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Physiology

Why Trying Things May Be The Answer To Find Your Talent – Forbes

Two of my favorite books about human performance are written by David Epstein, one of the very best science writers in the world, due to his unusual ability to pair elegant prose with accurate summaries of scientific research. The first book, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, focused largely on talent and focus in sports, whereas the second book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, focused largely on the importance of domain sampling and later specialization in a wide range of performance domains. Thus, when reading the two books side by side you get an integrated perspective on these issues. In an earlier interview for Psychology Today we primarily discussed sports, but this time around we talked about how his thinking has evolved since the writing of his first book.

In The Sports Gene you highlighted the importance of talent and focus, but in Range you highlighted the importance of sampling and later specialization. Can you discuss how you think about performance from these two seemingly opposite perspectives?

The Sports Gene

This might sound surprising, but some of what led me to writeRangecame out of questions I got about talent afterThe Sports Gene. Second to people who wanted to argue about my critique of the 10,000-hours rule, probably the most common question I got was from parents or coaches asking how to identify the sport or training plan that best fit their child or someone they were training. I think a lot of that came from the "Big Bang of Body Types" chapter that described research on how the physiology of elite athletes rapidly became more specific to particular athletic niches. Basically, as sports spread aroundthe world and becamemore competitive, more people were essentially screenedout of a given sport (at the elite level) by physiological factors. (The same goes for training, by the way. As sports have become more competitive, more people are screened out by either physiology or training. A century ago you might show up at the Olympics and be the only person with elite talent or the only person who knew anything about training, and you might win. Not so today, obviously.) So to get back to the link between the books, parents were asking me what lab measures their kids should get to determine whether their kid can be a pro athlete, or what sport they should try in. Well, there are a lot of factors other than the physiological parameters I mentioned that matter, and even when physiology is ante for the game, it often doesn't tell you much more than that. If you blinded sports scientists to the identity of sprinters at the Olympics and let them have whatever physiological data they wanted, it wouldn't help them predict who's going to win. It's just too multifactorial and complex.

Long story short, I realized that having a sampling period in which an athlete can try a variety of activities is a better way for them to help find the place where they fitphysiologically and psychologicallythan any lab test one can give. I must say, I did not expect that the sports science would also show skill development benefits to sport diversitylike in studies that matched athletes for ability at a certain age, and then followed them as they focused or diversifiedso that was a surprise to me. I thought the power of the sampling period would just be about talent matching. And I think that's important, but I came to believe there's more to it. (That's not even to mention durability. I spent some time with the physiologist for Cirque du Soleil, and he told me that they created a program to diversify the movement patterns in their training of performers, and it cut their injury rates by a third.) But as far as the bridge fromThe Sports GenetoRange, it was around that question of how you find match quality in a situation that isn't reducible to simple measurements. As I quoted Howard Finster, the legendary artist who discovered he could paint at age 59: "A person dont know what he can do unless he tries. Trying things is the answer to find your talent."

The Sports Gene focused, understandably, on sports, but Range provided a look at performance in all kinds of domains. In doing research for and writing these books, what did you learn about the similarities or differences in what goes into extraordinary performance across domains?

Range

The main differenceand I realized this less explicitly when my own career as a college athlete endedis that in many ways sports make the hardest parts of life easier. When I tell people I was an 800-meter runner in college, they tend to say "Oh that's the hardest event!" (I disagree, but that's another story). Let's say it is. The hard parts are still in many ways easier than almost all of the work world. The next steps and goals tend to be extremely clear. Progress is often very easy to measure. The rules never change. Tried and true systems that have been in place for years or decades are there to support you, etc. etc. Much of the time, you can turn your brain off and just make sure to be tough and resilient and consistent in training. And if you have a strong team culture, even that becomes not so difficult. In fact, sometimes it even helps to not think so much and outsource the thinking parts of what you're doing to, say, coaches. (Not always, but sometimes.) Some sports are the epitome of what psychologist Robin Hogarth called "kind learning environments"; clear goals, unchanging rules, quick and accurate feedback. There are absolutely principles and lessons from sports that can transfer to anything we do, but we also have to be careful about extrapolating too much. Most of the work that most of us do isn't necessarily in kind learning environments. We may have to figure out our own next steps and goals; rules may be unclear or change; feedback may be absent, delayed, or inaccurate, and work next year won't look like work last year.

Silver medalist figure skater Sasha Cohen captured this beautifully in a New York Times op-ed:Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports. Yes, striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in competition is different from the new challenges that await you. So after you retire, travel, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little too late, devote time to something that doesnt have a clear end goal. In a nutshell, I think resilience and matching your work to your talents and interests are extremely important in both sports and other areas. But whereas refusing to change course no matter what comes is often a virtue in sports, opportunistic course changes are often where the competitive advantages in the rest of the work world reside. I'd say I'm something of a student of science history, and I think you probably are too, and I think many of the most important breakthroughs have come from actionsshifting focus to some unexpected but interesting oddity; starting and abandoning many different projects; pursuing curiosities with unclear goals or utilitythat would have cost those innovators points on the grit scale.

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Why Trying Things May Be The Answer To Find Your Talent - Forbes

Physiology

Study finds 3 key qualities needed to break the 2-hour marathon – Runner’s World (UK)

Eliud Kipchoges 1.59 marathon showed us it was possible, but now a new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology has revealed the specific combination of physiological abilities required to have a chance of running a sub-two-hour marathon.

The research, conducted by Professor Andrew Jones at the University of Exeter was based on data from extensive testing of the athletes including Kipchoge who were involved in Nikes Breaking2 project. The project culminated in Kipchoge missing the 2-hr barrier by a mere 26 seconds on the Monza F1 race track before he went on to his sublime 1:59:40.2 at the Ineos 1:59 challenge in Vienna last year.

The requirements of a two-hour marathon have been extensively debated, but the actual physiological demands have never been reported before, says Jones, who also worked extensively with Paula Radcliffe throughout her career and in the build up to her London Marathon World record.

We see in the physiology of these runners a perfect balance of characteristics for the marathon.'

According to Jones, the findings reveal that the worlds best marathon runners have a perfect balance of three factors:

Its the combination of these qualities, rather than one particular stellar reading, that is key according to Jones. Some of the results particularly the VO2 max were not actually as high as we expected, says Jones. Instead, what we see in the physiology of these runners is a perfect balance of characteristics for marathon performance.

Drilling down into the data, the individual numbers measured in Kipchoge and the other athletes were, of course, hugely impressive. The elite runners were shown to be capable of taking in oxygen twice as fast at the required marathon pace as an average person of the same age.

To maintain a two-hour marathon pace of 21.1 km/h, the study found that a 59kg runner would need to take in about four litres of oxygen per minute (or 67ml per kg of weight per minute). To run for two hours at this speed, athletes must maintain what we call 'steady-state' VO2, says Jones. This means they meet their entire energy needs aerobically, rather than relying on anaerobic respiration which depletes carbohydrate stores in the muscles faster and leads to more rapid fatigue.

The second key characteristic is running economy, which refers to how efficiently the body uses the oxygen it takes in both internally and through an effective running action.

The third trait, known as lactate turn point, is the percentage of VO2 max a runner can sustain before anaerobic respiration begins. If and when this happens, carbohydrates in the muscles are used at a high rate, rapidly depleting glycogen stores, Jones explains.

At this point which many marathon runners may know as 'the wall' the body has to switch to burning fat, which is less efficient and ultimately means the runner slows down.

Of course, understanding the theory from the lab data is one thing, but putting into practice precisely in a marathon is an additional challenge. And this is another area where the elite runners were found to excel. The runners we studied 15 of the 16 from East Africa seem to know intuitively how to run just below their 'critical speed', close to the 'lactate turn point' but never exceeding it, says Jones.

'The runners seem to know intuitively how to run just be to run just below their critical speed.'

This is especially challenging because even for elite runners the turn point drops slightly over the course of a marathon, and its not possible to measure this in the lab. Having said that, we suspect that the very best runners in this group, especially Eliud Kipchoge, show remarkable fatigue resistance.

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Study finds 3 key qualities needed to break the 2-hour marathon - Runner's World (UK)

Physiology

Teaching assistants reflect on instruction in a pandemic – Arizona Daily Wildcat

From words muffled by masks, to dancers on hiatus, to socially distant hands-on help, graduate teaching assistants experience a variety of challenges teaching amidst a pandemic this semester at the University of Arizona.

The UA opted for an on-ramp approach to deliver in-person instruction for fall 2020. Stage one classes for fall included labs, and fine and performing arts studios, with more classes expected to be added to the stage one category next spring.

Stage one classes were taught predominantly by graduate teaching assistants; in the physics department, all labs over 30 sections are taught by teaching assistants. All sections of Physiology 201 lab are taught by graduate teaching assistants. Meanwhile, school of dance in-person classes are mostly, but not all, taught by faculty.

One mandatory safety measure implemented for in-person teaching was mask-wearing, which is an effective way of minimizing the spread of the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, masks present a challenge for effective communication in classrooms that are not equipped with microphones.

When I am teaching, I raise my voice more than what I would normally do, so students can hear me, said Edgar Salazar-Canizales, teaching assistant for the UA Physics Department. Students arent as aware of this and sometimes they ask questions in a really low voice and its really hard to hear.

Another novel factor with in-person settings is the need to socially distance. TAs said it requires real creativity to guide the students verbally and from a distance while teaching a hands-on lab. Students often struggle with the material and TAs are limited in the ways they can assist them.

Its definitely a little bit difficult doing the in-person as far as not being able to help students with hands-on things like microscopes," said Kyle Filicetti, a teaching assistant for Physiology 201. "If they are having trouble focusing the microscopes, we are not allowed to approach them.

Particularly for Physiology 201, what normally would be a three-hour long lab, has been reformatted to 45 minutes with fewer numbers of students in each section.

For Physiology 201, each teaching assistant has two sections of 30 students, each subdivided in sections of 10 students. In these labs they work with microscopes, look at bone anatomy and do dissections, all in under one hour.

I suddenly now have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what is the most important thing that I have to highlight in this essentially 35-minute class because we also have to make sure we have time left over for cleaning, said Keila Soto Espinoza, another physiology TA.

An added duty for teaching assistants this semester is keeping track of students who are in quarantine or isolating and supporting students who are missing labs. Salazar-Canizales said that it seems like every student will have to miss a lab at some point either because they were exposed or have the virus. By mid-semester, six of his 22 students needed to quarantine.

Filicetti, in physiology, pointed out there is extra administrative work involved when a student tests positive. They need to inform the department, communicate back and forth with the student while supporting them with deadline extensions and emailing the people in charge of moving those deadlines in D2L.

Aside from sick students, TAs have reported a lot more administrative work this fall with office hours, assignments and other forms of communications needing to be delivered in an online setting.

I think a lot of us are having issues with grading online, Filicetti said. We do a decent amount of grading and every time I go in and grade something I have to wait for it to download.

In addition, teachers have reported that there is a higher volume of emails needed without frequent in-class communication.

Its more than I ever thought," Filicetti said. "Just the administrative side of teaching is quite difficult online.

In the UA Physics Department, it is unclear what would happen if instructors were to get sick. The department told teaching assistants that if they miss a lab, another TA will cover for them. But then they would have to cover that other teaching assistant another time. If someone misses several lab sessions due to sickness, TAs said, the department will deal with it when it arises.

Teachers working in other departments report different challenges and implemented safety measures. In the UA School of Dance, faculty, graduate students and students attending in-person classes must get tested for the virus once a week, a protocol not mandatory for some other in-person classes.

If you miss your test of the week, your test time, then you are not allowed in the studio until you get your next test result, said Ilana Jonas, teaching assistant for the School of Dance. All students agreed before classes started that they would cooperate and test once a week.

A challenge specific to dance majors is the interruption in training. Dancers require strict workout routines and stamina to succeed in their dance programs. Hiatus can present physical risks for them.

One of my concerns was just bringing them back into taking class in a safe way, just because they had taken time off, Jonas said. They have done really well with that, but that was one consideration they hadnt done pointe work in six months and Im sure none of them had ever taken a break that long.

Whether in dance, physics or physiology, all the teaching assistants appreciated the COVID-19 testing available through the university. And despite the many challenges, all said they generally felt safe with the university safety measures implemented.

I dont think there is anything else I would really add to the safety protocol, Jonas said, reflecting what other teachers reported. Everyone has just thought of every possible scenario.

Jonas said she was a little nervous to be back in the classroom at first, But being in the studio and seeing the cooperation of the students with all of the protocols that have been put into place I was pleasantly surprised of how safe it felt to be in the studio."

Cynthia Bujanda is a graduate student in the applied bioscience program at the University of Arizona. Follow Cynthia Bujanda on Twitter

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Teaching assistants reflect on instruction in a pandemic - Arizona Daily Wildcat

Physiology

Jeff Krushell Interviews Thought Technology Ltd. Co-Founder Lawrence Klein on the Company’s History in the Field of Peak Performance Training -…

MONTREAL, Quebec, Nov. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --Podcaster and performance consultant, Jeff Krushell, interviews Thought Technology, Ltd Co-Founder, Lawrence Klein, in the final podcast of his series "The Krush Brain Game" where he explores the role of the brain body connection in optimal performance training.

Asked about his focus on the brain, Jeff replied, "We know the brain is a huge piece of the performance puzzle and new advances in technology are not only allowing us to map and track brain performance like never before but also allowing us to train the brain IN REAL TIME and in ways that we have NEVER been able to until recently."

Thought Technology's products have been used by Olympic and professional athletes and other high performers for decades. A key component in peak performance training is learning to keep stress at bay, so that both mind and body can focus a hundred percent on the task at hand. According to Lawrence Klein, "Each individual processes stress differently. A psychophysiological stress assessment looks at multiple modalities such as heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance, temperature, and muscle tension. When you are able to measure the body's physiological reaction to stress, you can learn to change how it responds and over time can call upon this skill whenever needed."

Included in this ongoing series, are interviews with several influential people from the biofeedback field including: Dr. Erik Peper, psychologist, author and president of the Biofeedback Federation of Europe; Dr. Inna Khazan who combines the use of biofeedback and mindfulness.

Click here to listen to Jeff Krushell's interview with Lawrence Klein.

About Jeff Krushell Jeff Krushell is the founder of Krush Performance and an Athlete Development Specialist & Organizational Performance Consultant. He is regarded as a noted expert in the area of talent development in sport and through his work has gained unique insights into the process of improving performance. Over the last 25 years Jeff has worked in the world of high-performance sport helping athletes tap into their potential to truly understand what it is like to achieve Human Maximum Performance. Jeff currently consults for Major League Baseball International; CTV News, Edmonton; Vauxhall Baseball Academy; Link Management and has previously worked as the strength and conditioning coach for both the Toronto Blue Jays and Edmonton Eskimos.

About Lawrence Klein In addition to being the Co- Founder of Thought Technology Ltd. with Dr. Hal Myers (1974), Lawrence Klein is:

About Thought Technology Ltd. Founded in 1975, Thought Technology is the world's leading biofeedback and physiological instrument manufacturer. Its products are used as an essential part of many therapeutic treatments and clinical assessment protocols in over 85 countries and are used by tens of thousands of clinicians in thousands of medical institutions.

Always supportive of new research and development ideas, Thought Technology Ltd. has encouraged a number of special interest groups and clinicians to create cutting edge applications for its instrumentation. Thought Technology Ltd. equipment is now being used in telemedicine, web-based monitoring and biofeedback, sports training, research in human-machine interface, physiology-driven multimedia environments and virtual reality. Constantly striving to improve the quality of the products and services, TTL has obtained, and maintains, ISO 13485, and CE certification for the organization and products.

Media Contact

Helen Mavros, Thought Technology Ltd., 514-489-8251, helen@thoughttechnology.com

SOURCE Thought Technology Ltd.

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Jeff Krushell Interviews Thought Technology Ltd. Co-Founder Lawrence Klein on the Company's History in the Field of Peak Performance Training -...

Physiology

Virginia Tech Scientists Provide New Evidence of Elusive Electrical Pathway in the Heart – Newswise

Newswise These days having both a land line and a mobile phone seems like overkill. But Virginia Tech researchers have shown that the heart relies on at least two key communication channels to keep abnormal heart rhythms in check.

In a study published in the American Journal of Physiology Heart and Circulatory Physiology, Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC scientists reveal further evidence of the nuanced interplay between two prominent cell-to-cell communication pathways that could influence how patients fare during a heart attack.

The research team, led by associate professor Steven Poelzing, discovered it could improve irregular heart rhythms even when the hearts blood supply was completely shut off just by altering concentrations of common electrolytes in the bloodstream. This discovery could have important implications for the prevention and treatment of heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Millions of Americans take anti-arrhythmic medications or suffer from heart disease. By shedding light on these basic physiological principles, our research could one day help us develop more effective medications and personalized saline solutions to help prevent dangerous arrhythmias, said Poelzing, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics in Virginia Techs College of Engineering. Our goal is to one day help cardiologists identify if a patient could be at higher or lower risk of developing a dangerous arrhythmia based on their blood chemistry.

Like a phone line, gap junctions are proteins that bridge two adjacent cells. These channels let small molecules, including ions, flow straight from one cell to the next, triggering the ripple of cellular contractions that allow our hearts to beat.

For roughly a century, scientists believed that these protein channels explained how the hearts electrical impulses passed from cell to cell. But within the past 15 years, mounting evidence has shown that gap junctions arent the only mechanism underlying electrical conduction in the heart. When researchers genetically knocked out most of the hearts gap junctions in mice, they were surprised to find that the test subjects were just as likely to live an ordinary lifespan as their healthy counterparts.

How can hearts to beat if most of the physical ports between their cells are missing? To answer this question, a theory ephaptic coupling has re-emerged.

Ephaptic coupling occurs within microscopic spaces wedged between two cell membranes. These pockets, called the perinexus, were first described by Fralin Biomedical Research Institute scientists in 2013 and span just one to two ten-thousandths of a millimeter. For the signaling to work, two cells need to be close enough to sense the electric field generated by their neighboring cell.

You can think of ephaptic coupling between cells in the context of magnets: When you have two magnets close together they are strongly attracted to each other due to the strength of the magnetic field; similarly, the closer two cells are to one another, the stronger the effect of the electric field will be on each other. But when you pull two magnets apart, you can feel the point where attraction weakens. The same thing happens with electric fields. When the space between cells increases, ephaptic coupling weakens, said Gregory Hoeker, a research assistant professor in Poelzings lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and the studys first author.

When blood stops flowing to the heart muscle, its tissues can swell up. This extra fluid between cells pushes the heart cells apart, expanding the width of the perinexus, and preventing ephaptic coupling.

In this new study, Poelzings team discovered how the spacing between heart muscle cells changes during a heart attack depends on the specific recipe of electrolytes calcium, sodium, and potassium present in the bloodstream. At the organ level, this prevents the heart beats from slowing down and becoming disorganized, which helps normalize the heart rhythm during a heart attack.

Were learning that a patients blood salt chemistry before and during a cardiac event is important and could impact their prognosis, Hoeker said. The data we have collected so far suggest that these two forms of electrical communication gap junction coupling and ephaptic coupling interact in complex ways. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they oppose one another. We believe this balance helps support safe conduction in the heart.

But there doesnt seem to be a one-size-fits-all cardioprotective cocktail of electrolytes. One patient may need more calcium and sodium, while another needs less. Small fluctuations in either direction can have a big impact on heart conduction depending on the patients baseline blood chemistry. Thats why Poelzing and his team are researching how different saline solutions, ranging from your common intravenous fluid drip bag to the wash that surgeons use during open heart surgeries, impact cardiac function and can contribute to arrhythmias.

The researchers say future experiments will examine how gap junctions and ephaptic coupling interact.

Our next research step is to take a multilayered approach, using peptide treatments to target gap junctions and different electrolyte fluids to modulate ephaptic coupling, so we can see how these systems work together during an event such as cardiac arrest, Hoeker said.

This research was funded by a Clinical Research Award in Honor of Mark Josephson and Hein Wellens granted by the Heart Rhythm Society (Hoeker) and the National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Poelzing).

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Virginia Tech Scientists Provide New Evidence of Elusive Electrical Pathway in the Heart - Newswise

Physiology

Western News – Four Western faculty named to Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list – Western News

November 19, 2020 By Communications Staff

Western researchers whose groundbreaking work has earned them a spot on the 2020 Highly Cited list: professors X. A. (Andy) Sun, Brian Feagan, Danielle Way and Klaus Meyer

Four Western faculty have been named to the Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list, released this week by Clarivate.

Materials engineering professor X.A. (Andy) Sun (materials science), Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Brian Feagan (clinical medicine category), biology professor Danielle Way (plant and animal science) and Ivey Business School professor Klaus Meyer (economics and business) have each been recognized for their work.

The annual list identifies researchers who have demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade.

Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top one per cent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.

Citations are one of the many ways our community demonstrates impact and reach,said Western vice-president (research), Lesley Rigg. Im particularly thrilled to see that we have researchers from four different faculties recognized on this list as it highlights the wealth of expertise we have across disciplines and across campus.

The methodology that determines the whos who of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. It also uses the tallies to identify the countries and research institutions where these scientific elite are based.

As Canada Research Chair in Development of Nanomaterials for Clean Energy, Andy Sun applies his expertise to the technical challenges of using fuel cells and lithium batteries to generate, store, and conserve clean energy.

Dr. Brian Feagan is a Schulich Medicine & Dentistry professor and scientist at Robarts Research Institute. He is an internal medicine specialist with training in clinical epidemiology and gastroenterology. His research interests focus on the design and implementation of randomized controlled trials of therapy for inflammatory bowel disease, and he has been the principal investigator on numerous multi-centre trials evaluating new treatments for the disease.

Danielle Way, an expert in global change biology, plant physiology and ecology, focuses on physiological responses to high temperatures, drought stress and changes in carbon dioxide concentration. Her goal is determining the mechanisms underpinning plant responses to global change at molecular and biochemical scales and the implications of these responses for the larger community and ecosystems.

A leading scholar in the field of international business, Klaus Meyer conducts research on the strategies of multinational enterprises, especially foreign entry strategies in emerging economies like Eastern Europe and East Asia.

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Western News - Four Western faculty named to Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list - Western News

Neuroscience

Virtual meets: Poppy Crum on the path from music through neuroscience to technology – E&T Magazine

Watch Poppy Crum discuss with E&T how everyone experiences the world differently and what that means for technology development.

"We have different experiences of the same stimulus, whether it's a physical stimulus or it's a sensory stimulus," says Poppy Crum, chief technologist for Dolby Laboratories, yet "a lot of technology has been built frankly for white men." So engineers and developers need to think about everyone, just as an artist would, or a Hollywood producer wants as manypeople as possible to enjoy their work. "If you're going to build something, don't you want it to work the way it should?"

Crum talks toE&T science writer Hilary Lamb about her transition from violinist to technology (and why they may have more in common than you might think), absolute pitch and neuroscience, innovation and awards. Crum is also on the advisory panel for the E&T Innovation Awards, which take place online this evening (19 November).

Sign up to the E&T News e-mail to get great stories like this delivered to your inbox every day.

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Virtual meets: Poppy Crum on the path from music through neuroscience to technology - E&T Magazine

Neuroscience

MedRhythms, Roux Institute Partner in the Fields of Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence – AiThority

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MedRhythms, Roux Institute Partner in the Fields of Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence - AiThority

Neuroscience

Neuroscience Meets Astrophysics: Does the Human Brain Resemble the Universe? – SciTechDaily

Left: section of cerebellum, with magnification factor 40x, obtained with electron microscopy (Dr. E. Zunarelli, University Hospital of Modena); right: section of a cosmological simulation, with an extension of 300 million light-years on each side (Vazza et al. 2019 A&A). Credit: University of Bologna

In their paper published in Frontiers of Physics, Franco Vazza (astrophysicist at the University of Bologna) and Alberto Feletti (neurosurgeon at the University of Verona) investigated the similarities between two of the most challenging and complex systems in nature: the cosmic network of galaxies and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain.

Despite the substantial difference in scale between the two networks (more than 27 orders of magnitude), their quantitative analysis, which sits at the crossroads of cosmology and neurosurgery, suggests that diverse physical processes can build structures characterized by similar levels of complexity and self-organization.

The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies. Within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies and neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both systems, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable Universe.

Starting from the shared features of the two systems, researchers compared a simulation of the network of galaxies to sections of the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum. The goal was to observe how matter fluctuations scatter over such diverse scales.

We calculated the spectral density of both systems. This is a technique often employed in cosmology for studying the spatial distribution of galaxies, explains Franco Vazza. Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the cerebellum neuronal network on a scale from 1 micrometer to 0.1 millimeters follows the same progression of the distribution of matter in the cosmic web but, of course, on a larger scale that goes from 5 million to 500 million light-years.

The two researchers also calculated some parameters characterizing both the neuronal network and the cosmic web: the average number of connections in each node and the tendency of clustering several connections in relevant central nodes within the network.

Once again, structural parameters have identified unexpected agreement levels. Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the striking and obvious difference between the physical powers regulating galaxies and neurons, adds Alberto Feletti. These two complex networks show more similarities than those shared between the cosmic web and a galaxy or a neuronal network and the inside of a neuronal body.

The encouraging results of this pilot study are prompting the researchers to think that new and effective analysis techniques in both fields, cosmology, and neurosurgery, will allow for a better understanding of the routed dynamics underlying the temporal evolution of these two systems.

This study was published in Frontiers of Physics with the title The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web. Its authors are Franco Vazza from the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Bologna, and Alberto Feletti from the Department of Neurosciences, Biomedicine, and Movement of the University of Verona.

Reference: The Quantitative Comparison Between the Neuronal Network and the Cosmic Web by F. Vazza and A. Feletti, 16 November 2020, Frontiers of Physics.DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2020.525731

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Neuroscience Meets Astrophysics: Does the Human Brain Resemble the Universe? - SciTechDaily

Neuroscience

Aarhus University to open new engineering and neuroscience research center – News-Medical.Net

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Nov 17 2020

A new cross-disciplinary center will develop brain-machine interface technologies. One of the goals is to develop the next generation of technology to monitor, diagnose, and treat brain diseases while at the same time developing brand new brain-inspired AI hardware.

On Monday the 8th of February 2021, Aarhus University will officially open its doors to ibrAIn - a new engineering and neuroscience research center. ibrAIn is the first center in Denmark with a goal to develop new brain interfacing technologies enabled by new artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

The center links will be part of NeuroCampus Aarhus (NCA), a research network already in place which brings together world-leading neuroscience research from Aarhus University (AU) and the Danish Neuroscience Center (DNC) at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH).

ibrAIn will be located at the newly established Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering under the Integrated Nanoelectronics research group and will bring together researchers from across AU and NCA. The center supports Aarhus University's strategy and vision to be an international leader in neuroscience research.

The ibrAIn center will provide a strong strategic link between the Faculty of Health and the Faculty of Technical Sciences. It's a perfect example of the university's leading, interdisciplinary research into neuroscience, and it showcases technical sciences at their best: How we can develop next-generation technologies in a synergetic link with other disciplines in the endeavour to make a difference for society."

Eskild Holm Nielsen, Dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences, Aarhus University

Associate Professor Farshad Moradi will be heading the new center. He is currently in charge of Integrated Nanoelectronics and ICElab, the research group's laboratory.

The group are among the pioneers in designing integrated circuits for biomedicine and are developing the next generation of technologies to drastically reduce energy consumption for integrated electronics. The group is currently running several Horizon 2020 funded projects within the fields of brain-inspired data processing, memory design, biomedicine and energy harvesting technologies.

For example, the team is leading the way in developing battery-less nanorobots that can use light to modulate neurons inside the brain and cure neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

The team is also developing novel AI hardware: A new type of computing system that mimics the structure of the brain and has the potential to massively improve the performance of state-of-the-art computer systems, while at the same time drastically lowering the energy consumption.

"The new centre and the collaboration with NeuroCampus Aarhus mark an important milestone for our research into the interface between electronics and the human brain. We see a huge potential in our research here at ibrAIn - both in terms of understanding and treating neurological diseases, and exploring the development of novel AI hardware that can change the game for computerised systems of the future," says Associate Professor Farshad Moradi.

Professor Jens Christian Hedemann Srensen, partner and chair at the Danish Neuroscience Center and NCA, agrees:

"We bring a long and great experience working with neuromodulation and treatments of neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease, tremor, epilepsy and spasticity by influencing the nervous system using various devices to the collaboration. Therefore, we're very much looking forward to being part of the ibrAIn centre, where Farshad Moradi is developing the next generation of these brain-machine interface technologies that we'll then translate into diagnostics and treatment at AUH and, ultimately, at hospitals worldwide," he says.

The new center will also play a role in AU's digitalisation strategy, which focuses partly on research into technologies and methods to better understand and interact with the human brain.

Due to the coronavirus situation, the opening of the center on 8 February 2021 will be an online event.

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Aarhus University to open new engineering and neuroscience research center - News-Medical.Net