Neuroscientists Launch 5 Year Study of Music Education and Child Brain Development

Researchers at USC Brain and Creativity Institute will explore the effects of intense music training on cognitive development in LA Phil’s YOLA at HOLA program.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) are delighted to announce a longitudinal research collaboration to investigate the emotional, social and cognitive effects of musical training on childhood brain development.

The five-year research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, will offer USC researchers an important opportunity to provide new insights and add rigorous data to an emerging discussion about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function.

Through a collaboration with the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles at Heart of Los Angeles (YOLA at HOLA) program, a partnership between the LA Phil and HOLA which provides free instruments and musical training to children from the Rampart District of Los Angeles, researchers with the USC Brain and Creativity Institute — led by acclaimed neuroscientists Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio – will track how children respond to music from the very onset of their exposure to systematic, high intensity music education.

"Depression: A Global Crisis"

Message on World Mental Health Day,
10 October 2012

Some 350 million people of all ages, incomes and nationalities suffer from depression. Millions more — family, friends, co-workers - are exposed to the indirect effects of this under-appreciated global health crisis.

Depression diminishes people’s ability to cope with the daily challenges of life, and often precipitates family disruption, interrupted education and loss of jobs. In the most extreme cases, people kill themselves. Approximately one million people commit suicide every year, the majority due to unidentified or untreated depression.

People develop depression for a number of reasons. Often, different causes — genetic, biological, psychological and social — combine to provide the trigger. Stress, grief, conflict, abuse and unemployment can also contribute. Women are more likely to suffer depression than men, including following childbirth.

A wide variety of effective and affordable treatments are available to treat depression, including psychosocial interventions and medicines. However, they are not accessible to all people, especially those living in less developed countries and the least advantaged citizens of more developed nations. Among the barriers to care and services are social stigma and the lack of general health care providers and specialists trained to identify and treat depression. This is why the World Health Organization is supporting countries through its Mental Health Gap Action Programme.

Depression is not simply a matter for health experts. We can all act to relieve the stigma around depression and other mental disorders - perhaps by admitting that we may have experienced depression ourselves, or by reaching out to those experiencing it now. On World Mental Health Day, let us pledge to talk more openly about depression. This is the first critical step to removing one of the barriers to treatment and helping to reduce the disability and distress caused by this global crisis.

Wasp has hints of a clockwork brain

The greenhouse whitefly parasite (Encarsia formosa) is just half a millimetre in length. It parasitises the larvae of whiteflies and so it has long been used as a natural pest-controller.

To find out how its neurons have adapted to miniaturisation, Reinhold Hustert of the University of Göttingen in Germany examined the insect’s brain with an electron microscope. The axons - fibres that shuttle messages between neurons - were incredibly thin. Of 528 axons measured, a third were less than 0.1 micrometre in diameter, an order of magnitude narrower than human axons. The smallest were just 0.045 μm (Arthropod Structure & Development, doi.org/jfn).

That’s a surprise, because according to calculations by Simon Laughlin of the University of Cambridge and colleagues, axons thinner than 0.1 μm simply shouldn’t work. Axons carry messages in waves of electrical activity called action potentials, which are generated when a chemical signal causes a large number of channels in a cell’s outer membrane to open and allow positively charged ions into the axon. At any given moment some of those channels may open spontaneously, but the number involved isn’t enough to accidentally trigger an action potential, says Laughlin - unless the axon is very thin. An axon thinner than 0.1 μm will generate an action potential if just one channel opens spontaneously (Current Biology, doi.org/frfwpz).

"That makes the axon impossibly noisy," Laughlin says. Any "legitimate" action potentials will be drowned out.

Hustert suggests that a neuron might get around this problem by firing bursts of action potentials to cut through the noise, but Laughlin is sceptical. “They’d be firing furiously all the time,” he says, and every action potential costs energy.

Instead, the neurons might not bother with conventional action potentials at all. “They could be sending signals mechanically,” Laughlin says. The tiny axons might each carry a long rigid rod stretching down the centre. Pulling the rod could create a physical rather than electrical trigger for the release of a chemical that passes the signal on to the neighbouring neuron.

In larger animals this would be far too slow, says Laughlin, but in the tiny body of the greenhouse whitefly parasite, a partly “clockwork” brain might be the best approach.

Alpha Waves Close Your Mind for Distraction, but Not Continuously, Research Suggests

Alpha waves were long ignored, but gained interest of brain researchers recently. Electrical activity of groups of brain cells results in brain waves with different amplitudes. The so-called alpha wave, a slow brain wave with a cycle of 100 milliseconds, seems to play a key role in suppressing irrelevant brain activity. The current hypothesis is that this alpha wave is associated with pulses of inhibition (every 100 ms) in the brain.

Mathilde Bonnefond and Ole Jensen (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen) discovered that when distracting information can be anticipated in time there is an increase of the power of this alpha wave just before the distracter. Furthermore, the brain is able to precisely control the alpha wave so that the pulse of inhibition is maximal when the distracter appears. Indeed, between pulses of inhibition, there is still a window where the brain is excitable.

'It is like briefly opening a door to look what's happening outside. This enables us to detect an unexpected but important or dangerous event. But to avoid to be distracted by completely irrelevant information, it is better if the inhibition is active when a distracter is presented. It could be seen as a mechanism slamming the door of the brain on intruders'. The results are published by the scientific journal Current Biology at October 4.

Gladstone Scientists Identify Biological Mechanism that Plays Key Role in Early-Onset Dementia: Findings explain how protein deficiency contributes to neurodegenerative disease

Using animal models, scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have discovered how a protein deficiency may be linked to frontotemporal dementia (FTD)—a form of early-onset dementia that is similar to Alzheimer’s disease. These results lay the foundation for therapies that one day may benefit those who suffer from this and related diseases that wreak havoc on the brain.

As its name implies, FTD is a fatal disease that destroys cells, or neurons, that comprise the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain—as opposed to Alzheimer’s which mainly affects brain’s memory centers in the hippocampus. Early symptoms of FTD include personality changes, such as increased erratic or compulsive behavior. Patients later experience difficulties speaking and reading, and often suffer from long-term memory loss. FTD is usually diagnosed between the ages of 40 and 65, with death occurring within 2 to 10 years after diagnosis. No drug exists to slow, halt or reverse the progression of FTD.

A new study led by Gladstone Senior Investigator Robert V. Farese, Jr., MD, offers new hope in the fight against this and other related conditions. In the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Dr. Farese and his team show how a protein called progranulin prevents a class of cells called microglia from becoming “hyperactive.” Without adequate progranulin to keep microglia in check, this hyperactivity becomes toxic, causing abnormally prolonged inflammation that destroys neurons over time—and leads to debilitating symptoms.

Brain connectivity predicts reading skills

The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Literacy requires the integration of activity in brain areas involved in vision, hearing and language. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, so efficient communication between them is essential for proficient reading.

Jason Yeatman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues studied how the development of reading ability relates to growth in the brain’s white-matter tracts, the bundles of nerve fibres that connect distant regions of the brain.

They tested how the reading skills of 55 children aged between 7 and 12 years old developed over a three-year period. There were big differences in reading ability between the children, and these differences persisted — the children who were weak readers relative to their peers at the beginning of the study were still weak three years later.

The researchers also scanned the brains of 39 of the children at least three times during the same period, to visualize the growth of two major white-matter tracts: the arcuate fasciculus, which conects the brain’s language centres, and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, which links the language centres with the parts of the brain that process visual information.

Differences in the growth of both tracts could predict the variations in reading ability. Strong readers started off with a weak signal in both tracts on the left side of the brain, which got stronger over the three years. Weaker readers exhibited the opposite pattern.

A new field of developmental neuroscience changes our understanding of the early years of human life

Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners, a special volume published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1, 2, 3) and authored largely by researchers of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), sets out an emerging new field of the developmental science of childhood adversity.

The implications of the research are far reaching, from new approaches to learning and language acquisition, to new considerations for the health effects of social environments affecting large populations, and policies for early childhood care and education.

"CIFAR’s multidisciplinary and international program in early childhood development is transforming our understanding of how early life experiences affect the development of the brain and in so doing set a lifelong trajectory," says Dr. Alan Bernstein, CIFAR President & CEO. "This research is providing the scientific basis for public policy concerning the critical window to provide the optimal conditions that will enable our children to grow up to be well-adjusted, well-educated and productive individuals."

Moms’ depression affects babies’ language development – but so does anti-depressant drug – research shows

Janet Werker and her colleagues played recordings to babies when they were still in the womb.

Then the University of British Columbia psychologist and her team tested babies’ ability to discriminate between English and French when the infants were just six and 10 months old.

The findings, published Monday, are striking.

Both maternal depression, which affects up to 20 per cent of pregnant women, and treating mothers with a common anti-depressant drug threw off infants’ language development, Werker and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Harvard University report in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Babies of depressed mothers were slow to reach language development “milestones,” they report. And babies of mothers taking antidepressants known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) reached milestones months early, they report.