I'm a third year Neuroscience student with a passion for writing about science and studying. This blog will include articles that will aim to engage others in this interesting topic, with other tips about studying and working in science. Please get in touch via the ask option if you would like to discuss anything neuroscience/university/studying/science related as I am always open for suggestions, questions or conversations! I will be writing my own and also linking to other interesting neuroscience articles. Click on the 'My Articles' link below to see what I've written!
4/10/16: i’ve started studying the brain today, it’s so interesting and yet so exhausting! there are so many names and really complex spatial concepts. anyway i can’t wait to see an actual brain in the dissection lab 💫
on another note, i’ve been @arystudies weekly planner and i love it!!
What’s That Ringing Noise? A New Avenue of Treatment for Tinnitus.
Have you ever been to a loud concert and after leaving you’ve been left with a ringing in your ears? Well, imagine hearing that continuously – for years!
Tinnitus is a condition of hearing sounds that aren’t there. It’s mostly described as a ringing but also like crickets, hissing or clicking. The intensity of tinnitus ranges widely – from low to high pitched, soft to loud, or appearing to originate from different places (coming from the left or right, or even from inside your head).
It can be caused by many different things; the most common is hearing loss from very loud sounds, but it can also be caused by ear infections, brain tumours, head injury, and even earwax.
However, there is currently no treatment. A study in 2013 by Langguth et al. revealed that this is a common symptom in around 10-15% of the population – but whilst some can deal with it well, it can become a very debilitating occurrence and is a serious problem for 1-2% of the population. Low mood, anger, depression and poor sleep are just a few of the many negative consequences of living with tinnitus. Thus, the need to find new ways to alleviate tinnitus is vital, and that’s exactly what Smith et al. at the University of Nottingham set out to do.
Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) is a technique currently being investigated by a number of scientists to relieve tinnitus. It is a way of stimulating deep areas of the brain by placing electrodes on the outside of someone’s scalp and providing an electrical current onto the brain area below. Stimulating the area just means you’ve activated that particular part of the brain externally and this has been shown to affect how your brain functions. This study aimed to stimulate very precise brain areas associated with tinnitus – the left temporoparietal area (LTA) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), as shown in the image labelled Figure 1.
A recent study in 2015 by Shekhawat et al. (check it out here!) investigated how changing stimulation intensity (1-2mA), duration (10-20 minutes) and location (LTA or DLPFC) could reduce tinnitus. They also wanted to determine whether the different areas had specific roles in tinnitus – is the LTA affecting tinnitus loudness and the DLPFC involved in level of annoyance?
They found the highest current (2mA) used for the longest period of time (20 minutes) caused the greatest reduction in tinnitus. However, they found that the different locations weren’t responsible for the different components. Patients with less significant hearing loss and higher tinnitus severity responded the best to treatment, making them the ideal candidates for future treatment.
To conclude, this study shows that electrical stimulation with high intensity for 20min (or more!) in these areas could one day be a treatment for tinnitus.
Most animals have smooth brains. The brains of humans (and a handful of animals we consider pretty intelligent – dolphins, chimps, elephants, pigs) start out smooth in the early days of gestation and get more and more wrinkled through infancy.
A wrinkled brain makes sense - folding means you can have a really big cortex but the different parts of the brain won’t be as far apart. But how do brains become wrinkled? Is it programmed somehow - does some genetic code determine the pattern of folds?
A new study from Harvard says no - its just simple physics. They created a 3D model of a smooth fetal brain and coated it with an elastomer gel “cortex.” When they immersed this brain in a special solution, the gel swelled, mimicking brain growth.
Lo and behold, the brain began to buckle, creating folds similar to size, shape and location of a real brain.
Wired for Gaming: Brain Differences Found in Compulsive Video Game Players
Brain scans from nearly 200 adolescent boys provide evidence that the brains of compulsive video game players are wired differently. Chronic video game play is associated with hyperconnectivity between several pairs of brain networks. Some of the changes are predicted to help game players respond to new information. Other changes are associated with distractibility and poor impulse control. The research, a collaboration between the University of Utah School of Medicine, and Chung-Ang University in South Korea, was published online in Addiction Biology on Dec. 22, 2015.
“Most of the differences we see could be considered beneficial. However the good changes could be inseparable from problems that come with them,” says senior author Jeffrey Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neuroradiology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Those with Internet gaming disorder are obsessed with video games, often to the extent that they give up eating and sleeping to play. This study reports that in adolescent boys with the disorder, certain brain networks that process vision or hearing are more likely to have enhanced coordination to the so-called salience network. The job of the salience network is to focus attention on important events, poising that person to take action. In a video game, the enhanced coordination could help a gamer to react more quickly to the rush of an oncoming fighter. And in life, to a ball darting in front of a car, or an unfamiliar voice in a crowded room.
“Hyperconnectivity between these brain networks could lead to a more robust ability to direct attention toward targets, and to recognize novel information in the environment,” says Anderson. “The changes could essentially help someone to think more efficiently.” One of the next steps will be to directly determine whether the boys with these brain differences do better on performance tests.
More troublesome is an increased coordination between two brain regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction, a change also seen in patients with neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, Down’s syndrome, and autism, and in people with poor impulse control. “Having these networks be too connected may increase distractibility,” says Anderson. At this point it’s not known whether persistent video gaming causes rewiring of the brain, or whether people who are wired differently are drawn to video games.
According to Doug Hyun Han, M.D., Ph.D., professor at Chung-Ang University School of Medicine and adjunct associate professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, this research is the largest, most comprehensive investigation to date of brain differences in compulsive video game players. Study participants were from South Korea, where video game playing is a popular social activity, much more than in the United States. The Korean government supports his research with the goal of finding ways to identify and treat addicts.
Researchers performed magnetic resonance imaging on 106 boys between the ages of 10 to 19 who were seeking treatment for Internet gaming disorder, a psychological condition listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as warranting further research. The brain scans were compared to those from 80 boys without the disorder, and analyzed for regions that were activated simultaneously while participants were at rest, a measure of functional connectivity.
The team analyzed activity in 25 pairs of brain regions, 300 combinations in all. Specifically, boys with Internet gaming disorder had statistically significant, functional connections between the following pairs of brain regions:
Auditory cortex (hearing) - motor cortex (movement)
Auditory cortex (hearing) - supplementary motor cortices (movement)
The Curve of Forgetting - A Basic Guide to Revision
Not really sure hot to keep on top of lectures/lesson? Fed up of the last minute, late night cramming the days before an exam?
If you want a basic guideline on how to keep on top of lectures and revision then the University of Waterloo have posted this handy graph, titled ‘The Curve of Forgetting’. It shows that small short revision techniques (from just 2-10 minutes!) regularly throughout the year are the trick to memorising content for your exams. It reveals just how quickly we can forget some things if we don’t use repetition to convert our short-term memory into long-term memory.
But what does this mean?
Day 1: this is probably when you enter the lecture and the curve starts at 0%. Hopefully by the end of the lecture you’re at around 100% if you disregarding wider reading. Unfortunately from here it’s all downhill if you leave and don’t think about the lecture again, which is always tempting if it was a bit dull and there’s no coursework for it.
Day 2: if you’ve walked out of the lecture hall and banished it from thought then by the second day you will have lost about 5-8-% of what you learnt yesterday. However, just ten minutes of work 24 hours after the lecture can help to convert the information from short-term to long-term memory. Try doing ten minutes of thinking about or reading through the lecture notes – or even writing it up in your own words, which is really useful for later revision.
Usually by Day 7 I wouldn’t even be able to remember the title of the lecture, and by Day 30 you can supposedly only remember 2-3% of the original hour! Hence why it often feels like you’re learning it all from scratch by the time exams come round.
So in order to retain these memories you should aim to do 5 minutes of work a week after the lecture, and 2-4 minutes of work is recommend 1 month after the lecture.
How about on Day 7 or Day 30 making some revision cards, posters, or set question for yourself? But if this seems too daunting and you don’t have time, even just reading through and reviewing the content is better than nothing! If you follow this graph then by the time you get to the end of term you’ll have reviewed the content 4 times and (although you might be sick of reading it) you probably won’t need to do as much cramming.
The researchers took brain scans of 145 school-aged children. They also asked the caregivers to identify whether their kids had exhibited any symptoms of excessive guilt, such as apologizing constantly for minor misbehavior or feeling guilty about things that had happened a long time ago. The researchers found that feelings of extreme guilt correlated highly with smaller anterior insulas.
“In the kids who had high levels of guilt, even the kids who weren’t necessarily depressed, they had smaller anterior insula volume, and that smaller anterior insula volume is predictive of later occurrence of depression,” said Joan Luby, one of the study authors. “This research suggests that early childhood experiences impact the way the brain develops.”
“Childhood Guilt, Adult Depression?” from The Atlantic
(via principleofplenitude)
Depression and anxiety are brain disorders that can have a huge and disastrous effect on your body and life. As well as the psychological effects that are also symptoms of effected appetite, sex drive, changes in sleep pattern, poor concentration and memory, and now emerging evidence is showing that depression and anxiety can affect your perception of taste.
Taste is one of your five traditional senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It is an evolutionary system that’s adapted to allow us to distinguish harmful toxic substances (which tend to be bitter) from a healthy food source – and is why we gag at the taste of something gone off! Taste is usually divided into five categories: sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami, which is the taste commonly found in soy sauce.
But how does taste really work? Normal taste transduction (known as gustoception starts at the tongue, on tiny little projections called papillae. There are different types with different shapes and each one contains different amounts of taste buds, from 1 to several hundred! These then have around 50-150 taste receptor cells, which responds to a chemical in the food you eat. This causes an action potential (an electric signal in the body) to be sent to the brain. Different tastes use different mechanisms – for example, a sour taste is due to the food having a high acidity, but different tastes can be due to different receptors and second messenger pathways being activated, causing a different type of signal being sent to the brain. For example, there’s a chemical called capsaicin which is found in chili peppers that acts on a TRP channel to give that hot taste as it acts on pain receptors!
The effect on taste was revealed in a 2006 study investigating antidepressant drugs. Serotonin is the hormone in the body associated with happiness and well-being, and is often found down regulated in depression and is thus one target for antidepressants. The study found an antidepressant drug that involved your serotonin levels made the individual more sensitive to sweet and biter tastes, and another drug that raised noradrenaline (a type of neurotransmitter) found enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes, and those with higher anxiety levels were also found to be less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes.
This reveals how the neurotransmitters serotonin and noradrenaline play a pivotal role in taste transduction and are effected by depression and anxiety, often dulling the senses. This can be a explanation as to why certain people with depression can also suffer from a diminished appetite – as the food just isn’t as appealing as it was before the condition.
Another study by Mannella et al. (2010) also found that children with a family history of alcoholism, or who had expressed depressive symptoms, had a higher preference for intense sweetness than the children who didn’t. Alcohol dependence and sweet taste activate some of the same reward circuits and can explain this craving for high amounts of sweetness. Sweetness is also shown to act as a pain relief, but a higher amount of sweetness was needed in the children with depressive symptoms to cause the same amount of pain relief seen in the control children. This really reveals a lot about how depression can alter your eating habits and can be a route of research for determining the link between depression and anxiety with eating disorders and obesity.
Thus, research has shown that those with depression and anxiety causes a decrease in taste transduction. Those who have these psychological deficits will need to eat a larger amount/higher concentration of sugar to reach the same amounts of satisfaction than normal.
Want to read more on this subject? Check out the references and links below, or drop me a message.
On changed taste levels: Heath, T. P., Melichar, J. K., Nutt, D. J., Donaldson, L. F., (2006) Human Taste Thresholds Are Modulated by Serotonin and Noradrenaline, in: The Journal of Neuroscience, volume 26, no. 49, pp. 12664-12671 Click here.
How depression/alcoholism effect taste: Mennella , J. A., Pepino, M. Y., Lehmann-Castor, S. M. and Yourshaw, L. M. (2010), Sweet preferences and analgesia during childhood: effects of family history of alcoholism and depression, in: Addiction, volume 105, pp. 666–675. Click here.
A more in depth look at taste perception and how the signals are altered:
Mapping taste in the brain: Zuker, C. S., Chen, X., Gabitto, M., Peng, Y., Ryba, N. J. P., (2011) A Gustotopic Map of Taste Qualities in the Mammalian Brain, in: Science, volume 333, no. 6047. Pp. 1262-1266. Read more here.
Serotonin and carbodydrates: Lysons, P.M., Truswell, A. S., (1988) Serotonin precursor influenced by type of carbohydrate meal in healthy adults, in: The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, volume 47, no. 3, pp. 433-439. Read more here.
Acute stress on taste: Ileri-Gurel, E., Pehlivanoglu, B., Dogan, M. (2013) Effect of acute stress on taste perception: in relation with baseline anxiety levels and body weight, in: Senses, volume 38, no. 1, pp. 27-34. Read about it.
This video is pretty funny and it takes a unique approach to teaching about the brain. It explores different neuroscience concepts by hypothesizing what could be wrong in the brains of zombies. You’ll learn about Parkinson’s disease, the neurotransmitter dopamine, ataxia, the cerebellum, Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, and the arcuate fasciculus and how all of these relate to Zombies. But here’s a quick list of the definitions of the terms for your reference:
Dopamine: a neurotransmitter found in the basal ganglia in the brain. It’s associated with movement.
Parkinson’s Disease: a disease in which the dopamine releasing neurons of the basal ganglia die off, resulting in difficulty in movement and muscle rigidity.
Ataxia: inability or lack of movement of the voluntary muscles.It’s usually a result of the dysfunction of the cerebellum- the little brain.
Broca’s aphasia: inability to produce coherent speech.
Wernicke’s aphasia: inability to comprehend language.
Arcuate Fasiculus: Bundle of neurons that connects Broca’s area (in the frontal lobe) to Wernicke’s area (in the temporal lobe).
This is a really cool project that’s been around for a couple of years, but I’ve just recently heard about it. It’s basically DIY neuroscience that almost anyone can do. The co-founders, Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, started “Backyard Brains” while they were studying neuroscience in grad school. They wanted to get more people interested in neuroscience and they knew that the reason more people weren’t interested in the brain because neuroscience equipment is very expensive and inaccessible. So they started with a prototype for the spikerbox, a device that allows you to hear neurons firing and even see neuronal spikes (basically action potentials) on a free app they created, and they received so much interest from scientists at the convention they presented it at that they decided to take their project further, and Backyard brains was born. Check out their website. There, you can buy the spikerbox assembled or as a kit to build yourself and also explore their many experiments using the spikerbox. My favorite one is controlling someone else’s arm while learning principles of neural prosthetics.
(via Meet the Neuroscientist Who Installed an Implant in His Own Brain | MIT Technology Review)
Philip Kennedy
I thought it was cool when MIT Professor Nancy Kanwisher shaved her head to teach an anatomy lesson, but neurologist Phil Kennedy certainly blew her out of the park. Kennedy is one of the fathers of “brain-computer interface.” Basically, that means that he pioneered a really invasive surgery that connects electrodes in a human brain to a computer. This allows the computer to receive information from the brain, which depends on electricity for communication. And when Kennedy couldn’t get enough data for his project, a speech recorder that would take neuronal signals produced when you imagine speech and convert them into words “spoken” from a speech synthesizer, he had brain surgery in Central America in order to collect more data for his dying project. After his surgery, which is his in more ways than one because he pioneered the surgery, Kennedy went back to his speech lab and experimented on himself to get more data. And he did. He even had enough data (from his brain of course) to present his findings at the Society for Neuroscience! To find out more check out this great article by the MIT Technology Review.
Everything we see is in our heads. And this video of cone trickery by Guillaume Riesen shows just that(it also never fails to amuse me).Try it! If you just want to see the trickery and read my explanation(although you should definitely listen to Guillaume’s wonderful explanation) below, you can skip to 2:29. You’ll see that after looking at a red cross on a picture with inverted colors, the same picture in black and white will appear to be normally colored.
This trick works because there are receptors on your retina(at the back of the eye) called cones which allow you to see color, and they get tired. But let’s backtrack a little. We have 3 types of cones which let us see different degrees of red, green, and blue. So when we look at something red like an apple, our red cones are active and the blue and green cones are “resting.” But if we stare at something red for too long, like the red cross and the inverted image in the video, the red cones will become fatigued and the blue and green cones will take over. Since we only see white when all of our cones are equally active, and our red cones have become fatigued, the blue and green cones take over once we switch to the black and white image and it seams to be a colored imaged with different shades of blue and green. Pretty cool isn’t it?
Neurotransmitters are chemicals that the nervous system uses to communicate, kind of like how the endocrine system uses hormones to communicate. Check out this graphic I made to learn about the really important neurotransmitters.
As cut and dry as side effects seem, there’s a surprisingly gray line between that and therapeutic effects (or the effect we’re aiming for)
Literally the definition of a therapeutic effect is the effect we’re aiming for. A side effect is literally anything else the drug might do
A great example is amphetamine-like drugs. They can be very useful for narcoleptics, as they create insomnia. However, they also induce weight loss. Conversely, they could potentially be an asset to someone trying to lose weight, however they might find they’re less able to sleep at night. The same two drug effects alternate between side effects and therapeutic depending on the needs of the individual. It’s a tough science to find a drug that does what we need with minimal things that do what we don’t need, especially since the body is one whole organism.
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