growing body of evidence suggests that perception is a construction of the brain. Because the brain initiates some actions before we become aware that we have made a decision, we might even deduce that each of us is some kind of biochemical puppet, but experiments confirm that we do indeed have free will. And our cognition clearly results from highly evolved neural mechanisms, common to all of us, for making new memories, navigating social relationships and recognizing faces. Ultimately a shared sense of reality influences how we perceive ourselves and the formation of “in-groups” and “out-groups,” which can create social and political division. © 2022 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28180 - Posted: 02.02.2022

by Laura Dattaro Early in her first postdoctoral position, Hollis Cline first showed her hallmark flair for creative problem-solving. Cline, who goes by Holly, and her adviser, neuroscientist Martha Constantine-Paton, wanted to study the brain’s ‘topographical maps’ — internal representations of sensory input from the external world. These maps are thought to shape a person’s ability to process sensory information — filtering that can go awry in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. No one knew just how these maps formed or what could potentially disrupt them. Cline and Constantine-Paton, who was then at Yale University and is now emerita professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, weren’t sure how to find out. But as a first step, the pair decided to take the plunge with an unusual animal model: the frog — specifically, a spotted greenish-brown species called Rana pipiens, or the northern leopard frog. The amphibians spend two to three months as tadpoles, a span during which their brains change rapidly and visibly — unlike in mammals, which undergo similar stages of development inside of the mother’s body. These traits made it possible for Cline and Constantine-Paton to introduce changes and repeatedly watch their effects in real time. “That’s an extended period when you can actually have access to the developing brain,” Cline says. The unorthodox approach paid off. Cline, 66, now professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, worked out that a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate, which had been shown to be important for learning and memory, also mediated how visual experiences influence the developing topographical map. She later created a novel live imaging technique to visualize frog neurons’ development over time and, sticking with frogs over the ensuing decades, went on to make fundamental discoveries about how sensory experiences shape brain development and sensory processing. © 2022 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Autism
Link ID: 28179 - Posted: 02.02.2022

By Veronique Greenwood Few pleasures compare to a long cool drink on a hot day. As a glass of water or other tasty drink makes its way to your digestive tract, your brain is tracking it — but how? Scientists have known for some time that thirst is controlled by neurons that send an alert to put down the glass when the right amount has been guzzled. What precisely tells them that it is time, though, is still a bit mysterious. In an earlier study, a team of researchers found that the act of gulping a liquid — really anything from water to oil — is enough to trigger a temporary shutdown of thirst. But they knew that gulping was not the only source of satisfaction. There were signals that shut down thirst coming from deeper within the body. In a paper published Wednesday in Nature, scientists from the same lab report that they’ve followed the signals down the neck, through one of the body’s most important nerves, into the gut, and finally to an unexpected place for this trigger: a set of small veins in the liver. The motion of gulping might provide a quick way for the body to monitor fluid intake. But whatever you swallowed will swiftly arrive in the stomach and gut, and then its identity will become clear to your body as something that can fulfill the body’s need for hydration, or not. Water changes the concentration of nutrients in your blood, and researchers believe that this is the trigger for real satiation. “There is a mechanism to ensure that what you’re drinking is water, not anything else,” said Yuki Oka, a professor at Caltech and an author of both studies. To find out where the body senses changes to your blood’s concentration, Dr. Oka and his colleagues first ran water into the intestines of mice and watched the behavior of nerves that connect the brain to the gut area, which are believed to work similarly in humans. One major nerve, the vagus nerve, fired the closest in time with the water’s arrival in the intestines, suggesting that this is the route the information takes on the way to the brain. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28178 - Posted: 01.29.2022

ByRobert F. Service More than 50 years after the Summer of Love, psychedelics are again the rage. This time the love comes from doctors beginning to embrace psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin to treat depression, substance abuse, and other serious mental health conditions. But because the drugs cause hallucinations, their medical use requires intensive monitoring by clinicians. That drives up treatment costs, making psychedelics impractical for widespread therapeutic use. In recent years, researchers have begun to tweak psychedelics’ chemical structures, aiming to make analogs that retain medical usefulness but don’t cause hallucinations. Now, researchers report in Science they’ve teased apart the molecular interactions responsible for psychedelics’ antidepressive effects from those that cause hallucinations. They used that knowledge to make new compounds that appear to activate brain cellular circuits that help relieve depression without triggering a closely related pathway involved in hallucinations. So far, the compounds have only been studied in mice. But if such psychedelic analogs work in humans, they could spawn new families of pharmaceuticals. “This work is going to generate a lot of interest,” says Bryan Roth, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, whose lab is also seeking nonhallucinogenic psychedelic analogs. The need is profound. Mental or neurological disorders are estimated to affect roughly one-quarter of U.S. adults every year, and therapies often don’t work. LSD, psilocybin (the main ingredient in magic mushrooms), and other psychedelics might do better. Studies have shown a single dose of psilocybin can offer relief from depression for months at a time, and last year, a clinical trial of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or ecstasy, showed it can alleviate posttraumatic stress disorder. © 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28177 - Posted: 01.29.2022

Hannah V. Carey Matthew Regan Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation. They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long. While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to as low as just 1% of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until springtime. That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles. In people, long periods of inactivity, like prolonged bed rest, lead to muscle wasting. But muscle wasting is minimal in hibernating animals. Despite as much as six to nine months of inactivity and no protein intake, they preserve muscle mass and performance remarkably well – a very handy adaptation that helps ensure a successful breeding season come spring. How do hibernators pull this off? It’s been a real head-scratcher for hibernation biologists for decades. Our research team tackled this question by investigating how hibernating animals might be getting a major assist from the microbes that live in their guts. We knew from previous research that a hibernator’s gastrointestinal system undergoes dramatic changes in its structure and function from summer feeding to winter fasting. And it’s not only the animals who are fasting all winter long – their gut microbes are, too. Along with our microbiology collaborators, we figured out that winter fasting changes the gut microbiome quite a bit. © 2010–2022, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28176 - Posted: 01.29.2022

ByWarren Cornwall Bats use sound to hunt a dizzying array of prey. Some zero in on flowers to sip nectar, whereas others find cattle and suck their blood. Many nab insects midflight. One species of bat senses small fish beneath the water and snatches them as osprey do. Now, scientists have discovered an anatomical quirk in the ears of some bats that could help explain how they evolved so many hunting specialties. “For me this is a huge revelation,” says Zhe-Xi Luo, a University of Chicago evolutionary biologist who has studied the origins of mammalian hearing and supervised the new research. “This is totally distinct and unique from all other hearing mammals.” Most bats use their ears to “see” the world around them: After a bat chirps, its ears sense shapes and movement as sound waves bounce off objects, much as ships use sonar. Bats’ ears were long thought to be just a finely tuned version of the ears of nearly all mammals. Then, in 2015, Benjamin Sulser, a University of Chicago biology student on the hunt for a thesis project, took detailed 3D images of the inner ear of a bat skull. But he couldn’t find a feature common in virtually all mammals—a bony tube that encases the nerve cells and connects the ear to the brain. Thinking he’d made a mistake, he and Luo imaged the skulls of two more related species using a computed tomography scanner, with similar results. The researchers realized they might have stumbled across an answer to a mystery that had bedeviled bat biologists for 2 decades—and an explanation for why some families of bats had such a diverse echolocation arsenal. © 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 28175 - Posted: 01.29.2022

By Meeri Kim Kellie Carr and her 13-year-old son, Daniel, sat in the waiting room of a pediatric neurology clinic for yet another doctor’s appointment in 2012. For years, she struggled to find out what was causing his weakened right side. It wasn’t an obvious deficit, by any means, and anyone not paying close attention would see a normal, healthy teenage boy. At that point, no one had any idea that Daniel had suffered a massive stroke as a newborn and lost large parts of his brain as a result. “It was the largest stroke I’d ever seen in a child who hadn’t died or suffered extreme physical and mental disability,” said Nico Dosenbach, the pediatric neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who finally diagnosed him using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. "If I saw the MRI first, I would have assumed this kid's probably in a wheelchair, has a feeding tube and might be on a ventilator," Dosenbach said. "Because normally, when a child is missing that much brain, it's bad." But Daniel — as an active, athletic young man who did fine in school — defied all logic. Before the discovery of the stroke, his mother had noticed some odd mannerisms, such as zipping up his coat or eating a burger using only his left hand. When engaged, his right hand often served as club-like support instead of a dexterous appendage with fingers. Daniel excelled as a left-handed pitcher in competitive baseball, but his coach found it unusual that he would always switch the glove to his left hand when catching the ball. Medical professionals tried to help — first his pediatrician, followed by an orthopedic doctor who sent him to physical therapy — but no one could figure out the root cause. They tried constraint-induced movement therapy, which forces patients to use the weaker arm by immobilizing the other in a cast, but Daniel soon rebelled and broke himself free. © 1996-2022 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stroke
Link ID: 28174 - Posted: 01.26.2022

John Crimaldi Brian H. Smith Elizabeth Hong Nathan Urban A dog raises its nose in the air before chasing after a scent. A mosquito zigzags back and forth before it lands on your arm for its next meal. What these behaviors have in common is that they help these animals “see” their world through their noses. While humans primarily use their vision to navigate their environment, the vast majority of organisms on Earth communicate and experience the world through olfaction – their sense of smell. We are members of Odor2Action, an international network of over 50 scientists and students using olfaction to study brain function in animals. Our goal is to understand a fundamental question in neuroscience: How do animal brains translate information from their environments to changes in their behaviors? Here, we trace the interconnections between smells and behaviors – looking at how behavior influences odor detection, how the brain processes sensory information from smells and how this information triggers new behaviors. When the odor of a flower is released into the air, it takes the shape of a wind-borne cloud of molecules called a plume. It encounters physical obstacles and temperature differences as it flows through space. These interactions create turbulence that splits the odor plume into thin threads that spread out as the scent moves away from its source. These filaments eventually reach an animal’s nose or an insect’s antenna. © 2010–2022, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 28173 - Posted: 01.26.2022

By Jason DeParle WASHINGTON — A study that provided poor mothers with cash stipends for the first year of their children’s lives appears to have changed the babies’ brain activity in ways associated with stronger cognitive development, a finding with potential implications for safety net policy. The differences were modest — researchers likened them in statistical magnitude to moving to the 75th position in a line of 100 from the 81st — and it remains to be seen if changes in brain patterns will translate to higher skills, as other research offers reason to expect. Still, evidence that a single year of subsidies could alter something as profound as brain functioning highlights the role that money may play in child development and comes as President Biden is pushing for a much larger program of subsidies for families with children. “This is a big scientific finding,” said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. “It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development.” Another researcher, Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard, reacted more cautiously, noting the full effect of the payments — $333 a month — would not be clear until the children took cognitive tests. While the brain patterns documented in the study are often associated with higher cognitive skills, he said, that is not always the case. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28172 - Posted: 01.26.2022

In 2016, Science magazine ranked Randy L. Buckner among the top 10 most influential brain scientists of the modern era. He explains the road to discovering the default network, the pattern of brain activity triggered as we think about the past and the future. Q: Why don’t we begin with a brief description of what the default network is, how and when it was discovered, and why it’s important. Randy L. Buckner: In the 1990s, neuroscientists were just starting to do functional imaging studies. For the first time, we had brain scanners that could see the mind at work. We were like kids in a candy store in the sense that we no longer needed a scalpel to see the brain; the new technology allowed us to safely discern information out about what parts of the brain people used when given different tasks and different kinds of visual or auditory stimuli. I was a graduate student at the time at Washington University and one of my mentors, Marcus Raichle, was at the forefront of positron emission tomography (PET), an imaging technique that measures physiological changes in the brain and shows where blood flow is increasing due to brain activity. This is when many of us first became aware of the Dana Foundation, which was helping fund our work. I was a Dana fellow in those early days, and this was an exciting time in neuroscience. In early studies, we often asked participants to perform very simple tasks: read and say words, detect colors in pictures, or try to recognize whether a viewed word was on an earlier studied list. The imaging revealed the parts of the brain involved in their responses. But what jumped out at us was something unexpected: When people weren’t asked for a response or given a specific task, much of their brain still remained active. © 2022 The Dana Foundation.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 28171 - Posted: 01.26.2022

Chloe Tenn Humans have a sugar sense. Animals and humans prefer sugar over artificial sweeteners in experiments, and that could be because a specific gut sensor cell triggers one of two separate neural pathways depending on which it detects, researchers suggest in a January 13 study in Nature Neuroscience. “It has been known for decades that animals prefer sugar to non-caloric sweeteners and that this preference relies on feedback from the gut,” Lisa Beutler, a Northwestern University endocrinologist who researches the connection between the gut and brain and was not affiliated with the new work, writes in an email to The Scientist. “This study is among the first to provide insight at the molecular level into how the gut knows the difference between sugar and non-caloric sweeteners, and how this drives preference.” The study builds on previous research from the lab of Duke University gut-brain neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez. In 2015, Bohórquez established that endocrine cells, which were previously thought to only communicate with the nervous system indirectly through hormone secretion, can in fact have direct contact with neurons, evidenced by a video. Then, in 2018, the Bohórquez Lab found that the gut has similar cells to those that allow for taste on the tongue and smell in the nose, and that these sensors also have direct contact with neurons. “If they are connected to neurons, they must be connected to the brain,” Bohórquez tells The Scientist. “When we ingest sugar, it stimulates cells in the gut, and these cells release glutamate and activate the vagus nerve,” Bohórquez explains of his prior research. The vagus nerve is a cranial nerve that plays a regulatory role in internal organ functions such as digestion. His team observed that these gut sensor cells, which the team dubbed “neuropods,” transmit the chemosensory information mere milliseconds after detecting sugar. © 1986–2022 The Scientist.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 28170 - Posted: 01.26.2022

ByMichael Price When it comes to killing and eating other creatures, chimpanzees—our closest relatives—have nothing on us. Animal flesh makes up much more of the average human’s diet than a chimp’s. Many scientists have long suggested our blood lust ramped up about 2 million years ago, based on the number of butchery marks found at ancient archaeological sites. The spike in calories from meat, the story goes, allowed one of our early ancestors, Homo erectus, to grow bigger bodies and brains. But a new study argues the evidence behind this hypothesis is statistically flawed because it fails to account for the fact that researchers have focused most of their time and attention on later sites. As a result of this unequal “sampling effort” over time at different sites, the authors say, it’s impossible to know how big a role meat eating played in human evolution. Even before the study, many experts suspected the link between carnivory and bigger brains and bodies in early humans might be complex, says Rachel Carmody, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who wasn’t involved in the work. The new results, though, “take the important step of demonstrating empirically that controlling for sampling effort actually changes the interpretation.” To conduct the study, W. Andrew Barr, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, and colleagues reviewed previously reported data on the appearance of butchery marks at nine archaeological hotbeds of early human activity across eastern Africa spanning 2.6 million to 1.2 million years ago. As expected, the scientist found an increase in the number of cutmarks on animal bones beginning about 2 million years ago. However, the researchers noticed that archaeologists tended to find more cutmarks at the sites that have received the most research attention. In other words, the more time and effort researchers poured into a site, the more likely they were to discover evidence of meat eating. © 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 28169 - Posted: 01.26.2022

By Christina Caron For the entirety of my adult life I have tried to avoid driving. I could claim all sorts of noble reasons for this: concern about the environment, a desire to save money, the health benefits gained from walking or biking. But the main reason is that I’m anxious. What if I did something stupid and accidentally pressed the gas pedal instead of the brake? What if a small child suddenly darted into the middle of the road? What if another driver was distracted or full of rage? By 2020 I had managed to avoid driving for eight years, even though I’d gotten my license in high school. Then came the pandemic. After more than a year of hunkering down in our Manhattan neighborhood, my little family of three was yearning for new surroundings. So, I booked lodging in the Adirondacks, about a three-hour drive from New York City, and — for the first time in my life — signed up for formal driving lessons. On that first day, I arrived queasy and full of impending doom, muscles tensed and brain on high alert. But my instructor assured me that we would not meet our demise — we wouldn’t be driving fast enough for that, he explained — and then he told me something that nobody ever had: “The fear never leaves you.” You have to learn to harness it, he said. Have just enough fear to stay alert and be aware of your surroundings, but not so much that it is making you overly hesitant. The idea that I didn’t need to completely erase my anxiety was freeing. Having some anxiety — especially when faced with a stressful situation — isn’t necessarily bad and can actually be helpful, experts say. Anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion, often fueled by uncertainty. It can create intense, excessive and persistent worry and fear, not just about stressful events but also about everyday situations. There are usually physical symptoms too, like fast heart rate, muscle tension, rapid breathing, sweating and fatigue. Too much anxiety can be debilitating. But a normal amount is meant to help keep us safe, experts say. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 28168 - Posted: 01.22.2022

Sung Han & Shijia Liu You’re startled by a threatening sound, and your breath quickens. You smash your elbow and pant in pain. Why does your breathing rate increase dramatically when you’re hurting or anxious? As neurobiologists studying how the brain responds to environmental threats and the neural circuitry of emotion, we were curious about the answer to this question ourselves. In our recently published study, we discovered that one particular circuit of the brain in mice underlies this tight connection between pain, anxiety and breathing. And this discovery may eventually help us develop safer pain killers for humans. One of the most common symptoms of both pain and anxiety disorders is shortness of breath, or hyperventilation. On the other hand, slow, deep breathing can reduce pain and distress. The simplest way to explain this, we reasoned, is the existence of a common pathway in the brain that regulates breathing, pain and anxiety simultaneously. So we searched for brain regions previously reported to regulate breathing, pain and emotion. A small area in the brainstem called the lateral parabrachial nucleus caught our attention. Not only is it part of the breathing regulation center of the brain, it also mediates pain and negative emotions like fear and anxiety. Searching through a public database of gene expression patterns, or how genetic material is translated into proteins that let cells function, in the mouse brain, we serendipitously found that one type of opioid receptor called the µ-opioid receptor is highly expressed in parabrachial neurons. © 2010–2022, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28167 - Posted: 01.22.2022

Chloe Tenn Whether they’re predicting the outcomes of sports games or opening jars, the intelligence of octopuses and their cephalopod kin has fascinated avid sports fans and scientists alike (not that the two groups are mutually exclusive). However, insights into the animals’ brains have been limited, as structural data has come from low-tech methods such as dissection. Wen-Sung Chung, a University of Queensland Brain Institute neurobiologist who focuses on marine species, explains that octopuses have “probably the biggest centralized brain in invertebrates,” with multiple layers and lobes. Some species have more than 500 million neurons, he adds—compared to around 70 million in lab mice—making cephalopods especially intriguing as models for neuroscience. Chung and his colleagues decided to bring cephalopod neuroscience into the 21st century: using cutting-edge MRI, they probed the brains of four cephalopod species. They were especially interested in exploring whether cephalopod brain structures reflect the environments they live in. Indeed, the team reports numerous structural differences between species that live on reefs and those that dwell in deeper waters in a November 18 Current Biology paper. Giovanna Ponte, an evolutionary marine biologist at Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn Napoli in Italy who was not involved with the work, tells The Scientist that while this isn’t the first study to look for neurological correlates underlying ecological differences in cephalopods, it offers a new technological approach to investigating these animals’ brain morphology and diversity, and most importantly, “is the first time that there is . . . a comparative approach between different species.” © 1986–2022 The Scientist.

Keyword: Evolution; Brain imaging
Link ID: 28166 - Posted: 01.22.2022

by Lauren Schenkman Autism is thought to arise during prenatal development, when the brain is spinning its web of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the main signal-generating cell types in the cerebral cortex. Though this wiring process remains mysterious, one thing seemed certain after two decades of studies in mice: Although both neuron types arise from radial glia, excitatory neurons crop up in the developing cortex, whereas inhibitory neurons, also known as interneurons, originate outside of the cortex and then later migrate into it. Not so in the human brain, according to a study published in December in Nature. A team of researchers led by Tomasz Nowakowski, assistant professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, used a new viral barcoding method to trace the descendants of radial glial cells from the developing human cortex and found that these progenitor cells can give rise to both excitatory neurons and interneurons. “This is really a paradigm-shifting finding,” Nowakowski says. “It sets up a new framework for studying, understanding and interpreting experimental models of autism mutations.” Nowakowski spoke with Spectrum about the discovery’s implications for studying the origins of autism in the developing brain. Spectrum: Why did you investigate this topic? Tomasz Nowakowski: My lab and I are interested in understanding the early neurodevelopmental events that give rise to the incredible complexity of the human cerebral cortex. We know especially little about the early stages of human development, primarily because a lot of our knowledge comes from mouse models. As we’ve begun to realize over the past decade, the processes that underlie development of the brain in humans and mice can be quite different. © 2022 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28165 - Posted: 01.22.2022

Rupert Neate The billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain chip startup is preparing to launch clinical trials in humans. Musk, who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, has promised that the technology “will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs”. The Silicon Valley company, which has already successfully implanted artificial intelligence microchips in the brains of a macaque monkey named Pager and a pig named Gertrude, is now recruiting for a “clinical trial director” to run tests of the technology in humans. “As the clinical trial director, you’ll work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink’s first clinical trial participants,” the advert for the role in Fremont, California, says. “You will lead and help build the team responsible for enabling Neuralink’s clinical research activities and developing the regulatory interactions that come with a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment.” Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated $256bn fortune, said last month he was cautiously optimistic that the implants could allow tetraplegic people to walk. “We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” he told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit. “I think we have a chance with Neuralink to restore full-body functionality to someone who has a spinal cord injury. Neuralink’s working well in monkeys, and we’re actually doing just a lot of testing and just confirming that it’s very safe and reliable and the Neuralink device can be removed safely.” © 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 28164 - Posted: 01.22.2022

Veronique Greenwood In the moment between reading a phone number and punching it into your phone, you may find that the digits have mysteriously gone astray — even if you’ve seared the first ones into your memory, the last ones may still blur unaccountably. Was the 6 before the 8 or after it? Are you sure? Maintaining such scraps of information long enough to act on them draws on an ability called visual working memory. For years, scientists have debated whether working memory has space for only a few items at a time, or if it just has limited room for detail: Perhaps our mind’s capacity is spread across either a few crystal-clear recollections or a multitude of more dubious fragments. The uncertainty in working memory may be linked to a surprising way that the brain monitors and uses ambiguity, according to a recent paper in Neuron from neuroscience researchers at New York University. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans of people engaged in a memory task, they found that signals encoded an estimate of what people thought they saw — and the statistical distribution of the noise in the signals encoded the uncertainty of the memory. The uncertainty of your perceptions may be part of what your brain is representing in its recollections. And this sense of the uncertainties may help the brain make better decisions about how to use its memories. The findings suggests that “the brain is using that noise,” said Clayton Curtis, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at NYU and an author of the new paper. All Rights Reserved © 2022

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28163 - Posted: 01.19.2022

Nicola Davis It’s a cold winter’s day, and I’m standing in a room watching my dog stare fixedly at two flower pots. I’m about to get an answer to a burning question: is my puppy a clever girl? Dogs have been our companions for millennia, domesticated sometime between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. And the bond endures: according to the latest figures from the Pet Food Manufacturers Association 33% of households in the UK have a dog. But as well as fulfilling roles from Covid detection to lovable family rogue, scientists investigating how dogs think, express themselves and communicate with humans say dogs can also teach us about ourselves. And so I am here at the dog cognition centre at the University of Portsmouth with Calisto, the flat-coated retriever, and a pocket full of frankfurter sausage to find out how. We begin with a task superficially reminiscent of the cup and ballgame favoured by small-time conmen. Amy West, a PhD student at the centre, places two flower pots a few metres in front of Calisto, and appears to pop something under each. However, only one actually contains a tasty morsel. West points at the pot under which the sausage lurks, and I drop Calisto’s lead. The puppy makes a beeline for the correct pot. But according to Dr Juliane Kaminski, reader in comparative psychology at the University of Portsmouth, this was not unexpected. “A chimpanzee is our closest living relative – they ignore gestures like these coming from humans entirely,” she says. “But dogs don’t.” © 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 28162 - Posted: 01.19.2022