Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have long studied neurostimulation to treat paralysis and sensory deficits caused by strokes and spinal cord injuries, which in Canada affect some 380,000 people across the country.

A new study published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine demonstrates the possibility of autonomously optimizing the stimulation parameters of prostheses implanted in the brains of animals, without human intervention.

The work was done at Université de Montréal by neuroscience professors Marco Bonizzato, Numa Dancause and Marina Martinez, in collaboration with mathematics professor and Mila researcher Guillaume Lajoie.

You learn from your mistakes. At least, most of us have been told so. But science shows that we often fail to learn from past errors. Instead, we are likely to keep repeating the same mistakes.

What do I mean by mistakes here? I think we would all agree that we quickly learn that if we put our hand on a hot stove, for instance, we get burned, and so are unlikely to repeat this mistake again. That’s because our brains create a threat-response to the physically painful stimuli based on past experiences. But when it comes to thinking, behavioral patterns and decision making, we often repeat mistakes—such as being late for appointments, leaving tasks until the last moment or judging people based on first impressions.

The reason can be found in the way our brain processes information and creates templates that we refer to again and again. These templates are essentially shortcuts, which help us make decisions in the real world. But these shortcuts, known as heuristics, can also make us repeat our errors.

In a large study led by the MHH neurology department, researchers investigated the cognition of patients with the rare disease NMOSD. It was found that about 20 percent of those affected have limited cognitive abilities.

People with the rare neuromyelitis optica spectrum disease (NMOSD) have severe physical and psychological impairments. But do they also suffer from limitations in their cognitive abilities? Neurologists investigated this in the CogniNMO study. A total of 17 treatment centers specialized in the disease in Germany took part. Professor Dr. Corinna Trebst and Dr. Martin Hümmert from the Department of Neurology at the Hannover Medical School (MHH) led the study. The results were published in the Multiple Sclerosis Journal.

There are a few thousand people with NMOSD in Germany. This is a rare autoimmune disease that causes relapsing inflammations of the central nervous system. Those affected suffer from limitations such as impaired vision, paralysis, incontinence and pain. “Whether their cognitive abilities are also reduced has not been clear until now. Studies had delivered different and partly contradictory results on this,” Professor Trebst says.

The more vividly a person imagines something, the more likely it is that they believe it’s real, finds a new study by University College London researchers.

The research, published in Nature Communications, involved more than 600 participants who took part in an online experiment, where they were asked to imagine images of alternating black and white lines while looking at a computer screen.

After they imagined a stimulus, participants then had to report how vividly they were able to visualize it.

The function of the human brain is exceptional, driving all aspects of our thoughts and creativity. Yet the part of the human brain—the neocortex—responsible for such cognitive functions has a similar overall structure to other mammals.

Through close collaboration between The University of Queensland (UQ), The Mater Hospital and the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, researchers have discovered the human brain’s enhanced processing power may stem from differences in the structure and function of our neurons.

The results of this study have been published in Cell Reports as “High-fidelity dendritic sodium spike generation in human layer 2/3 neocortical pyramidal neurons.”

In parallel to recent developments in machine learning like GPT-4, a group of scientists has recently proposed the use of neural tissue itself, carefully grown to recreate the structures of the animal brain, as a computational substrate. After all, if AI is inspired by neurological systems, what better medium to do computing than an actual neurological system? Gathering developments from the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, neurobiology, electrophysiology, and pharmacology, the authors propose a new research initiative they call “organoid intelligence.”

OI is a collective effort to promote the use of brain organoids —tiny spherical masses of brain tissue grown from stem cells—for computation, drug research and as a model to study at a small scale how a complete brain may function. In other words, organoids provide an opportunity to better understand the brain, and OI aims to use that knowledge to develop neurobiological computational systems that learn from less data and with less energy than silicon hardware.

The development of organoids has been made possible by two bioengineering breakthroughs: induced pluripotent stem cells and 3D cell culturing techniques.

An electrically driven on-chip light source of entangled photon pairs is developed by combining an InP gain section and Si3N4 microrings. A pair generation rate of 8,200 counts s−1 and a coincidence-to-accidental ratio of more than 80 are achieved around the wavelength of 1,550 nm.

Biodegradable devices that generate energy from the same effect behind most static electricity could help power transient electronic implants that dissolve in the body, researchers say.

Implantable electronic devices now help treat everything from damaged hearts to traumatic brain injuries. For example, pacemakers can help keep hearts beating properly, while brain sensors can monitor patients for potentially dangerous swelling in the brain.

However, when standard electronic implants run out of power, they need to be removed lest they eventually become sites of infection. But their surgical removal can result in potentially dangerous complications. Scientists are developing transient implantable electronics that dissolve once they are no longer needed, but these mostly rely on external sources of power, limiting their applications.

A study published in the journal Stem Cell Reports on March 23, led by Dr. Ryosuke Tsuchimochi and Professor Jun Takahashi, examined the effects of combining cell transplantation and gene therapy for axonal outgrowth in the central nervous system. The authors demonstrated the potential of this combinatorial therapy for promoting axonal regeneration in patients with central nervous system injuries.

Stroke and traumatic brain/spinal cord injuries often damage the corticospinal tract (CST), composed of descending axonal tracts from the motor cortex down the spinal cord, that innervates motor neurons to activate skeletal muscles for controlling voluntary movements. Pharmacological and surgical interventions, in conjunction with rehabilitation, can maintain some lost motor functions, but patients with such acute neural injuries often suffer from lifelong severe motor impairment.

Cell replacement therapy—the implantation of new neurons into damaged brain regions —is viewed as a last hope that could help patients recover sufficient motor functions to live a normal life. The research team previously demonstrated that brain tissues transplanted into injured mouse brains could find their way to the CST and spinal cord but believed that further optimization of the host environment was necessary to promote CST reconstruction and functional recovery.