Lifeboat Foundation

Early-life stress (ELS) is one of the strongest lifetime risk factors for depression, anxiety, suicide, and other psychiatric disorders, particularly after facing additional stressful events later in life. Human and animal studies demonstrate that ELS sensitizes individuals to subsequent stress. However, the neurobiological basis of such stress sensitization remains largely unexplored. We hypothesized that ELS-induced stress sensitization would be detectable at the level of neuronal ensembles, such that cells activated by ELS would be more reactive to adult stress. To test this, we leveraged transgenic mice to genetically tag, track, and manipulate experience-activated neurons. We found that in both male and female mice, ELS-activated neurons within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), and to a lesser extent the medial prefrontal cortex, were preferentially reactivated by adult stress. To test whether reactivation of ELS-activated ensembles in the NAc contributes to stress hypersensitivity, we expressed hM4Dis receptor in control or ELS-activated neurons of pups and chemogenetically inhibited their activity during experience of adult stress. Inhibition of ELS-activated NAc neurons, but not control-tagged neurons, ameliorated social avoidance behavior following chronic social defeat stress in males. These data provide evidence that ELS-induced stress hypersensitivity is encoded at the level of corticolimbic neuronal ensembles.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Early-life stress enhances sensitivity to stress later in life, yet the mechanisms of such stress sensitization are largely unknown. Here, we show that neuronal ensembles in corticolimbic brain regions remain hypersensitive to stress across the life span, and quieting these ensembles during experience of adult stress rescues stress hypersensitivity.

Changes to short, repetitive sequences in the genome have been linked to diseases like autism and schizophrenia. New revelations about how such changes increase and decrease gene expression may provide insight into these and other disorders.

Pat Bennett’s prescription is a bit more complicated than “Take a couple of aspirins and call me in the morning.” But a quartet of baby-aspirin-sized sensors implanted in her brain are aimed at addressing a condition that’s frustrated her and others: the loss of the ability to speak intelligibly. The devices transmit signals from a couple of speech-related regions in Bennett’s brain to state-of-the-art software that decodes her brain activity and converts it to text displayed on a computer screen.

Bennett, now 68, is a former human resources director and onetime equestrian who jogged daily. In 2012, she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks neurons controlling movement, causing physical weakness and eventual paralysis.

Continue reading “Brain implants, software guide speech-disabled person’s intended words to computer screen” »

The human brain, with its intricate network of approximately 86 billion neurons, is arguably among the most complex specimens scientists have ever encountered. It holds an immense, yet currently immeasurable, wealth of information, positioning it as the pinnacle of computational devices.

Grasping this level of intricacy is challenging, making it essential for us to employ advanced technologies that can decode the minute, intricate interactions happening within the brain at microscopic levels. Thus, imaging emerges as a pivotal instrument in the realm of neuroscience.

The new imaging and virtual reconstruction technology developed by Johann Danzl’s group at ISTA is a big leap in imaging brain activity and is aptly named LIONESS – Live Information Optimized Nanoscopy Enabling Saturated Segmentation. LIONESS is a pipeline to image, reconstruct, and analyze live brain tissue with a comprehensiveness and spatial resolution not possible until now.

Once we fully we understand intelligence it could be essentially increased to nearly infinite levels once everything is quantified like this article talks about 😗😁.

Modern humans have a gene mutation that boosts the growth of neurons in the brain neocortex, a brain region associated with higher intelligence.

By Michael Le Page

Continue reading “A single gene mutation may have made us smarter than Neanderthals” »

The recreation of the human brain is giving clues to essentially how we engineer a super brain someday 😀.

Nobody’s quite sure what it means yet. But we’re sure that it’s important.

This is leading to even better brain engineering 👏 🙌 👌 😀 😄.

Computer-augmented brains, cures to blindness, and rebuilding the brain after injury all sound like science fiction. Today, these disruptive technologies aren’t just for Netflix, “Terminator,” and comic book fodder — in recent years, these advances are closer to reality than some might realize, and they have the ability to revolutionize neurological care.

Neurologic disease is now the world’s leading cause of disability, and upwards of 11 million people have some form of permanent neurological problem from traumatic brain injuries and stroke. For example, if a traumatic brain injury has damaged the motor cortex — the region of the brain involved in voluntary movements — patients could become paralyzed, without hope of regaining full function. Or some stroke patients can suffer from aphasia, the inability to speak or understand language, due to damage to the brain regions that control speech and language comprehension.

Continue reading “Science Fiction Meets Neuro-Reality: Organoids to Rebuild the Brain” »

Could changing your diet play a role in slowing or even preventing the development of dementia? We’re one step closer to finding out, thanks to a new UNLV study that bolsters the long-suspected link between gut health and Alzheimer’s disease.

The analysis — led by a team of researchers with the Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine (NIPM) at UNLV and published this spring in the Nature journal Scientific Reports — examined data from dozens of past studies into the belly-brain connection. The results? There’s a strong link between particular kinds of gut bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease.

UNLV study pinpoints 10 bacterial groups associated with Alzheimer’s disease, provides new insights into the relationship between gut makeup and dementia.

Continue reading “Brain-Belly Connection: Gut Health May Influence Likelihood of Developing Alzheimer’s” »

The study’s authors compared the influence of two components of the brain’s physical structure: the outer folds of the cerebral cortex — the area where most higher-level brain activity occurs — and the connectome, the web of nerves that links distinct regions of the cerebral cortex. The team found that the shape of the outer surface was a better predictor of brainwave data than was the connectome, contrary to the paradigm that the connectome has the dominant role in driving brain activity. “We use concepts from physics and engineering to study how anatomy determines function,” says study co-author James Pang, a physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

A model of the brain’s geometry better explains neuronal activity than a model based on the ‘connectome’.