Lifeboat Foundation

Recently, a team of South Korean scientists led by Director C. Justin Lee of the Center for Cognition and Sociality within the Institute for Basic Science made a discovery that could revolutionize both the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease. The group demonstrated a mechanism where the astrocytes in the brain uptake elevated levels of acetates, which turns them into hazardous reactive astrocytes. They then went on to further develop a new imaging technique that takes advantage of this mechanism to directly observe the astrocyte-neuron interactions.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), one of the major causes of dementia, is known to be associated with neuroinflammation in the brain. While traditional neuroscience has long believed that amyloid beta plaques are the cause, treatments that target these plaques have had little success in treating or slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

On the other hand, Director C. Justin Lee has been a proponent of a novel theory that reactive astrocytes are the real culprit behind Alzheimer’s disease. Reactive astrogliosis, a hallmark of neuroinflammation in AD, often precedes neuronal degeneration or death.

In the brains of people without schizophrenia, concepts are organized into specific semantic domains and are globally connected, enabling coherent thought and speech.

In contrast, the researchers reported that the semantic networks of people with schizophrenia were disorganized and randomized. These impairments in semantics and associations contribute to delusion and incoherent speech.

Researchers at UC Davis are the first to report how a specific type of brain cells, known as oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, transfer cell material to neurons in the mouse brain. Their work provides evidence of a coordinated nuclear interaction between these cells and neurons. The study was published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

“This novel concept of material transfer to neurons opens new possibilities for understanding brain maturation and finding treatments for neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” said corresponding author Olga Chechneva is an assistant project scientist at UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and independent principal investigator in the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine at Shriners Children’s Northern California.

Oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, also called oligodendroglia, are a type of glial cells found in the central nervous system. From birth onward, these glial cells arise to support neural circuit maturation. They are mostly known for their role in myelination—the formation of the insulating myelin sheath around nerve axons.

Summary: Two distinct networks in the frontal and temporal lobes become activated and work in unison to integrate the meaning of words in order to obtain a higher-order and more complex meaning when reading.

Source: UT Houston.

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a study at UTHealth Houston.

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Researchers from John Hopkins University together with Dr. Brett Kagan, chief scientist at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, have recently led the development of the DishBrain project, in which human cells in a petri dish learnt to play Pong.

Continue reading “Computers Powered By Brain Cells” »

Researchers say immune cells in people with schizophrenia may hamper the growth of blood cells in their brain.

Neuroscientists at MIT have discovered a way to potentially reverse neurodegeneration and other issues related to Alzheimer’s disease, according to a news release from the school.

Researchers, experimenting on mice, found that interfering with an enzyme that is typically overactive in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s can reverse the degeneration in the brain.

Human decision-making is relevant for concept formation and cognitive illusions. Cognitive illusions can be explained by quantum probability, while the reason for introducing quantum mechanics is based on ad hoc bounded rationality (BR). Concept formation can be explained in a set-theoretic way, although such explanations have not been extended to cognitive illusions. We naturally expand the idea of BR to incomplete BR and introduce the key notion of nonlocality in cognition without any attempts on quantum theory. We define incomplete bounded rationality and nonlocality as a binary relation, construct a lattice from the relation by using a rough-set technique, and define probability in concept formation. By using probability defined in concept formation, we describe various cognitive illusions, such as the guppy effect, conjunction fallacy, order effect, and so on.

One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time was literally grinding to a halt. The sensation was powerful, visceral, overwhelming. It was a life-changing moment, or, as it felt at the time, a life-changing eon.

It has been my goal ever since to compose music that usurps the perceived flow of time and commandeers the sense of how time passes. Although I’ve learned to manipulate subjective time, I still stand in awe of Schubert’s unparalleled power. Nearly two centuries ago, the composer anticipated the neurological underpinnings of time perception that science has underscored in the past few decades.

The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and recalibrates temporal perception. Our ability to encode and decode sequential information, to integrate and segregate simultaneous signals, is fundamental to human survival. It allows us to find our place in, and navigate, our physical world. But music also demonstrates that time perception is inherently subjective—and an integral part of our lives. “For the time element in music is single,” wrote Thomas Mann in his novel, The Magic Mountain. “Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills.”