Tag: Neuroscience

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Dogs get what you say, and how you say it

Image: Dogs on scanner
Trained dogs gather around the fMRI scanner in Budapest. The researchers said the dogs seemed to enjoy lying in the scanner during the experiment. (Credit: Enikő Kubinyi)

Scientists have put dogs through brain scans to confirm what pet owners already suspected: Dogs not only comprehend the words we speak, but also how we say them.

The patterns of brain activity suggest that dogs process the words of their trainers much as humans do.

“There is a well-known distribution of labor in the human brain,” Attila Andics of Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University said in a news release. “It is mainly the left hemisphere’s job to process word meaning, and the right hemisphere’s job to process intonation. The human brain not only separately analyzes what we say and how we say it, but also integrates the two types of information, to arrive at a unified meaning. Our findings suggest that dogs can also do all that, and they use very similar brain mechanisms.”

The findings, which are being published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, are based on functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

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How evolution played a role in autism genes

Image: Human and Neanderthal skulls
These skulls of a modern human and a Neanderthal are from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. (Credit: DrMikeBaxter / HairyMuseumMatt via Wikimedia)

One of the biggest genetic differences between humans and other members of the primate family tree, including Neanderthals, predisposes people to a type of autism. The stretch of DNA appears to be an important piece of the human genome, but why?

University of Washington genome scientist Evan Eichler and his colleagues on an international research team focus on that question in a study published today by the journal Nature.

The key genetic structure consists of 95,000 molecular base pairs in a region on chromosome 16 that’s known as 16p11.2. The structure includes 28 genes, flanked by blocks of DNA with duplicated sequences of genetic code known as copy-number variants.

Eichler’s team compared the genomes of modern humans with the genetic code for chimps, gorillas and orangutans, as well as the code for Neanderthals and another strain of extinct pre-humans known as Denisovans. Humans were the only ones to have the structure in the 16p11.2 region.

The researchers’ analysis indicates that the structure appeared in our ancestors’ genome relatively suddenly, about 280,000 years ago. That time frame is about 80,000 years before anatomically modern humans – that is, Homo sapiens – show up in the fossil record.

“Most duplications in our genome are millions of years old, and the speed at which this structure transformed our genome is unprecedented,” Eichler said in a news release.

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This new map doubles the brain’s domains

Image: Brain map
This map highlights distinct brain regions associated with three of our senses – hearing in red, touch in green, and vision in blue – as well as opposing cognitive systems in light and dark shades. The map is based on data from resting-state fMRI scans performed as part of the Human Connectome Project. (Credit: Matthew Glasser and David Van Essen / WUSTL)

The number of separate domains recognized in the human cortex has doubled, thanks to a newly developed map based on functional MRI brain scans.

The mapping effort, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health through its Human Connectome Project, is detailed today in research published by the journal Nature.

Previous studies charted 83 brain regions in each hemisphere of the brain – for example, Broca’s Area, which is thought to be responsible for speech production. The mapping of those regions was typically based on just one measure, such as examining tissue samples under a microscope. The boundaries of the regions were often uncertain.

“The situation is analogous to astronomy, where ground-based telescopes produced relatively blurry images of the sky before the advent of adaptive optics and space telescopes,” study lead author Matthew Glasser, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a news release.

To produce a sharper image, Glasser and colleagues at seven research centers conducted fMRI scans on 210 healthy study participants. They looked for similarities and differences in cortical architecture, activity, connectivity and topography – and then fed those readings into software that produced a map of regions with similar qualities.

That map identified 97 additional cortex areas per hemisphere, for a total of 180. The analysis was verified by checking the map against an independent set of readings from 210 other participants.

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Monkey genes shed light on brain mysteries

Image: Monkey brain
A cross-section of the neocortex and cerebellum from an adult rhesus monkey brain has been labeled with a stain that highlights brain cells. (Credit: Allen Institute)

A project led by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science has mapped out how genes get fired up in key areas of a rhesus monkey’s brain as it develops – and the results could help researchers unlock the mysteries surrounding autism, microcephaly, schizophrenia and other neurological conditions.

The gene expression map, laid out today in research published by the journal Nature, shows that rhesus macaque monkeys are much better models than the usual mice for humans when it comes to brain development. It also confirms the view that different neurological disorders follow dramatically different genetic pathways.

“The sets of genes that turn on early, and the sets of genes that turn on in the adult, shift dramatically,” Allen Institute neuroscientist Ed Lein, the study’s senior author, told GeekWire.

The gene map follows up on earlier work that Lein and his colleagues have done with mice, to track how the brain develops from its fetal stage to adulthood. The Allen Institute has done similar work with adult human brains and fetal brains as well.

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Brain Observatory peers into the minds of mice

Brain Observatory research
Senior scientist Jerome Lecoq and research associate Kate Roll inspect a microscope platform from the Allen Brain Observatory that was used to record real-time cellular activity in the visual cortex of mice as they were shown pictures and movies. (Credit: Allen Institute)

The Allen Brain Observatory is open for business, revealing what’s running through the mind of a mouse as it sees patterns of light and dark, pictures of butterflies and tigers – or even the opening scene of Orson Welles’ 1958 classic film, “Touch of Evil.”

The online repository of 30 trillion bytes’ worth of brain-cell readings represents the latest scientific offering from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It follows through on a $300 million pledge that Allen made more than four years ago.

The Allen Institute’s president and chief scientific officer, Christof Koch, has compared the project to a Hubble Space Telescope for the brain.

“No one has ever taken this kind of industrial approach to surveying the active brain at cellular resolution in order to measure how the brain processes information in real time,” Koch said today in the institute’s announcement of the data release. “This is a milestone in our quest to decode how the brain’s computations give rise to perception, behavior and consciousness.”

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Scientists join forces to study aging brains

Image: Brain tissue
This brain tissue has undergone antibody labeling for the Aging, Dementia and TBI Study. Dark brown spots are amyloid plaques, implicated in Alzheimer’s Disease. (Credit: Allen Institute)

Scientists from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, the University of Washington and Group Health Research Institute have put together a first-of-its-kind database of brain imagery and medical data, to help unravel the potential links between brain injuries, aging and dementia.

The database for the Aging, Dementia and Traumatic Brain Injury Study is hosted at the Allen Institute’s Brain-Map.org website. For years, the institute has been mapping the connections between brain function and gene expression, but this database goes way beyond genetics.

The study’s brain samples come from a bigger study called Adult Changes in Thought. That longitudinal research effort, led by Eric Larson and Paul Crane of the Group Health Research Institute and UW, looks at health records and cognitive assessments from thousands of aging adults.

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Scientists straighten out a tangle of brain cells

Image: Brain neurons
This graphic traces a network of cortical neurons from a trillions of bytes’ worth of 3-D data. Some of the neurons are color-coded according to their activity patterns in the living brain. (Credit: Clay Reid, Allen Institute; Wei-Chung Lee, Harvard Medical School; Sam Ingersoll, graphic artist)

Scientists say they’ve analyzed trillions of bytes’ worth of mapping data from the brain of a mouse to trace the connections within a tangle of neurons that’s smaller than a pinhead.

The results, published today in the journal Nature, mark a preliminary step toward an even more ambitious neuron-mapping project called MICrONS.

“This is the culmination of a research program that began almost 10 years ago,” study co-author R. Clay Reid, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a news release. “Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring.”

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Study says meditation helps ease back pain

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A study conducted at Group Health Research Institute found that meditation can be as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy and medication for treating low back pain. (Credit: JAMA via YouTube)

Mindfulness meditation can give a boost to treatments for chronic low back pain for a wide spectrum of patients, a study conducted by Seattle’s Group Health Research Institute has found.

The study, published today by the Journal of the American Medical Association, assessed treatment outcomes over the course of a year for 342 Group Health back-pain patients, ranging in age from 20 to 70.

The patients were divided into three groups. The control group continued their usual treatment plan, including medications and physical therapy. The other two groups went through two-hour training sessions, once a week for eight weeks, in two different types of mental techniques for addressing stress and pain.

One technique is known as cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which has previously been used to treat back pain as well as other conditions such as depression. CBT helps patients reframe how they think about pain to manage it more successfully. It also helps them change behaviors that may contribute to pain.

The other technique is mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR. Practitioners are trained to observe, acknowledge and accept their thoughts and feelings, including their sensation of pain. The training also promotes body awareness through yoga.

The CBT and MBSR patients were allowed to receive other types of care independent of the study.

Group Health’s researchers found that the CBT and MBSR patients were more likely to experience at least a 30 percent improvement in function, as well as in their self-reported assessments of how much they were bothered by back pain.

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Big project aims to build a bit of a virtual brain

Image: Neuron network
This image shows a network of neurons reconstructed with large-scale electron microscopy. (Credit: Clay Reid, Allen Institute / Wei-Chung Lee, Harvard Medical School / Sam Ingersoll)

Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science is in on a multimillion-dollar campaign to trace the connections between the neurons in a mouse’s brain and figure out what they do, well enough to create a 3-D wiring diagram.

The five-year project – backed by the federal government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA – is aimed at reverse-engineering the way the brain processes information. The project is called Machine Intelligence From Cortical Networks, or MICRONS.

“The reason IARPA is funding this is not merely to get a better understanding of the brain, but to get inspiration from biology to do the next iteration of machine learning,” R. Clay Reid, the Allen Institute’s principal investigator for the project, told GeekWire.

IARPA is the U.S. intelligence community’s equivalent of the Pentagon’s DARPA think tank, and you can assume that the new types of artificial intelligence programs inspired by MICrONS could help give the United States an edge when it comes to analyzing data for national security purposes.

At the same time, neuroscientists will benefit from seeing how neurons work together in unprecedented detail. “It’s absolutely a win-win situation,” Reid said.

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Scientists read minds at the speed of thought

Brain monitoring
Subjects viewed a random sequence of images of faces and houses and were asked to look for an inverted house like the one at bottom left. “That was a distractor,” Jeff Ojemann said. “We were interested in what the brain was doing at the other times.” (Credit: Kai Miller / Brian Donohue / UW)

University of Washington neuroscientists and their colleagues have developed a system that uses electrodes implanted in the human brain’s temporal lobe to decode brain signals at nearly the speed of perception.

“Clinically, you could think of our result as a proof of concept toward building a communication mechanism for patients who are paralyzed or have had a stroke and are completely locked-in,” Rajesh Rao, a UW professor who directs the Center for Sensorimotor Engineering, said in a news release.

The study was published Jan. 28 in PLOS Computational Biology.

Rao and his colleagues inserted the electrodes into the brains of epilepsy patients undergoing care at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. The patients’ seizures couldn’t be relieved by medication alone, so they were given the implants temporarily in an attempt to locate the seizures’ focal points.

“They were going to get the electrodes no matter what,” said Jeff Ojemann, a neurosurgeon at UW Medicine. “We were just giving them additional tasks to do during their hospital stay while they are otherwise just waiting around.”

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