#neuroscience-research-debate

#neuroscience-research-debate

Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.

Social foraging strategies illustrate the balance between competition and cooperation, where individuals either produce resources or exploit the efforts of others, navigating ecological and social constraints.

DNA damage can originate from internal sources like metabolic by-products or normal cellular activities, as well as external factors such as cosmic radiation, diet, and pollution.

Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied neurotransmitters, chemicals that convey signals from cell to cell. It's the one with the highest profile outside neuroscience: often known as the 'pleasure chemical', it's depicted as the hit of reward that people get from recreational drugs or scrolling through social media. That's a gross simplification of what dopamine does; on that, researchers agree.

The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that's the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression? The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you'll be far more persuasive than you've ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.

Young, two-month-old lab mice housed with older, 18-month-old mice showed really impaired cognition. Researchers exposed young mice raised in a sterile, microbe-free environment to gut bacteria from old mice, causing the younger animals to perform worse on cognitive tests, as if they had prematurely aged, just like the cohoused mice.

Anyone living with schizophrenia understands the true limitations of current treatment options. Antipsychotics remain the single leading treatment for the disorder, and they are riddled with undesirable side effects. Weight gain, tardive dyskinesia, and excessive drowsiness are a few. Much research is devoted to expanding the range of medication options, and few academics have pursued other avenues. However, there is a possibility that treatment for schizophrenia can be approached through cellular methods if long-term research validates early signs of hope.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

We found that a simple, guideline-based exercise program can make the brain look measurably younger over just 12 months. Many people worry about how to protect their brain health as they age. Studies like this offer hopeful guidance grounded in everyday habits. These absolute changes were modest, but even a one-year shift in brain age could matter over the course of decades.

We've always said that SuperAgers show that the aging brain can be biologically active, adaptable, flexible, but we didn't know why. This is biological proof that their brains are more plastic, and a real discovery that shows that neurogenesis of young neurons in the hippocampus may be a contributing factor.

A groundbreaking study found that adults who sit for 10 or more hours daily face a significantly higher risk of dementia compared to those who sit less. The research, which tracked over 50,000 adults using wearable devices, revealed that the risk increases dramatically after crossing that 10-hour threshold.

At the Winter Olympics, skiers, bobsledders, speedskaters, and many other athletes all have to master one critical moment: when to start. That split second is paramount during competition because when everyone is strong and skilled, a moment of hesitation can separate gold from silver. A competitor who hesitates too much will be left behind -but moving too early will get them disqualified.

The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

There was a group of neurons that predicted the wrong answer, yet they kept getting stronger as the model learned. So we went back to the original macaque data, and the same signal was there, hiding in plain sight. It wasn't a quirk of the model - the monkeys' brains were doing it too. Even as their performance improved, both the real and simulated brains maintained a reserve of neurons that continued to predict the incorrect answer.