UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Contrary to accepted knowledge, blood can bring more oxygen to mice brains when they exercise because the increased respiration packs more oxygen into the hemoglobin, according to an international team of researchers who believe that this holds true for all mammals.

"Standard thought was that mammalian blood is always completely saturated with oxygen," said Patrick J. Drew, Huck Distinguished Associate Professor of Neural Engineering and Neurosurgery and associate director of the Penn State Neuroscience Institute.

That would mean that the only way to get more oxygen to the brain would be to get more blood to the brain by increasing blood flow. The researchers were interested in seeing how brain oxygen levels were affected by natural behaviors, specifically exercise.

"We know that people change breathing patterns when doing cognitive tasks," said Drew. "In fact, respiration phase locks to the task at hand. In the brain, increases in neural activity usually are accompanied by increases in blood flow."

However, exactly what is happening in the body was unknown, so the researchers used mice who could chose to walk or run on a treadmill and monitored their respiration, neural activity, blood flow and brain oxygenation.

"We predicted that brain oxygenation would depend on neural activity and blood flow," said Qing Guang Zhang, postdoctoral fellow in engineering science and mechanics. "We expected the oxygenation would drop in the brain's frontal cortex if blood flow decreased.

"That was what we thought would happen, but then we realized it was the respiration that was keeping the oxygenation up."

The only way that could happen would be if exercise was causing the blood to carry more oxygen, he explained, which would mean that the blood was not normally completely saturated with oxygen.

The researchers looked at oxygenation in the somatosensory cortex and the frontal cortex which is an area involved in cognition and the olfactory bulb an area involved in the sense of smell because they are the most accessible areas of the brain.

They used a variety of methods to monitor respiration, blood flow and oxygenation. They also tested oxygenation levels while suppressing neural activity and blood vessel dilation.

The researchers report in today's (Dec. 4) issue of Nature Communications that "The oxygenation persisted when neural activity and functional hyperemia (blood flow increases) were blocked, occurred both in the tissue and in arteries feeding the brain, and were tightly correlated with respiration rate and the phase of respiration cycle."

They conclude that "respiration provides a dynamic pathway for modulating cerebral oxygenation."

Also working on this project at Penn State were Kyle W. Gheres, graduate student in molecular, cellular and integrative biosciences; Ravi Kedrasetti, doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics; and William D. Haselden, M.D./Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program and Neuroscience Graduate Program.

Others on the project include Morgane Roche, graduate student; Emmanuelle Chaigneau, postdoctoral researcher; and Serge Charpak, professor of neuroscience, all at the Institut de la Sant et de la Recherche Mdicale, Paris, France.

The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience and the National Institutes of Health supported this research.

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Respiration key to increase oxygen in the brain - Penn State News

A study conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behaviour (INHB) has concluded that motorcyclists are less stressed and more fulfilled than their four-wheeled counterparts.

The study originally set about trying to find out if bikers were constantly riding in fear of being involved in an accident, but inadvertently proved the opposite! The results centre around a certain hormone called cortisol that is released in the brain when we become anxious. Scientists found that bikers would produce 28% less cortisol during testing than drivers on the same course.

The study was conducted by INHB in a controlled manner, with 50 motorcyclists and 50 car drivers making their way around a closed course for 20-minutes. During this time, the team measured the users heart rate, cortisol, and adrenaline levels. The users brain activity and its here where the most interesting results came from.

The results found that when riding, the subjects experienced increased sensory focus and resilience to distraction. Riding also produced an increase in adrenaline levels and heart rate, and a decrease in cortisol levelsthe kind of results you often get after a light exercise session, which also is a stress reducer.

The news regarding the mental well-being of motorcyclists goes hand in hand with a study that found that riding a motorcycle can burn anywhere between 170-600 calories an hour. As much as some people can burn in an hour at the gym.

So, there we have it, motorcycles really are good for your body and mind!

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Motorcycles are better for brain and body health heres the proof! - Visordown.com

For most students, the idea of a STEM and fine arts double major seems foreign, especially with finals season now here. To many STEM and arts double majors, this means balancing traditional exam finals with turning in semester-long projects and portfolios.

The difference between junior computer science and music performance major Jordan Benders dual majors is apparent in his finals. For computer science, he is often presented with a traditional paper and pencil final, while his music classes often evaluate his skills through performances. For his Music Theory 3 course, Bender needed to apply the musical knowledge he gained throughout the semester through a final research paper.

Skills in music classes tend to compound upon one another, so its more of a cumulative sort of final, Bender said. Whereas computer science classes, in my experience, have been less cumulative and more what have you done since the last test.

Growing up, Bender played percussion as a member of the school band, yet his love of music never overshadowed his love of technology and video games. Hes interested in possibly coding for video games and working in game design, while he plans on using his music degree to work toward a performance career in musical theater.

Though hes following his passions, balancing two courses of study hasnt always been easy for Bender he didnt realize the extreme differences in his two majors would make his experience a lot tougher than others.

I dont think I realized how busy I would be going into having a double major because people have double majors in related areas quite often, he said.

Two majors can be difficult to balance, especially with a minor attached. Junior Alex Johnson is currently pursuing an environmental studies and communications double major as well as a studio arts minor. In contrast to Bender, Johnson said his interests do not conflict as much as other students may think.

Its honestly been super helpful to have different ways to approach the things I care about, he said. [Double majoring] offers an interesting perspective, and its never been entirely separate things that are hard to think about at the same time.

In preparing for finals, Johnson said that he spends five or six hours preparing for an environmental studies final. Meanwhile, a final project in studio arts can take 10 to 15 hours to complete because of the artistic detail that is often involved.

I think the studio arts classes are a lot more time consuming and require more commitment than studying for a written final for environmental science, Johnson said. You just have to be on top of it and be proactive about starting things well before theyre due.

Delaney Jenkins, chair of the studio arts department, said studio art finals are different from a traditional paper and pencil final because students have to show how theyve developed their skills over the course of the semester and are then critiqued by their professors and classmates.

A critique in studio arts is like a final exam. You show up with your accomplished piece and you present it, Jenkins said. Youre getting full feedback now. Youve been getting feedback on the parts, but now heres the final thing.

During a critique, students present their finalized piece to the class. Their peers provide feedback and explain its possible meanings. The artist then interprets their work in front of the class, where they are provided with additional comments from their classmates and professor.

Johnson originally planned to enter college as an art major, but said he found that he is more passionate about the environment. Johnson said he hopes to use his interest in the environment and his communications and studio arts background to promote a better understanding of scientific issues through artwork.

I think creating artwork that talks about environmental science, and in particular environmental issues, is just another way to get people interested and contribute new ideas in a nontraditional way to that discussion about environmentalism and science in general, he said.

While Johnson views his studio arts classes as more time-consuming than his STEM work, Ari Freedman, a sophomore who majors in neuroscience and music, sees his situation differently. He said his neuroscience major often presents a greater challenge than music due to the amount of material he must remember for finals.

My finals for my STEM major rely a lot more on my ability to memorize information, whereas my finals for the music major require more of a bodied understanding of what the music is, Freedman said. It seems that theres more weight in the classes that are science based. Maybe because I feel there is more of a challenge, more of a pressure in the world of professional sciences.

Biology professor Erica McGreevey said STEM finals often assess students ability to recall information from the beginning of the semester as well as the material they are currently learning, citing the Foundations of Biology exam, which consists of 40 multiple choice questions covering material from the entire semester.

Often times, it will have a section of new material as well, so students are learning something new in addition to having to demonstrate their understanding of the entire course content, she said.

While remembering material for his neuroscience exams adds to Freedmans stress around finals, its important for him to pursue in regards to what he wants to do. His goal is to analyze how music can affect mental and emotional states. He utilizes his music and neuroscience interests in his current research position at an occupational lab, where he conducts EEG studies of patients and examines what parts of the brain are affected when a musical stimulus is present.

I liked the fact that we could use an empirically based understanding of the world to change what we were doing, Freedman said, that we could realize certain things are flawed and that we could learn what is the best way to go about doing things using science.

Despite the differences between the arts and STEM, Johnson still finds that they can work together in harmony. He said he utilizes both of these fields and feels that others should do the same.

I would encourage people to pursue art, even if they are a science major, because you can always find a way to connect the two, Johnson said.

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Balancing finals as a STEM and art double major - University of Pittsburgh The Pitt News

Updated December 09, 2019 08:15:43

When it was announced in October that Netflix was trialling a new variable playback option that would allow viewers to watch their titles sped up (or slowed down), filmmakers reacted with dismay.

Judd Apatow, director and screenwriter of Knocked Up and Funny People, tweeted: "Leave them as they were intended to be seen."

Filmmakers Brad Bird (The Incredibles), Peter Ramsey (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Peyton Reed (Ant-Man) also piled on.

"Having worked a lot in large-scale TV, it's kind of like sitting in a theatre audience and yelling out to the directors and the actors to 'hurry up!' it feels that rude as a concept," says Thomas M Wright, an Australian actor (Top of The Lake) and filmmaker (Acute Misfortune).

In fact, browser plugins that allow viewers to adjust the speed that they watch Netflix (and other video content) already exist.

Melbourne university student Seraphya told Stop Everything! that he watches YouTube videos at triple speed and Netflix at double speed.

"If you watch faster, you get to watch more shows," he says.

And speeding through video content seems like a natural evolution in one sense; first there was speed reading, then came speed listening, after podcasts and audiobooks invaded our phones.

Seraphya, a bioinformatics student, jacks up his podcast listening to triple speed.

"I'm listening for both knowledge and entertainment, and it's just boring to listen at single speed," he says.

He's also not particularly fazed by the concerns of content creators, pointing out that "we now know from musical historians that Beethoven was meant to be much faster than we currently generally perform it at so there's no use getting stuck with what was intended, because what was intended doesn't last".

Seraphya has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but says that speed listening and watching actually calms him down, the stimulation allowing his brain to focus.

Emma, undertaking her teaching masters in Adelaide, ramps up her speed to dial down her FOMO: "I feel like there is so much to be seen and not enough time to see it in, so when I get the opportunity I do tend to ramp the speed up."

She recently watched historical action thriller Hotel Mumbai and Swedish fantasy Border "between x1.4 and x1.6 speed".

She's likely to use Netflix's faster playback option, but she believes "some things that are really stressful and distressing shouldn't be watched at speed", pointing to Netflix miniseries Unbelievable, based on a true story of rape and injustice, as an example.

"There will always be things I listen to at 1.0 speed, the things that I love," Emma says.

"It's irrational and personal, but isn't everybody's relationship to what they consume?"

Ian, a public servant in Queensland, listens to most podcasts on double speed and sometimes watches YouTube videos sped up, but says he won't be speeding through Netflix.

"I don't think I would do it for television shows I think they usually have particular production values that I don't think would be helped by watching them at a faster rate."

Director Thomas M Wright recognises that not all television is "carefully crafted" and some directors wouldn't be concerned by the idea of viewers speed-watching their work.

"But cinema takes years and people are actually orchestrating a completely false reality, and in order to do that it takes extraordinary investment and extraordinary care and the idea of that being trampled over for convenience is absurd," he says.

"Cinema for me is a machine of empathy and there's something that dies, the more people atomise it."

Joel Werner, host and producer of ABC podcast Sum of All Parts, understands why listeners speed up some podcast content but draws a line.

"I think watching a really good TV series or a really good movie, or listening to a really immersive audio documentary, it's an experience, right?"

"It's taking you to a different world, it's putting you in someone else's shoes, it's giving you a perspective on life that you didn't have before and I just don't think you can get any of that nuance when you listen at double the speed it was intended to be listened at," Werner says.

"So the theory on speed reading is it's more of a skim than a read," says Jared Cooney Horvath, an educational neuroscientist from The University of Melbourne.

Dr Horvath says that our ability to speed read is limited by the foveal spot at the back of the eye, "which essentially determines what you can focus on.

"If something isn't in that spot, then bad news, you're not going to be reading it and unfortunately, it's a very small spot."

When you combine our small foveal spots with the fact you need to move your eyes across a page to read, he says that even a speed reader would still take 10-20 seconds to read an average page of text.

While many seem to draw the line at narrative-based or fictional content, Dr Horvath says that "because of the way narratives are constructed, especially creative narratives, that's when you might be able to get away with it [skim reading]".

That's because fiction involves a degree of "redundancy" (repetition and references to characters, plot points and settings) which enables readers to make sense of a book while skimming through it.

But if you speed through nonfiction or anything you're planning to learn information from, "you get almost nothing out of it because you don't have these little points to use as kind of references," says Dr Horvath.

"Without that 'redundancy' you have nothing to hang your hat on. You get to the end and your comprehension is just trash."

The good news for speed-demons? Dr Horvath says that for speed listening and watching, anything up to x1.25 speed is "fine" in terms of recall and comprehension.

"As soon as you go above that, prepare to start just dropping key facts and that's just fact recall. Comprehension is [about] now how do you piece those facts together into a story."

As you recall fewer facts, Dr Horvath says your "comprehension tanks" compared to someone listening to or watching something on normal speed.

"When you're breastfeeding with your mother, you get a very certain chemical signature that spreads through your body which we think is a signature of bonding," Dr Horvath says.

"It turns out when you're lost in a narrative you get that same signature, so you're bonding. So when people say 'I love Dostoyevsky,' they're not being flippant, you're bonding with the author at that moment."

If you speed through a book, you risk losing the depth and engagement required to bond with the work.

Even so as long as the current glut of content exists, there are going to be people willing to sacrifice depth of engagement in favour of skimming as much of it as they can.

Dr Horvath traces the problem of "information overload" to the advent of the printing press, pinning this as the moment we were faced with a major decision between depth and breadth.

"The vast majority of people pick broad: 'I just want to listen to as many podcasts, watch as many shows, make sure I get everything'. And it's neither right nor wrong," he says.

But if you choose to speed through all three seasons of Stranger Things in one evening, don't expect it to make much of an impact.

"Deep learning is predicated on thinking," says Dr Horvath.

"You have to embed these memories and you have to give yourself time to think about them."

Rather than speed-watching, Dr Horvath suggests: "If you watch a show don't binge it, spend a day not watching the show, thinking about the episode you just watched, predicting what's going to come next."

"That's the deep thinking that makes the show resonate."

Topics:arts-and-entertainment,film-movies,film,television,popular-culture,books-literature,neuroscience,australia,united-states

First posted December 07, 2019 06:25:33

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Netflix's speed-watching trial joins a long history of content cramming, but may be bad for artists and viewers - ABC News

by Maria Ann Roglieri

914INC Women in Business awards celebrated 20 2019 honorees at a luncheon in November at the DoubleTree in Tarrytown. Congratulations to three honorees who do a lot of business in our towns: Geri Eisenman Pell, Private Wealth Advisor & CEO, Pell Wealth Partners; Astara N. Crews Director of Regulatory Affairs/Compliance & Privacy Officer, ENT and Allergy Associates, LLP in Tarrytown; and Sarah Jones-Maturo, President, RM Friedland LLC.

Phelps Hospital welcomed Dr. Yafell Serulle, a board-certified interventional neuroradiologist, as the Director of Neuroendovascular Surgery. Neuroendovascular surgery, a subspecialty of neurosurgery, is a minimally-invasive surgery performed on a patients blood vessels to prevent conditions such as headaches, seizures, or stroke.

Dr. Serulle holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University School of Medicine (NYU) and an M.D. from Universidad Nacional Pedro Henriquez Urena in his native Dominican Republic. He completed several years of postgraduate training in neuroradiology, diagnostic radiology, and internal medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and at NYU. Before joining Phelps/Northwell, Dr. Serulle was the Stroke Medical Director at Aventura Hospital and Medical Center in Aventura, Florida. Prior to that, he was a neurointerventional surgeon at two regional medical centers in FloridaWestside Regional Medical Center in Plantation and Kendall Regional Medical Center in Miami.

I am excited to lead the new neuroendovascular service at Phelps and to be able to bring world class care to the Westchester community, said Dr. Serulle. I am very proud of the phenomenal team we have assembled here, with a state-of-the-art neuroscience center covering all subspecialties of neuroscience. This speaks of the high level of commitment that Phelps Hospital and Northwell Health have to deliver the best possible care to our patients in Westchester.

Dr. Serulle lives in Dobbs Ferry with his wife and three children.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills was awarded two Michelin stars, while The Cookery in Dobbs Ferry was among eight Westchester County restaurants listed for the first time this year in the 2020 Michelin Guides NYC edition. Also listed was Cookery chef/owner David DiBaris Eugenes Diner and Bar in Port Chester; RaaSa Fine Indian Cuisine and Shiraz Kitchen, both in Elmsford; Southern Table in Pleasantville; Cafe Alaia in Scarsdale; and Dubrovnik and Maria Restaurant, both in New Rochelle. The eight Westchester restaurants are among 133 Bib Gourmand distinctions, which are restaurants Michelin commends for quality food at a good value, typically two courses and a glass of wine or dessert for $40 or less.

As an international reference and trusted companion for travelers for more than 120 years, Michelin is honored to recognize the evolution of gastronomy and culinary talent in Westchester County, said Michelin Guide International Director Gwendal Poullennec. Inspectors were particularly impressed by the technique and highest quality of ingredients that they discovered during multiple visits to the area.

Congratulations to Sarah Clayton for becoming a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist and to Devin Batheja, Emma Guarnieri, Tess Kaplan and Ryan Schatzel for being recognized as Commended Students by the National Merit Scholarship Program (NMSC). These five SHHS students are among 34,000 high-performing students across the nation. More than 1.5 million students took the PSAT last October and were entered into the National Scholarship Program. The NMSC Programs mission is to promote academic excellence and to recognize students who achieve these goals.

Sleepy Hollow resident George Lence, co-founder and President of Nicholas & Lence Communications, has been chosen for another consecutive year as a member of the City & State Westchester Power 100, a group of the most influential individuals within Westchesters sectors of advocacy, academia, media and business. He was recently celebrated at the Whitby Castle in Rye at a special reception for the honorees, which also highlighted the current landscape of Westchesters politics and various industries.

In November, Tarrytowns Main Street became home to a new art gallery, Main Street Atelier. The gallerys first exhibit will feature artwork by resident artists, student artists, and local artists. For more information about the gallery, go to http://www.mainstreetatelier.com.

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Heard Around the Watercooler - The Hudson Independent

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or the neurobiology of the brain? The answer to this question might surprise you. As a marketer, you have an opportunity to create an immediate connection with your audience and that starts with the look and feel of your marketing assets. This is because your audiences brain responds favorably to aesthetically pleasing stimuli. And yes, that includes emails, print ads, web pages, social media posts, digital ads and more.

The aesthetic experience starts the moment your audience looks at your ad. At this moment, your audiences brain begins to process visual content quickly. In fact, the processing of visual information happens so quickly that your audience is unaware of what the eyes see, at least initially. Put more succinctly, the brain processes visual stimuli before consciousness is even possible.

When it comes to creating an aesthetic experience, the visual strength of your imagery is key for creating an immediate connection. According to Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, the brain responds automatically to beauty. In other words, beautiful imagery, whether in the form of a print ad or a social media post, is critical for creating positive associations with your brand automatically.

An aesthetic experience stirs activity in different regions in the brain, including areas associated with emotion, reward and decision-making. Importantly, the experience extends across multiple sensory modalities and happens to occur regardless of whether a person is viewing a painting, listening to music or admiring a perfectly constructed math equation. Remarkably, you can quantify the experience.

Researchers across multiple studies directed subjects to view artwork and state the extent to which each image was considered beautiful all while measuring activity in the brain. As Semir Zeki, Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University College London, observes, activity in a key area of the brain, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, was proportional to the declared intensity of the aesthetic experience.

When it comes to viewing attractive faces, the experience becomes even more profound. In a 2019 study, Chatterjee demonstrated how an aesthetic experience can actually activate the motor parts of the brain to compel people to move physically towards attractive faces. In the study, a computer monitor displayed a number at the bottom of the screen and two numbers at the top. The task was simple. Click on the number that was closest to the number on the bottom.

Simple enough, right? But to see if attractiveness affects motor behavior, the researchers paired the top numbers with faces, one attractive and the other unattractive. Incredibly, researchers discovered the mouse would drift toward the attractive face even if the number was incorrect. In other words, the aesthetic response to an attractive face was so powerful that it affected hand movement!

As you think about the look and feel of your marketing assets, you might want to consider these key takeaways:

Given that your audiences brain responds automatically to beauty on a subconscious level, one of your goals as a marketer should be to facilitate approach-behavior on a subconscious level. In other words, get your audience to become drawn toward your marketing asset. As a skilled marketer, however, you already know thats only part of the story. Once you engage your audiences brain on a subconscious level, you must present the appropriate message, which taps into individual preferences within a culture-appropriate framework. As such, you must create content that resonates with your audience since triggering aesthetic appreciation is only a starting point.

In your role, youre often presented with obstacles from less informed persons. Have you worked for a client or reported to a CEO who was uninterested in what your marketing content looked like? Are you told that your audience doesnt care what your marketing collateral looks like? The problem is that your audiences brain is attracted to aesthetically pleasing stimuli whether they know it or not. Now you can make a science-based argument on why you must create good-looking marketing content.

The most important takeaway is to understand that visually appealing content matters. Since brain regions that are associated with emotion and reward become active when viewing aesthetically appealing content, its important to create marketing assets that tap into the circuitry thats involved in the aesthetic experience. When youre able to do that, youll find that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder but also in the neurobiology of the brain.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

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Neuroscience and beauty: How to create an immediate connection with your audience - MarTech Today

Psychedelic drugs have long been exiled to the fringes of medicine, dismissed as recreational drugs with limited therapeutic potential. That all changed with the breakthrough therapy status granted last year to psilocybin, the active compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, for its ability to rapidly reverse treatment-resistant depression. This has led to an explosion of interest in the field, with new institutes opening and new disorders identified as targets for psychedelic therapy. In our latest interview series, we discuss the potential of psychedelics to revolutionize clinical neuroscience with thought leaders in the field.When you think about psychedelics, 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), also known as Ecstasy, isnt what first comes to mind. Whilst this commonly used party drugs status as a psychedelic is still debated by some in the field, MDMA has, alongside more traditional psychedelics, become a hot topic in neuropharmacological research, and received its own Breakthrough Therapy status from the FDA for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its therapeutic potential for neurological disorders has attracted attention from researchers and ravers alike. In this first interview of our series exploring the Neuroscience of Psychedelics, we talk to Johns Hopkins Associate Professor Gul Dlen, who has spent years exploring the effects of MDMA on the mammalian (and more recently, cephalopod) brain.

Ruairi Mackenzie (RM): In a recent paper, you exposed octopuses to MDMA. Could you tell us why?Gul Dlen(GD): Years ago, people had started to suspect that psychedelic drugs might be acting on the serotonergic system and specifically MDMA had been shown to be interacting with a protein called the serotonin transporter or SERT. Most people have heard of this transporter by another name because theyve heard of drugs like Prozac, which is a blocker of the serotonin transporter. Prozac makes serotonin available in the synapse by preventing the serotonin transporter from vacuuming extra serotonin from the synapse. Because Prozac blocks that action it makes more serotonin available.

What MDMA does is it reverses the direction of the serotonin transporter. Instead of vacuuming up the serotonin, it is spewing it out into the synapse. Its not just making more serotonin available, but its actually pushing more serotonin into the synapse. That was the main mechanism that people had focused on for the last couple of decades. When we studied the octopus we just wanted to know whether an animal which is evolutionarily so distant from humans our last common ancestor was over 515 million years ago would have the same serotonin transporter, similar enough that if we gave the animals MDMA it would cause the animals to behave in a way that is recognizable to the way that we know MDMA makes humans and other mammals behave.

What was super exciting for us was that when we gave MDMA to the octopuses, they spent more time in the social chamber of the three-chambered tank that we had built for them. This was exactly what happens when we do the same experiment in mice, for example. That was both a little bit exciting and surprising because octopuses arent normally social. It was amazing to us that MDMA could encourage social behaviors in an animal that doesnt normally exhibit social behaviors at all, much less increase social behaviors. What it suggests is that the neural circuitry that enables social behavior exists in an octopus brain but then outside the reproductive period, when they would be socially tolerant, it just gets turned off. What MDMA is doing is releasing that circuitry to act the way that they would when theyre mating, for example.

RM: You also conducted research exposing mice to MDMA what did you learn from these experiments?GD: The mouse study had more novel mechanistic details. The way we started studying MDMA really was that firstly we had discovered a brand-new critical period in mouse behavior. Critical periods are familiar to most people because they are aware of the adage you cant teach an old dog new tricks. Anybody whos tried to learn a second language when they were an adult knows that its much harder to do. When youre a child you pick up languages without even being aware of the effort of learning them but as an adult, when you try and learn a language its difficult. The reason for that is the brain is less able to learn information when its older than when its younger because it has less plasticity. Different parts of the brain have different windows of time when they are most plastic. Those different windows of time support learning and memory of different types of behaviors.

Theres a critical period for language and for vision. What we discovered is that theres also a critical period for social behaviors and forming social attachments. We think that this critical period for social reward learning is the reason why, for example, kids are so much more susceptible to peer pressure and why they have 400 friends, and theyre always on their iPhones.

Theyre insatiably social, whereas most adults relish their alone time and after a week of conferencing for example you need to have some quiet time when youre not interacting quite so much. What we wondered is whether or not we could reopen that [social] critical period in adulthood. We thought this might be important in certain clinical situations where, for example, a person was socially injured during their childhood, which was leading to all kinds of maladaptive behaviors in adulthood: addiction or PTSD.

There are some theories out there that these are the consequence of social injury during earlier parts of life. If we could reopen that critical period and have them relearn those social interactions under optimized conditions, that might have some therapeutic value. When we were working on the critical period for social reward learning one of the mechanisms that we focused on was the developmental regulation of the receptor for [love hormone] oxytocin in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. In mammals, the nucleus accumbens is one of those nodes of the brain thats knowing for sex, drugs, and rock and roll and is the pleasure center of the brain. In previous work I had done when I was a post-doc, we had shown that oxytocin acting in that nucleus accumbens node of the reward circuit was really important for encoding the reward value of social interactions.

What we figured out in this more recent paper is that the oxytocin receptor protein that senses the oxytocin in the nucleus accumbens is developmentally downregulated. This downregulation of the receptor corresponds to the time in the animals life when social interactions behaviorally become less important for helping them learn new things. We had identified this mechanism, but we knew that targeting it to reopen the critical period would be difficult because despite what you may have heard about intranasal oxytocin, it actually doesnt get into the brain when you squirt it up your nose.

But then we thought of this psychedelic drug, MDMA. Everybody knows when people take it at parties, they get extremely social and they want to hug everybody. They form these cuddle puddles! So wouldnt it be cool if MDMA could somehow interact with our neural circuits to reopen the critical period? Basically, thats what we found that it does. It causes the oxytocin synaptic plasticity mechanisms to come back online and make the adult brain socially plastic again, the way that it was when the animal was a juvenile. We think that this property of MDMA to reopen this critical period is going to be really useful in explaining why this drug works so well for treating things like PTSD. It also gives us some hints about where we might go next; understanding the mechanism helps us to build up other potential applications and figure out how else we might tweak this critical period for therapeutic benefit.

RM: So, should we be giving out MDMA at conferences?GD: I dont know about you, but for me, being a teenager was difficult. Its not without an energetic cost to care what people think about you. I think the great thing about being an adult is not having to care quite so much. I find that to be quite nice. I think a lot of people have a first knee jerk reaction of Great, I can make my brain young again! I want to make myself young in every way, why not my brain too? I think that its adaptive to devote your emotional energies to other things as you mature, once your group membership is stabilized. If you have a problem that youre trying to fix, then maybe you want to be able to selectively target this one critical period, open it, fix your problem and then have it closed back up again.

RM: Is there therapeutic potential for disorders with social deficits?GD: I think that there are a lot of other diseases that we dont necessarily think of as being social in their ideology but actually are. Theres a lot of evidence that people who become addicts have social injury in their past. A huge percentage of female heroin addicts have been sexually abused when they were children. For those types of illnesses where there is a social injury component, I think theres an obvious potential therapeutic link.

Even if there is no social injury per se, I think that there is something useful about being able to reopen the social critical period. Being able to reopen the critical period and reform a therapeutic alliance with your therapist, for example, and being able to trust somebody and tell them everything that has been festering because its so horrifying you havent been able to look at it. I think thats another way that we can think about how MDMA might be working therapeutically in the context of a critical period for social learning.

RM: These drugs are very heavily regulated in research. Is the regulation proportionate to the risk?GD: Very soon, I suspect, the FDA will reconsider their scheduling of these drugs. MDMA and psilocybin are both what we call Schedule 1 drugs in the United States. Cocaine, for example, is Schedule 2 and the reason that they have decided to schedule them that way is because cocaine has some therapeutic uses, I believe in dentistry as a numbing agent. Theres no known therapeutic use for psychedelic drugs but given that the FDA has just given both the psychedelics MDMA and psilocybin breakthrough therapy status, which is encouraging clinical trials for these drugs, that rationale for making them Schedule 1 will go away.

The other rationale for making them Schedule 1 is that they are highly addictive. There is to my knowledge no evidence that these drugs are addictive at all. Most people who take psilocybin take it once and they need a rest, theyre not really interested in taking another dose for months. It doesnt have a profile of a drug that is addictive in any way. I think both of those reasons mean that these drugs will be rescheduled shortly. I hope.

RM: What does Schedule 1 classification mean in terms of access to these drugs in research?GD: It takes a long time to get a license. You need a separate license for Schedule 1 drugs. Its different from the license that you need for Schedule 2 drugs. It took our lab roughly eight months or something to get the Schedule 1 license. The FDA has to send people out here and make sure the building is secure and we have the proper locks and safes and double locks and logs and that people who are using it are properly trained in how to handle it and dispose of it and log the amount that we use every time we use it.

Its involved, and for a lot of science, before you can devote the resources to studying something you want to test it quickly. Just to do a quick pilot study and if it works then you can devote a full-time post-doc to it, put the resources in. When a drug is Schedule 1, and you dont have a Schedule 1 license, doing that pilot experiment is not feasible.

A lot of crazy ideas just dont get done because its not worth it to invest eight months of paperwork to test one crazy idea that probably wont work anyway.

RM: Theyre often the best ideas.GD: I think so, yes. With our octopus MDMA idea, we would never have started with MDMA and an octopus if it hadnt been for the fact that we were already licensed to use it in the PTSD and critical period for social behavior studies. I think a lot of science comes from those one-off, crazy, wouldnt it be cool if, kind of experiments, that just dont get done if you have to fill out too much paperwork.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity

See the original post here:
The Neuroscience of Psychedelic Drugs: Octopuses, MDMA and Healing Social Injury - Technology Networks

The room is pitch black. Every light, from the power button on the computer to the box controlling the microscope, is covered with electrical tape. I feel a gush of air as the high-powered AC kicks on, offsetting the heat emitted from the microscopes lasers.

I take my mouse out of its cage and get ready to image its brain. Im wearing a red headlamp so I can see, but it is still quite dim. I peer closely at my lab notebook and note the two positions: 1, +2. I recite them repeatedly in a hushed tone, so I dont forget; it is 1 A.M., after all. I hook the mouse up to the stage of the microscope and then use my handy toothpick to make sure its head position is correct.

While there are many unsung heroes of scienceveterinarians, lab technicians, graduate students (I might be a bit biased with this one!)these arent the ones Im talking about. Im talking about a toothpick that played a significant role in my research project.

I am lucky enough to have access to a cutting-edge microscope and several other pieces of expensive equipment in my lab. But can also find things you might never guess were used in science: red-light headlamps, black electrical tape, and toothpicks.

Using the microscope, I can take a picture of a mouses living, working brain through a literal window: a piece of glass that replaces a small piece of the animals skull.

To image the mouse, we affix a plastic bar on the front of its head and then secure the bar to a head-mounting device on the stage under the microscope lens. Using this mount, we can precisely position the head up and down and right to left.

This is where our problem starts.

As neuroscience advances, weve grown to appreciate how each individual brain cell plays a vital role in the larger organ. A lot of the nuance is lost, however, when we cant see whats happening in each individual cell. But with this specialized setup, we can image the same cells in the brain across several days, allowing us to follow each ones activity over time.

We did one round of experiments, and though we thought we were imaging the same cells each time, the analysis revealed that was not the case. Using this technique was new in our lab, and while there are scientific papers with instructions, some of the little details were lost in translation. When the next round of animals was ready, we needed to think of a solution fast. Thats when the idea to track the mouses head tilt came in.

We made a crude scale from 4 to +4 in both the up-down and left-right directions on the head mount, but we needed a way to indicate what position the mouses head was in. We needed something easy and fast that we use to track the position. Then the idea struck: a toothpick would be perfect. We would create two mini protractors (one for up-down and one for left-right), with the toothpick serving as the position tracker. We broke the toothpick in half and stuck the rough edge to the head mount. The pointy end would point to a position on our scale, one for up-down and one for left-right. And just like that with a toothpick and a bit of superglue, our problem was solved.

Now I can record the toothpick position, then go back and put the mouses head in an identical position day after day. Over a four-day experiment we have to go back into the darkroom every six hours, and the handy toothpick allows me to collect the data I need for my next insight into the ever-complex biology of the brain.

Walk into any molecular biology lab, and you may see something similar: an everyday object as humble as a toothpick next to (or even attached to) a very expensive piece of equipment. These are the labs where we learn about the types of cells that allow us to think, which proteins cause which diseases and how our genetic code can be targeted to improve our health. The environment where we make these lifesaving discoveries may seem utterly exotic, but we sometimes have to improvise with whatever we can findjust like anyone else. I know I will always have a toothpick at the ready from now on.

And keep in mind, next time you need a quick fix, there are probably some tiny, pointy wooden sticks in a drawer near youor something equally commonthat can turn failure into success.

The possibilities are endless.

Read the original:
The Toothpick That Saved a Neuroscience Experiment - Scientific American

K. Guadalupe Cruzs path into neuroscience began with storytelling.

For me, it was always interesting that we are capable of keeping knowledge over so many generations, says Cruz, a PhD student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. For millennia, information has been passed down through the stories shared by communities, and Cruz wanted to understand how that information was transferred from one person to the next. That was one of my first big questions, she says.

Cruz has been asking this question since high school and the urge to answer it led her to anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, but she felt like something was missing. I wanted a mechanism, she explains. So I kept going further and further, and eventually ended up in neuroscience.

As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, Cruz became fascinated with the sheer complexity of the brain. We started learning a lot about different animals and how their brains worked, says Cruz. I just thought it was so cool, she adds. That fascination got her into the lab and Cruz has never left. Ive been doing research ever since.

A sense of space

If youve ever seen a model of the brain, youve probably seen one that is divided into regions, each shaded with a different color and with its own distinct function. The frontal lobe in red plans, the cerebellum in blue coordinates movement, the hippocampus in green remembers. But this is an oversimplification.

The brain isnt entirely modular, says Cruz. Different parts of the brain dont have a single function, but rather a number of functions, and their complexity increases toward the front of the brain. The intricacy of these frontal regions is embodied in their anatomy: They have a lot of cells and theyre heavily interconnected, she explains. These frontal regions encode many types of information, which means they are involved in a number of different functions, sometimes in abstract ways that are difficult to unravel.

The frontal region Cruz is bent on demystifying is the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, a part of the brain that wraps around the corpus callosum, which divides the outer layers of the brain into left and right hemispheres. Working with mice in Professor Mriganka Surs lab, Cruz looks at the role of the ACC in coordinating different downstream brain structures in orientating tasks. In humans, the ACC is involved in motivation, but in mice it has a role in visually guided orienting.

Everything you experience in the world is relative to your own body, says Cruz. Being able to determine where your body is in space is essential for navigating through the world. To explain this, Cruz gives the example of driver making a turn. If you have to do a left turn, youre going to need to use different information to determine whether youre allowed to make that turn and if thats the right choice, Cruz explains. The ACC in this analogy is the driver: It has to take in all the information about the surrounding world, decide what to do, and then send this decision to other parts of the brain that control movement.

To study this, Cruz gives mice a simple task: She shows them two squares of different shades on a screen and asks them to move the darker square. The idea is, how does this area of the brain take in this information, compare the two squares and decide which movement is correct, she explains. Many researchers study how information gets to the ACC, but Cruz is interested in what happens after the information arrives, focusing on the processing and output ends of the equation, particularly in deciphering the contributions of different brain connections to the resulting action.

Cruz uses optogenetics to figure out which areas of the brain are necessary for decision-making. Optogenetics is a technique that uses light to turn on or off previously targeted neurons or areas of the brain. This allows us to causally test whether parts of a circuit are required for a behavior or not, she explains. Cruz distills it even further: But mostly, it just lets us know that if you screw with this area, youre going to screw something up.

Community builder

At MIT, Cruz has been able to ask the neuroscience questions shes captivated by, but coming to the Institute also made her more aware of how few underrepresented minorities, or URMs, there are in science broadly. I started realizing how academia is not built for us, or rather, is built to exclude us, says Cruz. I saw these problems, and I wanted to do something to address them.

Cruz has focused many of her efforts on community building. A lot of us come from communities that are very other oriented, and focused on helping one another, she explains. One of her initiatives is Community Lunch, a biweekly casual lunch in the brain and cognitive sciences department. Its sponsored by the School of Science for basically anybody thats a person of color in academia, says Cruz. The lunch includes graduate students, postdocs, and technicians who come together to talk about their experiences in academia. Its kind of like a support group, she says. Connecting with people that have shared experiences is important, she adds: You get to talk about things and realize this is a feeling that a lot of people have.

Another goal of Cruzs is to make sure MIT understands the hurdles that many URMs experience in academia. For instance, applying to graduate school or having to cover costs for conferences can put a real strain on finances. I applied to 10 programs; I was eating cereal every day for a month, remembers Cruz. I try to bring that information to light, because faculty and administrators have often never experienced it.

Cruz also is the representative for the LGBT community on the MIT Graduate Student Council and a member of LGBT Grad, a student group run by and for MITs LGBT grad students and postdocs. LGBT Grad is basically a social club for the community, and we try to organize events to get to know each other, says Cruz. According to Cruz, graduate school can feel pretty lonely for members of the LGBT community, so, similar to her work with URMs, Cruz concentrates on bringing people together. I cant fix the whole system, which can be very frustrating at times, but I focused my efforts on supporting people and allowing us to build a community.

As in her research, Cruz again comes back to the importance of storytelling. In her activism on campus, she wants to make sure the stories of URMs are known and, in doing so, help remove the obstacles faced by that generations of students that come after her.

Excerpt from:
Fueled by the power of stories - MIT News

Teens who bully their peers tend to display a different pattern of brain activity in response to certain facial expressions, according to new research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The findings shed light on the neurological underpinnings of bullying behaviors and could help lead to new interventions to combat bullying.

Bullying is fairly common during adolescence, with about 25-50% of teenagers in the U.S. reporting that they have bullied or been a victim of bullying, said study author Johnna R. Swartz, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

We also know that being a bully or victim of bullying is associated with poor mental health. I was interested in examining how measures of brain function relate to bullying or being a victim of bullying so we could better understand which factors may contribute to higher likelihood of these outcomes.

Swartz and her colleagues were particularly interested in a brain region known as the amygdala, which plays a key role in emotional processing and responding to threats.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine amygdala activity in 49 adolescents as they completed an emotional face matching task.

They found that adolescents who reported engaging in more relational bullying behaviors (such as purposefully excluding a peer or spreading rumors) tended to display higher amygdala activity in response to angry faces and lower amygdala activity in response to fearful faces.

Higher amygdala activity to angry faces could suggest that these teens are more sensitive to signals of anger from other people, while lower amygdala activity to fearful faces could suggest that their brains are less responsive to signals of distress, which could lead to lower empathy when bullying victims, Swartz told PsyPost.

The higher amygdala activity to angry faces could also lead teens to perceive more hostility in their social interactions, whereas the lower amygdala activity to fearful faces could lead to lower empathy, and this combination seems to be associated with more bullying behavior. These results can help us to understand what may make some teens more likely to bully their peers.

The researchers also found that lower amygdala activity in response to angry faces and lower amygdala activity in response to fearful faces were both associated with lower levels of victimization.

But the study like all research includes some limitations.

A major caveat of this study is that the design was cross-sectional, meaning that amygdala activity and the measures of bullying behavior were collected at the same point in time. This means it is unclear whether these patterns of brain activity may have led to increased likelihood of bullying, or whether being a bully leads to these changes in brain activity, Swartz said.

Future research could use longitudinal designs with measures across several occasions to test whether these patterns of brain activity predict bullying behavior, or whether engaging in more bullying behavior predicts changes in these patterns of brain activity over time.

If longitudinal research confirms that these patterns of brain activity predict increases in bullying behavior over time, results from this study could have implications for new ways to reduce bullying behavior in the future, Swartz explained.

For example, the finding that higher amygdala activity to angry faces predicts more bullying behavior suggests that training teens attention away from angry faces or teaching teens to interpret ambiguous facial expressions in less hostile ways could be potential methods for reducing bullying.

The more we understand about how patterns of brain activity and the way we process social cues relates to bullying and victimization, the better we will be able to intervene to reduce bullying and victimization in teens, Swartz added.

The study, Amygdala activity to angry and fearful faces relates to bullying and victimization in adolescents, was authored by Johnna R. Swartz, Angelica F. Carranza, and Annchen R. Knodt.

Continue reading here:
Neuroscience study finds amygdala activity is related to bullying behaviors in adolescents - PsyPost