Neuroscience In The News On April 4

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about the how dance may help Huntington's Disease and the role of altruism and brain activity.  Last but not least is how a bird dances to a beat and the insights that are learned from this for neuroscience.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning April 4, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from March 14, 2016

Can Dance Help Huntington's Disease?

Huntington's disease is an inherited disease that causes the progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the brain. It has a broad impact on a person's functional abilities and usually results in movement, thinking and psychiatric disorders.

Dennis, of Amherst, says dance can help in the maintenance of balance and posture, coordination of voluntary movements, motor learning, cognition and emotional well being.

Article Link:

• Umass Professor Believes Dance Can Help Huntington's Disease
• Paul A. Dennis, Assistant Professor of Dance, University of Massachusetts

Altruism and Brain Activity

However, subjects who showed the greatest activity in areas of the brain linked to pain perception, emotion and imitating others gave away an average of 75% of their funds. The researchers say this behavior can be referred to as "prosocial resonance" - a type of mirroring impulse that they believe is a key driver for altruism.

Based on their results, the researchers suggest we may be hard-wired for altruism. What is more, they believe the results indicate that it may be possible to make people less selfish and more generous toward others.

"This is potentially groundbreaking," says Christov-Moore. Senior author Marco Iacoboni, a psychiatry professor at UCLA

Article Link:

• Altruism Could Be Increased By Reducing Specific Brain Activity
• Leonardo Christov-Moore, University Of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• Source:  Medical News Today

The Beasts That Keep The Beat

For Irena Schulz, one of those moments happened on an otherwise ordinary day in August, 2007.  Schulz was someone who already had a deep appreciation for the intelligence and myriad talents of birds. She had even seen some parrots sway and bob to music. But Spudic’s claims seemed a bit hyperbolic. “We were humoring him, saying, ‘Sure, sure,’” Schulz recalls. Later that evening, she and her husband popped Spudic’s CD into the computer in their living room. “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by The Backstreet Boys started playing. Immediately, Snowball, who was perched on Schulz’s arm, began kicking up his feet and bouncing his head with great zeal — and precision.

Make sure you check out the video posted in the story.

Article Link:

• The Beasts That Keep The Beat, New Insights From Neuroscience
• John Iversen and Aniruddh Patel at Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla CA.
• Source:  Quanta Magazine

The Brain Never Rests

According to an article on Newsweek.com, Why Your Brain Never Really Rests, scientists have ignored the brain activity in the background as the brain is not really active doing anything. Since scientists doing PET scans and MRI's assumed this activity was meaningless, they actually took it out of the results from the scans.

When someone is lying still and it seems like the mind is blank, the brain activity is really working hard. The very idea of default activity was so against the norm for the scientific community that when Marcus Raichle discovered it, his paper on the subject was rejected. The brain might be very active in the areas where it seems as if nothing is going on.

The brain is in the "default mode" when we sleep, stare in to space, undergo anesthesia or even when we are sitting motionless like in a moment of meditation and relaxation. The brain consumes 20 times as much energy during this time as compared to times of thinking, feeling and using our senses. That is a lot of energy consumed for the brain to be at rest. So while one may say the brain is at rest, it truly is not at rest.

The default mode of the brain seems to be preparing our minds for future situations including creating images about what to expect from future situations so we are prepared for those moments. There are many synapses taking place in the visual cortex of our brain during this default mode which suggests that the brain is creating mental images that help us make sense of the images in real time. The default mode is active when we are not taking in information and processing events from our day. It is a time when we may be pulling all kinds of information together including other people's perspectives to help us play through possible scenarios which help us plan and prepare for our moments ahead.

Just think of how much our brains are doing while we are in this default mode and then consider just how much we may limit the capacity of our brain when we keep ourselves too busy. We need the down time and the rest whether it is relaxing on a beach or at a pool, taking a leisurely walk, taking an afternoon nap or doing meditation and relaxation exercises. If we constantly stimulate our minds, we may be missing out on some of the most important revelations that will help us navigate through life in a much better and more balanced way.

I cannot help but think of the times that I've struggled to solve a problem. In one case, I was on a client site and spent all day trying to solve an issue. Finally I went home and just completely let go of it from my mind. I knew I had just a few hours to solve the situation the next day but I also realized that the best thing I could do was to just let go of it and get my brain off of the problem. Lo and behold the next morning when I walked into the client site, I solved the problem in the first 15 minutes. My brain had a chance to analyze all scenarios and all the information and input from the day to come to a solution that worked.

It is very important to give our minds a rest during the day and if we do this even for a few minutes, we'll be far more productive than if we just keep pushing through our day and pouring those gallons of caffeine into our body. Our brains offer us much more than we sometimes realize and often times, we are the ones holding ourselves back. Let us give ourselves what we need and watch how much our brain gives us in return.

Images: NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

*For more articles, check out the Mind Body Thoughts Blog

Ear Temperature And Left Brain, Right Brain

According to an article on www.physorg.com , researchers at Australian National University have developed a device that could potentially unravel the mysteries of the left and right brain by measuring temperature.

The device allows researchers a cost effective method of testing which side of the brain is active when performing various tasks and functions. Researchers understand that one side of the brain is usually more active depending upon what tasks or functions it is undergoing. In a general manner of speaking, language is handled by the left side of the brain and more logic prone functions are handled by the right side of the brain. Brain scans can be very expensive so this device gives new possibilities.

The new device was developed by psychologists Mr. Nicolas Cherbuin and Dr. Cobie Brinkman. It measures the temperature inside the ear which of course indicates the busier side of the brain. If an area of the brain is more active, it requires more blood. Because the blood flows through the carotid artery on either side of the neck and the blood is shared between the brain and the ear, ear temperature gives an indication of which side is busier.

Because blood flowing to the brain is cooler than blood already in the brain, a decrease in ear temperature indicates increased blood flow. This signals increased activity to the corresponding side of the brain.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news3468.html

Image Source: www.physorg.com