Category Archives: Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Bat study reveals secrets of the social brain – EurekAlert

image:A new study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, used wireless neural recordings of Egyptian fruit bats to provide a glimpse into how the brains of social animals process complex group interactions. view more

Credit: Photo courtesy Michael Yartsev

Berkeley Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being said, as well as what our relationship to that person may be because, after all, we probably give the opinion of our best friend more weight than that of a complete stranger.

A study published today in the journal Science provides the first glimpse into how the brains of social mammals process these types of complex group interactions.

In the study, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, used wireless neural recording devices to track the brain activity of Egyptian fruit bats as they freely interacted in groups and occasionally vocalized to each other through high-pitched screeches and grunts.

Most studies of communication, particularly vocalization, are typically performed with single animals or with pairs of animals, but basically none have been conducted in actual group settings, said study co-first author Maimon Rose, a graduate student in the NeuroBat Lab at UC Berkeley. However, many social mammals, including humans, typically interact in groups. Egyptian fruit bats, specifically, like to interact within large colonies.

By tracking which of the bats vocalized, while simultaneously measuring the real-time neural activity in both the vocalizing and the listening bats, the researchers were able to decode how neurons in the bats frontal cortices distinguished among vocalizations made by themselves and by others, as well how the bats distinguished among different individuals in the group.

When they compared the neural recordings among the different bats, they also found that brain activity became highly correlated when a bat made a vocalization. Surprisingly, they found that communication produced by bats that were friendlier those that spent more time in close proximity to others induced a higher degree of correlations across the brains of the group members.

Other neuroscience studies have tried to examine small pieces of these interactions individually. For example, one study might examine how neurons respond when somebody else speaks, and then a separate study might look at how neurons respond when that individual speaks, said study senior author Michael Yartsev, an assistant professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at UC Berkeley. This study is the first to really put all of these pieces together to get a full picture of communication within a social group.

Thousands of squabbling roommates

Like humans, Egyptian fruit bats are highly social creatures. After long nights spent flying 10 miles or more in search of ripe fruit, these nocturnal animals pass the daylight hours packed into tight caves and crevices alongside hundreds or thousands of other bats. Not surprisingly, studies suggest that these bats typically vocalize to squabble over food, sleeping space and mating attempts.

These bats are very long-lived they live about 25 years and basically their entire lives are spent in this group social living, Yartsev said. So, the ability to live together in a group and communicate with each other is an inherent feature of their lives.

Even in laboratory settings, bats seem to prefer the comfort of a crowd, typically spending most of their time physically pressed against each other in a tight cluster. Notably, aside from making clicking noises for echolocation, Egyptian fruit bats do not engage in any long-distance form of communication and appear to vocalize to other bats only when clustered together.

If you visit these bat caves, you can just look up and see tens of thousands of animals, Yartsev said. So, it really wouldnt make sense for a bat to shout across to the cave to another bat.

Bats habit of only vocalizing within tight social clumps makes them ideal subjects for studying group communication because, if a bat does call out while in a cluster, that call is most likely an indicator that social communication is taking place. However, this behavior also posed one of many technical challenges for the research team, said study co-first author Boaz Styr, a postdoctoral researcher in the NeuroBat Lab.

One big problem was trying to identify which bat made a vocalization, because they spend their time in tight clusters and sometimes obscure each other, Styr said. Even though we had high resolution cameras recording at different angles, and lots of microphones around, it could be hard to pinpoint which bat was making a call at exactly which point.

During the experiments, four to eight bats were allowed to freely interact in a darkened enclosure in the lab, and allowed to spontaneously vocalize. To accurately identify which bat made each vocalization, the team developed wireless vibration sensors that the bats could wear around their necks, almost like necklaces, and which could detect the vibrations created when a bat made a call.

These vibration sensors, paired with our ability to wirelessly record neural data from multiple bats at the same time, allowed us to create this experiment in which the bats could freely behave and spontaneously communicate, Styr said. Getting all of these technical things to work together was extremely challenging, but it allowed us to ask these very important questions.

Neurons for self and others

In one set of experiments, the researchers allowed groups of four or five bats to freely interact within a darkened enclosure in the lab, while carefully monitoring each bats vocalizations and brain activity.

They found that, within each bats frontal cortex an area known to be involved in mediating social behaviors in animals and humans separate sets of neurons were activated, depending on which bat in the group vocalized; in other words, a vocalization from one bat would stimulate activity in one set of neurons, while a vocalization from a different bat would stimulate a different set of neurons. These correlations were so strong that, after identifying which sets of neurons corresponded to which bat, the researchers could identify which bat had vocalized purely by looking at the neural activity of the other bats.

What these individual neurons cared about was, Am I making the call? Or is somebody else making the call? no matter what type of vocalization it was, Styr said. Other neurons were only sensitive to when one specific bat within the group was talking.

Earlier work from the NeuroBat Lab has demonstrated that the brains of bat pairs tend to sync up when they socialize. In this study, the authors discovered that during vocal communication, the whole group syncs up together. This effect was not observed when the bats simply heard playback of the same sounds, suggesting that this phenomenon was specific to active communication taking place among the group members.

Intriguingly, the degree of correlation among the group members brains appeared to depend on which bat was talking, with some bats having stronger synchronization with specific individuals. Remarkably, these inter-brain patterns lasted for weeks, presumably representing stable social relationships among the individuals.

To better understand how social dynamics impact brain activity, the researchers conducted a separate set of experiments in which eight bats were allowed to freely interact in a larger enclosure. In addition to monitoring the vocalizations and neural activity of each bat, they also tracked each bats spatial position relative to the other bats in the group.

Bats can recognize and have stable social relationships with other individual bats, even over long periods of time and in different circumstances, Rose said. And because we had this group of bats, we decided to track their positions in a larger area to see if that would tell us anything about their social relationships who likes whom, and who are more sociable bats and the less sociable bats.

They found that, while most in-cluster bats spent nearly all their time clumped together with other bats, a couple of out-of-cluster bats spent more time off to the side, separate from the group. Surprisingly, the team also found that the in-cluster or out-of-cluster status of a bat impacted the neural activity of the other bats during vocalizations.

We found that when the in-cluster bats vocalized, they elicited a much more accurate neural representation of their identity in the other bats and also elicited a much higher level of brain synchrony within the group, Rose said. So, while its not entirely clear what exactly is going on, it seems that the behavior of the out-of-cluster bats really shifts their neural representation in the brains of the other bats.

Understanding the neural underpinnings of why some individuals can navigate almost any social situation with ease, while others are consistently ostracized or misunderstood, could have major implications for improving human mental health, Yartsev said. He hopes the study inspires neuroscientists to take a more comprehensive look at group communication within other social mammals.

Often, in neuroscience, we like to take a simplified approach and focus on one component of a complex process at a time, Yartsev said. But in reality, the social world is complex. When we spend time with our friends, there's a lot of relationship history and baggage that comes with each interaction: what happened yesterday, who that person is friends with, how each person feels in the moment. And so, breaking things down and looking at them individually can give an illusion of control but, in fact, make it very difficult to get the complete picture.

Our brains, and those of animals, have evolved for and constantly struggle with the complexity of real life, Yartsev added. I personally believe that to truly understand the brain, we need to embrace this complexity, rather than fear it, and, indeed, every time we did so, we found out something new and exciting. I hope that this, as well as our other studies, demonstrate that we need to study the brain in all its complexity.

Co-authors of the paper include Tobias A. Schmid and Julie E. Elie of UC Berkeley. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Award DP2-DC016163), the National Institute of Mental Health (Award 1-R01MH25387-01), the New York Stem Cell Foundation (Award NYSCF-R-NI40), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Award FG-2017-9646), the Brain Research Foundation (Award BRFSG-2017-09), the Packard Fellowship (Award 2017-66825), the Klingenstein Simons Fellowship, the Human Frontiers Science Program, the Pew Charitable Trust (Award 00029645), the McKnight Foundation, the Dana Foundation and the Human Frontiers Science Program postdoctoral fellowship.

Experimental study

Animals

Cortical representation of group social communication in bats

21-Oct-2021

Excerpt from:
Bat study reveals secrets of the social brain - EurekAlert

Neuroscience

How sexism hinders brain research – University of California

Why does Alzheimers Disease afflict far more women than men? Why do some women report problems with memory and concentration during menopause?

Science can offer few answers, for a simple if frustrating reason: Over the decades, there has been relatively little research on the female brain. Emily Jacobs, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara, points to two main reasons for this discrepancy: Unfounded assumptions that have been passed down from generation to generation, and the fact that the vast majority of neuroscientists are men.

I dont think this pattern of overlooking womens health was done out of malice, she said. It might be the result of indifference or obliviousness.

Science is a human endeavor. The questions we ask and the way we design our studies are products of the people who get to ask the questions. Ultimately, scientists cant answer questions they dont see. For a field like neuroscience, where over 85 percent of tenured professors are men, its likely that menopause was never visible.

Leila Rupp, a professor of feminist studies and interim dean of the Graduate Division at UC Santa Barbara, puts it more bluntly. Theres a history of talking about womens brains from a very misogynist perspective, she said.

Rupp is organizer of the Feminist Futures Initiative, which is co-sponsoring a talk Jacobs is giving at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 26, in the UC Santa Barbara Librarys Pacific View Room. In The Scientific Body of Knowledge: Whose Body Does It Serve? Jacobs will discuss how the lack of female medical researchers has slowed progress in tackling womens health issues, as well as her labs work on how hormones impact brain function.

Part of the librarys Pacific View series, the lecture is free and open to the public. It will also be livestreamed on the UC Santa Barbara Library Facebook page.

Pregnancy, the menstrual cycle, menopause: All of these features of womens lives have been largely ignored by science, Jacobs said. Thats not just detrimental to womens health; its detrimental to our basic understanding of the brain.

Neuroscientists are often so taken by the complexities of the brain that we forget it is part of a larger biological system. Why should the brain care about whats going on down in our ovaries, or, for men, testes? Well, it does, in a pretty major way. About half of the neurons in your prefrontal cortexthe area right behind your forehead contain estrogen receptors.

According to Jacobs, medical researchers have traditionally thought of the female brain and to some extent, the female body as in constant flux due to hormonal changes, and therefore unknowable. This notion that females are inherently more variable than males because of hormones is unfounded by the data, and yet theres this lore, she said. It also overlooks the fact that men also possess hormones.

That misapprehension, she argued, has led to studies with flawed designs that fail to answer vital questions.

One of the biggest challenges in neuroscience is to understand what happens to the brain as it ages, she said. Entire research programs have used an outdated model that takes a group of people 65 years and older and compares them to a group of young adults. But that number 65 is a historical artifact thats rooted in the average retirement age of wage-earners. Its not based on biology.

Although neuroscientists have learned a tremendous amount about the aging brain, she added, that research convention leapfrogs over menopause, and blinds us to the kind of changes that are unfolding earlier in the aging process.

Jacobs and her team are attempting to fill that gap by studying how the female brain changes across the menstrual cycles, during pregnancy and over the menopause transition. She became fascinated by this area of research at UC Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D.

I was in a terrific lab that was investigating the role of dopamine in human brain function, she recalled. Studying for my qualifying exam, I stumbled upon a small pocket of work in rodents that found the amount of estrogen in a mouses body can modulate the amount of dopamine in the brain. I was floored. Few people in my field were thinking about sex hormones in that way.

As I did more research on menopause, I realized this was systemic. Almost every aspect of womens brain health is understudied relative to men, Jacobs continued. My lab is devoted to correcting course to ensure that men and women get the full benefit of our research efforts. I have brilliant Ph.D. students who have taken up the cause. That brings me such joy.

While Jacobs is focused on looking at the brain and body holistically, Rupp is taking a similar approach with gender-related research here at UC Santa Barbara. The institute, launched in 2018, is forging links between researchers across campus whose work touches on feminist issues. The hope is that scholars from different disciplines can exchange knowledge and ideas and work collaboratively toward forging a better future.

Those of us who came into feminism in the 1960s and 1970s want to connect with a younger generation of leaders and empower future feminist leadership, Rupp said. Our goal is to develop a Center for Feminist Futures that is intergenerational, intersectional, and sponsors impactful research and programming.

To date, the initiative has sponsored or co-sponsored several dialogues on feminist issues, including a 2020 visit to campus by Anita Hill. The Division of Social Sciences, which sponsors the initiative, is about to launch a search for the first director of the future Center.

Rupp said she is thrilled to be asked to co-sponsor Jacobs talk, and Jacobs is equally excited by the collaboration. I cant wait to put our heads together, she said, noting the need for cross-disciplinary research on the barriers faced by female scientists. Im tickled that they exist, and I cant wait to join forces.

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How sexism hinders brain research - University of California

Neuroscience

Cerevel Therapeutics to Report Third Quarter 2021 Financial Results on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 – Yahoo Finance

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cerevel Therapeutics (Nasdaq: CERE), a company dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the brain to treat neuroscience diseases, today announced it will report third quarter 2021 financial results and pipeline updates on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, before the U.S. financial markets open.

Management will host a conference call to discuss third quarter 2021 financial results and recent pipeline updates on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 8:00 a.m. ET. To access the call, please dial 833-665-0655 (domestic) or 702-495-1044 (international) and refer to conference ID 9784674.

A live webcast of the call, along with supporting slides, will be available on the investors section of Cerevels website here. Following the live webcast, an archived version of the call will be available on the website.

About Cerevel TherapeuticsCerevel Therapeutics is dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the brain to treat neuroscience diseases. The company is tackling diseases with a targeted approach to neuroscience that combines expertise in neurocircuitry with a focus on receptor selectivity. Cerevel Therapeutics has a diversified pipeline comprising five clinical-stage investigational therapies and several pre-clinical compounds with the potential to treat a range of neuroscience diseases, including Parkinsons, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and substance use disorder. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Cerevel Therapeutics is advancing its current research and development programs while exploring new modalities through internal research efforts, external collaborations, or potential acquisitions. For more information, visit http://www.cerevel.com.

Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on managements beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: may, will, could, would, should, expect, intend, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, project, potential, continue, ongoing or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although we believe that we have a reasonable basis for each forward-looking statement contained in this press release, we caution you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by us and our projections of the future, about which we cannot be certain. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements about our upcoming financial results and pipeline update announcement and the potential attributes and benefits of our product candidates. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements in this press release will prove to be accurate. Furthermore, if the forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. Actual performance and results may differ materially from those projected or suggested in the forward-looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties, including, among others: clinical trial results may not be favorable; uncertainties inherent in the product development process (including with respect to the timing of results and whether such results will be predictive of future results); the impact of COVID-19 on the timing, progress and results of ongoing or planned clinical trials; other impacts of COVID-19, including operational disruptions or delays or to our ability to raise additional capital; whether and when, if at all, our product candidates will receive approval from the FDA or other regulatory authorities, and for which, if any, indications; competition from other biotechnology companies; uncertainties regarding intellectual property protection; and other risks identified in our SEC filings, including those under the heading Risk Factors in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on August 11, 2021 and our subsequent SEC filings. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that we will achieve our objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent our views as of the date of this press release. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we have no current intention of doing so except to the extent required by applicable law. You should, therefore, not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

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Media Contact:Kate ContrerasReal Chemistrykcontreras@realchemistry.com

Investor Contact:Matthew CalistriCerevel Therapeuticsmatthew.calistri@cerevel.com

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Cerevel Therapeutics to Report Third Quarter 2021 Financial Results on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 - Yahoo Finance

Neuroscience

Study of Mice Watching Movies Reveals Brain Circuit That Ensures Vision Remains Reliable – SciTechDaily

By David Orenstein, MIT Picower Institute for Learning and MemoryOctober 21, 2021

A new study finds that our brain cells rely on a circuit of inhibitory neurons to help ensure that the same images are represented consistently.

A study of mice watching movies shows our brain cells rely on a circuit of inhibitory neurons to help ensure that the same images are represented consistently.

When it comes to processing vision, the brain is full of noise. Information moves from the eyes through many connections in the brain. Ideally, the same image would be reliably represented the same way each time, but instead different groups of cells in the visual cortex can become stimulated by the same scenes. So how does the brain ultimately ensure fidelity in processing what we see? A team of neuroscientists in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT found out by watching the brains of mice while they watched movies.

What the researchers discovered is that while groups of excitatory neurons respond when images appear, thereby representing them in the visual cortex, activity among two types of inhibitory neurons combines in a neatly arranged circuit behind the scenes to enforce the needed reliability. The researchers were not only able to see and analyze the patterns of these neurons working, but once they learned how the circuit operated they also took control of the inhibitory cells to directly manipulate how consistently excitatory cells represented images.

The question of reliability is hugely important for information processing and particularly for representation in making vision valid and reliable, says Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience in MITs Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and senior author of the new study in the Journal of Neuroscience. The same neurons should be firing in the same way when I look at something, so that the next time and every time I look at it, its represented consistently.

Research scientist Murat Yildirim and former graduate student Rajeev Rikhye led the study, which required a number of technical feats. To watch hundreds of excitatory neurons and two different inhibitory neurons at work, for instance, they needed to engineer them to flash in distinct colors under different colors of laser light in their two-photon microscope. Taking control of the cells using a technology called optogenetics required adding even more genetic manipulations and laser colors. Moreover, to make sense of the cellular activity they were observing, the researchers created a computer model of the tripartite circuit.

It was exciting to be able to combine all these experimental elements, including multiple different laser colors, to be able to answer this question, Yildirim says.

The teams main observation was that as mice watched the same movies repeatedly, the reliability of representation among excitatory cells varied along with the activity levels of two different inhibitory neurons. When reliability was low, activity among parvalbumin-expressing (PV) inhibitory neurons was high and activity among somatostatin-expressing (SST) neurons was low. When reliability was high, PV activity was low and SST activity was high. They also saw that SST activity followed PV activity in time after excitatory activity had become unreliable.

PV neurons inhibit excitatory activity to control their gain, Sur says. If they didnt, excitatory neurons would become saturated amid a flood of incoming images and fail to keep up. But this gain suppression apparently comes at the cost of making representation of the same scenes by the same cells less reliable, the study suggests. SST neurons meanwhile, can inhibit the activity of PV neurons. In the teams computer model, they represented the tripartite circuit and were able to see that SST neuron inhibition of PV neurons kicks in when excitatory activity has become unreliable.

This was highly innovative research for Rajeevs doctoral thesis, Sur says.

The team was able to directly show this dynamic by taking control of PV and SST cells with optogenetics. For instance, when they increased SST activity they could make unreliable neuron activity more reliable. And when they increased PV activity, they could ruin reliability if it was present.

Importantly, though, they also saw that SST neurons cannot enforce reliability without PV cells being in the mix. They hypothesize that this cooperation is required because of differences in how SST and PV cells inhibit excitatory cells. SST cells only inhibit excitatory cell activity via connections, or synapses, on the spiny tendrils called dendrites that extend far out from the cell body, or soma. PV cells inhibit activity at the excitatory cell body itself. The key to improving reliability is enabling more activity at the cell body. To do that, SST neurons must therefore inhibit the inhibition provided by PV cells. Meanwhile, suppressing activity in the dendrites might reduce noise coming into the excitatory cell from synapses with other neurons.

We demonstrate that the responsibility of modulating response reliability does not lie exclusively with one neuronal subtype, the authors wrote in the study. Instead, it is the co-operative dynamics between SST and PV [neurons] which is important for controlling the temporal fidelity of sensory processing. A potential biophysical function of the SSTPV circuit may be to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of excitatory neurons by minimizing noise in the synaptic inputs and maximizing spiking at the soma.

Sur notes that the activity of SST neurons is not just modulated by automatic feedback from within this circuit. They might also be controlled by top-down inputs from other brain regions. For instance, if we realize a particular image or scene is important, we can volitionally concentrate on it. That may be implemented by signaling SST neurons to enforce greater reliability in excitatory cell activity.

Reference: Reliable Sensory Processing in Mouse Visual Cortex through Cooperative Interactions between Somatostatin and Parvalbumin Interneurons by Rajeev V. Rikhye, Murat Yildirim, Ming Hu, Vincent Breton-Provencher and Mriganka Sur, 20 October 2021, JNeurosci.DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3176-20.2021

In addition to Sur, Yildirim, and Rikhye, the papers other authors are Ming Hu and Vincent Breton-Provencher.

The National Eye Institute, The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health, and the JPB Foundation funded the study.

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Study of Mice Watching Movies Reveals Brain Circuit That Ensures Vision Remains Reliable - SciTechDaily

Neuroscience

Charles Lafitte Foundation’s $5 Million Gift Furthers a Shared Goal of Solving Challenges through Innovation – Duke Today

A new $5 million gift from the Charles Lafitte Foundation will bolster Duke Science and Technology, the universitys signature effort to elevate excellence in the sciences, and support students aspirations in pursuing the study of artificial intelligence, fintech, cybersecurity, neuroscience and more.

This is the second major gift to Duke from the family foundation of Duke parents and philanthropists Jeffrey and Suzanne Citron of Hobe Sound, Fla., who donated another $5 million to Duke in 2018.

The largest portion of the gift will endow a new professorship for the Pratt School of Engineering. The Charles Lafitte Foundation Professor of the Practice/Executive in Residence will make it possible for the school to recruit experienced leaders in fields such as fintech, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cryptographic computing to teach engineering students and prepare them for careers in industry-related computing fields.

FinTech and other fields built on cutting edge technology evolve at a rate faster than traditional academic practices can support,said Jeffrey Citron, founder of the foundation and high-speed Internet and broadband device company Vonage. Providing students direct access to industry leaders will not only serve to educate them in the academic sense but will enable them to be an active part of developing future innovations. Innovative solutions and change are essential elements of the Charles Lafitte Foundation and partnering with Duke to endow this professorship will ensure the foundation can continue achieving our mission in perpetuity.

The gift also enables the Pratt School to hire an expert to serve as a liaison with the universitys Office of Research and Innovation. The goal is to accelerate new discoveries and create new companies, therapies and products in part by building fruitful collaborations with corporate partners.

Further, the gift will help create a big-tech internship training program, will expand offerings of advanced courses that align with the needs of big-tech firms and will give students the practical knowledge to apply their skills to industry-focused challenges.

We know one of the great strengths of a Duke education is putting students in direct contact with experts who can help them take their next steps, said Jeff Glass, interim dean of engineering. By enabling us to recruit thought leaders and connect students with industry partners in cutting-edge tech fields, the Citrons gift will help shape the next great innovators and entrepreneurs at Duke.

As part of the gift, the Citrons also renewed $2.3 million of wide-ranging funding from their foundations 2018 gift. This includes $750,000 added to its endowed incubation fund to support turning ideas into solutions to societys challenges. Another $750,000 adds to the Charles Lafitte Foundation Program in Psychological Research, which gives seed grants for research by faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates through the Psychology & Neuroscience department.

In addition to Duke University, the Charles Lafitte Foundation supports organizations working in the fields of education, childrens advocacy, medical research and issues, and the arts and underwrites programs it feels can become self-sustaining with long-term commitment and measurable impact.

Support from the Charles Lafitte Foundation has provided new opportunities for action, said Scott Huettel, chair of Psychology & Neuroscience. Our students and faculty have sparked new projects on topics from how COVID changes attitudes toward risks to how identity shapes individual social behavior. They have risen to the challenge of the times by doing research that matters not only for the advancement of science, but also for the advancement of our society. We are extraordinarily grateful that the Foundation believes in the value of that research.

Additional Duke support renewed by the foundation included operating gifts to the Annual Funds of the Pratt School of Engineering, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Jewish Life at Duke and Duke Gardens.

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Charles Lafitte Foundation's $5 Million Gift Furthers a Shared Goal of Solving Challenges through Innovation - Duke Today

Neuroscience

What Can Mapping the Whole Brain Tell Us About Ourselves? – Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

The worm and fly brains have been mapped. The mouse brain has, in part, been mapped. But the human brain offers the real challenge for the researchers working around the clock. Our brains are not just more complex; they are more complex on a number of dimensions:

To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the networks that drive how we think and behave.

We hear about these new types of cells as they are identified (there is even a census in the works) . The hope is that a complete map will enable new therapies for cognitive disorders like Alzheimer. But the brain mapping projects, begun nearly a decade ago, are still in the early stages:

The consortium [BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN)] has mapped the cell types in around 1% of the mouse brain, and has some preliminary data on primate brains, including humans. It plans to complete the whole mouse brain by 2023. The maps already hint at some small differences between species that could help to explain our susceptibility to some human-specific conditions such as Alzheimers disease.

Its a big job:

In 2006, the Allen Institute created a gene-expression atlas showing where in the mouse brain each of its roughly 21,000 genes are expressed. It took 3 years for around 50 staff to build the Allen Brain Atlas one gene at a time and its value was instantly recognized by the neuroscience community. It is updated regularly and continues to be widely used as a reference, helping scientists to locate where their gene of interest is expressed or to study the role of a particular gene in a disease.

Still, the community wanted more. We wanted to be able to see every gene that is expressed in every cell at the same time, says Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. The different patterns of gene expression in individual cells would allow researchers to define which type of cell they were an ambitious task because the mouse brain contains more than 100 million cells, two-thirds of which are neurons. (The human brain is three orders of magnitude larger, with more than 170 billion cells, of which half are neurons.)

Human brains differ from mouse brains in more than just size. We have more different cell types and a different balances in types of neurons. Neuroscientist Ed Lein of the Allen Institute offers, These cumulative differences could lead to profound changes in how the human cortex is organized and functions.

So then, what makes the human brain special?

What makes the human brain special will come down to differences in the cellular diversity, the proportions of the cell types, the wiring of the brain and probably much more, says neuroscientist John Ngai at the University of California, Berkeley, who heads the US BRAIN Initiative. Theres no simple answer to this age-old question.

No simple answer indeed! The brain is full of surprises. Much that happens is not what we might expect. Here are some of the situations brain mappers must confront to provide the rest of us with insight:

A computer model of the brain wont really work. Our brains are not like computers although they do have some resemblance to billions of them working together. Even the axons in our nerve cells are smart PCs. As a result, we are told, far-flung regions (thousands of cell body widths from their nucleus) can even make independent decisions.

A complete DNA map of the brain wont be a Big Answer either. Our brains break DNA in order to learn more quickly: to express learning and memory genes more quickly, brain cells snap their DNA into pieces at many key points, and then rebuild their fractured genome later Quanta

The brain is both eclectic and orderly at the same time. For example, gray matter isnt the simple big big explanation many of us have assumed: Connectionthe connectomeis the astonishing feature of the brain. Mapping the connectome all the connections in the brainresearchers expected a huge, random tangle. They found a street map.

In the brain, things may not be in one place or in a place we expect. Most parts of the brain are involved in processing signals. Mouse studies found brain waves that can bypass synapses and gaps and even communicate with severed nerves. Our conscious visual perception lies outside our visual field. And memories can drift from neuron to neuron.

Damaged or deficient brains can work well in ways that are just baffling at present. People with brains that have been split in half to control epilepsy function normally. Some people think and speak with only half a brain or even less.

The proposed whole brain map will probably shed light on many of these situations. Those it doesnt shed light on are probably a new frontier.

You may also wish to read:

Study: The human brain and the universe are remarkably similar. It looks as though the universe is not random but rather patterned in the way it unfolds. When an astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon compared notes, they were surprised by the way the brain follows the same pattern as the universe.

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What Can Mapping the Whole Brain Tell Us About Ourselves? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Neuroscience

Global Neuroscience Market Analysis 2021 to 2027 Top Key Players are GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Noldus Information Technology EcoChunk -…

The complete study Global Neuroscience Market from 2021 to 2027, the MarketsandResearch.biz gives an in-depth examination of the present situation and key elements in the given industry. It provides accurate information and conducts in-depth research to assist in the creation of the best business plan and the identification of the best path for market participants to achieve maximum growth.

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Global Neuroscience Market Analysis 2021 to 2027 Top Key Players are GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Noldus Information Technology EcoChunk -...

Neuroscience

Psychiatry | Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human …

The UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences is the home within theDavid Geffen School of Medicinefor faculty who are expert in the origins of and treatments for disorders of complex human behavior.

The Department is also an integral part ofThe Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLAwhich is a world leading, interdisciplinary research and education institute devoted to the understanding of complex human behaviour and the causes and consequences of neuropsychiatric disorders.

TheResnick Neuropsychiatric Hospitalis the department's flagship location for patient care at UCLA and has consistently been ranked among the top five facilities nationwide by U.S. News & World Reports.

Interim Chair: Alexander Young

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Psychiatry | Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human ...

Neuroscience

Follow the Money: CRISPR, Next-Gen Neuroscience, Protein Platforms – Bio-IT World

October 11, 2021 | CRISPR unicorn, pan-coronavirus vaccine research, chemical and biological weapons protection for warfighters, new methods for live cell research, seed round for a new drug discovery platform, and more.

$195M for CRISPR Toolkit

Mammoth Biosciences has secured $195 million in financing, joining the select ranks of unicorn startups with a valuation of more than $1 billion. The funds will enable the company to broaden its toolkit of next-generation CRISPR systems with a focus on building permanent genetic cures through in vivo gene-editing therapeutics and democratizing disease detection with on-demand diagnostics. The financing comprises a $150 million Series D led by Redmile Group, with participation from Foresite Capital, Senator Investment Group, Sixth Street, Greenspring Associates, Mayfield, Decheng Capital, NFX and Plum Alley, among others. It follows a $45 million Series C in late 2020, which was led by Redmile Group and Foresite Capital, and included participation from Amazon as well as existing investors.

$124M Buyout for Protein Detection, Acquisitions

Vector Laboratories has closed a $124 million cash buyout, backed by private equity firm Thompson Street Capital Partners, to accelerate its expansion into protein detection. This new funding enables Vector Laboratories to embark upon an acquisition strategy, while also accelerating the commercialization of innovative labeling and detection technologies for immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, glycobiology, and bioconjugation. Through this buyout, Vector Laboratories has gained the flexibility of a well-funded startup combined with a market-tested product portfolio driving innovative research by academic, industrial, and clinical researchers around the world. The buyout was led by Lisa V. Sellers, Ph.D., now appointed Chief Executive Officer. Prior to taking the helm at Vector Laboratories, Dr. Sellers served as Chief Operating Officer at the company. Previously, she served as VP of Marketing at 10x Genomics, having led marketing during the company's hyper-growth phase. In addition, she has held leadership roles overseeing the global reagent and instrumentation businesses for Applied Biosystems, Life Technologies, and ThermoFisher Scientific.

$109M for COVID-19 Consumables Supply Chain

OraSure Technologies has been awarded a $109 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to build additional manufacturing capacity in the United States for InteliSwab COVID-19 rapid tests as part of the nations pandemic preparedness plan. InteliSwab is a remarkably simple test that rapidly detects active COVID-19 infection. It was granted three Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June for professional point-of-care use, prescription (Rx) home use, and over-the-counter (OTC) use. The federal funding will expand OraSures production capacity by 100 million tests annually, by March 2024. An existing OraSure location in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, will be retrofitted to accommodate increased manufacturing and an additional new facility will be added in another U.S. location to be determined. In addition to this contract, OraSure also has internally funded expansion plans to achieve 120 million tests annually by the second quarter of 2022.

$105M FDA Review Voucher Sale

Albireo Pharma has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Priority Review Voucher (PRV) for $105 million. The PRV was granted to Albireo under a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provision that encourages the development of treatments for rare pediatric diseases. The Company received the voucher with the approval of Bylvay for the treatment of pruritus in all types of progressive familial intrahepatic cholestasis (PFIC). Albireo will receive a payment of $105 million upon the closing of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to occur following expiration of the applicable U.S. antitrust clearance requirements.

$45M Series B for Virtual Care

eVisit, the leading Virtual Care platform for large healthcare providers, has closed a $45 million Series B financing round led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs), with participation from Texas Health Resources, Tom Burton and Steve Barlow (Co-founders of Health Catalyst), and existing insiders. eVisit will invest the capital to drive growth by building out its Virtual Care platform and scaling up its sales and marketing efforts. The fundraise comes in the midst of eVisits rapid operational growth and staff expansion, driven by enterprise demand for its Virtual Care capabilities from large-scale Healthcare Organization (HCO) customers including Banner Health, Texas Health Resources Group, and Concentra.

$40M for Diversity in Decentralized Clinical Trials

Lightship has raised $40 million to create access to clinical research for all patients, and improving diversity among patient groups taking part in clinical trials around the world. The funding round has been led by Define Ventures and Brook Byers, with participation from Khosla Ventures, McKesson Ventures and Marc Benioffs TIME Ventures. The new funds will be used to help drive the firms expansion, including internationally, with a new office opening in the Fall in London, United Kingdom. With its end-to-end model, Lightship brings operational excellence to running decentralized clinical trials at scale. Founded in 2018, the firm is continuing to add new pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to its client base, in new therapeutic areas, and has continued to expand with the addition of over 100 new employees so far in 2021. To underpin the continued expansion of the firm, Lightship has bolstered its senior team with several senior hires. This includes the appointment of Robert P. Jones as Chief Financial Officer following nearly 14 years with Goldman Sachs as a Managing Director leading the firm's coverage of Healthcare Services & Technology within Global Investment Research.

$36.3M for Pan-Coronavirus Vaccines

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded approximately $36.3 million to three academic institutions to conduct research to develop vaccines to protect against multiple types of coronaviruses and viral variants. The awards are intended to fuel vaccine research for a diverse family of coronaviruses, with a primary focus on potential pandemic-causing coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2. The awards are designed to fund multidisciplinary teams at University of Wisconsin, Madison; Brigham and Womens Hospital, Boston; and Duke University, Durham, North Carolina to conduct research focused on incorporating understanding of coronavirus virology and immunology, immunogen design, and innovative vaccine and adjuvant platforms and technologies to discover, design, and develop pan-coronavirus vaccine candidates that provide broad protective immunity to multiple coronavirus strains.

$22.8M Series A for Next-Gen Neuroscience

Rune Labs, a brain data company empowering the development and delivery of precision neuroscience therapeutics, has announced a $22.8 million Series A financing led by Eclipse Ventures with participation from current investors including DigiTx and Moment Ventures. Justin Butler, Partner at Eclipse, will join the Rune Labs Board of Directors. Rune Labs was founded to fill the gap in software and data support for next-generation neuroscience therapeutics, and to expand the benefits of precision medicine to the millions of patients with neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases. Runes first-in-class precision brain data software platform integrates electrophysiology, brain imaging, and device data together with wearable data and clinical labels. The combination will provide researchers, drug developers, and clinicians with the tools to guide treatment, uncover hidden disease phenotypes, and design better-targeted therapies.

$22M Series C, Acquisition for Imaging Data Management, Analytics

Flywheel has announced a $22 million Series C funding round and a subsequent acquisition. The funding round is being led by 8VC, which is focused on building technology platforms that create long-term economic and societal value. Other investors include iSelect, Argonautic Ventures, Beringea, DrX/Novartis, HPE Pathfinder, Spike Ventures, Key Investments, Seraph, Great North Labs and others. The acquisition is of St. Louis-based Radiologics. The two organizations combined capabilities in imaging research data management and analytics provide the medical research community unrivaled end-to-end research workflow solutionsfrom open source to global enterprise. Together, the two companies, now operating as Flywheel, offer the only biomedical research platform that can connect any organization or data set across academia, life sciences, clinical, and medical AI.

$20M Series A for Protein-Protein Interactions

A-Alpha Bio has closed a $20M Series A Financing Round to dramatically expand capabilities and throughput. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Perceptive Advisors Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund (PXV Fund) and Lux Capital. Madrona Venture Groups Matt McIlwain and Xontogenys Ben Askew, Ph.D. have joined A-Alpha Bios Board of Directors as part of the financing. A-Alpha Bio is building a high-resolution model of biology by measuring millions of protein-protein interactions, leveraging the intersection of synthetic biology, protein engineering, and machine learning. Compared to traditional technologies for screening protein interactions, including biophysical and display platforms, A-Alpha Bios proprietary AlphaSeq platform can measure protein interactions at a scale and to a degree of precision that is otherwise inaccessible. The quantity and quality of AlphaSeq data is ideal for drug discovery and also critical for training highly predictive ML-models for protein-protein binding.

$20M for Personalized Medicine Plans

Tesis Labs, a leader in targeted genetic sequencing, announced $20 million of growth equity financing at a post-money valuation of $520 million. The round was led by Xcellerant 1 TLC, LLC, an investment group headed by John Shufeldt, M.D. This is the first external financing for Tesis Labs since it initiated operations in early 2020. Prior to this funding, the Company raised approximately $15 million. Tesis Labs offers healthcare providers and physicians access to unique genetic testing and precision medicine, enabling them to create personalized care plans for treating chronic diseases individually and across generations. The Tesis mission is to change medicine by providing physicians, hospitals, and researchers with treatment tools to help patients overcome major chronic conditions such as heart disease, lung disease, and cancer through advanced genetic testing.

$17.1M to Study Drugs for Pregnant Women, Children

A new, five-year $17.1 million grant awarded to The Ohio State University College of Medicine will fund the creation of a knowledge bank to support the study of drugs and medical treatments for pregnant and lactating women and children. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant to the departments of Biomedical Informatics, Obstetrics and Gynecology and Pediatrics will help establish the Maternal and Pediatric Precision in Therapeutics Data, Model, Knowledge and Research Coordination Center. This newly created center will serve as a national resource for multidisciplinary expertise and knowledge in maternal and pediatric therapeutics.

$16M for Chemical, Biological Weapons Protection

Charles River Analytics announced it was awarded a contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to lead a team of research organizations seeking to develop a novel biosystem solution to protect warfighters from chemical and biological threats. The five-year, $16M contract will focus on neutralizing threats at vulnerable internal tissue barriers (including skin, airway, and ocular barriers) using a configurable biological countermeasure.Charles River Analytics will lead a team of partners as they collaborate on DARPAs Personalized Protective Biosystem (PPB) program. PPB aims to develop technology that reduces the need for burdensome protective equipment while increasing individual protection against biological attacks. The program will explore the use of new transgenic commensal organismsspecifically hookworms and schistosomesto secrete therapeutics specifically targeting chemical and biological threats, including neurotoxins (such as organophosphates) and microbial pathogens.

$13.6M for COVID-19 Testing Consumables

OraSure Technologies has announced that the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA), part of the office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will provide up to $13.6 million in funding for the Company to obtain 510(k) clearance and Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) waiver for OraSures InteliSwab COVID-19 rapid test from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). InteliSwab is a simple swab, swirl, and see test that uses an integrated swab to self-collect a sample from the lower nostrils. The result appears right on the test stick within 30 minutes. It has three Emergency Use Authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration for professional point-of-care use, prescription (Rx) home use, and over-the-counter (OTC) use.

$13.5M for New Experimental Methods for Live Cell Research

A new Center for Live Cell Genomics, funded by a five-year, $13.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health, will bring together researchers at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute to develop new methods and experimental platforms for biomedical research using live cells and tissues. The center will deploy this new biotechnology to study neurodevelopmental diseases and cancer. UC Santa Cruz has built an international reputation as a leader in bioinformatics and genomics, working at the forefront of efforts to use genomics in precision medicine and biomedical research. With the new center, the Genomics Institute is spearheading transformational innovations in experimental platform design for large-scale, long-term genomic studies of disease processes in living cells and complex tissues. Advanced methods for growing three-dimensional cultures of human cells and tissues in the lab will be combined with lab-on-a-chip technologies and connected to the internet to create an inexpensive and scalable system with internet-based remote control and analysis capabilities.

$10.89M Wellcome Funding For COVID-19 Therapeutics

The COVID Moonshot, a non-profit, open-science consortium of scientists from around the world dedicated to the discovery of globally affordable and easily-manufactured antiviral drugs against COVID-19 and future viral pandemics has received key funding of 8 million from Wellcome, on behalf of the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. The Moonshot started as a spontaneous virtual collaboration in March 2020. As countries locked down, a group of scientists, academics, pharmaceutical research teams and students began a worldwide, twitter-fuelled race against the clock to identify new molecules that could block SARS-CoV-2 infection and develop pills that would be readily available to the most vulnerable communities. All the generated discovery scientific data and the general learnings of the project will be put in the public domain. Moonshot data is already available online to enable others to freely build on its work the project has already generated over 50% of known structural information on the main protease, a key protein in SARS-CoV-2. The first clinical trials are expected in 2022.

$9M Seed Funding for Drug Discovery Platform

Fauna Bio, a biotechnology company leveraging animal genomics to improve human health, today announced it has raised $9 million in Seed funding led by LifeForce Capital, with participation from True Ventures, Boom Capital, Pacific 8 Ventures, BioMed Ventures, Vibe Capital and Arcadia Science. Fauna Bio will use the new funds to expand its drug discovery platform Convergence while accelerating the discovery of new therapeutic targets for human diseases across a broad range of indications. Fauna Bio harnesses the power of comparative and functional genomics to find better therapies for human disease, including neurologic, metabolic, fibrotic, and cardiovascular disorders. The initial version of Convergence uses gene expression data from hibernating mammals due to their extreme biology and their remarkable ability to reverse disease-causing traits. The platform has so far identified two compounds and four novel genetic targets currently undergoing evaluation for heart disease and related disorders. The company also collaborates with Novo Nordisk on a target discovery program for obesity. Additionally, Fauna Bio has identified seven novel genetic targets to reduce fibrosis, which is a core component of many chronic and debilitating diseases, including NASH and cardiovascular disease secondary to chronic kidney disease and diabetic cardiomyopathy.

$6.8M Swedish IPO for Simultaneous Analysis of Gut Microbiota

Microbiome DX company Genetic Analysis AS closed up 50% over the first two days of trading on the Swedish Spotlight Stock Market following completion of a share issue. The issue of units was oversubscribed to a total of approximately NOK 99 million, corresponding to a subscription ratio of approximately 165 percent, and the Company received approximately NOK 60 million before issue costs. Through the issue of units, approximately 1,200 new shareholders were added to GA including several leading Nordic and international private and institutional investors. The company now plans to use the funds to accelerate commercialization of its proprietary GA-map diagnostic platform for simultaneous analysis of gut microbiota.

$5M Seed Round for Web-Based CRISPR Data Analysis

Latch Bio, a company building data infrastructure for the biocomputing revolution, today announced the closing of a $5 million seed funding round led by Lux Capital with participation from General Catalyst, Haystack, Fifty Years, and Asimov co-founder and CEO, Alec Nielsen, Ph.D. The company has also announced the launch of its first-of-a-kind web-based platform which enables any biologist to analyze CRISPR data without any code or cloud infrastructure setup. Latch Bio was founded in 2021 by Alfredo Andere, Kyle Giffin, and Kenny Workman who met as undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. Using the Latch platform, any researcher can now create a centralized one-stop-shop for storing, transforming and visualizing their data without writing any code. Through the Latch plugins, users can import files from their existing data stack including Amazon S3, Benchling, and Illuminas BaseSpace. Biologists have access to dozens of popular workflows including CRISPResso, MAGeCK, CasTLE, Cas.py, MultiQC, and CasOffinder, among others. After performing a specific workflow, users can further interrogate the results using the built-in genomic visualizer and quality controls. The Latch platform is offered free to academic research users.

$4M in NIH Funding for Early Career Researchers at Mount Sinai

Two Mount Sinai cancer researchers will be awarded $4 million in total costs from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund, which supports exceptionally high-impact programs and research by junior scientists around the country. Deborah Marshall, MD, MAS, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at The Tisch Cancer Institute and The Blavatnik Family Womens Health Research Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Jalal Ahmed Khan, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Precision Immunology Institute and The Tisch Cancer Institute, each received an Early Independence Award worth $2 million given out over five years. Dr. Marshalls study seeks to define novel predictors of female sexual dysfunction and to identify quantitative imaging and microbiome-based biomarker indices associated with damage to specific sexual organs from radiation oncology treatments. Dr. Ahmed Khans study seeks to advance the cancer therapy known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for solid tumors by manipulating CAR T cell interactions with the immune tumor microenvironment.

$1.99M Seed Round for Medical Genetics Software

Genetics software startup PhenoTips announced today that it has raised CAD $2.5 million in an oversubscribed seed fundraising round led by the GreenSky Accelerator Fund IV. This round includes the support of the Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners, Thin Air Labs, Yorkville Partners, and angel investors including members of the GreenSky Presidents Club. PhenoTips empowers healthcare providers to deliver precision medicine with the most complete and interoperable software solution for medical genetics. PhenoTips technology is used by leading genetic care providers in four countries, across four NHS Trusts and two provincial Canadian health systems, currently serving over 200,000 patients with tools that enable deep phenotyping, family history, and genomic analysis. With the additional funds from this seed round, the company plans to double the size of its twelve-person Canada-based team and expand its cloud-based product offerings.

$1M to Engage Diverse Researchers in the All of Us Dataset

Baylor College of Medicine has received more than $1 million from the National Institutes of Health to engage researchers from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups, in utilizing the All of Us Research Programs data resources to advance precision medicine. As part of the effort to engage researchers from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups, in using All of Us data, Baylor will host All of Us Evenings with Genetics seminars, modeled after the Evenings with Genetics seminars hosted by the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, at universities across the country. The seminar series will introduce the All of Us Research Program to biomedical researchers and students from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented groups, and show them how to use the data in a variety of fields, including medicine, psychology, nutrition, and education.

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Follow the Money: CRISPR, Next-Gen Neuroscience, Protein Platforms - Bio-IT World

Neuroscience

The neuroscience of advanced scientific concepts | npj Science of Learning – Nature.com

This study identified the content of the neural representations in the minds of physicists considering some of the classical and post-classical physics concepts that characterize their understanding of the universe. In this discussion, we focus on the representations of post-classical concepts, which are the most recent and most abstract and have not been previously studied psychologically. The neural representations of both the post-classical and classical concepts were underpinned by four underlying neurosemantic dimensions, such that these two types of concepts were located at opposite ends of the dimensions. The neural representations of classical concepts tended to be underpinned by underlying dimensions of measurability of magnitude, association with a mathematical formulation, having a concrete, non-speculative basis, and in some cases, periodicity. By contrast, the post-classical concepts were located at the other ends of these dimensions, stated initially here in terms of what they are not (e.g. they are not periodic and not concrete). Below we discuss what they are.

The main new finding is the underlying neural dimension of representation pertaining to the concepts presence (in the case of the classical concepts) or absence (in the case of the post-classical concepts) of a concrete, non-speculative basis. The semantic characterization of this new dimension is supported by two sources of converging evidence. First, the brain imaging measurement of each concepts location on this underlying dimension (i.e. the concepts factor scores) converged with the behavioral ratings of the concepts degree of association with this dimension (as we have interpreted it) by an independent group of physicists. (This type of convergence occurred for the other three dimensions as well.) Second, the two types of concepts have very distinguishable neural signatures: a classifier can very accurately distinguish the mean of the post-classical concepts signatures from the mean of the classical concepts within each participant, with a grand mean accuracy of 0.93, p<0.001.

As physicists ventured into conceptually new territory in the 20th century and developed new post-classical concepts, their brains organized the new concepts with respect to a new dimension that had not played a role in the representation of classical concepts.

To describe what mental processes might characterize the post-classical end of this new dimension, it is useful to consider what attributes of the post-classical concepts could have led to their being neurally organized as they are and what cognitive and neural processes might operate on these attributes. Previously mentioned was that post-classical concepts often involve their immeasurability and their lower likelihood of being strongly associated with a mathematical formulation and periodicity, both of which are attributes that are often absent from post-classical concepts.

More informative than the absent attributes are four types of cognitive processes evoked by the post-classical concepts: (1) Reasoning about intangibles, taking into account their separation from direct experience and their lack of direct observability; (2) Assessing consilience with other, firmer knowledge; (3) Causal reasoning about relations that are not apparent or observable; and (4) Knowledge management of a large knowledge organization consisting of a multi-level structure of other concepts.

In addition to enabling the decoding of the content of the participants thoughts, whether they were thinking of dark matter or tachyon for example, the brain activation patterns are also informative about the concomitant psychological processes that operate on the concepts, in particular, the four processes listed above are postulated to co-occur specifically with the post-classical concepts. The occurrence of these processes was inferred from those locations of the voxel clusters associated with (having high loadings on) the classical/post-classical factor, specifically the factor locations where the activation levels increased for the post-classical concepts. (These voxel clusters are shown in Fig. 4, and their centroids are included in Table 2). Inferring a psychological process based on previous studies that observed activation in that location is called reverse inference. This can be an uncertain inferential method because many different processes or tasks can evoke activation at the same location. What distinguishes the current study are several sources of independent converging evidence, in conjunction with the brain locations associated with a factor (and not simply observed activation), indicating a particular process.

The factor clusters are encircled and numbered for ease of reference in the text and their centroids are included in Table 2. These locations correspond to the four classes of processes evoked by the post-classical concepts.

First, a statistically reliable decoding model predicted the activation levels for each concept in the factor locations, based on independent ratings of the concepts with respect to the postulated dimension/factor. The activation levels of the voxels in the factor locations were systematically modulated by the stimulus set, with the post-classical concepts, a specific subset of the stimuli eliciting the highest activation levels in these locations, resulting in the highest factor scores for this factor. Thus these brain locations were associated with an activation-modulating factor, not with a stimulus or a task. Second, the processes are consistent with the properties participants reported to have associated with the post-classical concepts. These properties provide converging evidence for these four types of processes occurring. For example, the concept of multiverse evoked properties related to assessing consilience, such as a hypothetical way to explain away constants. Another example is that tachyons and quasars were attributed with properties related to reasoning about intangibles, such as quasi-stellar objects. Third, the processes attributed to the factor locations were based not simply on an occasional previous finding, but on the large-scale meta-analysis (the Neurosynth database, Yarkoni et al.10) using the association based test feature. The association between the location and the process was based on the cluster centroid locations; particularly relevant citations are included in the factor descriptions. Each of the four processes is described in more detail below.

The nature of many of the post-classical concepts entails the consideration of alternative possible worlds. The post-classical factor location in the right temporal area (shown in cluster 5 in Fig. 4) has been associated with hypothetical or speculative reasoning in previous studies. In a hypothetical reasoning task, the left supramarginal factor location (shown in cluster 8) was activated during the generation of novel labels for abstract objects11. Additionally, the right temporal factor location (shown in cluster 5) was activated during the assessment of confidence in probabilistic judgments12.

Another facet of post-classical concepts is that they require the unknown or non-observable to be brought into consilience with what is already known. The right middle frontal cluster (shown in cluster 2) has been shown to be part of a network for integrating evidence that disconfirms a belief13. This consilience process resembles the comprehension of an unfolding narrative, where a new segment of the narrative must be brought into coherence with the parts that preceded it. When readers of a narrative judge the coherence of a new segment of text, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex location (shown in cluster 6) is activated14. This location is associated with a post-classical factor location, as shown in Fig. 4. Thus understanding the coherence of an unfolding narrative text might involve some of the same psychological and neural consilience-seeking processes as thinking about concepts like multiverse.

Thinking about many of the post-classical concepts requires the generation of novel types of causal inferences to link two events. In particular, the inherent role of the temporal relations in specifying causality between events is especially complex with respect to post-classical concepts. The temporal ordering itself of events is frame-dependent in some situations, despite causality being absolutely preserved, leading to counter-intuitive (though not counter-factual) conclusions. For example, in relativity theory the concept of simultaneity entails two spatially separated events that may occur at the same time for a particular observer but which may not be simultaneous for a second observer, and even the temporal ordering of the events may not be fixed for the second observer. Because the temporal order of events is not absolute, causal reasoning in post-classical terms must eschew inferencing on this basis, but must instead rely on new rules (laws) that lead to consilience with observations that indeed can be directly perceived.

Another example, this one from quantum physics, concerns a particle such as an electron that may be conceived to pass through a small aperture at some speed. Its subsequent momentum becomes indeterminate in such a way that the arrival location of the particle at a distant detector can only be described in probabilistic terms, according to new rules (laws) that are very definite but not intuitive. The perfectly calculable non-local wave function of the particle-like object is said to collapse upon arrival in the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. Increasingly elaborate probing of physical systems with one or several particles, interacting alone or in groups with their environment, has for decades elucidated and validated the non-intuitive new rules about limits and alternatives to classical causality in the quantum world. The fact that new rules regarding causal reasoning are needed in such situations was described as the heart of quantum mechanics and as containing the only mystery by Richard Feynman15.

Generating causal inferences to interconnect a sequence of events in a narrative text evokes activation in a right temporal and right frontal location (shown in clusters 3 and 4) which are post-classical factor locations16,17,18 as shown in Fig. 4. Causal reasoning accompanying perceptual events also activates a right middle frontal location (shown in cluster 3) and a right superior parietal location (shown in cluster 1)19. Notably, the right parietal activation is the homolog of a left parietal cluster associated with causal visualization1 found in undergraduates physics conceptualizations, suggesting that post-classical concepts may recruit right hemisphere homologs of regions evoked by classical concepts. Additionally, a factor location in the left supramarginal gyrus (shown in cluster 8) is activated in causal assessment tasks such as determining whether the causality of a social event was person-based (being a hard worker) or situation based (danger)20.

Although we have treated post-classical concepts such as multiverse as a single concept, it is far more complex than velocity. Multiverse entails the consideration of the uncertainty of its existence, the consilience of its probability of existence with measurements of matter in the universe, and the consideration of scientific evidence relevant to a multiverse. Thinking about large, multi-concept units of knowledge, such as the schema for executing a complex multi-step procedure evokes activation in medial frontal regions (shown in cluster 6)21,22. Reading and comprehending the description of such procedures (read, think about, answer questions, listen to, etc.) requires the reader to cognitively organize diverse types of information in a common knowledge structure. Readers who were trained to self-explain expository biological texts activated an anterior prefrontal cortex region (shown in cluster 7 in Fig. 4) during the construction of text models and strategic processing of internal representations23.

This underlying cognitive function of knowledge management associated with the post-classical dimension may generate and utilize a structure to manage a complex array of varied information that is essential to the concept. This type of function has been referred to as a Managerial Knowledge Unit22. As applied to a post-classical concept such as a tachyon, this knowledge management function would contain links to information to evaluate the possibility of the existence of tachyons, hypothetical particles that would travel faster than light-speed in vacuum. The concept invokes a structured network of simpler concepts (mass, velocity, light, etc.) that compose it. This constitutes a knowledge unit larger than a single concept.

Although the discussion has so far focused on the most novel dimension (the classical vs. post-classical), all four dimensions together compose the neural representation of each concept, which indicates where on each dimension a given concept is located (assessed by the concepts factor scores). The bar graphs of Fig. 5 show how the concepts at the extremes of the dimensions can appear at either extreme on several dimensions. These four dimensions are:

the classical vs. post-classical dimension, as described above, which is characterized by contrasting the intangible but consilient nature of post-classical concepts versus the quantifiable, visualizable, otherwise observable nature of classical concepts.

the measurability of a magnitude associated with a concept, that is, the degree to which it has some well-defined extent in space, time, or material properties versus the absence of this property.

the periodicity or oscillation which describes how many systems behave over time versus the absence of periodicity as an important element.

the degree to which a concept is associated with a mathematical formulation that formalizes the rules and principles of the behavior of matter and energy versus being less specified by such formalizations.

A concept may have a high factor score for more than one factor; for example, potential energy appears as measurable, mathematical, and on the classical end of the post-classical dimension. In contrast, multiverse appears as non-measurable, non-periodic, and post-classical.

The locations of the clusters of voxels with high loadings on each of the factors are shown in Fig. 6.

Colors differentiate the factors and greater color transparency indicates greater depth. Sample concepts from the two ends of the dimensions are listed. The post-classical factor locations include those whose activations were high for post-classical concepts (their locations are shown in Fig. 4) as well as those locations whose activations were high for classical concepts.

Classical concepts with high factor scores on the measurability factor, such as frequency, wavelength, acceleration, and torque, are all concepts that are often measured, using devices such as oscilloscopes and torque wrenches, whereas post-classical concepts such as duality and dark matter have an uncertainty of boundedness and no defined magnitude resulting in factor scores at the other end of the dimension. This factor is associated with parietal and precuneus clusters that are often found to be activated when people have to assess or compare magnitudes of various types of objects or numbers24,25,26, a superior frontal cluster that exhibits higher activation when people are comparing the magnitudes of fractions as opposed to decimals27, and an occipital-parietal cluster (dorsolateral extrastriate V3A) that activates when estimating the arrival time of a moving object28. Additional brain locations associated with this factor include left supramarginal and inferior parietal regions that are activated during the processing of numerical magnitudes;26 and left intraparietal sulcus and superior parietal regions activated during the processing of spatial information29. This factor was not observed in a previous study that included only classical concepts and hence the factor would not have differentiated among the concepts1.

The mathematical formulation factor is salient for concepts that are clearly associated with a mathematical formalization. The three concepts that are most strongly associated with this factor, commutator, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian, are mathematical functions or operators. Cluster locations that are associated with this factor include: parietal regions that tend to activate in tasks involving mathematical representations30,31 and right frontal regions related to difficult mental calculations32,33. The parietal regions associated with the factor, which extend into the precuneus, activate in arithmetic tasks34. While most if not all physics concepts entail some degree of mathematical formulation, post-classical concepts such as quasar, while being measurable, are typically not associated with an algebraic formulation.

The periodicity factor is salient for many of the classical concepts, particularly those related to waves: wave function, light, radio waves, and gamma rays. This factor is associated with right hemisphere clusters and a left inferior frontal cluster, locations that resemble those of a similarly described factor in a neurosemantic analysis of physics concepts in college students1. This factor was also associated with a right hemisphere cluster in the inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral precuneus.

For all four underlying semantic dimensions, the brain activation-based orderings of the physics concepts with respect to their dimensions were correlated with the ratings of those concepts along those dimensions by independent physics faculty. This correlation makes it possible for a linear regression model to predict the activation pattern that will be evoked by future concepts in physicists brains. When a new physics concept becomes commonplace, (such as a new particle category, say, magnetic monopoliae), it should be possible to predict the brain activation that will be the neural signature of the magnetic monopole concept, based on how that concept is rated along the four underlying dimensions.

The neurosemantic conceptual space defined by the four underlying dimensions includes regions that are currently sparsely populated by existing concepts, but these regions may well be the site of some yet-to-be theorized concepts. It is also possible that as future concepts are developed, additional dimensions of neural representation may emerge, expanding the conceptual space that underpins the concepts in the current study.

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The neuroscience of advanced scientific concepts | npj Science of Learning - Nature.com