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A groundbreaking clinical trial has revealed that nerve-stimulating therapy can bring significant improvements to people with severe, treatment-resistant depression.

Nearly 500 participants, many unable to work due to their condition, received devices that stimulate the vagus nerve—a critical connection between the brain and body. After a year, those with activated devices reported measurable improvements in symptoms, quality of life, and daily functioning.

Breakthrough in Treatment-Resistant Depression.

There’s still so much we don’t know about Alzheimer’s disease, but the link between poor sleep and worsening disease is one that researchers are exploring with gusto.

In a study published in 2023, scientists found that using sleeping pills to get some shut-eye could reduce the build-up of toxic clumps of proteins in fluid that washes the brain clean every night.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found people who took suvorexant, a common treatment for insomnia, for two nights at a sleep clinic experienced a slight drop in two proteins, amyloid-beta and tau, that pile up in Alzheimer’s disease.

“Facial recognition is essential to human interaction, and we were curious about how the brain processes ambiguous or incomplete facial images—especially when they’re hidden from conscious awareness. We believe understanding these mechanisms can shed light on subconscious visual processing,” said study author Makoto Michael Martinsen, a PhD student conducting research under the Visual Perception and Cognition Laboratory and the Cognitive Neurotechnology Laboratory at the Toyohashi University of Technology.

To investigate how the brain processes face-like stimuli unconsciously, the researchers used a method called Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). In this technique, participants were presented with a dynamic series of high-contrast masking images in one eye while a target image—such as a face-like stimulus—was shown to the other eye. The rapid flashing of the mask suppressed the perception of the target image, rendering it temporarily invisible to the participant. By measuring the time it took for the target image to “break through” the suppression and reach conscious awareness, the researchers could infer how efficiently the brain processed the image.

The study included 24 participants, all university students aged 20 to 24, with normal or corrected-to-normal vision. They were exposed to two types of visual stimuli: grayscale images of faces and binary images resembling faces. These binary images were created using black-and-white contrasts to simulate minimal facial features, such as contours and the general arrangement of facial elements. Each image was presented in both upright and inverted orientations to assess the impact of orientation on recognition.

The neurobiology of learning and intelligence and synthetic neurobiology.


For The Transmitter’s first annual book, five contributing editors reflect on what subfields demand greater focus in the near future—from dynamical systems and computation to technologies for studying the human brain.

Links:

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136…0024-2

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1196/annals.1417.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00637.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-020-02146-4

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763419300624

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📝 — Kee, et al.

This review focuses on compartmentalized inflammation in Multiple sclerosis (MS) and in particular, what we know about meningeal tertiary lymphoid structures which are organised clusters of immune cells, associated with more severe and progressive forms of MS.

Full text is available 👇


Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, immune-mediated, demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). The most common form of MS is a relapsing–remitting disease characterised by acute episodes of demyelination associated with the breakdown of the blood–brain barrier (BBB). In the relapsing–remitting phase there is often relative recovery (remission) from relapses characterised clinically by complete or partial resolution of neurological symptoms. In the later and progressive stages of the disease process, accrual of neurological disability occurs in a pathological process independent of acute episodes of demyelination and is accompanied by a trapped or compartmentalised inflammatory response, most notable in the connective tissue spaces of the vasculature and leptomeninges occurring behind an intact BBB.

For years, they had been losing their central vision—what allows people to see letters, faces, and details clearly. The light-receiving cells in their eyes had been deteriorating, gradually blurring their sight.

But after receiving an experimental eye implant as part of a clinical trial, some study participants can now see well enough to read from a book, play cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle despite being legally blind. Science Corporation, the California-based brain-computer interface company developing the implant, announced the preliminary results this week.

When Max Hodak, CEO of Science and former president of Neuralink, first saw a video of a blind patient reading while using the implant, he was stunned. It led his company, which he founded in 2021 after leaving Neuralink, to acquire the technology from Pixium Vision earlier this year.