Category: neuroscience

Hitting the right nerve: the electronic neck implant to treat depression | Life and style | The Guardian

Steve Collins is a 45-year-old unemployed architect who has been living with severe depression for 15 years. “I’m like a hermit crab hiding under rocks, crouching in dark spaces and only venturing out occasionally; there’s no light, no hope, no way in or out. I’ve been in therapy for years and must have taken at least six different antidepressant drugs. I had ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and that literally shocked me out of it for a bit, but the depression came back – and the idea of ECT was so shocking for my family. People say: ‘Well, at least you haven’t got cancer.’ But, honestly, I’d rather have almost anything than live like this.”

A new type of treatment, vagal nerve stimulation (VNS), may offer hope for people like Collins who don’t improve with conventional depression treatment. A small battery-powered device like a pacemaker is inserted under the skin in the neck, from where it emits pulses of weak electical current to stimulate part of the vagus nerve. The vagus normally monitors our vital functions; it collects information about our breathing, heart rate and joint position, and sends signals back to the brain that tell it to respond if there are fluctuations.

No one fully understands how VNS works in severe depression that has been unresponsive to other treatments, admits psychiatrist Prof Hamish McAllister-Williams, of Newcastle University. “We don’t know exactly how lots of treatments work in psychiatry, including antidepressant drugs. I’m more interested in whether something works and, in the case of VNS, I’m persuaded that it does.” He cites two recent studies supporting the role of VNS, in addition to the usual treatment options of drugs, talking therapies and ECT. He says it’s likely to be a true effect, not just a placebo, because a placebo tends to kick in quickly – and wear off quickly – whereas VNS takes six months to work, but at least half of those who respond, remain well. It may be particularly effective with people like Collins, who have improved after ECT, but whose depression keeps on returning.

Hitting the right nerve: the electronic neck implant to treat depression | Life and style | The Guardian

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind — Quartzy

Breathing is traditionally thought of as an automatic process driven by the brainstem—the part of the brain controlling such life-sustaining functions as heartbeat and sleeping patterns. But new and unique research, involving recordings made directly from within the brains of humans undergoing neurosurgery, shows that breathing can also change your brain.

Simply put, changes in breathing—for example, breathing at different paces or paying careful attention to the breaths—were shown to engage different parts of the brain.

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind — Quartzy

What Your Brain Looks Like When It Solves a Math Problem – The New York Times

Solving a hairy math problem might send a shudder of exultation along your spinal cord. But scientists have historically struggled to deconstruct the exact mental alchemy that occurs when the brain successfully leaps the gap from “Say what?” to “Aha!”

Now, using an innovative combination of brain-imaging analyses, researchers have captured four fleeting stages of creative thinking in math. In a paper published in Psychological Science, a team led by John R. Anderson, a professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, demonstrated a method for reconstructing how the brain moves from understanding a problem to solving it, including the time the brain spends in each stage.

What Your Brain Looks Like When It Solves a Math Problem – The New York Times

Concentrate! How to tame a wandering mind

I am about to be zapped in the head with an electromagnet, once a second, for eight minutes. I fidget, trying to get comfortable in a huge black chair with jointed metal arms that stand between me and the door. I feel faintly ridiculous wearing a tight headband with what looks like a coat hook on the top. “All you need to do is relax,” says Mike Esterman, the researcher about to zap me. That’s easy for him to say – he’s holding the magnet.

I’ve come to the Boston Attention and Learning Lab in the US to try and train my brain to focus better. Esterman and fellow cognitive neuroscientist Joe DeGutis have spent nearly seven years working on a training programme to help wandering minds stay “in the zone”.

So far, their methods seem to be particularly promising for enhancing focus in US army veterans with attention problems linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and brain injuries, as well as people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But what I want to know is, can the mind-wandering of the average procrastinating person be improved? And if so, can they do it to me? Please?

BBC – Future – Concentrate! How to tame a wandering mind

Nine lifestyle changes can reduce dementia risk, study says – BBC News

One in three cases of dementia could be prevented if more people looked after their brain health throughout life, according to an international study in the Lancet.

It lists nine key risk factors including lack of education, hearing loss, smoking and physical inactivity.

The study is being presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London.
By 2050, 131 million people could be living with dementia globally.

There are estimated to be 47 million people with the condition at the moment.

Nine lifestyle changes can reduce dementia risk, study says – BBC News

New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience | WIRED

SITTING AT THE desk in his lower-campus office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the neuroscientist Tony Zador turned his computer monitor toward me to show off a complicated matrix-style graph. Imagine something that looks like a spreadsheet but instead of numbers it’s filled with colors of varying hues and gradations. Casually, he said: “When I tell people I figured out the connectivity of tens of thousands of neurons and show them this, they just go ‘huh?’ But when I show this to people …” He clicked a button onscreen and a transparent 3-D model of the brain popped up, spinning on its axis, filled with nodes and lines too numerous to count. “They go ‘What the _____!’”

What Zador showed me was a map of 50,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex of a mouse. It indicated where the cell bodies of every neuron sat and where they sent their long axon branches. A neural map of this size and detail has never been made before. Forgoing the traditional method of brain mapping that involves marking neurons with fluorescence, Zador had taken an unusual approach that drew on the long tradition of molecular biology research at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island. He used bits of genomic information to imbue a unique RNA sequence or “bar code” into each individual neuron. He then dissected the brain into cubes like a sheet cake and fed the pieces into a DNA sequencer. The result: a 3-D rendering of 50,000 neurons in the mouse cortex (with as many more to be added soon) mapped with single cell resolution.

New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience | WIRED

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?

Another week, another school shooting. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is the eighth school shooting resulting in death or injury this year, yet we have only completed seven weeks. It is, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the 1,607th mass shooting since the rampage of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, widely thought to have been the country’s best hope at changing gun control laws.

It didn’t. And gun violence in schools continues.

But in the midst of the gun control debate, it can be easy to forget that there are humans—often children—who have borne witness to terrifying nightmarish scenes that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. What will happen to them?

While much research has been done into the minds and motives of mass shooters, the psychology of school shooting survivors is in its infancy—though the rate and increasing population of subjects means that it is a burgeoning field. According to The Washington Post, there are more than 150,000 school shooting survivors since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, considered to be the first of modern school mass shootings.

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

Chew your deep-dish filled-crust pizza slowly. Slurp your thickshake with care. Do not pour cooking oil down your neck to act as a slide for your next Cinnabon.

Eat slowly. Get thin. This is the promise underlined by researchers at Japan’s Kyushu University, who pored over the data of 60,000 Japanese health insurance claimants. Slow eaters were 42% less likely to be overweight or obese than fast eaters. Even normal-speed eaters had a 29% lower risk of being overweight.

“It’s all to do with the signal to the brain,” explains performance nutritionist Elly Rees. “Studies show that it takes up to 20 minutes for us to register that we’re full. So people who overeat tend to eat too quickly.”

That 20-minute gap can be vast. If people eat more slowly they “find that they’re actually full,” Rees says.

Chew it over: a guide to eating slowly | Life and style | The Guardian

11 Shocking Things That Happen To Your Brain When You Suffer From Even Mild Anxiety

If you have an anxiety disorder, then you already know how it can impact your brain, cause you to worry, and totally mess with your day. But did you know even mild cases of anxiety can affect you, in much the same way? Chemically speaking, any type of anxiety can alter your brain, in some pretty surprising ways. But it can also affect you psychologically — perhaps more than you’d think.

But it’s important to note how mild anxiety is different from regular nerves. “Anxiety is a natural human response that serves a purpose: to keep us safe. However, sometimes your brain is more sensitive and perceives danger when it does not exist,” licensed psychologist Crystal I. Lee, PsyD tells Bustle. “Your brain mistakenly floods itself with norepinephrine and cortisol, which triggers anxious thoughts and feelings when they’re not useful.”

That’s why you might be sitting at work, and suddenly boom — you’re filled with worry. And thanks to stress chemicals, like cortisol, going haywire in your brain, you might even struggle to think clearly, or make decisions. It can be intense for some people, which is why therapy is always a good idea, as well as taking care of great yourself — by exercising, eating well, and sleeping at least eight hours — so your symptoms can be less intrusive.

Here are a few shocking ways anxiety can affect you, according to experts.

11 Shocking Things That Happen To Your Brain When You Suffer From Even Mild Anxiety

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider

If you are in a relationship with a narcissist, you will have been through a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

At the beginning, everything would have been wonderful. You might have even thought you’d found your soul mate. But after a while, things started to go sour.

This is because after a few weeks, months, or even years, the narcissist will no longer see any value in you. As soon as they realise you are a real human being, and thus flawed, they struggle to see the use of you any more. They’ll start blaming you for things, shouting at you, or even break up with you, leaving you to try and work out what went wrong.

But for many reasons, it is hard to answer the question: “Do narcissists mean to hurt people?”

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider