Tag Archives: Brain

I tried to train my color vision. Here’s what happened.

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Sequencer

When I gamified my color blindness, I stumbled into the limits and latitudes of neuroplasticity.

One afternoon during my PhD, I took a break from lab work to snack on a banana. I grabbed a seat in the office, slid off my headphones, and peeled open my treat. Just as I bit in, I noticed a labmate staring at me.

“Max,” she told me, holding back some laughter. “That banana is a 4.”

I instantly knew what she meant because I’d made this mistake before. The banana was days from being ripe, and I had misjudged the color. A laughably green banana.

Even before I knew that I had mild deuteranomaly (so-called red-green colorblindness), I struggled with cryptic color schemes on spreadsheets and graphs. Whether in spite or because of this, color theory fascinated me. I had neurological, practical, and philosophical questions. Why do we call the retina’s longest wavelength cone “red” when it actually best absorbs yellow-green light? Why does mixing paint obey different rules than mixing light? If I could see through your eyes, would your mental images match mine — does your blue match my blue? And I had questions that blended all three, like what the hell is brown???

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Why Antidepressants Take So Long to Work

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WIRED

A clinical trial reveals the first evidence of how the brain restructures physically in the first month on SSRIs—and the link between neuroplasticity and depression.

CLINICAL DEPRESSION IS considered one of the most treatable mood disorders, but neither the condition nor the drugs used against it are fully understood. First-line SSRI treatments (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) likely free up more of the neurotransmitter serotonin to improve communication between neurons. But the question of how SSRIs enduringly change a person’s mood has never returned completely satisfying answers.

In fact, SSRIs often don’t work. Scientists estimate that over 30 percent of patients don’t benefit from this class of antidepressants. And even when they do, the mood effects of SSRIs take several weeks to kick in, although chemically, they achieve their goal within a day or two. (SSRIs raise the levels of serotonin in the brain by blocking a “transporter” protein that decreases serotonin levels.) “It’s really been a puzzle to many people: Why this long time?” says Gitte Knudsen, a neurobiologist and neurologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “You take an antibiotic and it starts working immediately. That’s not been the case with the SSRIs.”

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Everyone Was Wrong About Antipsychotics

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WIRED

An unprecedented look at dopamine in the brain reveals that psychosis drugs get developed with the wrong neurons in mind.

ANTIPSYCHOTICS COME FROM a long line of accidents. In 1876, German chemists created a textile dye called methylene blue, which happened to also dye cells. It meandered into biology labs and, soon after, proved lethal against malaria parasites. Methylene blue became modern medicine’s first fully synthetic drug, lucking into gigs as an antiseptic and an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning. Cue the spinoffs: A similar molecule, promethazine, became an antihistamine, sedative, and anesthetic. Other phenothiazines followed suit. Then, in 1952, came chlorpromazine.

After doctors sedated a manic patient for surgery, they noticed that chlorpromazine suppressed his mania. A series of clinical trials confirmed that the drug treated manic symptoms, as well as hallucinations and delusions common in psychoses like schizophrenia. The US Food and Drug Administration approved chlorpromazine in 1954. Forty different antipsychotics sprang up within 20 years. “They were discovered serendipitously,” says Jones Parker, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “So we don’t know what they actually do to the brain.”

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Neuroscientists Unravel the Mystery of Why You Can’t Tickle Yourself

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WIRED

Playfulness and tickling aren’t always considered “serious” subjects, but a new study shows how they can address key questions about the brain.

INSIDE A BERLIN neuroscience lab one day last year, Subject 1 sat on a chair with their arms up and their bare toes pointed down. Hiding behind them, with full access to the soles of their feet, was Subject 2, waiting with fingers curled. At a moment of their choosing, Subject 2 was instructed to take the open shot: Tickle the hell out of their partner.

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Researchers Want to Restore ‘Good Noise’ in Older Brains

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WIRED

Aging people lose variation in brain oxygen levels—a sign of declining cognitive flexibility. A new drug study probes whether that loss can be reversed.

TO EAVESDROP ON a brain, one of the best tools neuroscientists have is the fMRI scan, which helps map blood flow, and therefore the spikes in oxygen that occur whenever a particular brain region is being used. It reveals a noisy world. Blood oxygen levels vary from moment to moment, but those spikes never totally flatten out. “Your brain, even resting, is not going to be completely silent,” says Poortata Lalwani, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Michigan. She imagines the brain, even at its most tranquil, as kind of like a tennis player waiting to return a serve: “He’s not going to be standing still. He’s going to be pacing a little bit, getting ready to hit the backhand.”

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This Protein Predicts a Brain’s Future after Traumatic Injury

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WIRED

A blood test of “NfL” proteins answers questions about damage severity that doctors—and families—desperately need.

NEIL GRAHAM SEES a lot of head injuries: “Car accidents, violence, assault, gunshots, stabbing—the works, really,” says Graham, a neurologist from Imperial College London who practices at St. Mary’s Hospital nearby.

Doctors stop the bleeding, they relieve any pressure building inside the skull, maybe they’ll put the patient into a coma to keep the brain from overworking when it needs to relax and heal. Imaging can also help—to an extent. CT scans or MRIs pinpoint bruising or specks of hemorrhage in gray matter, the brain’s outer layer where neurons do most of their processing. But a clean scan isn’t a clean bill of health. Trauma to axons—a neuron’s root-like fibers that extend toward other neurons—often appears only in the deeper white matter, sometimes eluding simple scans.

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You’re Not Alone: Monkeys Choke Under Pressure Too

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WIRED

Now you can blame the primate brain. And neuroscientists are eager for a deeper look.

SITTING ALONE IN a dim room in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Earl flung his arm to the left. He slowed his movement down, examining the position of a cursor on the computer screen in front of him. Where his hand went, so did the cursor. Earl gestured the dot closer to a colorful target zone, just as he had done thousands of times before. This time, he expected a big reward, but instead—time’s up. Earl, a rhesus monkey, choked under the pressure. He didn’t move the dot into the target before the timer ran out.

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What Rat Empathy May Reveal About Human Compassion

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WIRED

Rats may feel concern when cage mates are trapped. But, like people, they don’t always care enough to help.

AGONY IS CONTAGIOUS. If you drop a thick textbook on your toes, circuits in your brain’s pain center come alive. If you pick it up and accidentally drop it on my toes, hurting me, an overlapping neural neighborhood will light up in your brain again.

“There’s a physiological mechanism for emotional contagion of negative responses like stress and pain and fear,” says Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, a neuroscientist at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. That’s empathy. Researchers debate to this day whether empathy is a uniquely human ability. But more scientists are finding evidence suggesting it exists widely, particularly in social mammals like rats. For the past decade, Bartal has studied whether—and why—lab rodents might act on that commiseration to help pals in need.

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This Brain-Controlled Robotic Arm Can Twist, Grasp—and Feel

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WIRED

Nathan Copeland learned to move a robotic arm with his mind, but it was kind of slow. Then researchers gave him touch feedback.

NATHAN COPELAND WAS 18 years old when he was paralyzed by a car accident in 2004. He lost his ability to move and feel most of his body, although he does retain a bit of sensation in his wrists and a few fingers, and he has some movement in his shoulders. While in the hospital, he joined a registry for experimental research. About six years ago, he got a call: Would you like to join our study?

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