To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Brandy Schillace sometimes writes fiction, but her new book is not that. Schillace, a medical historian, promises that her Cold War-era tale of a surgeon, neuroscientist, and father of 10 obsessed with transplanting heads is true from start to finish.
Schillace came across the story behind her book,
Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, somewhat serendipitously: One day, her friend, Cleveland neurologist Michael DeGeorgia, called her to his office. He quietly slid a battered shoebox toward her, inviting her to open it. Schillace obliged, half-worried it might contain a brain. She pulled out a notebook perhaps from the ‘50s or ‘60s, she says and started to leaf through it.
High-resolution imaging, 3D computer modeling reveal the fractal nature of neurons
High-resolution imaging and 3D computer modeling show that the dendrites of neurons weave through space in a way that balances their need to connect to other neurons with the costs of doing so.
The discovery, reported in Nature
Scientific Reports Jan. 27, emerged as researchers sought to understand the fractal nature of neurons as part of a University of Oregon project to design fractal-shaped electrodes to connect with retinal neurons to address vision loss due to retinal diseases.
The challenge in our research has been understanding how the neurons we want to target in the retina will connect to our electrodes. Essentially, we have to fool the neurons into thinking that the electrode is another neuron by making the two have the same fractal character.
E-Mail
IMAGE: An artist s impression of the brain, made from images of the SARM1 protein. view more
Credit: The University of Queensland
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson s and Alzheimer s disease are in the firing line after researchers identified an attractive therapeutic drug target.
An international collaboration, co-led by University of Queensland researchers, has isolated and analysed the structure and function of a protein found in the brain s nerve fibres called SARM1.
Dr Jeff Nanson said the protein was activated when nerve fibres were damaged by injury, disease, or as a side effect of certain drugs. After a damaging incident occurs, this protein often induces a form of nerve fibre degeneration - known as axon degeneration - a self-destruct mechanism of sorts, Dr Nanson said.
Study provides detailed insight into neural mechanisms underlying placebo effects
A large proportion of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual s mindset, not to the drug itself.
Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has been a longstanding question. A meta-analysis published in
Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.
Previous studies of this kind have relied on small-scale studies, so until now, researchers did not know if the neural mechanisms underlying placebo effects observed to date would hold up across larger samples. This study represents the first large-scale mega-analysis, which looks at individual participants whole brain images.
New, revolutionary theory for understanding brain and memory function
Mar 1 2021
Research from the University of Kent has led to the development of the MeshCODE theory, a revolutionary new theory for understanding brain and memory function. This discovery may be the beginning of a new understanding of brain function and in treating brain diseases such as Alzheimer s.
In a paper published by
Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience, Dr Ben Goult from Kent s School of Biosciences describes how his new theory views the brain as an organic supercomputer running a complex binary code with neuronal cells working as a mechanical computer. He explains how a vast network of information-storing memory molecules operating as switches is built into each and every synapse of the brain, representing a complex binary code. This identifies a physical location for data storage in the brain and suggests memories are written in the shape of molecules in the synaptic scaffolds.