It’s Way Too Late For This, But It’s Important To Note That NASA Didn’t Discover The New Earth-like

Scientists use lasers to control mouse brain switchboard

Ever wonder why it’s hard to focus after a bad night’s sleep? Using mice and flashes of light, scientists show that just a few nerve cells in the brain may control the switch between internal thoughts and external distractions. The study, partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, may be a breakthrough in understanding how a critical part of the brain, called the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), influences consciousness.

“Now we may have a handle on how this tiny part of the brain exerts tremendous control over our thoughts and perceptions,” said Michael Halassa, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor at New York University’s Langone Medical Center and a lead investigator of the study. “These results may be a gateway into understanding the circuitry that underlies neuropsychiatric disorders.”

The TRN is a thin layer of nerve cells on the surface of the thalamus, a center located deep inside the brain that relays information from the body to the cerebral cortex. The cortex is the outer, multi-folded layer of the brain that controls numerous functions, including one’s thoughts, movements, language, emotions, memories, and visual perceptions. TRN cells are thought to act as switchboard operators that control the flow of information relayed from the thalamus to the cortex.

“The future of brain research is in studying circuits that are critical for brain health and these results may take us a step further,” said James Gnadt, Ph.D., program director at NIH’s National Institute Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which helped fund the study. “Understanding brain circuits at the level of detail attained in this study is a goal of the President’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.”

To study the circuits, the researchers identified TRN cells that send inhibitory signals to parts of the thalamus known to relay visual information to the cortex. Using a technique known as multi-electrode recordings, they showed that sleep and concentration affected these cells in opposite ways.

They fired often when the mice were asleep, especially during short bursts of simultaneous brain cell activity called sleep spindles. These activity bursts briefly widen electrical brain wave traces making them look like spindles, the straight spikes with rounded bottoms used to make yarn. In contrast, the cells fired infrequently when the mice were tasked with using visual cues to find food. The results suggested that these cells blocked visual information from reaching the cortex during sleep and allowed its transmission when the mice were awake and attentive.

For Dr. Halassa, a practicing psychiatrist who treats schizophrenia, these surprising results may provide fundamental insights into how the brain controls information transmission, a process that is disrupted in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. Previous studies suggested that people who experienced more spindles while sleeping were less susceptible to being disturbed by outside noises. Moreover, people with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder may experience fewer spindles.

“Spindles may be peepholes into the mysteries of these disorders,” said Dr. Halassa.

To test this idea, the researchers used optogenetics, a technique that introduces light-sensitive molecules into nerve cells. This allowed them to precisely control the firing patterns of visual TRN cells with flashes of laser light. The experiments were performed in well-rested as well as sleep-deprived mice. Similar to what is seen in humans, sleep deprivation can disrupt the ability of mice to focus and block out external distractions.

Well-rested mice needed just a second or two to find the food whereas sleep-deprived mice took longer, suggesting that lack of sleep had detrimental effects on their ability to focus. When the researchers used flashes of laser light to inhibit the firing of optogenetically engineered visual TRN cells in sleep-deprived mice, the mice found the food faster. In contrast, if they used optogenetics to induce sleep-like firing patterns in well-rested mice, then the mice took longer to find food.

“It’s as if with a flick of a switch we could alter the mental states of the mice and either mimic or cure their drowsiness,” said Dr. Halassa.

In a parallel set of experiments the researchers found neighbors of the visual TRN cells had very different characteristics. These neighboring cells control the flow of information to the cortex from limbic brain regions, which are involved with memory formation, emotions and arousal. The cells fired very little during sleep and instead were active when the mice were awake. Dr. Halassa thinks that their firing pattern may be important for the strengthening of new memories that often occurs during sleep. Combined, the results suggest that the TRN is divided into sub-networks that oversee discrete mental states. The researchers think understanding the sub-networks is an initial step in thoroughly exploring the role of the TRN in brain disorders.

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

Source:science dump

THE 👏🏾 ALIENS 👏🏾 ARE 👏🏾 COMING 👏🏾 BINCH

Monkey sees… monkey knows?

Socrates is often quoted as having said, “I know that I know nothing.” This ability to know what you know or don’t know—and how confident you are in what you think you know—is called metacognition.

When asked a question, a human being can decline to answer if he knows that he does not know the answer. Although non-human animals cannot verbally declare any sort of metacognitive judgments, Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Rochester, and PhD candidate Stephen Ferrigno, have found that non-human primates exhibit a metacognitive process similar to humans. Their research on metacognition is part of a larger enterprise of figuring out whether non-human animals are “conscious” in the human sense.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they report that monkeys, like humans, base their metacognitive confidence level on fluency—how easy something is to see, hear, or perceive. For example, humans are more confident that something is correct, trustworthy, or memorable—even if this may not be the case—if it is written in a larger font.

“Humans have a variety of these metacognitive illusions—false beliefs about how they learn or remember best,” Cantlon says.

Because other primate species exhibit metacognitive illusions like humans do, the researchers believe this cognitive ability could have an evolutionary basis. Cognitive abilities that have an evolutionary basis are likely to emerge early in development.

“Studying metacognition in non-human primates could give us a foothold for how to study metacognition in young children,” Cantlon says. “Understanding the most basic and primitive forms of metacognition is important for predicting the circumstances that lead to good versus poor learning in human children.”

Cantlon and Ferrigno determined that non-human primates exhibited metacognitive illusions after they observed primates completing a series of steps on a computer:

The monkey touches a start screen.

He sees a picture, which is the sample. The goal is to remember that sample because he will be tested on this later. The monkey touches the sample to move to the next screen.

The next screen shows the sample picture among some distractors. The monkey must touch the image he has seen before.

Instead of getting a reward right away—to eliminate decisions based purely on response-reward—the monkey next sees a betting screen to communicate how certain he is that he’s right. If he chooses a high bet and is correct, three tokens are added to a token bank. Once the token bank is full, the monkey gets a treat. If he gets the task incorrect and placed a high bet, he loses three tokens. If he placed a low bet, he gets one token regardless if he is right or wrong.

Researchers manipulated the fluency of the images, first making them easier to see by increasing the contrast (the black image), then making them less fluent by decreasing the contrast (the grey image).

The monkeys were more likely to place a high bet, meaning they were more confident that they knew the answer, when the contrast of the images was increased.

“Fluency doesn’t affect actual memory performance,” Ferrigno says. “The monkeys are just as likely to get an answer right or wrong. But this does influence how confident they are in their response.”

Since metacognition can be incorrect through metacognitive illusion, why then have humans retained this ability?

“Metacognition is a quick way of making a judgment about whether or not you know an answer,” Ferrigno says. “We show that you can exploit and manipulate metacognition, but, in the real world, these cues are actually pretty good most of the time.”

Take the game of Jeopardy, for example. People press the buzzer more quickly than they could possibly arrive at an answer. Higher fluency cues, such as shorter, more common, and easier-to-pronounce words, allow the mind to make snap judgments about whether or not it thinks it knows the answer, even though it’s too quick for it to actually know.

Additionally, during a presentation, a person presented with large amounts of information can be fairly confident that the title of a lecture slide, written in a larger font, will be more important to remember than all the smaller text below.

“This is the same with the monkeys,” Ferrigno says. “If they saw the sample picture well and it was easier for them to encode, they will be more confident in their answer and will bet high.”

This image hurts my brain more than the original debate ever did. Brains are dumb.

Just Made a Bad Decision?

Most people experience anxiety in their lives. For some, it is just a bad, passing feeling, but, for many, anxiety rules their day-to-day lives, even to the point of taking over the decisions they make.

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a mechanism for how anxiety may disrupt decision making. In a study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, they report that anxiety disengages a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is critical for flexible decision making. By monitoring the activity of neurons in the PFC while anxious rats had to make decisions about how to get a reward, the scientists made two observations. First, anxiety leads to bad decisions when there are conflicting distractors present. Second, bad decisions under anxiety involve numbing of PFC neurons.

The data indicates that anxiety has an exquisitely selective effect on neuronal activity that supports decision making, says Bita Moghaddam, the lead author of the study and a professor in the Department of Neuroscience within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Up to now, scientists have mostly studied anxiety in animal models in the context of fear and measured how brain cells react to a threatening situation. But human anxiety is devastating, not merely because of how the person feels, but also because it can interfere with nearly all aspects of daily life including decision making, Moghaddam says.

Pitt researchers studied this aspect of anxiety by monitoring the activity of a large number of neurons as rats made decisions about which choice was most optimal for receiving a reward. They compared behavior and neuronal activity in two groups: one group that had a placebo injection and another that got a low dose of an anxiety-inducing drug.

As with many people who suffer from anxiety but go through day-to-day life and make decisions, the anxious rats completed the decision-making task and, actually, did not do too badly. But they made far more mistakes when the correct choice involved ignoring distracting information. “A brain locus of vulnerability for these anxiety-induced mistakes was a group of cells in the PFC that specifically coded for choice. Anxiety weakened the coding power of these neurons.

“We have had a simplistic approach to studying and treating anxiety. We have equated it with fear and have mostly assumed that it over-engages entire brain circuits. But this study shows that anxiety disengages brain cells in a highly specialized manner.”

Perhaps, down the line, this better understanding of the brain mechanics behind anxiety and decision making, she says, could lead to better treatment of anxiety in people and, subsequently, better outcomes in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

DO NOT GIVE OR GET ANY VACCINATIONS FOR YOURSELF OR  YOUR KIDS………..

New York City Has Genetically Distinct ‘Uptown’ and ‘Downtown’ Rats

A graduate student sequenced rats all over Manhattan, and discovered how the city affects their genetic diversity.

whoa-o-o-o-o-oh-oh

WHOA-O-O-O-O-OH-OH

UPTOWN RAT