Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have long thought that rewards like food or money encourage learning in the brain by causing the release of the “feel-good” hormone dopamine, known to reinforce storage of new information. Now, a new study in rodents describes how learning still occurs in the absence of an immediate incentive.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study explored the relationship between dopamine and the brain chemical acetylcholine, also known to play a role in learning and memory. Past research had shown that these two hormones compete with one another, so that a boost in one causes a decline in the other. Rewards were thought to promote learning by simultaneously triggering an increase in dopamine and a decrease in acetylcholine.

This sudden hormone imbalance is believed to open a window of opportunity for brain cells to adjust to new circumstances and form memories for later use. Known as neuroplasticity, this process is a major feature of learning as well as recovery after injury. However, the question had remained whether food and other external rewards are the only drivers for this memory system, or whether our brains instead are able to create the same conditions that are favorable to learning without outside help.

Research roadblocks and political debates have delayed progress—but scientists are inching closer to delivering a cure.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, researchers in Wisconsin isolated powerful stem cells from human embryos. It was a fundamental breakthrough for biology, since these cells are the starting point for human bodies and have the capacity to turn into any other type of cell—heart cells, neurons, you name it.

National Geographic would later summarize the incredible promise: “the dream is to launch a medical revolution in which ailing organs and tissues might be repaired” with living replacements. It was the dawn of a new era. A holy grail. Pick your favorite cliché—they all got… More.

Continue reading “After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment” »

How To Own Yourself (Jungian Philosophy)
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In this video we will be talking about how to own yourself from the philosophy of Carl Jung. He found his own school of psychology, called analytical psychology and his philosophy is dubbed as “Jungian philosophy”. Within the field of psychology, Jung is famously known for introducing the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert,’ introducing archetypes of the psyche and classifying the boundary between the unconscious and conscious. Our consciousness includes everything that we know about ourselves; the unconsciousness entails everything that is part of us but that we are not aware of. Jung introduced ‘the ego’ and ‘the persona’ as our consciousness, and ‘the shadow’ and ‘the animus and anima’ as the parts that make up our unconsciousness. The shadow is one of the toughest, most intimidating parts to handle: it exists out of everything about ourselves that we dislike, which is why we often refuse to acknowledge it as a part of us. However, what many people don’t know is that not facing the shadow can be an even more intense blow on your self-esteem. But facing it is actually the only way to gain true control over yourself and who you are.

Continue reading “Carl Jung — How To Own Yourself (Jungian Philosophy)” »

A new study suggests that a bodybuilding supplement may help protect against cognitive decline by reducing amyloid plaque buildup, at least in mice.

HBP researchers from Germany performed detailed cytoarchitectonic mapping of distinct areas in a human cortical region called frontal operculum and, using connectivity modelling, linked the areas to a variety of different functions including sexual sensation, muscle coordination as well as music and language processing.

The study contributes to the further unravelling of the relationship of the human brain’s structure with function, and is the first proof-of-concept of structural and functional connectivity analysis of the frontal operculum. The newly identified cytoarchitectonic areas have been made publicly available as part of the Julich-Brain Atlas on the EBRAINS platform, inviting for future research to further characterise this brain region.

Based on cell-body stained histological sections in ten postmortem brains (five females and five males), HBP researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Research Centre Jülich identified three new areas in the frontal operculum: Op5, Op6 and Op7. Each of these areas had a distinct cytoarchitecture. Connectivity modelling showed that each area could be ascribed a distinct functional role.

Immune system changes in the pregnant body that protect the fetus appear to extend to the brain, where a decrease in immune cells late in gestation may factor into the onset of maternal behavior, new research in rats suggests.

In adult female rats that had never given birth—which typically don’t like being around babies—depletion of these cells sped up their care for rat newborns that were placed in their cage.

The loss of these cells, called microglia, and the related uptick in motherly attentiveness were also associated with changes to neuron activity in several regions of the rat brain, suggesting shifts in immune function have a role in regulating maternal behavior.

For many people, they are tiny pests. These fruit flies that sometimes hover over a bowl of peaches or a bunch of bananas. But for a dedicated community of researchers, fruit flies are an excellent model organism and source of information into how neurons self-organize during the insect’s early development and form a complex, fully functioning nervous system.

That’s the scientific story on display in this beautiful image of a larval fruit fly’s developing nervous system. Its subtext is: fundamental discoveries in the fruit fly, known in textbooks as Drosophila melanogaster, provide basic clues into the development and repair of the human nervous system. That’s because humans and fruit flies, though very distantly related through the millennia, still share many genes involved in their growth and development. In fact, 60 percent of the Drosophila genome is identical to ours.

Once hatched, as shown in this image, a larval fly uses neurons (magenta) to sense its environment. These include neurons that sense the way its body presses against the surrounding terrain, as needed to coordinate the movements of its segmented body parts and crawl in all directions.

Spirituality declines, depression rises. Is there a link?

David Chalmers is a philosopher at New York University and the Australian National University. He is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU, and also Professor of Philosophy at ANU.

Chalmers works in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in consciousness, but am also interested in all sorts of other issues in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science.

From an early age, he excelled at mathematics, eventually completing his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before receiving his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995, and his first professorship was at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998.