Posts tagged brain

August 9, 2012

MIT study reveals changes in brain activity as children learn to read other people’s behavior.

When you try to read other people’s thoughts, or guess why they are behaving a certain way, you employ a skill known as theory of mind. This skill, as measured by false-belief tests, takes time to develop: In children, it doesn’t start appearing until the age of 4 or 5.

Several years ago, MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe showed that in adults, theory of mind is seated in a specific brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). Saxe and colleagues at MIT have now shown how brain activity in the TPJ changes as children learn to reason about others’ thoughts and feelings.

The findings suggest that the right TPJ becomes more specific to theory of mind as children age, taking on adult patterns of activity over time. The researchers also showed that the more selectively the right TPJ is activated when children listen to stories about other people’s thoughts, the better those children perform in tasks that require theory of mind.

The paper, published in the July 31 online edition of the journal Child Development, lays the groundwork for exploring theory-of-mind impairments in autistic children, says Hyowon Gweon, a graduate student in Saxe’s lab and lead author of the paper.

“Given that we know this is what typically developing kids show, the next question to ask is how it compares to autistic children who exhibit marked impairments in their ability to think about other people’s minds,” Gweon says. “Do they show differences from typically developing kids in their neural activity?”

Saxe, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, is senior author of the Child Development paper. Other authors are Marina Bedny, a postdoc in Saxe’s lab, and David Dodell-Feder, a graduate student at Harvard University.

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August 8, 2012 By Lia Samson

(Phys.org) — In a recent paper, Aleksander Ellis of the University of Arizona Eller College of Management and a colleague demonstrate that lack of sleep can cause deviant behavior at work.

Early 2011 saw a spate of reports in the media about air traffic controllers sleeping on the job as a result of sleep deprivation. The potential harm from this behavior is obvious, but what about the average office job? Can sleep deprivation cause counterproductive, or even unethical, behavior in organizations?

“Over the past decade, Americans have been getting less and less sleep, and estimates are that this trend will continue,” said Professor of Management and Organizations Aleksander Ellis, the Charles and Candice Nelson Fellow. “In fact, in certain industries, lack of sleep is worn as a badge of honor.”

In a recent paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, Ellis and co-author Michael Christian of Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill demonstrate that lack of sleep can cause deviant behavior.

In one part of the study, for instance, the researchers asked a group of subjects to respond to an email that contained colloquial language and misspellings. One of the sleep-deprived subjects responded with an unprofessional, personal attack. This is just one example Ellis and Christian cite to demonstrate how sleep deprivation reduces self-control and increases hostility.

Ellis and Christian are currently working on a parallel project that examines how sleep deprivation affects the tendency of individuals to behave unethically by conforming to the behavior of unethical authority figures.

Source: PHYS.ORG

August 8th, 2012

The brain has billions of neurons, arranged in complex circuits that allow us to perceive the world, control our movements and make decisions. Deciphering those circuits is critical to understanding how the brain works and what goes wrong in neurological disorders.

MIT neuroscientists have now taken a major step toward that goal. In a new paper appearing in the Aug. 9 issue of Nature, they report that two major classes of brain cells repress neural activity in specific mathematical ways: One type subtracts from overall activation, while the other divides it.

“These are very simple but profound computations,” says Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. Newton Professor of Neuroscience and senior author of the Nature paper. “The major challenge for neuroscience is to conceptualize massive amounts of data into a framework that can be put into the language of computation. It had been a mystery how these different cell types achieve that.”

Neuroscientists report that two major classes of brain cells repress neural activity in specific mathematical ways: One type subtracts from overall activation, while the other divides it.

The findings could help scientists learn more about diseases thought to be caused by imbalances in brain inhibition and excitation, including autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Lead authors of the paper are grad student Caroline Runyan and postdoc Nathan Wilson. Forea Wang ’11, who contributed to the work as an MIT undergraduate, is also an author of the paper.

A fine balance

There are hundreds of different types of neuron in the brain; most are excitatory, while a smaller fraction are inhibitory. All sensory processing and cognitive function arises from the delicate balance between these two influences. Imbalances in excitation and inhibition have been associated with schizophrenia and autism.

“There is growing evidence that alterations in excitation and inhibition are at the core of many subsets of neuropsychiatric disorders,” says Sur, who is also the director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT. “It makes sense, because these are not disorders in the fundamental way in which the brain is built. They’re subtle disorders in brain circuitry and they affect very specific brain systems, such as the social brain.”

In the new Nature study, the researchers investigated the two major classes of inhibitory neurons. One, known as parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons, targets neurons’ cell bodies. The other, known as somatostatin-expressing (SOM) interneurons, targets dendrites — small, branching projections of other neurons. Both PV and SOM cells inhibit a type of neuron known as pyramidal cells.

To study how these neurons exert their influence, the researchers had to develop a way to specifically activate PV or SOM neurons, then observe the reactions of the target pyramidal cells, all in the living brain.

First, the researchers genetically programmed either PV or SOM cells in mice to produce a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin. When embedded in neurons’ cell membranes, channelrhodopsin controls the flow of ions in and out of the neurons, altering their electrical activity. This allows the researchers to stimulate the neurons by shining light on them.

The team combined this with calcium imaging inside the target pyramidal cells. Calcium levels reflect a cell’s electrical activity, allowing the researchers to determine how much activity was repressed by the inhibitory cells.

“Up until maybe three years ago, you could only just blindly record from whatever cell you ran into in the brain, but now we can actually target our recording and our manipulation to well-defined cell classes,” Runyan says.

Taking a circuit apart

In this study, the researchers wanted to see how activation of these inhibitory neurons would influence how the brain processes visual input — in this case, horizontal, vertical or tilted bars. When such a stimulus is presented, individual cells in the eye respond to points of light, then convey that information to the thalamus, which relays it to the visual cortex. The information stays spatially encoded as it travels through the brain, so a horizontal bar will activate corresponding rows of cells in the brain.

Those cells also receive inhibitory signals, which help to fine-tune their response and prevent overstimulation. The MIT team found that these inhibitory signals have two distinct effects: Inhibition by SOM neurons subtracts from the total amount of activity in the target cells, while inhibition by PV neurons divides the total amount of activity in the target cells.

“Now that we finally have the technology to take the circuit apart, we can see what each of the components do, and we found that there may be a profound logic to how these networks are naturally designed,” Wilson says.

These two types of inhibition also have different effects on the range of cell responses. Every sensory neuron responds only to a particular subset of stimuli, such as a range of brightness or a location. When activity is divided by PV inhibition, the target cell still responds to the same range of inputs. However, with subtraction by SOM inhibition, the range of inputs to which cells will respond becomes narrower, making the cell more selective.

Increased inhibition by PV neurons also changes a trait known as the response gain — a measurement of how much cells respond to changes in contrast. Inhibition by SOM neurons does not alter the response gain.

The researchers believe this type of circuit is likely repeated throughout the brain and is involved in other types of sensory perception, as well as higher cognitive functions.

Sur’s lab now plans to study the role of PV and SOM inhibitory neurons in a mouse model of autism. These mice lack a gene called MeCP2, giving rise to Rett Syndrome, a rare disease that produces autism-like symptoms as well as other neurological and physical impairments. Using their new technology, the researchers plan to test the hypothesis that a lack of neuronal inhibition underlies the disease.

Source: Neuroscience News

ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2012) — Stressed and non-stressed people use different brain regions and different strategies when learning. This has been reported by the cognitive psychologists PD Dr. Lars Schwabe and Professor Oliver Wolf from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the Journal of Neuroscience. Non-stressed individuals applied a deliberate learning strategy, while stressed subjects relied more on their gut feeling. “These results demonstrate for the first time that stress has an influence on which of the different memory systems the brain turns on,” said Lars Schwabe.

The experiment: Stress due to ice-water

The data from 59 subjects were included in the study. Half of the participants had to immerse one hand into ice-cold water for three minutes under video surveillance. This stressed the subjects, as hormone assays showed. The other participants had to immerse one of their hands just in warm water. Then both the stressed and non-stressed individuals completed the so-called weather prediction task. The subjects looked at playing cards with different symbols and learned to predict which combinations of cards announced rain and which sunshine. Each combination of cards was associated with a certain probability of good or bad weather. People apply differently complex strategies in order to master the task. During the weather prediction task, the researchers recorded the brain activity with MRI.

Two routes to success

Both stressed and non-stressed subjects learned to predict the weather according to the symbols. Non-stressed participants focused on individual symbols and not on combinations of symbols. They consciously pursued a simple strategy. The MRI data showed that they activated a brain region in the medial temporal lobe — the hippocampus, which is important for long-term memory. Stressed subjects, on the other hand, applied a more complex strategy. They made their decisions based on the combination of symbols. They did this, however, subconsciously, i.e. they were not able to formulate their strategy in words. The result of the brain scans was also accordingly: In the case of the stressed volunteers the so-called striatum in the mid-brain was activated — a brain region that is responsible for more unconscious learning. “Stress interferes with conscious, purposeful learning, which is dependent upon the hippocampus,” concluded Lars Schwabe. “So that makes the brain use other resources. In the case of stress, the striatum controls behaviour — which saves the learning achievement.”

Source: Science Daily