Category: neural activity

7 Very Bizarre (and Very Rare) Psychotic Hallucinations

On By A.P.In Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome, Anxiety, bipolar disorder, brain, Capgras delusion, Caro Lippman, Charles Bonnet syndrome, Clinical lycanthropy, Cotard's Syndrome, delusional infestations, delusional parasitosis, Dementia, Depression, Drugs, Ekbom's syndrome, epilepsy, John Todd, Jules Cotard, Medicine, mental health, mental illness, migraine, multiple sclerosis, neural activity, neurologist, Neurology, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, Othello syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatrist, Psychiatry, Psychosis, seizure, stroke, traumatic brain injury, Walking Corpse SyndromeLeave a comment

brain

The many documented cases of strange delusions and neurological syndromes can offer a window into how bizarre the brain can be.

It may seem that hallucinations are random images that appear to some individuals, or that delusions are thoughts that arise without purpose. However, in some cases, a specific brain pathway may create a particular image or delusion, and different people may experience the same hallucination.

In recent decades, with advances in brain science, researchers have started to unravel the causes of some of these conditions, while others have remained a mystery.

Here is a look at seven odd hallucinations, which show that anything is possible when the brain takes a break from reality.

1. Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome
This neurological syndrome is characterized by bizarre, distorted perceptions of time and space, similar to what Alice experienced in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

Patients with Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome describe seeing objects or parts of their bodies as smaller or bigger than their actual sizes, or in an altered shape. These individuals may also perceive time differently.

The rare syndrome seems to be caused by some viral infections, epilepsy, migraine headaches and brain tumors. Studies have also suggested that abnormal activity in parts of the visual cortex that handle information about the shape and size of objects might cause the hallucinations.

It’s also been suggested that Carroll himself experienced the condition during migraine headaches and used them as inspiration for writing the tale of Alice’s strange dream.

English psychiatrist John Todd first described the condition in an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1955, and that’s why the condition is also called Todd’s syndrome. However, an earlier reference to the condition appears in a 1952 article by American neurologist Caro Lippman. The doctor describes a patient who reported feeling short and wide as she walked, and referenced “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” to explain her body image illusions.

2. Walking Corpse Syndrome
This delusion, also called Cotard’s Syndrome, is a rare mental illness in which patients believe they are dead, are dying or have lost their internal organs.

French neurologist Jules Cotard first described the condition in 1880, finding it in a woman who had depression and also symptoms of psychosis. The patient believed she didn’t have a brain or intestines, and didn’t need to eat. She died of starvation.

Other cases of Cotard’s syndrome have been reported in people with a range of psychiatric and neurological problems, including schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis.

In a recent case report of Cotard’s syndrome, researchers described a previously healthy 73-year-old woman who went to the emergency room insisting that she was “going to die and going to hell.” Eventually, doctors found the patient had bleeding in her brain due to a stroke. After she received treatment in the hospital, her delusion resolved within a week, according to the report published in January 2014 in the journal of Neuropsychiatry.

3. Charles Bonnet syndrome
People who have lost their sight may develop Charles Bonnet syndrome, which involves having vivid, complex visual hallucinations of things that aren’t really there.

People with this syndrome usually hallucinate people’s faces, cartoons, colored patterns and objects. It is thought the condition occurs because the brain’s visual system is no longer receiving visual information from the eye or part of the retina, and begins making up its own images.

Charles Bonnet syndrome occurs in between 10 and 40% of older adults who have significant vision loss, according to studies.

4. Clinical lycanthropy
In this extremely rare psychiatric condition, patients believe they are turning into wolves or other animals. They may perceive their own bodies differently, and insist they are growing the fur, sharp teeth and claws of a wolf.

Cases have also been reported of people with delusional beliefs about turning into dogs, pigs, frogs and snakes.

The condition usually occurs in combination with another disorder, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, according to a review study published in the March issue of the journal History of Psychiatry in 2014.

5. Capgras delusion
Patients with Capgras delusion believe that an imposter has replaced a person they feel close to, such as a friend or spouse. The delusion has been reported in patients with schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, advanced Parkinson’s disease, dementia and brain lesions.

One brain imaging study suggested the condition may involve reduced neural activity in the brain system that processes information about faces and emotional responses.

6. Othello syndrome
Named after Shakespeare’s character, Othello syndrome involves a paranoid belief that the sufferer’s partner is cheating. People with this condition experience strong obsessive thoughts and may show aggression and violence.

In one recent case report, doctors described a 46-year-old married man in the African country Burkina Faso who had a stroke, which left him unable to communicate and paralyzed in half of his body. The patient gradually recovered from his paralysis and speaking problems, but developed a persistent delusional jealousy and aggression toward his wife, accusing her of cheating with an unidentified man.

7. Ekbom’s syndrome
Patients with Ekbom’s syndrome, also known as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestations, strongly believe they are infested with parasites that are crawling under their skin. Patients report sensations of itching and being bitten, and sometimes, in an effort to get rid of the pathogens, they may hurt themselves, which can result in wounds and actual infections.

It’s unknown what causes these delusions, but studies have linked the condition with structural changes in the brain, and some patients have improved when treated with antipsychotic medications.

http://www.livescience.com/46477-oddest-hallucinations.html

Mice run for fun on wheels out in the wild.

On By A.P.In Dr. Nakamura, Exercise, Gene D. Block, Huda Akil, James Gorman, Johanna H. Meijer, Konrad Lorenz, Leiden University Medical Center, Marc Bekoff, mice, Nature, Netherlands, neural activity, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Russell Foster, Science, wheel running, Yuri RobbersLeave a comment

By James Gorman

If an exercise wheel sits in a forest, will mice run on it?

Every once in a while, science asks a simple question and gets a straightforward answer.

In this case, yes, they will. And not only mice, but also rats, shrews, frogs and slugs.

True, the frogs did not exactly run, and the slugs probably ended up on the wheel by accident, but the mice clearly enjoyed it. That, scientists said, means that wheel-running is not a neurotic behavior found only in caged mice.

They like the wheel.

Two researchers in the Netherlands did an experiment that it seems nobody had tried before. They placed exercise wheels outdoors in a yard and in an area of dunes, and monitored the wheels with motion detectors and automatic cameras.

They were inspired by questions from animal welfare committees at universities about whether mice were really enjoying wheel-running, an activity used in all sorts of studies, or were instead like bears pacing in a cage, stressed and neurotic. Would they run on a wheel if they were free?

Now there is no doubt. Mice came to the wheels like human beings to a health club holding a spring membership sale. They made the wheels spin. They hopped on, hopped off and hopped back on.

“When I saw the first mice, I was extremely happy,” said Johanna H. Meijer at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “I had to laugh about the results, but at the same time, I take it very seriously. It’s funny, and it’s important at the same time.”

Dr. Meijer’s day job is as a “brain electrophysiologist” studying biological rhythms in mice. She relished the chance to get out of the laboratory and study wild animals, and in a way that no one else had.

She said Konrad Lorenz, the great-grandfather of animal behavior studies, once mentioned in a letter that some of his caged rats had escaped and then returned to his garden to use running wheels placed there.

But, Dr. Meijer said, the Lorenz observation “was one sentence.”

For the experiment, the wheels were enclosed so that small animals could come and go but so that larger animals could not knock them over. Dr. Meijer set up motion sensors and automatic video cameras. Several years and 12,000 snippets of video later, she and Yuri Robbers, also a Leiden researcher, reported the results. They were released in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Gene D. Block, chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, was not involved with the paper but knows Dr. Meijer and had seen the wheel set up in her garden. He said the study made it clear that wheel-running is “some type of rewarding behavior” and “probably not driven by stress or anxiety.”

Mice accounted for 88 percent of the wheel-running events, and spent one minute to 18 on the wheel. The other animals each accounted for less than 1 percent. Frogs, though there were very few, were seen to get on the wheel, get off and get back on.

Russell Foster, a circadian rhythm researcher at Oxford University, said he read the paper and sent it out to other scientists on behalf of the Proceedings and was delighted when peer reviews from other scientists were positive.

Marc Bekoff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado who is active in the animal welfare movement, said in an email that he thought the paper did show that wheel-running could be a “voluntary activity,” but that mice in labs may be doing more of it because of the stress of confinement.

“Wild bears will often pace back and forth,” he wrote, “but in captivity, the rate of doing it seems to be greatly heightened.”

As to why the mice, frogs or perhaps even slugs run, or move, on the wheel, Dr. Meijer said she thought that “there is an intrinsic motivation for animals, or should I say organisms, to be active.”

Huda Akil, co-director of the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan, who has studied reward systems, said: “It’s not a surprise. All you have to do is watch a bunch of little kids in a playground or a park. They run and run and run.”

Dr. Akil said that in humans, running activates reward pathways in the brain, although she pointed out that there are innate differences in temperament in all sorts of animals, including humans. Rats that do not like to run can be bred. And plenty of people do all they can to avoid jogging, cycling and elliptical machines.

Presumably, the same is true of wild mice. While some were setting the wheel on fire with their exertions, others, out of camera range, may have been sprawled out on the mouse equivalent of a lounge chair, shaking their whiskers in dismay and disbelief.

Thanks to Dr. Nakamura for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

‘Jumping Genes’ Linked to Schizophrenia

On By A.P.In DNA, Dr. Rajadhyaksha, gene, Japan, jumping gene, line element, Medicine, mental health, mental illness, neural activity, neurogenesis, neurologist, Neurology, Neuron, neuroplasticity, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, neurotransmitter, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, schizophrenia, Science, Tadafumi KatoLeave a comment

sn-schizophrenia

Roaming bits of DNA that can relocate and proliferate throughout the genome, called “jumping genes,” may contribute to schizophrenia, a new study suggests. These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease. The study could help explain how genes and environment work together to produce the complex disorder and may even point to ways of lowering the risk of the disease, researchers say.

Schizophrenia causes hallucinations, delusions, and a host of other cognitive problems, and afflicts roughly 1% of all people. It runs in families—a person whose twin sibling has the disorder, for example, has a roughly 50-50 chance of developing it. Scientists have struggled to define which genes are most important to developing the disease, however; each individual gene associated with the disorder confers only modest risk. Environmental factors such as viral infections before birth have also been shown to increase risk of developing schizophrenia, but how and whether these exposures work together with genes to skew brain development and produce the disease is still unclear, says Tadafumi Kato, a neuroscientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako City, Japan and co-author of the new study.

Over the past several years, a new mechanism for genetic mutation has attracted considerable interest from researchers studying neurological disorders, Kato says. Informally called jumping genes, these bits of DNA can replicate and insert themselves into other regions of the genome, where they either lie silent, doing nothing; start churning out their own genetic products; or alter the activity of their neighboring genes. If that sounds potentially dangerous, it is: Such genes are often the culprits behind tumor-causing mutations and have been implicated in several neurological diseases. However, jumping genes also make up nearly half the current human genome, suggesting that humans owe much of our identity to their audacious leaps.

Recent research by neuroscientist Fred Gage and colleagues at the University of California (UC), San Diego, has shown that one of the most common types of jumping gene in people, called L1, is particularly abundant in human stem cells in the brain that ultimately differentiate into neurons and plays an important role in regulating neuronal development and proliferation. Although Gage and colleagues have found that increased L1 is associated with mental disorders such as Rett syndrome, a form of autism, and a neurological motor disease called Louis-Bar syndrome, “no one had looked very carefully” to see if the gene might also contribute to schizophrenia, he says.

To investigate that question, principal investigator Kazuya Iwamoto, a neuroscientist; Kato; and their team at RIKEN extracted brain tissue of deceased people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as well as several other mental disorders, extracted DNA from their neurons, and compared it with that of healthy people. Compared with controls, there was a 1.1-fold increase in L1 in the tissue of people with schizophrenia, as well as slightly less elevated levels in people with other mental disorders such as major depression, the team reports today in Neuron.

Next, the scientists tested whether environmental factors associated with schizophrenia could trigger a comparable increase in L1. They injected pregnant mice with a chemical that simulates viral infection and found that their offspring did, indeed, show higher levels of the gene in their brain tissue. An additional study in infant macaques, which mimicked exposure to a hormone also associated with increased schizophrenia risk, produced similar results. Finally, the group examined human neural stem cells extracted from people with schizophrenia and found that these, too, showed higher levels of L1.

The fact that it is possible to increase the number of copies of L1 in the mouse and macaque brains using established environmental triggers for schizophrenia shows that such genetic mutations in the brain may be preventable if such exposures can be avoided, Kato says. He says he hopes that the “new view” that environmental factors can trigger or deter genetic changes involved in the disease will help remove some of the disorder’s stigma.

Combined with previous studies on other disorders, the new study suggests that L1 genes are indeed more active in the brain of patients with neuropsychiatric diseases, Gage says. He cautions, however, that no one yet knows whether they are actually causing the disease. “Now that we have multiple confirmations of this occurring in humans with different diseases, the next step is to determine if possible what role, if any, they play.”

One tantalizing possibility is that as these restless bits of DNA drift throughout the genomes of human brain cells, they help create the vibrant cognitive diversity that helps humans as a species respond to changing environmental conditions, and produces extraordinary “outliers,” including innovators and geniuses such as Picasso, says UC San Diego neuroscientist Alysson Muotri. The price of such rich diversity may be that mutations contributing to mental disorders such as schizophrenia sometimes emerge. Figuring out what these jumping genes truly do in the human brain is the “next frontier” for understanding complex mental disorders, he says. “This is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Thanks to Dr. Rajadhyaksha for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/01/jumping-genes-linked-schizophrenia

Electric brain stimulation in a specific area discovered to induce a sense of determination

On By A.P.In aMCC, anterior midcingulate cortex, brain, Depression, determination, epilepsy, Josef Parvizi, Kebmodee, motivation, neural activity, neural prosthetics, neurologist, Neurology, Neuron, neuroplasticity, neuroprosthetic device, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuropsychopharmacology, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, neurosurgery, neurotransmitter, neurotrophin, Stanford, The FutureLeave a comment

Doctors in the US have induced feelings of intense determination in two men by stimulating a part of their brains with gentle electric currents.

The men were having a routine procedure to locate regions in their brains that caused epileptic seizures when they felt their heart rates rise, a sense of foreboding, and an overwhelming desire to persevere against a looming hardship.

The remarkable findings could help researchers develop treatments for depression and other disorders where people are debilitated by a lack of motivation.

One patient said the feeling was like driving a car into a raging storm. When his brain was stimulated, he sensed a shaking in his chest and a surge in his pulse. In six trials, he felt the same sensations time and again.

Comparing the feelings to a frantic drive towards a storm, the patient said: “You’re only halfway there and you have no other way to turn around and go back, you have to keep going forward.”

When asked by doctors to elaborate on whether the feeling was good or bad, he said: “It was more of a positive thing, like push harder, push harder, push harder to try and get through this.”

A second patient had similar feelings when his brain was stimulated in the same region, called the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC). He felt worried that something terrible was about to happen, but knew he had to fight and not give up, according to a case study in the journal Neuron.

Both men were having an exploratory procedure to find the focal point in their brains that caused them to suffer epileptic fits. In the procedure, doctors sink fine electrodes deep into different parts of the brain and stimulate them with tiny electrical currents until the patient senses the “aura” that precedes a seizure. Often, seizures can be treated by removing tissue from this part of the brain.

“In the very first patient this was something very unexpected, and we didn’t report it,” said Josef Parvizi at Stanford University in California. But then I was doing functional mapping on the second patient and he suddenly experienced a very similar thing.”

“Its extraordinary that two individuals with very different past experiences respond in a similar way to one or two seconds of very low intensity electricity delivered to the same area of their brain. These patients are normal individuals, they have their IQ, they have their jobs. We are not reporting these findings in sick brains,” Parvizi said.

The men were stimulated with between two and eight milliamps of electrical current, but in tests the doctors administered sham stimulation too. In the sham tests, they told the patients they were about to stimulate the brain, but had switched off the electical supply. In these cases, the men reported no changes to their feelings. The sensation was only induced in a small area of the brain, and vanished when doctors implanted electrodes just five millimetres away.

Parvizi said a crucial follow-up experiment will be to test whether stimulation of the brain region really makes people more determined, or simply creates the sensation of perseverance. If future studies replicate the findings, stimulation of the brain region – perhaps without the need for brain-penetrating electrodes – could be used to help people with severe depression.

The anterior midcingulate cortex seems to be important in helping us select responses and make decisions in light of the feedback we get. Brent Vogt, a neurobiologist at Boston University, said patients with chronic pain and obsessive-compulsive disorder have already been treated by destroying part of the aMCC. “Why not stimulate it? If this would enhance relieving depression, for example, let’s go,” he said.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/05/determination-electrical-brain-stimulation

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Brain implants: Restoring memory with a microchip

On By A.P.In brain, brain computer interface, Constantine Lyketsos, Doug Brown, hippocampus, Inventions, Johnny Mnemonic, memory, neural activity, neural prosthetics, Neurology, neuroplasticity, neuroprosthetic device, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, neurosurgery, Rob Hampson, Science, Technology, Ted Berger, The Brain, The Future, The Singularity, University of Southern California, Wake Forest University1 Comment

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William Gibson’s popular science fiction tale “Johnny Mnemonic” foresaw sensitive information being carried by microchips in the brain by 2021. A team of American neuroscientists could be making this fantasy world a reality. Their motivation is different but the outcome would be somewhat similar. Hailed as one of 2013’s top ten technological breakthroughs by MIT, the work by the University of Southern California, North Carolina’s Wake Forest University and other partners has actually spanned a decade.

But the U.S.-wide team now thinks that it will see a memory device being implanted in a small number of human volunteers within two years and available to patients in five to 10 years. They can’t quite contain their excitement. “I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,” said Ted Berger, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “I might not benefit from it myself but my kids will.”

Rob Hampson, associate professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University, agrees. “We keep pushing forward, every time I put an estimate on it, it gets shorter and shorter.”

The scientists — who bring varied skills to the table, including mathematical modeling and psychiatry — believe they have cracked how long-term memories are made, stored and retrieved and how to replicate this process in brains that are damaged, particularly by stroke or localized injury.

Berger said they record a memory being made, in an undamaged area of the brain, then use that data to predict what a damaged area “downstream” should be doing. Electrodes are then used to stimulate the damaged area to replicate the action of the undamaged cells.

They concentrate on the hippocampus — part of the cerebral cortex which sits deep in the brain — where short-term memories become long-term ones. Berger has looked at how electrical signals travel through neurons there to form those long-term memories and has used his expertise in mathematical modeling to mimic these movements using electronics.

Hampson, whose university has done much of the animal studies, adds: “We support and reinforce the signal in the hippocampus but we are moving forward with the idea that if you can study enough of the inputs and outputs to replace the function of the hippocampus, you can bypass the hippocampus.”

The team’s experiments on rats and monkeys have shown that certain brain functions can be replaced with signals via electrodes. You would think that the work of then creating an implant for people and getting such a thing approved would be a Herculean task, but think again.

For 15 years, people have been having brain implants to provide deep brain stimulation to treat epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease — a reported 80,000 people have now had such devices placed in their brains. So many of the hurdles have already been overcome — particularly the “yuck factor” and the fear factor.

“It’s now commonly accepted that humans will have electrodes put in them — it’s done for epilepsy, deep brain stimulation, (that has made it) easier for investigative research, it’s much more acceptable now than five to 10 years ago,” Hampson says.

Much of the work that remains now is in shrinking down the electronics.

“Right now it’s not a device, it’s a fair amount of equipment,”Hampson says. “We’re probably looking at devices in the five to 10 year range for human patients.”

The ultimate goal in memory research would be to treat Alzheimer’s Disease but unlike in stroke or localized brain injury, Alzheimer’s tends to affect many parts of the brain, especially in its later stages, making these implants a less likely option any time soon.

Berger foresees a future, however, where drugs and implants could be used together to treat early dementia. Drugs could be used to enhance the action of cells that surround the most damaged areas, and the team’s memory implant could be used to replace a lot of the lost cells in the center of the damaged area. “I think the best strategy is going to involve both drugs and devices,” he says.

Unfortunately, the team found that its method can’t help patients with advanced dementia.

“When looking at a patient with mild memory loss, there’s probably enough residual signal to work with, but not when there’s significant memory loss,” Hampson said.

Constantine Lyketsos, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore which is trialing a deep brain stimulator implant for Alzheimer’s patients was a little skeptical of the other team’s claims.

“The brain has a lot of redundancy, it can function pretty well if loses one or two parts. But memory involves circuits diffusely dispersed throughout the brain so it’s hard to envision.” However, he added that it was more likely to be successful in helping victims of stroke or localized brain injury as indeed its makers are aiming to do.

The UK’s Alzheimer’s Society is cautiously optimistic.

“Finding ways to combat symptoms caused by changes in the brain is an ongoing battle for researchers. An implant like this one is an interesting avenue to explore,” said Doug Brown, director of research and development.

Hampson says the team’s breakthrough is “like the difference between a cane, to help you walk, and a prosthetic limb — it’s two different approaches.”

It will still take time for many people to accept their findings and their claims, he says, but they don’t expect to have a shortage of volunteers stepping forward to try their implant — the project is partly funded by the U.S. military which is looking for help with battlefield injuries.

There are U.S. soldiers coming back from operations with brain trauma and a neurologist at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is asking “what can you do for my boys?” Hampson says.

“That’s what it’s all about.”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/07/tech/brain-memory-implants-humans/index.html?iref=allsearch

Flip of a single molecular switch makes an old brain young

On By A.P.In adolescent brain, aged brain, aging, Axerion Therapeutics, brain, Feras Akbik, learning, memory, National Institutes of Health, neural activity, Neuron, neuroplasticity, Neuroscience, neuroscientist, Nogo Receptor 1, plasticity, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Pujan Patel, Pujan R. Patel, rehabilitation, Sarah Bhagat, Sarah M. Bhagat, Science, Stephen Strittmatter, Stroke, synapse, The Brain, Traumatic Brain Injury, William B.J. Cafferty, William Cafferty, Yale University1 Comment

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The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function of a single gene that slows the rapid change in synaptic connections between neurons.

By monitoring the synapses in living mice over weeks and months, Yale researchers have identified the key genetic switch for brain maturation a study released March 6 in the journal Neuron. The Nogo Receptor 1 gene is required to suppress high levels of plasticity in the adolescent brain and create the relatively quiescent levels of plasticity in adulthood. In mice without this gene, juvenile levels of brain plasticity persist throughout adulthood. When researchers blocked the function of this gene in old mice, they reset the old brain to adolescent levels of plasticity.

“These are the molecules the brain needs for the transition from adolescence to adulthood,” said Dr. Stephen Strittmatter. Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology, Professor of Neurobiology and senior author of the paper. “It suggests we can turn back the clock in the adult brain and recover from trauma the way kids recover.”

Rehabilitation after brain injuries like strokes requires that patients re-learn tasks such as moving a hand. Researchers found that adult mice lacking Nogo Receptor recovered from injury as quickly as adolescent mice and mastered new, complex motor tasks more quickly than adults with the receptor.

“This raises the potential that manipulating Nogo Receptor in humans might accelerate and magnify rehabilitation after brain injuries like strokes,” said Feras Akbik, Yale doctoral student who is first author of the study.

Researchers also showed that Nogo Receptor slows loss of memories. Mice without Nogo receptor lost stressful memories more quickly, suggesting that manipulating the receptor could help treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We know a lot about the early development of the brain,” Strittmatter said, “But we know amazingly little about what happens in the brain during late adolescence.”

Other Yale authors are: Sarah M. Bhagat, Pujan R. Patel and William B.J. Cafferty

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Strittmatter is scientific founder of Axerion Therapeutics, which is investigating applications of Nogo research to repair spinal cord damage.

http://news.yale.edu/2013/03/06/flip-single-molecular-switch-makes-old-brain-young

The brain’s natural valium

On By A.P.In Anxiety, benzodiazepine, Boston, caffeine, cerebrospinal fluid, Clifford Saper, CSF, David Rye, Drugs, Elio Lugaresi, Emory University School of Medicine, flumazenil, GABA, Georgia, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Hoffmann-La Roche, Medicine, narcolepsy, neural activity, neurologist, Neuropsychiatric Disease, Neuroscience, Northwestern University, primary hypersomnia, Science, Science Translational Medicine, soporific compound, The BrainLeave a comment

sn-sleep

Hitting the wall in the middle of a busy work day is nothing unusual, and a caffeine jolt is all it takes to snap most of us back into action. But people with certain sleep disorders battle a powerful urge to doze throughout the day, even after sleeping 10 hours or more at night. For them, caffeine doesn’t touch the problem, and more potent prescription stimulants aren’t much better. Now, a study with a small group of patients suggests that their condition may have a surprising source: a naturally occurring compound that works on the brain much like the key ingredients in chill pills such as Valium and Xanax.

The condition is known as primary hypersomnia, and it differs from the better known sleep disorder narcolepsy in that patients tend to have more persistent daytime sleepiness instead of sudden “sleep attacks.” The unknown cause and lack of treatment for primary hypersomnia has long frustrated David Rye, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “A third of our patients are on disability,” he says, “and these are 20- and 30-year-old people.”

Rye and colleagues began the new study with a hunch about what was going on. Several drugs used to treat insomnia promote sleep by targeting receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that dampens neural activity. Rye hypothesized that his hypersomnia patients might have some unknown compound in their brains that does something similar, enhancing the activity of so-called GABAA receptors. To try to find this mystery compound, he and his colleagues performed spinal taps on 32 hypersomnia patients and collected cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the liquid that bathes and insulates the brain and spinal cord. Then they added the patients’ CSF to cells genetically engineered to produce GABAA receptors, and looked for tiny electric currents that would indicate that the receptors had been activated.

In that first pass, nothing happened. However, when the researchers added the CSF and a bit of GABA to the cells, they saw an electrical response that was nearly twice as big as that caused by GABA alone. All of this suggests that the patients’ CSF doesn’t activate GABAA receptors directly, but it does make the receptors almost twice as sensitive to GABA, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine. This effect is similar to that of drugs called benzodiazepines, the active ingredients in antianxiety drugs such as Valium. It did not occur when the researchers treated the cells with CSF from people with normal sleep patterns.

Follow-up experiments suggested that the soporific compound in the patients’ CSF is a peptide or small protein, presumably made by the brain, but otherwise its identity remains a mystery.

The idea that endogenous benzodiazepinelike compounds could cause hypersomnia was proposed in the early 1990s by Elio Lugaresi, a pioneering Italian sleep clinician, says Clifford Saper, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. But several of Lugaresi’s patients later turned out to be taking benzodiazepines, which undermined his argument, and the idea fell out of favor. Saper says the new work makes a “pretty strong case.”

Based on these results, Rye and his colleagues designed a pilot study with seven patients using a drug called flumazenil, which counteracts benzodiazepines and is often used to treat people who overdose on those drugs. After an injection of flumazenil, the patients improved to near-normal levels on several measures of alertness and vigilance, the researchers report. Rye says these effects lasted up to a couple hours.

In hopes of longer-lasting benefits, the researchers persuaded the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche, which makes the drug, to donate a powdered form that can be incorporated into dissolvable tablets taken under the tongue and a cream applied to the skin. One 30-something patient has been taking these formulations for 4 years and has improved dramatically, the researchers report in the paper. She has resumed her career as an attorney, from which her hypersomnia had forced her to take a leave of absence.

The findings are “certainly provocative,” Saper says, although they’ll have to be replicated in a larger, double-blind trial to be truly convincing.

Even so, says Phyllis Zee, a neurologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois: “This gives us a new window into thinking about treatments” for primary hypersomnia. “These patients don’t respond well to stimulants,” Zee says, so a better strategy may be to inhibit the sleep-promoting effects of GABA—or as Rye puts it, releasing the parking brake instead of pressing the accelerator.

The next steps are clear, Rye says: Identify the mystery compound, figure out a faster way to detect it, and conduct a larger clinical trial to test the benefits of flumazenil. However, the researchers first need someone to fund such a study. So far, Rye says, they’ve gotten no takers.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/11/putting-themselves-to-sleep.html

Musicians’ Brains Synchronize During Duets

On By A.P.In Berlin, BMC Neuroscience, brain oscillations, Christian Gottlieb Scheidler, EEG, electroencephalography, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, guitar, Johanna Sänger, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, music, Nature, neural activity, Neuroscience, social cognition, Sonata in G Major, Ulman Lindenberger4 Comments

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The brain waves of two musicians synchronize when they are performing duet, a new study found, suggesting that there’s a neural blueprint for coordinating actions with others.

A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin used electrodes to record the brain waves of 16 pairs of guitarists while they played a sequence from “Sonata in G Major” by Christian Gottlieb Scheidler. In each pair, the two musicians played different voices of the piece. One guitarist was responsible for beginning the song and setting the tempo while the other was instructed to follow.

In 60 trials each, the pairs of musicians showed coordinated brain oscillations — or matching rhythms of neural activity — in regions of the brain associated with social cognition and music production, the researchers said.

“When people coordinate their own actions, small networks between brain regions are formed,” study researcher Johanna Sänger said in a statement. “But we also observed similar network properties between the brains of the individual players, especially when mutual coordination is very important; for example at the joint onset of a piece of music.”

Sänger added that the internal synchronization of the lead guitarists’ brain waves was present, and actually stronger, before the duet began.

“This could be a reflection of the leading player’s decision to begin playing at a certain moment in time,” she explained.

Another Max Planck researcher involved in the study, Ulman Lindenberger, led a similar set of experiments in 2009. But in that study, which was published in the journal BMC Neuroscience, the pairs of guitarists played a song in unison, rather than a duet. Lindenberger and his team at the time observed the same type of coordinated brain oscillations, but noted that the synchronization could have been the result of the similarities of the actions performed by the pairs of musicians.

As the new study involved guitarists who were performing different parts of a song, the researchers say their results provide stronger evidence that there is a neural basis for interpersonal coordination. The team believes people’s brain waves might also synchronize during other types of actions, such as during sports games.

The study was published online Nov. 29 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

http://www.livescience.com/25117-musicians-brains-sync-up-during-duet.html