Posts tagged brain structure
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
360 degree brain
This interactive feature gives visitors a chance to get a close-up of the brain’s structure. This brain was removed from a man’s skull shortly after his death and came from the Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank at Imperial College.
Dramatic expansion of the human cerebral cortex, over the course of evolution, accommodated new areas for specialized cognitive function, including language. Understanding the genetic mechanisms underlying these changes, however, remains a challenge to neuroscientists.
A team of researchers in Japan, led by Hideyuki Okano of Keio University School of Medicine and Tomomi Shimogori of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, has now elucidated the mechanisms of cortical evolution. They used molecular techniques to compare the gene expression patterns in mouse and monkey brains.
Using the technique called in situ hybridization to visualize the distribution of mRNA transcripts, Okano, Shimogori and their colleagues examined the expression patterns of genes that are known to regulate development of the mouse brain. They compared these patterns to those of the same genes in the brain of the common marmoset. They found that most of the genes had similar expression patterns in mice and marmosets, but that some had strikingly different patterns between the two species. Notably, some areas of the visual and prefrontal cortices showed expression patterns that were unique to marmosets.
The researchers also found differences in gene expression within regions that connect the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, a structure that is critical for learning and memory.
Learning who’s the top dog: Study reveals how the brain stores information about social rank
Researchers supported by the Wellcome Trust have discovered that we use a different part of our brain to learn about social hierarchies than we do to learn ordinary information. The study provides clues as to how this information is stored in memory and also reveals that you can tell a lot about how good somebody is likely to be at judging social rank by looking at the structure of their brain.
Primates (and people) are remarkably good at ranking each other within social hierarchies, a survival technique that helps us to avoid conflict and select advantageous allies. However, we know surprisingly little about how the brain does this.
The team at the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience used brain imaging techniques to investigate this in twenty six healthy volunteers.
Participants were asked to play a simple science fiction computer game where they would be acting as future investors. In the first phase they were told they would first need to learn about which individuals have more power within a fictitious space mining company (the social hierarchy), and then which galaxies have more precious minerals (non-social information).
Whilst they were taking part in the experiments, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor activity in their brains. Another MRI scan was also taken to look at their brain structure.
Their findings reveal a striking dissociation between the neural circuits used to learn social and non-social hierarchies. They observed increased neural activity in both the amygdala and the hippocampus when participants were learning about the hierarchy of executives within the fictitious space mining company. In contrast, when learning about the non-social hierarchy, relating to which galaxies had more mineral, only the hippocampus was recruited.
(Source: eurekalert.org)