Braincubix.com

Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests.

Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up.

They say the discovery, published in Plos One, could lead to new treatments for addictive behaviour.

Internet addiction is a clinical disorder marked by out-of-control internet use.

A research team led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan carried out brain scans of 35 men and women aged between 14 and 21.

Seventeen of them were classed as having internet addiction disorder (IAD) on the basis of answering yes to questions such as, "Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop Internet use?"

Specialised MRI brain scans showed changes in the white matter of the brain - the part that contains nerve fibres - in those classed as being web addicts, compared with non-addicts.

There was evidence of disruption to connections in nerve fibres linking brain areas involved in emotions, decision making, and self-control.

Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: "Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.

"The results also suggest that IAD may share psychological and neural mechanisms with other types of substance addiction and impulse control disorders."

Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts.

He told the BBC: "For the first time two studies show changes in the neuronal connections between brain areas as well as changes in brain function in people who are frequently using the internet or video games."

Commenting on the Chinese study, Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, consultant psychiatrist and honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College London, said the research was "groundbreaking".

She added: "We are finally being told what clinicians suspected for some time now, that white matter abnormalities in the orbito-frontal cortex and other truly significant brain areas are present not only in addictions where substances are involved but also in behavioural ones such as internet addiction."

She said further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings.

Objects that resemble faces are everywhere. Whether it’s New Hampshire’s erstwhile granite “Old Man of the Mountain,” or a face on Mars, our brains are adept at locating images that look like faces.

However, the normal human brain is almost never fooled into thinking such objects actually are human faces.

“You can tell that it has some ‘faceness’ to it, but on the other hand, you’re not misled into believing that it is a genuine face,” says Pawan Sinha, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. But how?

A new study from Sinha and his colleagues has found two brain regions that make the analysis. The fusiform gyrus — an area long associated with face recognition — on the left side of the brain carefully calculates how “facelike” an image is.

The right fusiform gyrus then appears to use that information to make a quick, categorical decision of whether the object is, indeed, a face.

This distribution of labor is one of the first known examples of the left and right sides of the brain taking on different roles in high-level visual-processing tasks, Sinha says, although hemispheric differences have been seen in other brain functions, most notably language and spatial perception.

When reading direct quotations, the brain “hears” the voice of the speaker, researchers at the University of Glasgow have found, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

This shows that readers are likely to engage in perceptual simulations, or spontaneous imagery, of the reported speaker’s voice when reading direct speech, the researchers said.

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a novel approach that could redefine optical imaging of live biological samples, simultaneously achieving high resolution, high penetration depth (for seeing deep inside 3D samples), and high imaging speed.

The research team employed an unconventional imaging method called light-sheet microscopy: a thin, flat sheet of light is used to illuminate a biological sample from the side, creating a single illuminated optical section through the sample.

The light given off by the sample is then captured with a camera oriented perpendicularly to the light sheet, harvesting data from the entire illuminated plane at once. This allows millions of image pixels to be captured simultaneously, reducing the light intensity that needs to be used for each pixel.

To achieve sharper image resolution with light-sheet microscopy deep inside biological samples, the team used a process called two-photon excitation for the illumination.

“The goal is to create ‘digital embryos,’ providing insights into how embryos are built, which is critical not only for basic understanding of how biology works but also for future medical applications such as robotic surgery, tissue engineering, or stem-cell therapy,” said biologist Scott Fraser, director of the Biological Imaging Center at Caltech’s Beckman Institute.

The brain's ability to function can start to deteriorate as early as 45, suggests a study in the British Medical Journal.

University College London researchers found a 3.6% decline in mental reasoning in women and men aged 45-49.

They assessed the memory, vocabulary and comprehension skills of 7,000 men and women aged 45 to 70 over 10 years.

The Alzheimer's Society said research was needed into how changes in the brain could help dementia diagnoses.

Previous research had suggested that cognitive decline does not begin much before the age of 60.

But the results of this study show that it could in fact begin in middle age.

This is important, the researchers say, because dementia treatments are more likely to work at the time when individuals start to experience mental impairment.

The UCL researchers tested the cognitive functions of 5,198 men and 2,192 women aged 45 to 70, who were all UK civil servants, from 1997 to 2007.

Individuals were tested for memory, vocabulary and aural and visual comprehension skills.

Differences in education level were taken into account.

Mid-life crisis

The results of the tests show that cognitive scores declined in all categories except vocabulary - and there was a faster decline in older people.

The study found a 9.6% decline in mental reasoning in men aged 65-70 and a 7.4% decline for women of the same age.

For men and women aged 45-49, there was a 3.6% decline.

Professor Archana Singh-Manoux from the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health in France, who led the research team at University College London, said the evidence from the study showed that dementia involved cognitive decline over two to three decades.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as a brain can.

The research demonstrates how molecular systems can exhibit autonomous brain-like behaviors.

How it works

Using a simple DNA gate architecture that allows experimental scale-up of multilayer digital circuits, the researchers systematically transformed arbitrary linear threshold circuits (an artificial neural network model) into DNA strand displacement cascades that function as small neural networks.

That approach enabled them to implement a Hopfield associative memory with four fully connected artificial neurons made from 112 distinct DNA strands. After training in silico, it remembers four single-stranded DNA patterns and recalls the most similar one when presented with an incomplete pattern.

To build the DNA neural network, the researchers used a process called a strand-displacement cascade that uses single and partially double-stranded DNA molecules. The latter are double helices, one strand of which sticks out like a tail.

While floating around in a water solution, a single strand can run into a partially double-stranded one, and if their bases (the letters in the DNA sequence) are complementary, the single strand will grab the double strand’s tail and bind, kicking off the other strand of the double helix. The single strand thus acts as an input, while the displaced strand acts as an output, which can then interact with other molecules.

Demonstration game

As a test and demonstration, the artificial neural network plays a mind-reading game in which it tries to identify a mystery scientist. The researchers “trained” the neural network to “know” four scientists, whose identities are each represented by a specific, unique set of answers to four yes-or-no questions, such as whether the scientist was British.

After thinking of a scientist, a human player provides an incomplete subset of answers that partially identifies the scientist. The player then conveys those clues to the network by dropping DNA strands that correspond to those answers into the test tube. Communicating via fluorescent signals, the network then identifies which scientist the player has in mind.

“Intelligent” DNA system possible

The results suggest that DNA strand displacement cascades could be used to endow autonomous chemical systems with the capability of recognizing patterns of molecular events, making decisions and responding to the environment. Uses could include biomedical diagnostics, such as classifying cancers with microRNA signals. Furthermore, when DNA strand displacement systems are provided with interfaces for sensing non-nucleic-acid inputs and controlling chemical reactions as output actions, an “intelligent” DNA system could directly perceive and act on its chemical environment.

While this “proof-of-principle” experiment shows the promise of creating DNA-based networks that can “think,” this particular neural network is limited, the researchers said. It doesn’t easily scale to 100 billion neurons (the size of a human brain), and is slow to process information. However, the researchers also said that engineering these systems could provide indirect insight into the evolution of intelligence and biological information processing.

University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University researchers have found neurobiological evidence for the context reinstatement hypothesis: that memories formed nearby in time become linked.

“When I remember my grandmother, for example, I pull back all sorts of associations of a different time and place in my life,” said University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Kahana. “I’m also remembering living in Detroit and her Hungarian cooking. It’s like mental time travel. I jump back in time to the past, but I’m still grounded in the present.”

To test this hypothesis, researchers made electrocorticographic recordings (subdural and depth electrodes) as 69 neurosurgical patients studied and recalled lists of words during treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy.

By examining the activity of the implanted electrodes, the researchers were able to measure when the brain’s response was similar to a previously recorded pattern. When a patient recalled a word, their brain activity was similar to when they studied the same word, the researchers said. In addition, the patterns at recall contained traces of other words that were studied prior to the recalled word.

“What seems to be happening is that when patients recall a word, they bring back not only the thoughts associated with the word itself but also remnants of thoughts associated with other words they studied nearby in time,” Kahana said.

In an in-depth study of the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, an international team of researchers led by the University of California, San Diego has imaged the brains of people viewing videos of an “uncanny” android (compared to videos of a human and a robot-looking robot).

The term “uncanny valley” refers to an artificial agent’s (such as a robot) drop in likeability when it becomes too humanlike.

The researchers showed subjects 12 videos of the Japanese Repliee Q2 robot performing such ordinary actions as waving, nodding, taking a drink of water, and picking up a piece of paper from a table.

They were also shown videos of the same actions performed by the human on whom the android was modeled, and by a stripped version of the android — skinned to its underlying metal joints and wiring, revealing its mechanics until it could no longer be mistaken for a human.

They set up three conditions: (1) a human with biological appearance and movement; (2) a robot with mechanical appearance and mechanical motion; and (3) a human-seeming android with the exact same mechanical movement as the robot... to read more click here

Well, OK, maybe not totally destroying it, just making it unnecessary to rely on friends, libraries, books, notes, and other forms of “transactive memory” (external systems), thanks to the rise of Internet search engines, Wikipedia, and other Internet tools.

So says Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, co-author of an article in Science Express.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” she said. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

Creative forgetting

Sparrow’s research reveals that we forget things we are confident we can find on the Internet. We are more likely to remember things we think are not available online. And we are better able to remember where to find something on the Internet than we are at remembering the information itself.

But what is the quality of what we’re finding with these random crowdsourced tools? Maybe it’s time to take another look at The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains? Do we have any way to know what’s real on the Internet any more? Speaking of, why are schools still forcing students to memorize if they have all these great tools?

“Perhaps those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization,” said Sparrow. “And perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.”

Transactive memory tools

OK, that’s all good, but we are still stuck with unstructured search tools with millions of random hits and an unwieldy kluge of software and hardware tools to access our electronic alter egos. (That’s not knowledge, that’s texting, to paraphrase Truman Capote.)

So let’s see, I use Google Chrome bookmarks in a complex hierarchy, Instapaper “Read later” (which I never do), Kindle and paper books, countless desktop folders with terabytes of files, thousands of random audio and video recordings…

And then there’s lifelogging tools, like Lifelapse for iPhone, which I just started experimenting with (takes a photo every 30 seconds and lets you share it via a one-minute video) and Lifenaut, which lets you create a “mindfile” that preserves biographical pictures, videos, and documents in a digital archive.

But none of these tools really provides deep structured access to reliable, credible information. That may have to wait until Watson@home shows up….

Meanwhile, what tools do you use to remember, organize, and archive knowledge?

A “fountain of youth” that sustains the production of new neurons in the brains of rodents may also be present in the human brain, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found.

The existence of a vital support system of cells around stem cells in the brain explains why stem cells by themselves can’t generate neurons in a lab dish, a major roadblock in using these stem cells for injury repair.

The scientists found that neighboring “epithelial-like” ependymal cells — not stem cells themselves – maintain a special structure that keeps neural stem cells “neurogenic,” able to make new neurons. Currently, when neural stem cells are harvested for growth in culture, however, the ependymal cells are not removed along with them, and this can be a problem.

“Neural stem cells in a lab dish don’t continue to make neurons as they do inside the brain,” said Chay Kuo, MD, PhD, George Brumley Jr. Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, Pediatrics, and Neurobiology. “Instead, they often produce astrocytes, a cell type that may not be helpful to re-implant into a brain.” He said that uncontrolled astrocyte growth can lead to brain tumors.

They discovered that the Foxj1 transcription factor, a class of master proteins that turn other genes on and/or off, is critical to instruct ependymal cells to change shape and assemble into pinwheel-like architecture surrounding stem cells. The researchers said the lateral membranes of mature ependymal cells are shaped like machine cogs or fingers that lace together.

Kuo decided to study these cells because the lateral ventricles in the brain, where adult neural stem cells reside, are also the last area of a developing brain that grows ependymal cells. “The common radial glial progenitors in the developing nervous system prior to birth give rise to both the ependymal cells and the adult stem cells,” Kuo said. “So it made sense to study these niche cells as well as the stem cells.”

The researchers also determined that the structural protein Ankyrin 3 was turned on by Foxj1 in these ependymal cells to provide structural support for the delicate neural stem cells. Signals generated by this structural support will probably be important for instructing introduced neural stem cells to make neurons in therapeutic settings, the researchers said.

A “needle-in-the-haystack” search through nearly 390,000 chemical compounds has led scientists at the Mass General Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease to find a substance that can sneak through the protective barrier surrounding the brain, with promising effects for new drugs for Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

Several other studies have suggested that too much cholesterol may kill brain cells in similar neurodegenerative diseases.  The researchers launched a search for “small molecules” — substances ideal for developing into medicines — capable of blocking formation of cholesterol. They discovered a brain-permeable SIRT2 inhibitor that blocks the activity of a key protein involved in cholesterol production.

Researchers from the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, have linked out-of-body (OBE) experiences to neural instabilities in the brain’s temporal lobes and to errors in the body’s sense of itself.

The researchers tested a group of individuals, including some “OBEers,” for their predisposition to unusual perceptual experiences, and found that the OBEers reported significantly more of a particular type of experience associated with neuroelectrical anomalies in the temporal lobes of the brain, as well as those associated with distortions in the processing of body-based information.

These findings suggest that even in healthy people, striking hallucinations can and do occur. These may reflect anomalies in neuroelectrical activity of the temporal lobes, as well as biases of the “body representation” in the brain.

A small number (11) subjects given meditation training over five weeks increased activity in the left frontal region of the brain, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Stout have found. Other research has found that this pattern of brain activity is associated with positive moods.

At the beginning of the study, each participant had an EEG. They were told: “Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath.”

Eleven people were then invited to take part in meditation training, while a control group of another 10 were told they would be trained later. The 11 were offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practice as much as they could between sessions, but there wasn’t any particular requirement for how much they should practice.

After five weeks, the researchers did an EEG again on the 11 persons who did the meditation training. Each had done, on average, about seven hours of training and practice.

Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language, helps regulate the wiring of neurons in the brain, researchers at the The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford have determined.

Foxp2 codes for a regulatory protein that provides a window into unusual aspects of brain function. In 2001, scientists discovered that mutations of the human gene cause a rare form of speech and language disorder. The finding triggered a decade of intense research into the human gene and corresponding versions found in other species — for example, it has been shown to affect vocal imitation in songbirds, and learning of rapid movement sequences in mice.

The researchers gained insights into the functions of Foxp2 within the developing brain by exploiting its role as a genetic dimmer switch — turning up or down the amount of product made by other genes.

In their large-scale screening of embryonic brain tissue, they identified many novel targets regulated by Foxp2. Remarkably, many of these targets were known to be important for connectivity of the central nervous system. The team went on to show that changing Foxp2 levels in neurons impacted the length and branching of neuronal projections, a key route for modulating the wiring of the developing brain.

“The current study provides the most thorough characterization of Foxp2 target pathways to date,” notes Dr. Simon E. Fisher of The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford. “It offers a number of compelling new candidate genes that could be investigated in people with language problems.”

Researchers at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan and Lund University have independently worked out how to turn skin cells into specialized neurons that make dopamine, which is depleted in the brains of people with Parkinson’s disease.

The studies raise the possibility of improving mobility in people with Parkinson’s by restoring dopamine production to normal. At present, most patients take a drug called L-dopa to readjust levels, but with varying levels of success.

The San Raffaele team reprogrammed mouse skin cells using three transcription factors — proteins previously linked with the development of the neurons. The factors transformed skin cells taken from human embryos, healthy adults, and people with Parkinson’s.

The Lund University team converted human skin cells from embryos into neurons, then into specialized ones that make dopamine. Altogether, they used five transcription factors, including Mash1 and Lmx1a.

Bionic glasses using video cameras, position detectors, facial recognition and tracking software, and depth sensors have been developed by Oxford University researchers.

“We want to be able to enhance vision in those who’ve lost it or who have little left or almost none,” explains Dr Stephen Hicks of the Department of Clinical Neurology at Oxford University. “The glasses should allow people to be more independent — finding their own directions and signposts, and spotting warning signals,” he says.

The glasses would be appropriate for common types of visual impairment, such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. (NHS Choices estimates around 30% of people who are over 75 have early signs of age-related macular degeneration, and about 7% have more advanced forms.)

The researchers plan to convert newspaper headlines using optical character recognition into audible words. Barcode and price tag readers could also be useful additions, the researchers said.

The bionic glasses are being exhibited at this year’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.

More than 50 severely disabled people in Second Life have been trying out a sophisticated new brain-computer interface (BCI) that lets users freely explore Second Life’s virtual world and control their real-world environment.

The system was developed by medical engineering company G.Tec of Schiedlberg, Austria as part of a pan-European project called Smart Homes for All. It’s the first time the latest BCI technology has been combined with smart-home technology and online gaming.

To activate a command, the user focuses their attention on the corresponding icon on a screen. Electroencephalograph (EEG) caps pick up brain signals, which are translated into commands to navigate and communicate within Second Life and Twitter. It can also be used to open and close doors, answer the phone, and control the TV, lights, thermostat, and intercom.

G.Tec’s system has been tested at the Santa Lucia Foundation Hospital in Rome, Italy.