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.

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.

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.

One neuron has huge impact on brain behaviour

Researchers from Queensland and the USA have made a unique discovery about how the brain computes sensory information.

The study by scientists at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland (UQ) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA was conducted to better understand how circuits of nerve cells underlie behaviour.

Using advanced optical imaging in animal models, the research team was able to pinpoint a single neuron in the neocortex that signaled sensory behavior. This led to the discovery that active processes in its thin dendritic appendages are responsible for implementing the integration of sensory and motor signals.

“We have long known that active dendrites provide neurons with powerful processing capabilities,” says QBI’s Associate Professor Stephen Williams, who collaborated on the study. “However, little has been known about the role of neuronal dendrites in behaviourally related circuit computations. “We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the dendrites of nerve cells operate during behaviour to implement the integration of sensory and motor signals,” he said.

Such multi-modal integration enables the brain to perform at lightning speed, allowing animals to react to their environment in relation to existing knowledge. The paper, titled ‘Nonlinear dendritic integration of sensory and motor input during an active sensing task’ was published in the prestigious journal, Nature.

This is Your Brain on Freestyle Rap: NIDCD Study Reveals Characteristic Brain Patterns of Lyrical Improvisation

Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are “freestyling”—spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time. The findings, published online in the November 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this form of vocal improvisation is associated with a unique functional reallocation of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and proposes a novel neural network that appears to be intimately involved in improvisatory and creative endeavors. 

The researchers, led by Siyuan Liu, Ph.D., scanned the brains of 12 freestyle rap artists (who had at least 5 years of rapping experience) while they performed two tasks using an identical 8-bar musical track. For the first task, they improvised rhyming lyrics and rhythmic patterns guided only by the beat. In the second task, they performed a well-rehearsed set of lyrics.

During freestyle rapping, the researchers observed increases in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for motivation of thought and action, but decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions that normally play a supervisory or monitoring role. Like an experienced parent who knows when to lay down the law and when to look the other way, these shifts in brain function may facilitate the free expression of thoughts and words without the usual neural constraints. 

Freestyling also increased brain activity in the perisylvian system (involved in language production), the amygdala (an area of the brain linked to emotion), and cingulate motor areas, suggesting that improvisation engages a brain network that links motivation, language, mood, and action. Further studies of this network in other art forms that involve the innovative use of language, such as poetry and storytelling, could offer more insights into the initial, improvisatory phase of the creative process.

Uncommon Features of Einstein’s Brain Might Explain His Remarkable Cognitive Abilities

Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

Falk, along with colleagues Frederick E. Lepore of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Adrianne Noe, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, describe for the first time the entire cerebral cortex of Einstein’s brain from an examination of 14 recently discovered photographs. The researchers compared Einstein’s brain to 85 “normal” human brains and, in light of current functional imaging studies, interpreted its unusual features.

“Although the overall size and asymmetrical shape of Einstein’s brain were normal, the prefrontal, somatosensory, primary motor, parietal, temporal and occipital cortices were extraordinary,” said Falk, the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State. “These may have provided the neurological underpinnings for some of his visuospatial and mathematical abilities, for instance.”

The study, “The Cerebral Cortex of Albert Einstein: A Description and Preliminary Analysis of Unpublished Photographs,” was published in the journal Brain.

Ever wondered what your brain sounds like? Now you can hear the sweet melody of the mind by listening to sound composed from an analysis of brain activity.

Hear the best music yet from a maestro brain

Engineering a Photo-Switch for Nerve Cells in the Eye and Brain

Chemists and vision scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have designed a light-sensitive molecule that can stimulate a neural response in cells of the retina and brain — a possible first step to overcoming degenerative eye diseases like age-related macular degeneration, or to quieting epileptic seizures.

Their results are reported online in the journal Nature Communications.

Macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in people over 50, is caused by loss of light-sensitive cells in the retina — the rods and cones.

"The rods and cones, which absorb light and initiate visual signals, are the broken link in the chain, even though what we call the ‘inner cells’ of the retina, in many cases, are still potentially capable of function," says David Pepperberg, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences in the UIC College of Medicine, the principal investigator on the study.

"Our approach is to bypass the lost rods and cones, by making the inner cells responsive to light."

Pepperberg and his colleagues are trying to develop light-sensitive molecules that — when injected into the eye — can find their way to inner retinal cells, attach themselves, and initiate the signal that is sent to the brain.