Lifeboat Foundation

How reliable is your memory? Can you remember what you were doing on this day ten years ago? Or do you struggle to remember what you ate for lunch yesterday? Regardless of how well you think you remember things, all of our brains are full of memories of events that never happened – so-called false memories. And that, according to science, isn’t necessarily something to worry about.

To explain this strange phenomenon and much more, we talked to Dr Julia Shaw, a research associate at University College London and expert on criminal psychology.

Memories are essentially networks of neurons. And autobiographical memories – memories of our lives – involve connecting different parts of the brain. These memories don’t just live in one little piece.

Current Biology. They trained Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) to learn to spot and dodge obstacles. The study challenges previous notions that advanced learning requires a centralized brain and sheds light on the evolutionary roots of learning and memory.

No bigger than a fingernail, these seemingly simple jellies have a complex visual system with 24 eyes embedded in their bell-like body. Living in mangrove swamps, the animal uses its vision to steer through murky waters and swerve around underwater tree roots to snare prey. Scientists demonstrated that the jellies could acquire the ability to avoid obstacles through associative learning, a process through which organisms form mental connections between sensory stimulations and behaviors.

In a new study in mice, a team of researchers from UCLA, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Harvard University have uncovered a crucial component for restoring functional activity after spinal cord injury. The neuroscientists have shown that re-growing specific neurons back to their natural target regions led to recovery, while random regrowth was not effective.

In a 2018 study published in Nature, the team identified a treatment approach that triggers axons —the tiny fibers that link nerve cells and enable them to communicate—to regrow after spinal cord injury in rodents. But even as that approach successfully led to the regeneration of axons across severe spinal cord lesions, achieving functional recovery remained a significant challenge.

Continue reading “Scientists regenerate neurons that restore walking in mice after paralysis from spinal cord injury” »

In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (public library), Annie Murphy Paul explores the most thrilling frontiers of this growing understanding, fusing a century of scientific studies with millennia of first-hand experience from the lives and letters of great artists, scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Challenging our cultural inheritance of thinking that thinking takes place only inside the brain, she illuminates the myriad ways in which we “use the world to think” — from the sensemaking language of gestures that we acquire as babies long before we can speak concepts to the singular fuel that time in nature provides for the brain’s most powerful associative network.

Paul distills this recalibration of understanding:

Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads — the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of the other people around us — drawing them into our own mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.

Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have, for the first time, witnessed nerve plasticity in the axon in motion.

Our nerve cells communicate through rapid transmission of electrical signals known as action potentials. All action potentials in the brain start in one unique small area of the cell: the axon initial segment (AIS). This is the very first part of the axon, the long, thin extension of a nerve cell that transmits signals or impulses from one nerve cell to another. It acts as a control center where it is decided when an action potential is initiated before traveling further along the axon.

Previously, researchers made the surprising observation that plasticity also occurs at the AIS. Plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to create new connections and structures in order to scale the amount of electrical activity, which is crucial for learning and memory. AIS plasticity occurs during changes in brain network activity.

COVID-19 can affect various organs in the body, such as the brain, lungs, heart, and kidneys. But what happens to these organs after the infection is over? How long does it take for them to heal? A new study has tried to answer these questions by using MRI scans to look at multiple organs of people hospitalized with COVID-19.

The study, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, is one of the most comprehensive post–COVID–19 MRI studies to date. It involved 259 patients who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in the U.K. and 50 people who had never been… More.

Credits: SvetaZi/iStock.

Continue reading “MRI reveals long-term organ abnormalities after COVID-19” »

It could be a new way to treat one of the more common and more frustrating symptoms of Alzheimer’s. A team at Johns Hopkins is leading a study on the drug, and you can get involved.

This is the third part in a series on deep brain stimulation for depression. Read from the beginning.

Early in the morning on August 22, 2022, Jon’s medical team told him that neurologist Helen Mayberg would check in with him just before his deep brain stimulation surgery.