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Tired, neurons are napping

In our brain, isolated neurons could be having short "naps" when the body is in lack of sleep, suggests a new study. When awake much later than usual to study or complete any task, it is conventional to experience a decline in attention, some difficulty in concentrating, to be more irritable. But what happens in our brain? Although the latter is in the waking state, some neurons take small naps intermittently, according to a new study conducted on rodents. Giulio Tononi and Vlad Vyazovskiy's team (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), have studied in detail the effects of prolonged vigil in rats. They were prevented from sleeping for four hours by a stimulation with new objects. The activity of their neurons was recorded by electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers were able to observe for some isolated neurons a different path on the EEG, corresponding to slow sleep waves. For a short time, less than a second, these neurons were therefore in OFF mode, as during sleep, while the rat is awake. These neuronal naps occur in certain regions of the cortex, not everywhere: they are not a global phenomenon, as one can think of sleep, but very local. The longer was the state of wakefulness, the more frequent were the naps, say the researchers who just published their study in the journal Nature. And rodents were less effective in their task. 

These observations suggest that wakefulness and sleep are not only global phenomena, affecting the whole brain, but they can occur very locally. Sleepwalking is consistent with this pattern. Similarly, some mammals are able to keep awake one hemisphere while the other is sleeping, in order to keep their movement, such as marine mammals. Remains whether these neuronal naps are the cause of poor concentration or irritability when a person experience a lack of sleep. Tononi and his colleagues suggest that there is a direct link but it is not yet proven.

Source: Science & Avenir

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Seven ways to improve your IQ

Give your brain a rocket each day of the week with these seven scientifically proven techniques to boost your grey matter.

Your Intelligence Quotient (IQ) is a measure of your mental agility or comprehension speed. The average IQ for a 32-year old British man is 100, and while experts believe this is increasing by 3% a decade, you can fast-track yours right now. We’ve consulted leading psychologists to provide seven simple steps to improve your IQ by a not-to-be-sniffed-at 17 points over just one week, and help you solve any problem life can throw at you.

Monday: play games

Fluid intelligence is a major part of every IQ test, and relates to your working memory. Dr Susanne Jäggi at the University of Michigan used Dual N-Back games, where the player is asked to remember a sequence of geometric shapes and sounds, to boost this factor. Her research discovered 25 minutes every day will raise your IQ by an impressive 4 points. How to do it Try puzzles at dual-n-back.com/nback.html It takes 25 minutes You gain +4 IQ points

Tuesday: take supplements

Ingesting 5g of creatine a day can get your IQ stacked by no less than 15 points over a six-week period. Researchers gave volunteers this dose, testing their ability to spot missing items in grid patterns. “Creatine gave a significant boost to brain power,” says study leader Caroline Rae. It raises the energy levels available for computation in your brain. How to do it Buy it from healthrack.co.uk (£4 per 1,000mg) It takes 1 minute You gain +2 IQ points

Wednesday: be a social gamer

When it comes to improving your brain power, Scrabble is your friend. “Activities which involve a diverse range of skills plus social interaction, are excellent options if you’re aiming to enhance your IQ,” says MENSA’s consultant psychologist Maria Leitner. You can get all the interaction by playing the Scrabble app and playing head to head with a friend every day over WiFi. How to do it Visit apple.com/uk/itunes (59p) It takes 50 minutes You gain +1 IQ point

Thursday: blast some bad guys

A recent study at the University of Rochester, US, confirmed a link between first-person video games and enhanced visual awareness in the ‘real’ world – a crucial building block for IQ. When having your IQ tested, the ability to take in visual cues accurately at speed is invaluable, explains clinical psychologist Dr Anita Abrams. Yes, playing Call of Duty 4 is good for you. How to do it Call of Duty: Black Ops (Xbox, £31.99 from amazon.co.uk) It takes 60 minutes You gain +2 IQ points

Friday: pull on your trainers

Drop those weights and hit the treadmill if you want to be smarter. A Swedish study proved cardiovascular fitness can raise your verbal intelligence by 50%. “Increased cardiovascular fitness was associated with better cognitive scores,” says Maria Aberg, who led the study. “In contrast, muscular strength was only weakly associated with intelligence.” How to do it Get some tough cardio routines here. It takes 20 minutes You gain +5 IQ points

Saturday: do practice tests

Retaking IQ tests can actually raise your score by as many as two points. The ‘practice effect’ is a proven technique that arms you with the skills to comprehend the next test. “If the interval is very short – for example, a few hours – then examinees are likely to recall the strategies that proved most successful,” says educational psychologist Professor Alan S. Kaufman. How to do it Visit mensa.org/workout It takes 30 minutes You gain +2 IQ points

Sunday: go veggie

Meat eaters look away now. “A number of studies have linked higher IQ with a vegetarian diet,” says Leitner. “Both the lifestyle and nutritional choices of vegetarians are associated with strong intellectual functioning and a slower cognitive decline.” Fixing your diet now could bring back 10 years of your IQ age. And that means more Scrabble wins too. How to do it For recipe ideas, go to vegweb.com It takes 10 minutes You gain +1 IQ point

Total 7-day IQ gain: 17 points

(Thanks to Braincubix for this post!)

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Brain Enhancement: can we do it? should we? who says?

Brief summary of the Emory symposium "Neurocognitive enhancement: its impact on human mind & evolution" that was held on May 2: here.

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Nicotine and cocaine activate the same brain receptors

A new neuroscience research has found that nicotine has a similar initial impact on the brain as cocaine, explaining why both are highly addictive substances.

In the new experiments, Danyan Mao, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago Medical Centre monitored the electrical activity of VTA dopamine neurons in slices of brain dissected from adult rats.

Each slice was bathed for 15 minutes in a concentration of nicotine similar to the amount that would reach the brain after smoking a single cigarette.

After 3-5 hours, Mao conducted electrophysiology experiments to detect the presence of synaptic plasticity and determine which neurotransmitter receptors were involved in its development.

Mao discovered that nicotine-induced synaptic plasticity in the VTA is dependent upon one of the drug's usual targets, a receptor for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine located on the dopamine neurons.

But another element found necessary for nicotine's synaptic effects was a surprise: the D5 dopamine receptor, a component previously implicated in the action of cocaine.

Blocking either of these receptors during nicotine exposure eliminated the drug's ability to cause persistent changes in excitability.

"We found that nicotine and cocaine employ similar mechanisms to induce synaptic plasticity in dopamine neurons in VTA," Mao said.

The results suggest that nicotine and cocaine hijack similar mechanisms of memory on first contact to create long-lasting changes in a person's brain.

Source: Journal of Neuroscience

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LOVE STORY: the prizewinning film of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience "Brains on film" competition. Its author, Alistair Jennings (PhD student) describes the dopamine system through the notions of reward and desire. Very nice work.

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Drugs and neuroplasticity

Neuronal maturation of the brain, taken in the perinatal period, does not end until puberty, a period of existence highly vulnerable to the influence of external factors. Complex and fundamental neurobiological rearrangements at a psychic level succeed one another from birth to adolescence. Abnormalities occurring during these structural and functional changes in the central nervous system, commonly referred to as "neuroplasticity," seem to be involved in the expression of various mental disorders. Chronic use of psychoactive substances at this time of existence is therefore conducive to worsen (probably even induce) a disorder of neuronal development, having deleterious consequences on cognitive function and sometimes causing subsequent neuropsychiatric disorders (including psychotic disorders). They are also likely to promote the development of dependence and increase interest in the use of other types of drugs. This explains, for example, the spectrum of mental symptoms likely to accompany the excessive consumption of certain drugs or psychoactive medications, and, in particular cannabis. And it has been shown that chronic exposure to THC could, in adolescence, specifically disrupt the action of endocannabinnoïdes on the mesolimbic system, resulting in addiction and dependence. As the boundary between drugs and medicines is not strictly established and as the psychotropic substances side effects (especially long-term) are often not known, we should be cautious, particularly regarding the youngest age groups.

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Erasing bad memories

David Glanzman (prof. of biology, physiology & neurobiology @ UCLA) & his team have discovered that a proteine kinase (PKM), present in marine snails, could allow the erasure of bad memories from the human recall.

This is a very hot topic because although this perspective seems tempting for people living with traumas & thus doomed to relive upsetting moments, it raises crucial problems regarding personal identity & our responsibility towards others. 

Souce: April 27th issue of Journal of Neuroscience.

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It's Sunday: let's solve a small puzzle!

Peter is 80 years old but he just celebrated its twentieth birthday. How is this possible?

SOLUTION

Pierre was born on February 29. This date falling only once every four years (leap year), he only could celebrate his birthday 20 times. Of course, it may very well celebrate the next day but the goal of this enigma was to find the subtlety of 29 February in our calendar...

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Sport is good for the brain

                       Exercise is really good for the brain for at least two reasons. First, it reduces the risk of various diseases that can cause brain damage. This applies in particular to cardiovascular diseases. If your heart and circulatory system are well, you make fewer strokes, and your intellect will only look better. But there is also a more direct effect of sport on the brain. It was demonstrated some time ago in animals: for example, rats that have access in their cage to a wheel in which they can run, sporty rats, are much better than idle rats to orient themselves in a maze.

Recently, researchers have made a remarkable study combining mice and men. They made their mice exercise, and observed in MRI an increase in blood flow in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays an important role in memory and Alzheimer's disease. After that, the sporty mice were autopsied and it was clear this increase in blood flow was due to the fact that neurons had increased in the hippocampus. They then tried the same experiment with humans: three months of physical exercise and brain MRI. As in mice, exercise led to an increase in blood flow in the hippocampus, correlated with an improvement in memory tests. Obviously, the subjects were not autopsied, but by analogy with the mouse, one can imagine that exercise has encouraged the proliferation of neurons in the hippocampus of humans.

One mechanism is the production in the brain of various substances with poetic names such as IGF1, VEGF, BDNF, etc.. For example, we know that physical exercise increases the production of BDNF in the brain (this is an increase that is even measurable in blood tests in humans after physical exercise). Now this famous BDNF is involved in the one hand in the survival and growth of new neurons and, in the other hand, in the fine tuning of connections between cells, which is the basis for the formation of new memories. Moreover, in mice, if one blocks the effect of BDNF, we lose the effect of exercise on learning traffic in a maze.

Obviously, we're talking here about a reasonable exercise: it is not worth risking a heart attack in recovering severely tennis at age 55 without medical supervision.

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The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

Carl Sagan

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Augmented reality: retinal prosthesis & optogenetics

Presented at the Human + exhibition in Dublin, retinal prosthesis and optogenetics allow humans to see in infrared and ultraviolet. The first purpose of these technologies is therapeutic as it can restore sight to patients who suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition involving the retina's light-sensing cells and eventually leading to total blindness.

But from an enhancement point of view, they permit "multi-spectral imaging" which could be useful to tell whether an object is too hot to touch. Apart from this pragmatic purpose, it could offer some visual poetry by allowing us, for example and in the way honey bees do, to experience a flower in all its ultraviolet beauty.

Surely not revolutionary but definetly part of the new field of augmented reality, offering a slightly - this judgment depending on the interests of the individual using it - better understanding of the world around us.

RETINAL PROSTHESIS:

Video here.

OPTOGENETICS (elected "method of the year" by Journal Nature):

Video here.

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Neurobiologists at the University of Southern California have demonstrated that mice show significant brain damage after short-term exposure to vehicle pollution, including signs associated with memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers recreated air with freeway particulate matter under controlled laboratory conditions. They used brain cells in vitro as well as live mice. The particulate matter measured up to 200 nanometers in width.

They found that neurons involved in learning and memory showed significant damage; the mouse brains showed signs of inflammation associated with premature aging and Alzheimer’s disease; and neurons from developing mice did not grow as well.

Source: Caleb E. Finch et al., Glutamatergic Neurons in Rodent Models Respond to Nanoscale Particulate Urban Air Pollutants In Vivo and In Vitro, April 7 online edition, Environmental Health Perspectives

The researchers recreated air with freeway particulate...

Thanks to braincubix for this post!

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«The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.»

José Delgado

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Let's Train Your Brain! (it's Sunday...)

Follow this link and do as much exercises as you like/can!

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Alcohol favours learning

According to a study lead by Hitoshi Morikama of the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at the University of Texas and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, alcohol could increase our subconscious capacity to remember some precise facts or events. This effect is due to the release of dopamine which, apart from being a pleasure transmitter, is also a learning transmitter.

It's apéro time everybody!

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HUMAN +

15/04 => 26/06 @ Science Gallery (Trinity College Dublin)

I wouldn't miss this exhibition for the word!

Around the question of the enhancing technologies we will chose to become better humans (transhumans, posthumans?), it is all about augmented abilities, authored evolution, robots and genetics.

A range of installations and laboratories present different versions of our species' future, including the prosthetic head of Australian performance artist Stelarc and Eduardo Kac’s “plantimal” called the Edunia – a hybrid plant which includes the artists own DNA.

Exciting, don't you think?