Experts from Michigan Medicine answer questions about brain health and how to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Learn more about the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center at University of Michigan Health: https://alzheimers.med.umich.edu/
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Musk said that the first human patient implanted with a Neuralink chip last month “is able to… move the mouse around the screen just by thinking.”
Elon Musk announced this week that his company’s brain implant has allowed a person to move a computer mouse with their mind.
Neuralink’s first human patient able to use mouse…:
Elon Musk is the visionary behind Neuralink. He announced that the first human recipient of the company’s brain chip implant has fully recovered. The individual has demonstrated the ability to use a computer mouse solely through thoughts. Watch this video for all details.
Researchers have unraveled how mutations in a gene can lead to an incurable neurodevelopmental disorder that causes abnormal brain development in newborns and infants.
The WEHI study is the first to prove that a protein called Trabid helps control neuronal development, and that mutations to this protein can lead to microcephaly —a condition where a baby’s brain is smaller than expected.
It’s hoped the milestone findings will provide a deeper understanding into the protein’s impact on healthy development and lead to treatments that can slow or stop the development of microcephaly and potentially other neurological disorders.
The somatosensory cortex is a brain region known to play a role in the detection of tactile information, changes in temperature, and pain sensations. Some recent studies found that this crucial brain region is also involved in the human ability to learn and retain new motor skills.
Despite initial findings hinting at the involvement of the somatosensory cortex in motor learning, the nature of its involvement remains poorly understood.
Researchers at University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the contributions of the somatosensory cortex to the learning and retention of new movements. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the somatosensory cortex could be specifically responsible for encoding new sensory targets or, in other words, learning-adapted sensory states.
In this first article in a series on philosophy and science, we take a look at materialism and why it is fundamental to science.
A short disclaimer before we read further: I’m a materialist. Materialism is a branch of philosophy to which the sciences, particularly the physical and life sciences, owe a lot. Materialism posits that the material world — matter — exists, and everything in the Universe, including consciousness, is made from or is a product of matter. An objective reality exists and we can understand it. Without materialism, physics, chemistry, and biology as we know it wouldn’t exist.
Another branch of philosophy, idealism, is in direct contradiction to materialism. Idealism states that, instead of matter, the mind and consciousness are fundamental to reality; that they are immaterial and therefore independent of the material world.
An orchestra of complex neuronal networks performs a symphonic masterpiece called vision – an exciting field for neurobiologists like Alexander Borst, director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. In his department’s latest study, the scientists found a microcircuit which inverts excitatory to inhibitory signals and is thus able to transform a single type of neuronal input for multiple purposes. The discovery of this microcircuit is an important puzzle piece for the better understanding of the visual process of the fruit flies Drosophila and ultimately of vision itself.
Vision is one of the most important senses in humans. Accordingly, a large part of the brain is dedicated to processing visual information. In order to compute visual information quickly and accurately, a multitude of neuronal networks must perform a complex interplay — which fruit flies can help us to understand. Surprisingly, besides the obvious differences between the eyes of humans and fruit flies, many parallels can be found in the way how their brains process visual information. Since the visual system of flies is very efficient but significantly less complex than ours, it’s not surprising that this is one of the best understood neuronal network in neuroscience.
In the flies’ visual system, a cascade of cells is responsible to transform light information into direction-specific signals. T4 cells, for example, respond to moving bright edges (ON-pathway), while T5 cells only respond to moving dark edges (OFF-pathway). Both, T4 and T5 cells, have four subtypes that are tuned to the four cardinal directions (front-to-back, back-to-front, upwards and downwards). This means that each neuron only reacts to a specific direction of visual motion, their so-called preferred direction, while showing little reaction when stimulated by a moving edge in other directions (= null direction).
According to a study published in the BMJ, a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest while receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in a hospital is 22%, but that declines rapidly after only one minute to less than 1% after 39 minutes. The likelihood of leaving with no major brain damage is similar, declining from 15% after one minute of CPR to less than 1% after 32 minutes without a heartbeat.
Only around 25% of patients survive to hospital discharge after being admitted to the emergency department for cardiac arrest. This common catastrophic medical emergency with a high mortality rate is an important public health issue, affecting around 300,000 adults every year in America alone. Unfortunately, studies have shown that long resuscitation times are linked to lower odds of survival, but there are no specific recommendations on when to stop resuscitation.
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