Brazilian Mediums Shed Light on Brain Activity During a Trance State

Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil analyzed the cerebral blood flow (CBF) of Brazilian mediums during the practice of psychography, described as a form of writing whereby a deceased person or spirit is believed to write through the medium’s hand. The new research revealed intriguing findings of decreased brain activity during the mediums’ dissociative state which generated complex written content. Their findings appear in the November 16th edition of the online journal PLOS ONE.

The 10 mediums—five less expert and five experienced—were injected with a radioactive tracer to capture their brain activity during normal writing and during the practice of psychography which involves the subject entering a trance-like state. The subjects were scanned using SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to highlight the areas of the brain that are active and inactive during the practice.

The researchers found that the experienced psychographers showed lower levels of activity in the left hippocampus (limbic system), right superior temporal gyrus, and the frontal lobe regions of the left anterior cingulate and right precentral gyrus during psychography compared to their normal (non-trance) writing. The frontal lobe areas are associated with reasoning, planning, generating language, movement, and problem solving, perhaps reflecting an absence of focus, self-awareness and consciousness during psychography, the researchers hypothesize.

Less expert psychographers showed just the opposite—increased levels of CBF in the same frontal areas during psychography compared to normal writing. The difference was significant compared to the experienced mediums. This finding may be related to their more purposeful attempt at performing the psychography. The absence of current mental disorders in the groups is in line with current evidence that dissociative experiences are common in the general population and not necessarily related to mental disorders, especially in religious/spiritual groups. Further research should address criteria for distinguishing between healthy and pathological dissociative expressions in the scope of mediumship.

Functional Connectivity and Tuning Curves in Populations of Simultaneously Recorded Neurons

How interactions between neurons relate to tuned neural responses is a longstanding question in systems neuroscience. Here we use statistical modeling and simultaneous multi-electrode recordings to explore the relationship between these interactions and tuning curves in six different brain areas. We find that, in most cases, functional interactions between neurons provide an explanation of spiking that complements and, in some cases, surpasses the influence of canonical tuning curves. Modeling functional interactions improves both encoding and decoding accuracy by accounting for noise correlations and features of the external world that tuning curves fail to capture. In cortex, modeling coupling alone allows spikes to be predicted more accurately than tuning curve models based on external variables. These results suggest that statistical models of functional interactions between even relatively small numbers of neurons may provide a useful framework for examining neural coding.

Wandering Minds Associated With Aging Cells

Scientific studies have suggested that a wandering mind indicates unhappiness, whereas a mind that is present in the moment indicates well-being. Now a preliminary UCSF study suggests a possible link between mind wandering and aging, by looking at a biological measure of longevity.

In the study, telomere length, an emerging biomarker for cellular and general bodily aging, was assessed in association with the tendency to be present in the moment versus the tendency to mind wander, in research on 239 healthy, midlife women ranging in age from 50 to 65 years.

Being present in the moment was defined as an inclination to be focused on current tasks, while mind wandering was defined as the inclination to have thoughts about things other than the present or being elsewhere.

According to the findings, published online on Nov. 15 in the new Association for Psychological Science journal Clinical Psychological Science, those who reported more mind wandering had shorter telomeres, while those who reported more presence in the moment, or having a greater focus and engagement with their current activities, had longer telomeres, even after adjusting for current stress.

Neuroscience gets behind the mask of Greek theatre

Over 2000 years may have elapsed since masked Greek tragedies had their heyday on stage in Athens, but some of the most modern neuroscience may be able to give classicists a better understanding of how the ancients watched and thought about those plays that today exist only on paper.

Super-sensory hearing?

The discovery of a previously unidentified hearing organ in the South American bushcrickets’ ear could pave the way for technological advancements in bio-inspired acoustic sensors research, including medical imaging and hearing aid development.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and University of Lincoln discovered the missing piece of the jigsaw in the understanding of the process of energy transformation in the ‘unconventional’ ears of the bushcrickets (or katydids).

Bushcrickets have four tympana (or ear drums) – two on each foreleg; but until now it has been unknown how the various organs connect in order for the insect to hear. As the tympana (a membrane which vibrates in reaction to sound) does not directly connect with the mechanoreceptors (sensory receptors), it was a mystery how sound was transmitted from air to the mechano-sensory cells.

Sponsored by the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), the research was developed in the lab of Professor Daniel Robert, a Royal Society Fellow at the University of Bristol. Dr Fernando Montealegre-Z, who is now at the University of Lincoln’s School of Life Sciences, discovered a newly identified organ while carrying out research into how the bushcricket tubing system in the ear transports sound. The research focussed on the bushcricket Copiphora gorgonensis, a neotropical species from the National Park Gorgona in Colombia, an island in the Pacific. Results suggest that the bushcricket ear operates in a manner analogous to that of mammals. A paper detailing this remarkable new breakthrough is published in the journal, Science.

Electrical Engineer Turns Brain Implant Research into Products

University of Utah electrical engineering professor Florian Solzbacher is helping turn science fiction into reality through his research and related startup companies. Solzbacher is pushing the boundaries of electrical devices that can be implanted into the brain and used as an interface between neurons and computers. If you’re thinking about the “Six Million Dollar Man,” you’re not entirely off base.

Solzbacher’s research builds on Utah Electrode Array (“Utah Array”) technologies, which were invented by another University of Utah professor, Richard Normann, and are recognized as the leading approach for selective communication with hundreds of neurons in the central and peripheral nervous systems. The Utah Array is a computer chip that is implanted in, and takes signals from the brain. It transmits them in a way a computer can understand – in short, a neural interface. Solzbacher has improved how the chip works and pioneered its applications.

“We are making things work,” says Solzbacher. “People have had the idea to invent better technologies like ours for years, but we are the first to make them work and get them into patients. There are over 10,000 labs worldwide that can make things with our technologies, and they, in turn, pull us in and involve us in theirs.”

Solzbacher is commercializing his research through startup company Blackrock Microsystems and sister company Blackrock NeuroMed. Both firms employ a combined 50 people and are selling their neural interface technologies and related tools to researchers and companies around the globe. Their customers are using the technologies to find new approaches for treating nervous system disorders such as blindness, deafness, Parkinson’s and epilepsy, while another set of clients is using them to control prosthetic limbs.

Reduced Cardiac Vagal Modulation Impacts on Cognitive Performance in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Background: Cognitive difficulties and autonomic dysfunction have been reported separately in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). A role for heart rate variability (HRV) in cognitive flexibility has been demonstrated in healthy individuals, but this relationship has not as yet been examined in CFS. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between HRV and cognitive performance in patients with CFS.

Methods: Participants were 30 patients with CFS and 40 healthy controls; the groups were matched for age, sex, education, body mass index, and hours of moderate exercise/week. Questionnaires were used to obtain relevant medical and demographic information, and assess current symptoms and functional impairment. Electrocardiograms, perceived fatigue/effort and performance data were recorded during cognitive tasks. Between–group differences in autonomic reactivity and associations with cognitive performance were analysed.

Results: Patients with CFS showed no deficits in performance accuracy, but were significantly slower than healthy controls. CFS was further characterized by low and unresponsive HRV; greater heart rate (HR) reactivity and prolonged HR-recovery after cognitive challenge. Fatigue levels, perceived effort and distress did not affect cognitive performance. HRV was consistently associated with performance indices and significantly predicted variance in cognitive outcomes.

Conclusions: These findings reveal for the first time an association between reduced cardiac vagal tone and cognitive impairment in CFS and confirm previous reports of diminished vagal activity.

Parkinson’s Disease Protein Causes Disease Spread and Neuron Death in Healthy Animals

Understanding how any disease progresses is one of the first and most important steps towards finding treatments to stop it. This has been the case for such brain-degenerating conditions as Alzheimer’s disease. Now, after several years of incremental study, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania have been able to piece together important steps in how Parkinson’s disease (PD) spreads from cell to cell and leads to nerve cell death.

Their line of research also informs the general concept that this type of disease progression is a common pathway for such other neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, and possibly amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The Penn team found that injecting synthetic, misfolded and fibrillar α-Synuclein (α-Syn) – the PD disease protein — into the brains of normal, “wild-type” mice recapitulates the cascade of cellular demise seen in human PD patients.

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by abundant α-Syn clumps in neurons and the massive loss of midbrain dopamine-producing neurons. However, a cause-and-effect relationship between the formation of α-Syn clumps and neurodegeneration has been unclear.

In short, the Penn researchers found that, in healthy mice, a single injection of synthetic, misfolded α-Syn fibrils led to a cell-to-cell transmission of pathologic α-Syn proteins and the formation of Parkinson’s α-Syn clumps known as Lewy bodies in interconnected regions of the brain. Their findings appear in this week’s issue of Science. The team was led by senior author Virginia M.-Y Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR) and professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and first author Kelvin C. Luk, PhD, research assistant professor in the CNDR.

When the going gets tough, the tough get… more relief from a placebo?

Are you good at coping when life gets tough? Do people call you a straight-shooter? Will you help others without expecting anything in return?

Those personality traits might do more than help you win a popularity contest. According to new University of Michigan-led neuroscience research, those qualities also might make you more likely to get pain relief from a placebo – a fake medicine.

And, the researchers show, it’s not just your mind telling you the sham drug is working or not. Your brain’s own natural painkiller chemicals may actually respond to the pain differently depending on your personality.

If you’re more of an angry, hostile type, they find, a placebo won’t do much for you.

For the first time, the new findings link specific, established personality traits with an individual’s susceptibility to the placebo effect from a sham medicine for pain. The researchers showed a significant link between certain personality traits and how much relief people said they felt when given the placebo – as well as the level of a specific chemical that their brains released.

The work, published online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, was done by a team of U-M Medical School researchers and their colleagues at the University of North Carolina and University of Maryland.