Lifeboat Foundation

Review discusses the increasing importance of two-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene in neuroscience, highlighting their potential in nerve repair, creating brain-mimicking synaptic devices, and treating neurological disorders. It also considers the challenges and future prospects of these materials in this complex field.

We know this, Kushner says, because issues with alcohol can start before people develop anxiety or depression. His research also suggests that having either a dependence on alcohol or an anxiety condition substantially increases the probability of developing the other condition within several years.

For Kushner, this two-way relationship suggests alcohol use disorder and anxiety and depression might share a root cause.

Kushner’s team’s latest research brings us one step closer to figuring out why these conditions are so closely linked: Their study suggests people with a diagnosis of anxiety or depression are more likely to experience alcohol use disorder symptoms than people without these conditions, even when they drink the same amount of alcohol. The results are published in the journal Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Anosognosia is a condition in which a patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. Visual anosognosia, also called Anton syndrome, is associated with complete cortical blindness and unawareness of vision loss.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, sought to identify brain network connections associated with anosognosia. The investigators analyzed the connectivity patterns of 267 lesion locations associated with either vision loss (with and without awareness) or weakness (with and without awareness).

Continue reading “Brain network connections associated with anosognosia identified” »

Henry Molaison, known for years as “H.M.,” was famously unable to form new memories. If someone he had met left the room only to return several minutes later, he would greet that person again as if for the first time. Because of surgery to treat intractable epilepsy, H M. lacked a sea-horse-shaped brain structure called the hippocampus and had amnesia. His case helped establish the hippocampus as an engine of memory.

In recent years scientists have discovered another essential deficit that burdens people with hippocampal amnesia: they can’t envision the range of possibilities that must be considered to make future plans. When researchers asked a group of people with hippocampal damage to… More.

The ability to conjure up possible futures or alternative realities is the flip side of memory. Both faculties cohabit in the brain region called the hippocampus.

Continue reading “Where Imagination Lives in Your Brain” »

When interacting with another person, you likely spend part of your time trying to anticipate how they will feel about what you’re saying or doing. This task requires a cognitive skill called theory of mind, which helps us to infer other people’s beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.

MIT neuroscientists have now designed a computational model that can predict other people’s emotions—including joy, gratitude, confusion, regret, and embarrassment—approximating human observers’ social intelligence. The model was designed to predict the emotions of people involved in a situation based on the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic game theory scenario in which two people must decide whether to cooperate with their partner or betray them.

To build the model, the researchers incorporated several factors that have been hypothesized to influence people’s emotional reactions, including that person’s desires, their expectations in a particular situation, and whether anyone was watching their actions.

Camacho et al. show that emotion concepts are represented throughout the brain, giving insight to how the brain perceives real-world emotions. These patterns are present before children enter school and become more standardized across adolescence.

BRISBANE, Australia — COVID-19 infections have a lengthy track record of impacting both neurological health and thinking abilities. Some patients experience brain inflammation, while others are…

Conversations About AI: Using it to transform the treatment of mental health and for the promotion of social good.

How can AI be used to help human mental health and address the social good? Aryan Pandey, a new guest contributor shows us.

Have you ever made a great catch—like saving a phone from dropping into a toilet or catching an indoor cat from running outside? Those skills—the ability to grab a moving object—takes precise interactions within and between our visual and motor systems. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester have found that the ability to visually predict movement may be an important part of the ability to make a great catch—or grab a moving object.

“We were able to develop a method that allowed us to analyze behaviors in a natural environment with high precision, which is important because, as we showed, behavioral patterns differ in a controlled setting,” said Kuan Hong Wang, Ph.D., a Dean’s Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Wang led the study out today in Current Biology in collaboration with Jude Mitchell, Ph.D., assistant professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, and Luke Shaw, a graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the School of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Rochester. “Understanding how natural behaviors work will give us better insight into what is going awry in an array of neurological disorders.”