Most of us will get lost from time to time. But, nevertheless, our brains are actually pretty amazing at navigating. Even when you zone out on your daily commute, your brain is still able to get you there safely. This is thanks in part to your place cells.

Place cells are brain cells that respond to a particular location in the environment and become active when you are in that location. Researchers discovered them by putting rats in a square chamber and watching them run around. They monitoredwhen and where the rats' place cellswere active. By doing this, they could determine what location each place cell was responding to, called the cell's "place field." These place fields are usually circles of 15-25 inches in diameter for rats and mice.

These experiments taught us a lot about how place cells work, but they are not a great representation of the real world. A barren, square, white box is an unlikely environment for a rat, let alone a human, to encounter in the wild. How do your place cells represent locations in a real life, 3D world?

The 3D lattice used in the experiment

Grieves et al 2019. "The place-cell representation of volumetric space in rats."

Roddy M. Grieves, a neuroscientist at University College London, has designed a new rat navigation experiment to answer this question. Hebuilt a cubic lattice, a 3D grid that the rats could climb in any direction they pleased. They couldnt just move along the floor, but also vertically up and down.

Grieves and his colleagues wondered what the place fields of place cells would look like in such an environment. They posed two hypotheses. The first was that the place field might now look like cylinders, so one place cell would respond to a location parallel to the ground, regardless of high in the lattice the rate had climbed. The second was that the place fields would become spheres, so the place cell would take height into account and only respond when the rat was at a particular location along the ground and at a particular height. This hypothesis comes from research in Egyptian fruit bats, whose place cells have such spherical place fields.

The researchers discovered that place cells in rats roughly followed the second hypothesis: their place fields took the shape of elongated spheres, like rugby balls. The elongation was always along one of the three directions the rat could run in the wire frame lattice. Generally speaking, the place fields were more stretched in the vertical direction than they were horizontally. This is important, because it means that the cells are less accurate in this direction. In other words, the place cells were less precise in knowing how far up the rat was in space than where it was within the lattice on the ground.

This may be because rats are more inclined to move horizontally than vertically. Of course they can climb, but they tend to spend most of their time walking along the floor. Their place cells may just not be optimized for vertical movement. Another reason the place cells may be worse in the vertical direction is that it is physically harder for the rats to run in this direction. This makes it more difficult for them to gauge how far theyve traveled.

This research may give us an insight how the human brain performs navigation, because the human hippocampus, which is critical to navigation, is similar to that of rats. And like rats, we are mammals who generally navigate predominantly in a 2D environment. However, our environment is becoming more and more 3D, with tall buildings, bridges, and underground structures.

These findings in rats suggest that our brains are mainly tuned to the direction were used to navigating: parallel to the ground. Since most of our world is laid out flat in front of us, like the floors in buildings, this makes sense. Even if we fly a plane or drive a submarine we are often still moving parallel to the ground. But this might not always be the case.

Examples of different shaped 3D place fields, with (L-R) one, two, three, or four place fields visible.

Grieves et al 2019. "The place-cell representation of volumetric space in rats."

One possible future scenario where humans would be truly navigating in 3D would be in outerspace. Without gravity there would not be a single direction that would be relatively easier or harder to move along, such as the vertical axes for the rats. As of now, we dont know what our place cells might do in such a situation and, more importantly, whether we would be able to navigate around as efficiently as we do in our 2D world.

Both on Earth and in space the design of the environment ultimately has a big impact on our ability to navigate. We are better able to navigate if there are plenty of landmarks around to tell us where we are. We can orient ourselves more easily if a space is not symmetrical. We also navigate better through an environment if we have experienced it from different angles.

Knowing how we find our way around, especially in complex environments, has major implications for the fields of architecture and urban design. It should also be taken into account by engineers and anyone who designs the spaces around us. The goal of research into navigation is not just to understand how our brain works, but also to use this information to make the world around us more suitable for navigation.

This collaboration between neuroscience and urban design is combined in the burgeoning idea of conscious cities: environments built to take the needs and behaviors of humans into account. As our cities are getting larger and more complex, neuroscience research will become increasingly important in guiding their design.

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You live in a mostly 2D world, but the map in your brain charts the places you've been in 3D - Massive Science

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- A new theory on the source of consciousness has been published. It proposes that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of magnetic fields. Feedback between consciousness and perception is an essential feature of all experience. The human brain contains 5 million organically-formed magnetite crystals per gram. Each of these has a north and south pole, serving as in/out information channels, the basis for awareness. The brain's magnetic fields are extremely complex, and capable of supporting vast feedback mechanisms. They broadcast their information throughout the brain at a fraction of the speed of light, unifying conscious experience.

The brain experiences its own activity through its magnetism, and subjective experiences are actually the brain's magnetic field, resonating with the brain's electrical activity.

Consciousness is how magnetic each pole of a magnetic field experiences the other. Both the earth, with its geomagnetic field, and ordinary magnets, with just two poles, are conscious, but in such a rudimentary way that no one could imagine what they might experience.

Invoking the basic laws for electricity and magnetism ("Maxwell's Equations"), Prof. Todd Murphy points out that electrical currents (including the ones that run through brain cells), create magnetism, which influence the brain's magnetic fields. Its conscious magnetic field(s) "pick up," or resonate with, the brain's electrical activity, receiving its information and making organisms conscious of both mind and body. The brain may choose what to be aware of according to the information in its ongoing electrical signals and magnetic fields, possibly through specific signals that appear in response to potentially important events, especially threats and opportunities.

Prof. Todd Murphy, associated with Laurentian University's Neuroscience Program since 1998, also proposes that simple magnetic fields, from fewer magnets, support simple consciousness, such as in invertebrates with rudimentary senses (like an eye that only detects light or darkness). More complex consciousness, like that of humans or other primates, would require more developed nervous systems, and much larger numbers of magnetite crystals. Their greater nuances of thought and emotion give humans more to be aware of.

It will be a challenge to prove absolutely, because science can't prove that anything is conscious. The only way to know consciousness exists is through subjective experiences, which aren't admissible as scientific evidence. However, Murphy proposes several tests that would tend to support his theory.

Murphy's paper, "Solving the "Hard Problem":Consciousness as an Intrinsic Property of Magnetic Fields" appears in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research. He's also published several journal articles, and three books in neuroscience.

Todd Murphy can be contacted at: 229184@email4pr.com or (415) 368-3667His author page can be seen here:https://tinyurl.com/murphy-todd

End.Kirschivink, Joseph L., (et al.). "Magnetite biomineralization in the Human Brain", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 1992, 89 7683-7687

Murphy, Todd "Solving the "Hard Problem": Consciousness as an Intrinsic Property of Magnetic Fields" Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 2019, 10(8) p. 800-813Link: https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/835/850

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SOURCE Todd Murphy

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Neuroscience Researcher Todd Murphy Says: Consciousness is the Subjective Experience of the Brain's Magnetic Fields - P&T Community

Michael J. Moore, center, a professor of biomedical engineering in the Tulane School of Science and Engineering, is leading a team of researchers on a project called the HEAL Initiative, or Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative. Researchers include Jeffrey Tasker, the Catherine and Hunter Pierson Chair in Neuroscience, left, and James Zadina, director of the Neuroscience Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and an adjunct professor of medicine at the Tulane School of Medicine. (Photo by Matthew Hinton)

A Tulane University researcher is joining more than 40 universities from across the United States in looking for ways to improve treatment of chronic pain and ultimately achieve long-term recovery from opioid addiction.

Michael J. Moore, professor of biomedical engineering in the Tulane School of Science and Engineering, is part of a $945 million National Institutes of Health project called the HEAL Initiative, or Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative.

In 2016, an estimated 50 million U.S. adults suffered from chronic pain and in 2018, an estimated 10.3 million people 12 years and older misused opioids, including heroin.

This is indeed an exciting opportunity to work on a problem of great public health significance to our nation.

Tulane biomedical engineering professor Michael J. Moore

Its clear that a multi-pronged scientific approach is needed to reduce the risks of opioids, accelerate development of effective non-opioid therapies for pain and provide more flexible and effective options for treating addiction to opioids, NIH Director Francis S. Collins said in a statement. This unprecedented investment in the NIH HEAL Initiative demonstrates the commitment to reversing this devastating crisis.

Moores share of the project is $1.2 million. He will be teaming up with Jeffrey Tasker, the Catherine and Hunter Pierson Chair in Neuroscience, and James Zadina, director of the Neuroscience Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Medical Center and an adjunct professor of medicine at the Tulane School of Medicine.

This is indeed an exciting opportunity to work on a problem of great public health significance to our nation, Moore said.

The management of pain both acute and chronic can be a frustratingly futile endeavor for both patients and clinicians, Moore said. Desperate attempts at treatment with opioids and other narcotics has led to a heartbreaking and calamitous epidemic of addiction to prescription painkillers.

The epidemic has prompted federal agencies and the pharmaceutical industry to work toward identifying the next generation of painkillers. Unfortunately, Moore said, there are few adequate model systems currently in use to enable rapid screening of the analgesic properties of drug candidates.

Moores proposal seeks to develop the first model of pain that utilizes living human cells on a computer chip, mimicking the transmission of pain and enabling the evaluation of the cellular basis of tolerance to certain drugs. Moore said the model will eventually enable experimental drugs to be screened in a way that is faster, less expensive and more effective.

He and his team are collaborating with Randolph Ashton, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, and Swaminathan Rajaraman, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Central Florida. Ashton is developing human stem-cell derived spinal neurons, and Rajaraman is developing specially-made microelectrodes for taking electrical measurements from the cells.

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Tulane team researching ways to end opioid addiction - News from Tulane

LEDERACH, Pa., Nov. 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --Victory Nutrition International Inc. ("VNI") announces its newest published paper in the Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience:"Death by Opioids: Are there non-addictive scientific solutions?"

According to the published paper, the number of prescription opioids sold in America has quadrupled since 2000, with prescription opioid fatalities more than quadrupling in the same period of time.Moreover, the paper reports that a recent analytical report from Stanford University projects that currently available treatment, prevention, and public health approaches will result in 510,000 deaths from prescription opioids and street heroin between the years of 2016 to 2025 in the U.S.1

The published paper also reports that the excessively high relapse rates in the U.S. demonstrate that current treatment approaches have failed to help addicted patients on opioids have better outcomes and improved quality of life in recovery. Essentially, the authors conclude that since greater financial incentives and insurance coverages are available from longer-term treatment programs, a serious ethical dilemma can exist for scientists, clinicians, and counselors in the Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS) treatment community to explore scientifically validated non-medical options.2

Moreover, the authors ask the fundamental question that since most rehabilitation programs use opioid therapy to treat opioid addiction, should we continue to provide opioid treatment therapy for opioid recovery in the long term? While it is by default believed that most clinics and physicians want to do the right thing to reduce recidivism rates3, they and other healthcare professionals need to reexamine the routine practice of prescribing opioids for pain and recovery.

New exciting modalities supported by a significant amount of validating scientific research, such as the Genetic Addiction Risk Score [GARS] coupled with the precision KB220Z, certainly need to be implemented in all treatment programs in America. Anything less will ultimately retain and proliferate failed "revolving door" treatment programs for as many as 90% of returning treatment participants. It is time to adhere to genuine scientific principles.

1. Srivastava AB, Gold MS (2018) Beyond supply: How we must tackle the opioid epidemic. Mayo Clin Proc 93: 269-272. [Crossref]2. Blum K, Chen ALC, Thanos PK (2018) Genetic addiction risk score (GARS), a predictor of vulnerability to opioid dependence. Front Biosci (Elite Ed) 10: 175-196.3. Makani R, Pradhan B, Shah U, Parikh T (2017) Role of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rtms) in treatment of addiction and related disorders: A systematic review. Curr Drug Abuse Rev 10: 31-43.

About The Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience

Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience is a bimonthly open access journal with a comprehensive peer review policy and a very rapid publication process. The journal is primarily focused on research examining the complex interplay among the brain, behavior, and environment, utilizing multiple levels of analysis. These include behavioral, electrophysiological, pharmacological, cellular, genetic, molecular, and neural-network model approaches.

For more information, please visit https://www.oatext.com/Journal-of-Systems-and-Integrative-Neuroscience-jsin.php.

About GARS

VNI's DNA-Designed Precision Nutrition Genetic Addiction Risk Score (GARS)is a Disruptive Technological Breakthrough in Nutritional Support for Your Brain.

For more information, please visithttps://vni.life/partner/corporate/product/18132.

About Victory Nutrition International, Inc. (VNI)

VNI was launched in January 2014, and its founders are biochemists, formulators and published researchers. VNI produces high-quality, well-researched products with unique, exclusive,and patent-pending formulas. Their first-to-market products are made with premium-quality, research-driven, safety-affirmed ingredients encapsulated in an advanced absorption technology. VNI products are validated by peer-reviewed published clinical studies.

For more information, please visitwww.vni.life.

Contact Information

Bill DownsVictory Nutrition InternationalInc.Founder and CEO(215) 872-3334billd@vni.life

Jeff HooksVictory Nutrition InternationalInc.President and COO(919) 868-6988jeff@vni.life

Press Contact:Suzanne BradyDirector of Marketing(866) 881-1624suzanne@vni.life

SOURCE Victory Nutrition International

http://www.vni.life

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VNI Announces Its Newest Published Paper in the Journal of Systems and Integrative Neuroscience: 'Death by Opioids: Are There Non-Addictive Scientific...

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Global Neuroscience Antibodies and Assays Market 2019 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2025 - Breaking News Updates

Youd like to be on time, but no matter how hard you try, youre never less than fiveminutes late. Youve promised to meet a friend for coffee, but to your dismay, you realize theres no way youll get there within anywhere near that five-minute average.How are you going to explain your lateness this time?

Well, you can come up with all sorts of reasons, from traffic to an unexpected phone callor the need to answer an emergency email. However, this particular episode of lateness relates to a larger problem you have with procrastination. Deadlines come up at work or in your home life, but they dont seem real until the actual date or time is upon you.

Psychology tries to explain procrastination through a variety of theories. From the psychodynamic point of view, your constant stalling is due to a neurotic and self-defeating need to fail. Being late and missing mostdeadlines ensures that you will be regarded as unreliable, almost guaranteeing failure at work and in relationships.

Being overly narcissistic can be another source of procrastination. You love waiting until the last minute so you can make a grand entrance as everyone else is left waiting and wondering where you are.

Its also possible, though, that your brain is wired to make lateness an inherent part of your psychological makeup. According to a new study by Shunmin Zhang and colleagues (2019) of Southwest University, Chongqing, China, It is generally accepted that procrastination is a voluntary but irrational delay of intended courses of action (pp. 1-2). The authors summarize contemporary personality theories, which place the blame not on neurotic needs but on the personality traits of low self-control and high impulsivity. However, the Chinese research team believes that there are cognitive explanations of procrastination that are just as, if not more, valuable in understanding the causes of procrastination.

To understand the brain's role in procrastination, Zhang et al. begin by describingthe contrasting explanation of two cognitive approaches. The emotion-regulation perspective, as the term implies, proposes that people procrastinate when they let their short-term goal of putting off something they dont want to do outweigh the long-term benefits of getting the task accomplished. In other words, the benefits of avoiding task-induced aversiveness trump the benefits of the delayed rewards the task can yield (p. 2).

Conversely, motivation-based theory regards procrastination as due to an increase in motivation to act as the deadline looms. This theory, referred to as temporal discounting, proposes that the further away an event is temporally, the less impact it has (p. 2). You dont see that deadline of three weeks away as something to worry about, and only act when the weeks dwindle to days or even hours. As compelling as these cognitive approaches may seem on their own, though, the authors believe both motivation and emotion form part of the procrastination picture.

The Chinese authors believe, instead, that these psychological theories together can provide the answers in one temporal decision model. Whether you act now or in the future depends on whether the motivation to act outweighs the motivation to avoid. Heres where your brain steps in to explain your constant lateness. The emotional aversiveness piece of procrastination comes from the activity of the parahippocampus (involved in memory), which remembers how aversive the task was in the past (i.e., you really dont like that friend you were supposed to meet for coffee).Indeed, Zhang et al. maintain that this tiny piece of brain tissue provides one of the most solid neural underpinnings underlying trait procrastination (p. 11).

This is because the parahippocampus additionally communicates with other neighboring brain regions in the limbic system. In procrastinators, this whole region works together to amplify an events aversiveness. In people who dont procrastinate the brain sends out fewer emotional alarms about the upcoming and potentially unpleasant task.

Next, the temporal discounting piece in procrastination kicks in, leading procrastinators to feel less motivated to get started on an event that seems far away. Zhang et al. cite research showing that procrastinators may have less neural tissue in the prefrontal area of the brain (involved in planning and impulse control), making it more difficult for them to self-regulate their use of time. Without the ability to self-regulate, youll find it more difficult to pace yourself as you try to achieve a goal within the allotted time limits. Chronic procrastinators can only think of is how boring, frustrating, or unfulfilling the task will be until the inevitable comes along and they have no choice but to tackle it. Again, returning to the meeting with your friend, you may have started with plenty of time to get there at the appointed hour, but as the clock ticked down, you became more reluctant to get yourself organized enough to actually get out the door.

Although you might be tempted to use the temporal decision theory as an excuse for your lateness, or even to attribute your chronic lateness to insufficient gray matter, there are other ways to interpret this neuroscience-basedexplanation. If you know youre a procrastinator, you dont have to give in to the faulty brain waves youre receiving. Recognize the need to learn from your experiences and put into your memory bank the problems procrastination has caused you. Conversely, realizing that you tend to emphasize the negative aspects of tasks that you know must be completed, try to frame them in a more positive light. The basic premises of cognitive behavioral therapy can also be of use. Give yourself some basic rewards for getting things done on time, replacing your negative with positive associations.

To sum up, chronic procrastination may have its roots in many sources. By knowing the brain structures potentially underlying the inability to look a deadline in the eye, you dont have to suffer a lifetime of lateness.

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What Are the Neural Roots of Procrastination? - Psychology Today

Anyone who specializes in neurosciences R&D has to prepare themselves for some frustration along the way. And the team at Arkuda Therapeutics can tell you all about it.

The CEO and co-founder is Gerhard Koenig, who you may recall headed up the team at Quartet Medicines, which worked on neuronal and inflammatory cells, until they folded the shop after running into a blind alley. Before that, he was CSO at Forum, which Deborah Dunsire now CEO at Lundbeck had helmed as it tried to break new ground in Alzheimers and schizophrenia.

It didnt work out either.

But even though Atlas closed the checkbook on Quartet, Bruce Booth never blamed the crew. You want to try something cutting edge here, you pay your money and you take your chances. And sometimes you write off your losses.

Thats biotech.

So now Koenig and some of the execs hes known along the way are back, knocking the door on a new approach to neurodegeneration, another high-risk, high-reward play where they are looking to break new ground. And Booth has been bankrolling the incubator work in hopes of seeing a new venture fly.

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Some battle tested neuroscience vets are going all out on early onset dementia with a $44M launch round to build the team - Endpoints News