How screens are quietly destroying your focus, memory, and emotional clarity
Category: neuroscience – Page 76
Four-day work week benefits workers, employers, study says
A four-day work week can lead to happier and more productive, dedicated employees, a new global study found.
Workers at companies that instituted a four-day work week—essentially working 80% of their regular hours for the same pay—reported less burnout and better job satisfaction along with improved mental and physical health, researchers report in Nature Human Behavior.
“Across outcomes, the magnitude (of improvement) is larger for the two work-related measures—burnout and job satisfaction—followed by mental health, with the smallest changes reported in physical health,” wrote the research team co-led by Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College.
Why the Psychopathic Brain Struggles With Emotion and Control
At its core, psychopathy is not simply a matter of bad choices or poor upbringing — growing evidence suggests it has a biological foundation, shaped by the intricate wiring of the human brain.
Now, a new study offers fresh insights into how structural brain connectivity patterns are linked to psychopathic traits and the externalizing behaviors that often accompany them.
Optimists are alike, every pessimist has their own way
When thinking about future events, optimists’ brains work similarly, while pessimists’ brains show a much larger degree of individuality. The Kobe University finding offers an explanation why optimists are seen as more sociable—they may share a common vision of the future.
Optimists tend to be more satisfied with their social relationships and have wider social networks. Kobe University psychologist Yanagisawa Kuniaki says, “But what is the reason for this? Recent studies showed that the brains of people who occupy central social positions react to stimuli in similar ways. So it may be that people who share a similar attitude toward the future, too, truly envision it similarly in their brains and that this makes it easier for them to understand each other’s perspectives.”
To test this hypothesis, Yanagisawa assembled an interdisciplinary team from both the fields of social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. “The main reason why this question has remained untouched until now is that it exists in a gap between social psychology and neuroscience. However, the intersection of these two fields enabled us to open this black box.”
Dopamine Doesn’t Work in Our Brains Quite The Way We Thought
Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied chemical messengers in the human brain, and yet scientists are still figuring out how it works to accomplish so much.
For years, the classic view has been that, when released, dopamine slowly diffuses through the brain like a chemical megaphone, broadcasting information far and wide to numerous target cells.
Recently, however, that perspective has changed. Newer research suggests that dopamine is also capable of short, sharp whispers, precisely directed within milliseconds to neighboring cells.
Blood plasma reveals shared pathways in neurodegenerative diseases
Scientists know that many proteins and pathways are involved in the development and progression of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and that these proteins can be detected in the plasma of people with the conditions.
But it hasn’t been clear exactly which proteins are distinct to one disease vs. shared among two or more of them, adding to the difficulty both of diagnosing these complex diseases from blood samples and of developing effective treatments.
A new study by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis researchers, published in Nature Medicine, provides some answers. Led by Carlos Cruchaga, the Barbara Burton & Reuben Morriss III Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and director of the NeuroGenomics and Informatics Center at WashU Medicine, the researchers analyzed protein activity in more than 10,500 blood plasma samples from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or FTD.
APOE ε4 variant reveals hidden risk factors beyond Alzheimer’s
Further analysis for immune-specific processes revealed APOE ε4 enrichment in various infection-related pathways, including herpes, influenza A, hepatitis, measles, and Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Significant enrichment was also observed for B-cell, T-cell, and inflammatory signaling cascades. Next, immune cell subtype enrichment analysis revealed the most APOE ε4 enrichment in intermediate and non-classical monocytes among innate immune cells.
Among adaptive immune cells, memory cluster of differentiation 8 (CD8) T cells, regulatory T (Treg) cells, and memory CD4 T cells were the most enriched. Besides, γδ T cells and natural killer (NK) cells showed APOE ε4 enrichment. In the liver, a cell-type-specific enrichment analysis revealed the most APOE ε4 enrichment in Kupffer cells and hepatocytes.
Next, the researchers examined whether APOE ε4 CSF proteome changes were reflected in the plasma and used the GNPC dataset for plasma proteome profiling of AD, PDD, FTD, PD, ALS, and non-impaired controls. Fifty-eight plasma proteins associated with the APOE genotype were identified in non-impaired controls. CART modeling revealed that these 58 proteins could strongly differentiate between APOE ε4 carriers and non-carriers across neurodegenerative diseases, and this signature was found to be consistent across different sexes and racial groups.