Lifeboat Foundation

Mouse neurons trapped inside cages grow long appendages to connect to each other. Trapping the cells allows us to precisely control their growth.

Key points Compared to sham rats, rats a week after acute lung injury (ALI) express more proinflammatory cytokines in their brainstem respiratory control nuclei, exhibit a higher respiratory freque…

Our brain continuously receives signals from the body and the environment. Although we are mostly unaware of internal bodily processes, such as our heartbeats, they can affect our perception. Here, we show two distinct ways in which the heartbeat modulates conscious perception. First, increased heartbeat-evoked neural activity before stimulation is followed by decreased somatosensory detection. This effect can be explained by subjects adopting a more conservative decision criterion, which is accompanied by changes in early and late somatosensory-evoked responses. Second, stimulus timing during the cardiac cycle affects sensitivity but not criterion for somatosensory stimuli, which is reflected only in late somatosensory-evoked responses. We propose that these heartbeat-related modulations are connected to fluctuations of interoceptive attention and (unconscious) predictive coding mechanisms.

Even though humans are mostly not aware of their heartbeats, several heartbeat-related effects have been reported to influence conscious perception. It is not clear whether these effects are distinct or related phenomena, or whether they are early sensory effects or late decisional processes. Combining electroencephalography and electrocardiography, along with signal detection theory analyses, we identify two distinct heartbeat-related influences on conscious perception differentially related to early vs. late somatosensory processing. First, an effect on early sensory processing was found for the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP), a marker of cardiac interoception. The amplitude of the prestimulus HEP negatively correlated with localization and detection of somatosensory stimuli, reflecting a more conservative detection bias (criterion).

A years-long Allen Institute for Brain Science project to map the entire mouse brain is complete, and you can explore it now.

After three years of intensive data-gathering and careful drawing, the mapmakers’ work was complete.

The complex terrain they charted, with all its peaks, valleys and borders, is only about half an inch long and weighs less than a jellybean: the brain of the laboratory mouse.

In a paper published today in the journal Cell, the Allen Institute mapmakers describe this cartographical feat—the third iteration of the Allen Mouse Brain Common Coordinate Framework, or CCFv3 (https://portal.brain-map.org/), a complete, high-resolution 3D atlas of the mouse brain.

Recent sleep surveys show that Singaporeans are among the world’s most sleep-deprived people. Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) and the University of Tokyo provide new evidence, which supports the presence of a key mechanism that regulates our biological clock. In the study published in PNAS, the team used preclinical models to validate that mutations in PER2 protein can alter the balance of the circadian period, which can lead to sleep disorders.

Biological clocks are an organism’s innate timing device. It is composed of specific proteins called clock proteins, which interact in cells throughout the body. Biological clocks produce and regulate circadian rhythms —the physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. Understanding the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock provides a huge potential to identify therapeutic interventions to mitigate circadian disruption, and its long-term consequences such as diabetes, obesity and cancer among shift workers, who undergo frequent circadian disruption and are more prone to these diseases.

The Duke-NUS scientists had previously discovered that mutations in a specific protein (called casein kinase 1) alters the core clock protein (called PERIOD or PER), and this changes the timing of the biological clock. In this study, preclinical models were used to investigate the role of PER2 (a type of PER protein) in clock regulation to further understand and strengthen the model.

Pavlovian experiment reveals first evidence of brain lateralization in ants.

Penny for your thoughts.

Backed by $54 million, Kernel aims to turn an esoteric science into big business.

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Elucidating how the brain controls peripheral organs in the fight against infection is crucial for our understanding of brain–body interactions. A study in mice reveals one such pathway worthy of further investigation. Neurons in stress-responsive brain regions boost plasma-cell formation.