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Following more than seven years of research, researchers at the University of Seville-IBiS (Institute of Biomedicine of Seville) have identified a new key cell type with a critical role in the developmental processes of memory and learning. This breakthrough has been published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience.

The research, led jointly by the University of Seville-IBiS and Karolinska Institutet, helps to understand how neural systems with decisive functions for human behavior mature. The in-depth study highlights the role of microglia, a group of cells that has been the subject of substantial information in recent years due to its involvement in various brain pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Summary: Researchers discovered that electrical noise stimulation to the frontal part of the brain can improve mathematical learning.

The study focused on those who initially showed low levels of brain excitation towards math. Unlike in placebo groups, unlike in placebo groups, a significant improvement in math skills was observed after the application of neurostimulation. This novel approach could revolutionize personalized learning.

Bottom-up processing is an explanation for perceptions that start with an incoming stimulus and work upward until a representation of the object is formed in our minds. This process suggests that our perceptual experience is based entirely on the sensory stimuli that we piece together using only data that is available from our senses.

In order to make sense of the world, we must take in energy from the environment and convert it to neural signals, a process known as sensation. It is in the next step of the process, known as perception, that our brains interpret these sensory signals.

How exactly do people process perceptual information from the world around them? There are two basic approaches to understanding how this sensation and perception take place. One of these is known as bottom-up processing and the other is known as top-down processing.

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A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain.

When the woman’s illness began, “trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never previously been identified as causing human infection, was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Karina Kennedy, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Medical School and Director of Clinical Microbiology at Canberra Hospital, said in a press release.

Sepideh Sadaghiani, Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, & Bioengineering at Illinois, lectured on “The functional connectome across temporal scales” at 4:00 pm in 2,269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom. Introduction by Ryan Miller, MBM trainee and PhD candidate in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.

For more information on the lecture and Dr. Sadaghiani: https://publish.illinois.edu/minibrain/2022/07/26/sepideh-sa…s-lecture/

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Plenary Talk by Michael Levin on “Non-neural, developmental bioelectricity as a precursor for cognition: Evolution, synthetic organisms, and biomedicine” at the Virtual Miniature Brain Machinery Retreat, September 16, 2021. Introduction by William Baker.

Michael Levin.
Director of the Allen Discovery Center.
Tufts University.

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Sticking out your tongue while doing delicate work with your hands reveals a history of evolutionary relationships.

Being able to vocalize is one of the most essential elements of the human experience, with infants expected to start babbling their first words before they’re one year old, and much of their further life revolving around interacting with others using vocalizations involving varying degrees of vocabulary and fluency. This makes the impairment or loss of this ability difficult to devastating, as is the case with locked-in syndrome (LIS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and similar conditions, where talking and vocalizing has or will become impossible.

In a number of concurrent studies, the use of a brain-computer interface (BCI) is investigated to help patients suffering from LIS (Sean L. Metzger et al., 2023) and ALS (Francis R. Willett et al., 2023) to regain their speaking voice. Using the surgically implanted microelectrode arrays (Utah arrays) electrical impulses pertaining to the patient’s muscles involved in speaking are recorded and mapped to phonemes, which are the elements that make up speech. Each of these phonemes requires a specific configuration of the muscles of the vocal tract (e.g. lips, tongue, jaw and larynx), which can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy.

In the case of the study by Sean L. Metzger et al. as recently published in Nature, the accompanying research article on the University of California San Francisco website details the story of their patient: Ann. At the age of 30, Ann suffered a brainstem stroke which rendered her essentially fully paralyzed. As an LIS patient she lacked for a long time even the ability to move her facial muscles.