Mouse brain neural connections

Researchers have created the most detailed map of the mouse brain to date, capturing the projections and connections of over 1,000 neurons (and counting). via Reddit

via Gfycat

Study: Intelligent people's brains wired differently to those with fewer intellectual abilities

"Scientists claim to have found a correlation between how well wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and general success in life."

“We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people. In doing this, we hope to able to understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet’ of the brain,” said Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, who led the study published in Nature Neuroscience.

“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from one another. Then we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant,” Professor Smith said.

“It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits,” Professor Smith said.

“We hope that by looking at brain-imaging data we’ll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do,” he said.

It may also be possible to use the research to work out how to train people to improve their brain connectivity and therefore push than up the scale so that they achieve more than they otherwise would, he added.

“It’s a question of whether it’s possible to move people up the axis of connectivity. We know from other research that it is possible to improve cognitive performance with training, but what we don’t know yet is whether this is true of connectivity,” he explained.

These guys are distinguished scientists... you can tell.

Neuroskeptic: "Mr. B kept Cash on his mind both day and night"

"A man developed a passionate love for the music of Johnny Cash after being implanted with a brain stimulation device. The unique story is told in a case report in the Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience journal, published on the 6th May."

The authors, Mariska Mantione and colleagues, describe the case of “Mr. B”, a 58 year old Dutch man who had suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety since the age of 13.

Numerous medications and psychotherapy had failed to provide relief. So Mr B. was given deep brain stimulation (DBS) as a last resort treatment. The electrodes were placed in the nucleus accumbens.

It worked: his OCD and anxiety symptoms went down, down, down, so much so that he felt like his spirit was finally unchained:

Mr. B. reported he felt very confident, calm and assertive and he started to call himself “Mr. B. II”, the new and improved version of himself.

But it wasn’t just his symptoms that changed; his musical taste did too. Previously Mr B had been quite fond of the Rolling Stones, but he wasn’t really a big music lover. However,

…a half year after DBS surgery, Mr. B. stated that he was turning into a Johnny Cash fan. He had been listening to the radio, when he coincidentally heard “Ring of Fire” of the Country and Western singer and experienced that he was deeply affected by the song. Mr. B. started to listen to more songs of Johnny Cash and noticed that he was deeply moved by the raw and low-pitched voice of the singer

His appreciation for the Man in Black soon progressed from liking into devotion. Mr. B kept Cash on his mind both day and night (read more)

"Complexity simplified"

"These are collective decision-making systems," says Couzin. They have always looked fearsomely complex but maybe they follow rules that are much simpler than we have suspected. By observing the individual behaviour of these swarming cells we may be able to discover those rules, giving us new ways to intervene."

"Taking the idea even further, Couzin contends that neurons act like swarming animals. The brain is the very definition of complexity: it contains about 86 billion neurons, all interconnected by physical, chemical and electrical channels. Couzin and his colleagues wonder whether each might act as a simple sensor which, when networked, generates complex emergent behaviour. "We're interested in how they integrate local information from those around them, and how that gets encoded," he says. This might, he suggests, be a key to understanding how consciousness emerges. Perhaps it is collective information processing, analogous to the way groups of fish detect light gradients that a single fish cannot perceive."

 

New Scientist: Mind meld: The genius of swarm thinking 

"Long-Term Benefits of Music Lessons"

“It didn’t matter what instrument you played, it just mattered that you played,” said Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which appears in The Journal of Neuroscience."

She and her collaborators looked at 44 healthy adults ages 55 to 76, measuring electrical activity in a region of the brain that processes sound.

They found that participants who had four to 14 years of musical training had faster responses to speech sounds than participants without any training — even though no one in the first group had played an instrument for about 40 years.

Dr. Kraus said the study underscored the need for a good musical education. “Our general thinking about education is that it is for our children,” she said. “But in fact we are setting up our children for healthy aging based on what we are able to provide them with now.”

Sindyan N. Bhanoo NYT

How Men Have Become Less thrill-seeking, Study

The desire for adventure and thrilling activities has decreased in men over the last 35 years, according to new research.

A team from the school of psychology and neuroscience at the University of St Andrews discovered that men are less willing to take part in physical challenges such as skydiving than they used to.

The findings of the research led by Dr Kate Cross have been published in the journal Scientific Reports and was co-authored by Dr De-Laine Cyrenne and Dr Gillian Brown.

Researchers focused on the sensation-seeking personality trait which has been described by the university as the desire to pursue novel or intense experiences even if this involves risk.

A sensation seeking scale, version V (SSS-V) questionnaire was used to find out if people were willing to try various activities.

In the late 1970s more men were more likely to try parachuting, scuba diving or mountaineering than women, but over the years their desire for thrills has decreased.

The male average is now closer to the female average, backing up the argument that some sex differences in behaviour have decreased which is linked to cultural changes.

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