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Researchers taking part in the Human Brain Project have identified a mathematical rule that governs the distribution of neurons in our brains.

The rule predicts how neurons are distributed in different parts of the brain, and could help scientists create precise models to understand how the brain works and develop new treatments for neurological diseases.

In the wonderful world of statistics, if you consider any continuous random variable, the logarithm of that variable will often follow what’s known as a lognormal distribution. Defined by the mean and standard deviation, it can be visualized as a bell-shaped curve, only with the curve being wider than what you’d find in a normal distribution.

In their public lecture at Perimeter on May 1, 2019, neuroscientist Anne M. Andrews and nanoscientist Paul S. Weiss outlined their scientific collaboration and explained the importance of communicating across disciplines to target significant problems. \
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In this Perspective, Kühn and Gallinat present the role for environmental neuroscience in examining mental health and discuss how urban and natural environments can have detrimental or beneficial effects on mental health.

UCLA department of integrative biology and physiologyluskin endowment for leadership symposiumpushing the boundaries: neuroscience, cognition, and lifemarta…

UCLA Department of Integrative Biology and PhysiologyLuskin Endowment forLeadership SymposiumPushing the Boundaries: Neuroscience, Cognition, and LifeKarl Fris…

I’m thinking my autistic sister has this. Maybe my 80 year old mother too. Short but informative article.

Neuroinflammation—as measured by levels of activated microglia, the brain’s immune cells—was strongly linked with irritability, agitation, and nighttime disturbances in people with dementia, recent research found. The results, published in JAMA Network Open, were based on data from a cross-sectional study that involved 109 participants aged 38 to 87 years, about two-thirds of whom did not have cognitive impairment.

Higher levels of microglial activation, and particularly microglial activation–associated irritability, in participants with dementia were also tied to greater distress in their caregivers, family members, or close friends.

ETH Zurich researchers have shown for the first time that microvehicles can be steered through blood vessels in the brains of mice using ultrasound. They hope that this will eventually lead to treatments capable of delivering drugs with pinpoint precision.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health have identified a protein in the visual system of mice that appears to be key for stabilizing the body’s circadian rhythms by buffering the brain’s response to light. The finding, published Dec. 5 in PLoS Biology, advances efforts to better treat sleep disorders and jet lag, the study authors say.

“If circadian rhythms adjusted to every rapid change in illumination, say an eclipse or a very dark and rainy day, they would not be very effective in regulating such periodic behaviors as sleep and hunger. The protein we identified helps wire the brain during neural development to allow for stable responses to circadian rhythm challenges from day to day,” says Alex Kolodkin, Ph.D., professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Neuroscience and deputy director for the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.

Kolodkin co-led the study with Samer Hattar, Ph.D., chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The capacity to be creative, to produce new concepts, ideas, inventions, objects or art, is perhaps the most important attribute of the human brain. We know very little, however, about the nature of creativity or its neural basis. Some important questions include how should we define creativity? How is it related (or unrelated) to high intelligence? What psychological processes or environmental circumstance cause creative insights to occur? How is it related to conscious and unconscious processes? What is happening at the neural level during moments of creativity? How is it related to health or illness, and especially mental illness? This paper will review introspective accounts from highly creative individuals. These accounts suggest that unconscious processes play an important role in achieving creative insights. Neuroimaging studies of the brain during “REST” (random episodic silent thought, also referred to as the default state) suggest that the association cortices are the primary areas that are active during this state and that the brain is spontaneously reorganising and acting as a self-organising system. Neuroimaging studies also suggest that highly creative individuals have more intense activity in association cortices when performing tasks that challenge them to “make associations.” Studies of creative individuals also indicate that they have a higher rate of mental illness than a noncreative comparison group, as well as a higher rate of both creativity and mental illness in their first-degree relatives. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between the nature of the unconscious, the unconscious and the predisposition to both creativity and mental illness.

Keywords: Creativity, Complexity, Consciousness, Default mode, Functional imaging, Self-organising systems, The Unconscious, Resting state, REST

Creativity is one of our most valued human traits. It has given human beings the ability to change the world that they live in; and it has also, paradoxically, given them the ability to adapt to changes in the world over which they have no control. Our highly developed capacity to develop and implement new ideas arises from our highly developed human brain. Understanding how creative ideas arise from the brain is one of the most fascinating challenges of contemporary neuroscience.