Brain Function - Science topic

Background Connectome mapping may reveal new treatment targets for patients with neurological and psychiatric diseases. However, the long-term delayed recall based-network with structural and functional connectome is still largely unknown. Our objectives were to (1) identify the long-term delayed recall-based cortex-hippocampus network with structu...

Age-related neurobiological changes significantly affect hippocampal structure and function, such that the main cognitive impairments associated with aging are related to the integrity of this brain structure, including the deterioration in spatial object recognition (SOR) memory. Previous studies have shown that intrinsic factors such as neuroinfl...

A recent paper in this journal presents magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data on humans which are asserted to ‘suggest that we may have witnessed entanglement mediated by consciousness-related brain functions. Those brain functions must then operate non-classically, which would mean that consciousness is non-classical.’ Unfortunately, the article p...

Lipid-rich myelin is a special structure formed by oligodendrocytes wrapping neuronal axons. Abnormal myelin sheath is associated with many neurological diseases. Meningioma-expressed antigen 6 (Mea6)/cutaneous T cell lymphoma-associated antigen 5C (cTAGE5C) plays an important role in vesicle trafficking from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to Golgi...

Neural networks, composed of many neurons and governed by complex interactions between them, are a widely accepted formalism for modeling and exploring global dynamics and emergent properties in brain systems. In the past decades, experimental evidence of computationally relevant neuron-astrocyte interactions, as well as the astrocytic modulation o...

The field of neuroscience has largely overlooked the impact of motherhood on brain function outside the context of responses to infant stimuli. Here, we apply spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM) to resting-state fMRI data to investigate differences in brain function between a group of 40 first-time mothers at 1-year postpartum and 39 age- and...

Recent evidence documented a protective effect of Class II human leukocyte antigen (HLA) DRB1*13 on brain health across the lifespan including evidence of reduced neural network variability relative to non-carriers. Here, in an extension of those findings, we evaluated the influence of a large number of Class I and Class II HLA alleles on aging-rel...

Emerging brain technologies have significantly transformed human life in recent decades. For instance, the closed-loop brain-computer interface (BCI) is an advanced software-hardware system that interprets electrical signals from neurons, allowing communication with and control of the environment. The system then transmits these signals as controll...

Crosstalk between conflicting response codes contributes to interference in dual-tasking, an effect exacerbated in advanced age. Here, we investigated (1) brain activity correlates of such response-code conflicts, (2) activity modulations by individual dual-task performance and related cognitive abilities, (3) task-modulated connectivity within the...

The majority of animal studies on methylphenidate (MP) use intraperitoneal (IP) injections, subcutaneous (SC) injections, or the oral gavage route of administration. While all these methods allow for delivery of MP, it is the oral route that is clinically relevant. IP injections commonly deliver an immediate and maximum dose of MP due to their quic...

The antioxidant properties of polyphenols, which are found in most plants, have been shown to be useful for maintaining health, including enhancing brain function and alleviating stress. We aimed to investigate the effect of a single intake of taxifolin-containing foods on cognitive task performance and whole blood gene expression in healthy young...

The mental health crisis in graduate education combined with low treatment rates among engineering graduate students underscores the need for engineering graduate programs to provide effective methods to promote well-being. There is an extensive body of neuroscience research showing that contemplative practices, such as mindfulness, produce measura...

Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is widely used to assess brain function. However, most preclinical CBF studies have been performed under anesthesia, which confounds findings. High spatiotemporal-resolution CBF imaging of awake animals is challenging due to motion artifacts and background noise, particularly for Doppler-based flow imaging. Here, we report...

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) precedes the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum, making it crucial for therapeutic care to identify patients with MCI at risk of progression. We aim to create generalized models to identify patients with MCI who advance to AD using high-dimensional-data resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) br...

Mood disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) are often resistant to current pharmacological treatment. Therefore, various alternative therapeutic approaches including diets are, therefore, under investigation. Ketogenic diet (KD) is effective for treatment-resistant epilepsy and metabolic diseases, however, only...

Brain tumours are very dangerous diseases in the world. Brain tumours will cause people to lose their brain function and the survival rate of having brain tumours is low. The characteristics of brain tumours are very complex, so, the accuracy of manual classification to classify benign and malignant brain tumours comes with low accuracy. In this ca...

The intestinal immune system interacts with commensal microbiota to maintain gut homeostasis. Furthermore, stress alters the microbiome composition, leading to impaired brain function; yet how the intestinal immune system mediates these effects remains elusive. Here we report that colonic γδ T cells modulate behavioral vulnerability to chronic soci...

Brain functional network (BFN) analysis has become a popular technique for identifying neurological/mental diseases. Due to the fact that BFN is a graph, a graph convolutional network (GCN) can be naturally used in the classification of BFN. Different from traditional methods that directly use the adjacency matrices of BFNs to train a classifier, G...

Depression and metabolic disease are common disorders that share a bidirectional relationship and continue to increase in prevalence. Maternal diet and maternal behaviour both profoundly influence the developmental trajectory of offspring during the perinatal period. At an epidemiological level, both maternal depression and obesity during pregnancy...

Microscopy started as the histological analysis based on intrinsic optical properties of tissues such as the refractive index and light absorption, and is expanding to include the visualization of organelles by chemical staining, localization of molecules by immunostaining, physiological measurements such as Ca2+ imaging, functional manipulation by...

Carnosine is known to improve brain function. The molecular basis for the carnosine-mediated interaction between intestinal cells and neuronal cells is that carnosine acts on intestinal cells and stimulates exosome secretion, which can induce neurite outgrowth in neuronal cells. This study aimed to infer the carnosine-mediated interaction between m...

Death can be defined as irreversible stoppage of three vital functions necessary to sustain life: Respiration, Circulation and Brain functions. Thanatology deals with the study of death, its type, its stages and other aspects. There is a definite order that follows post-mortem that could be defined as various types or stages of death. Criminal juri...

The Yale Program for Psychedelic Science (YPPS) supports a multi-disciplinary research community dedicated to investigating the effects of psychedelic substances on brain function, cognition, and behavior, including their therapeutic potential in treating neuropsychiatric conditions. In support of this mission, YPPS is testing the safety and effica...

In situ capturing technologies add tissue context to gene expression data, with the potential of providing a greater understanding of complex biological systems. However, splicing variants and full-length sequence heterogeneity cannot be characterized at spatial resolution with current transcriptome profiling methods. To that end, we introduce spat...

Schizophrenia is a severe psychotic disorder characterized by positive and negative symptoms, but their neural bases remain poorly understood. Here, we utilized a nested-spectral partition (NSP) approach to detect hierarchical modules in resting-state brain functional networks in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls, and we studied dynamic t...

Understanding how different areas of the human brain communicate with each other is a crucial issue in neuroscience. The concepts of structural, functional and effective connectivity have been widely exploited to describe the human connectome, consisting of brain networks, their structural connections and functional interactions. Despite high-spati...

Light use is rising steeply, mainly because of the advent of light-emitting diode (LED) devices. LEDs are frequently blue-enriched light sources and may have different impacts on the non-image forming (NIF) system, which is maximally sensitive to blue-wavelength light. Most importantly, the timing of LED device use is widespread, leading to novel l...

Gene expression varies across the brain. This spatial patterning denotes specialised support for particular brain functions. However, general rules may govern shared spatial fluctuations in expression across the genome. Such information would offer insights into the molecular characteristics of brain areas supporting, for example, complex cognitive...

Key points Neurodiversity refers to the infinite variation of brain functioning within the population. This is the first of five articles aimed at all members of the dental team to raise awareness of neurodiversity. Raising awareness enables a more accessible and inclusive culture in dentistry which reduces the potential for inadvertent discrimin...

The innate immune system plays essential roles in brain synaptic development, and immune dysregulation is implicated in neurodevelopmental diseases. Here we show that a subset of innate lymphocytes (group 2 innate lymphoid cells, ILC2s) is required for cortical inhibitory synapse maturation and adult social behavior. ILC2s expanded in the developin...

The effectiveness, robustness, and flexibility of memory and learning constitute the very essence of human natural intelligence, cognition, and consciousness. However, currently accepted views on these subjects have, to date, been put forth without any basis on a true physical theory of how the brain communicates internally via its electrical signa...

There is mounting evidence for predictive coding theory from computational, neuroimaging, and psychological research. However, there remains a lack of research exploring how predictive brain function develops across childhood. To address this gap, we used pediatric magnetoencephalography to record the evoked magnetic fields of 18 younger children (...

Introduction: Cognition refers to brain functions including memory, learning, and thought processing and is increasingly important to individuals. However, impairment of cognitive function is a concern among North American adults. Therefore, effective and reliable treatments are needed. Methods: This randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled...

As the final product of glycolysis, lactate features not only as an energy substrate, a metabolite, and a signaling molecule in a variety of diseases—such as cancer, inflammation, and sepsis—but also as a regulator of protein lactylation; this is a newly proposed epigenetic modification that is considered to be crucial for energy metabolism and sig...

The international neuroscience community is building the first comprehensive atlases of brain cell types to understand how the brain functions from a higher resolution, and more integrated perspective than ever before. In order to build these atlases, subsets of neurons (e.g. serotonergic neurons, prefrontal cortical neurons etc.) are traced in ind...

Overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that consciousness may be fundamentally linked to properties of physical systems. Quantum coherence in biological molecules, as well as entangled states of macroscopic objects such as brains, are important examples that support this notion. If we consider the quantum effects that seem most relevant to biolog...

The cerebellum has increasingly been recognized for its role in diverse functional processes. The reciprocal cerebello-cerebral system may scaffold both brain size increase and advanced associative abilities, evolving highly coordinately in primates. In parallel, functional cerebello-cerebral modules have undergone reorganization and cerebellar lob...

Citation: William Winlow and Andrew Simon Johnson. "Neuronal Connectivity and Non-Classical Brain Functions". EC Neurology 15.4 (2023): 45-47. Many research workers have spent prolonged periods mapping connections between neurons in a wide variety of nervous systems [1-6]. The pathways of sensory inputs and motor outputs have been localised as have...

Objective: Older adults with sleep disorders (SDs) show impaired working memory abilities, and working memory processes are closely related to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the neural mechanism of working memory impairment in older adults with SD remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate changes in PFC function among older adults wit...

Imaging features associated with neuropsychiatric traits can provide valuable insights into underlying pathophysiology. Using data from the UK biobank, we perform tissue-specific TWAS on over 3,500 neuroimaging phenotypes to generate a publicly accessible resource detailing the neurophysiologic consequences of gene expression. As a comprehensive ca...

Oscillatory processes at all spatial scales and on all frequencies underpin brain function. Electrophysiological Source Imaging (ESI) is the data-driven brain imaging modality that provides the inverse solutions to the source processes of the EEG, MEG, or ECoG data. This study aimed to carry out an ESI of the source cross-spectrum while controlling...

Communication between neurons and glia plays an important role in establishing and maintaining higher order brain function. Astrocytes are endowed with complex morphologies which places their peripheral processes in close proximity to neuronal synapses and directly contributes to their regulation of brain circuits. Recent studies have shown that ex...

Iron is known to accumulate in neurological disorders, so a careful balance of the iron concentration is essential for healthy brain functioning. An imbalance in iron homeostasis could arise due to the dysfunction of proteins involved in iron homeostasis. Here, we focus on ferritin—the primary iron storage protein of the brain. In this study, we ai...

Purpose Cognitive impairment is a common feature among patients with diffuse glioma. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive function and clinical and molecular factors under the new 2021 WHO classification of tumors of the central nervous system (CNS 5). Methods A total of 110 patients with diffuse glioma were enrolled...

Paternal preconceptional health factors, such as exposures to stress, diet and exercise, have been found to significantly influence offspring phenotypes in a range of animal models. Preclinical studies have provided evidence that paternal stress is associated with increased stress responsivity and anxiety-related traits, particularly in male offspr...

It is crucial to maintain the intracranial pressure (ICP) within the physiological range to ensure proper brain function. The ICP may fluctuate during the light-dark phase cycle, complicating diagnosis and treatment choice in patients with pressure-related disorders. Such ICP fluctuations may originate in circadian or sleep-wake cycle-mediated modu...

Background: It is crucial to understand the neural feedback mechanisms and the cognitive decision-making of the brain during the processing of rewards. Here, we report the first attempt for a simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG)–functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in a gambling task by utilizing tensor decomposition. Methods: Fi...

In this work, we expand the normative model repository introduced in (Rutherford, Fraza, et al., 2022) to include normative models charting lifespan trajectories of structural surface area and brain functional connectivity, measured using two unique resting-state network atlases (Yeo-17 and Smith-10), and an updated online platform for transferring...

Neural population modeling, including the role of neural attractors, is a promising tool for understanding many aspects of brain function. We propose a modeling framework to connect the abstract variables used in modeling to recent cellular level estimates of the bioenergetic costs of different aspects of neural activity, measured in ATP consumed p...

Background: Deficits in motor learning could be an important explanation for the balance and gait impairments characteristic of people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Empirical studies often report that so-called implicit motor sequence learning is impaired in people with PD, but the results are inconclusive. Altered brain activity during implicit...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal analysis has become an interesting and required area in the medical industry to analyze brain function for different diseases. But, the EEG signal’s noise features might degrade the signal prediction's exactness score. So, the presented article aims to develop a novel EEG signal analysis system named a novel Firefl...

Existing studies have revealed that language acquisition influences both structure and function of the brain. However, whether the acquisition of second language at different periods of life alters functional network organization in different ways remains unclear. Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 30 English-speaking monolingual c...

Understanding the common topological characteristics of the human brain network across a population is central to understanding brain functions. The abstraction of human connectome as a graph has been pivotal in gaining insights on the topological properties of the brain network. The development of group-level statistical inference procedures in br...

Taking advantage of the human brain functional connectome as an individual's fingerprint has attracted great research in recent years. Conventionally, Pearson correlation between regional time-courses is used as a pairwise measure for each edge weight of the connectome. Building upon recent advances in graph signal processing, we propose here to es...

Background To investigate the relationship between antibiotic use and subsequent cognitive function in older adults. Older adults who use antibiotics will have lower cognitive function over time. Methods In this longitudinal study of a representative sample of older U.S. adults (N = 2,939, National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project), we direc...

Sex-related differences can be found in many brain disorders and psychophysiological traits, highlighting the importance to systematically understand the sex differences in brain function in humans and animal models. Despite emerging effort to address sex differences in behaviors and disease models in rodents, how brain-wide functional connectivity...

Objective: To explore potential mechanisms of cognitive changes in patients with anti-NMDAR encephalitis (ANMDARE) from intramodule and intermoduleeffects of brain functional networks. Methods: Resting-state functional MRI and T1-weighted imaging data were collected from 30 ANMDARE patientsand 30 healthy controls (HCs). Abrain functional matrix was...

Caspases are a family of proteins mostly known for their role in the activation of the apoptotic pathway leading to cell death. In the last decade, caspases have been found to fulfill other tasks regulating the cell phenotype independently to cell death. Microglia are the immune cells of the brain responsible for the maintenance of physiological br...

Plasticity is the key feature of our brain function. Specifically, plasticity of hippocampal synapses is critical for learning and memory. The functional properties of the neuronal circuit change as a result of synaptic plasticity. This review summarizes the use of voltage-sensitive dyes (VSDs) to examine neuronal circuit plasticity. We will discus...

Connexin 36 (Cx36) is responsible for signal transmission in electrical synapses by forming interneuronal gap junctions. Despite the critical role of Cx36 in normal brain function, the molecular architecture of the Cx36 gap junction channel (GJC) is unknown. Here, we determine cryo-electron microscopy structures of Cx36 GJC at 2.2–3.6 Å resolutions...

Introduction: Neural circuit alterations lay at the core of brain physiopathology, and yet are hard to unveil in living subjects. Virtual brain modelling (TVB), by exploiting structural and functional MRI, yields mesoscopic parameters of connectivity and synaptic transmission. Methods: We used TVB to simulate brain networks, which are key for human...

The development of reading networks across different languages and cultures provides an important window to address gene‐culture interactions in brain functionality development. Previous meta‐analyses have explored the neural correlates of reading in different languages with diverse orthographic transparencies. However, it remains unknown whether t...

Pain is a pervasive symptom in lung cancer patients during the onset of the disease. This study aims to investigate the connectivity disruption patterns of the whole-brain functional network in lung cancer patients with cancer pain (CP+). We constructed individual whole-brain, region of interest (ROI)-level functional connectivity (FC) networks for...

Lifestyle induces long lasting effects on brain and cognition, with some interventions like stress including transgenerational inheritance mediated by epigenetic mechanisms. Physical exercise is one lifestyle intervention driving robust improvements of cognition, including intergenerational transmission to the litter. However, little is known about...

While brain function is considered to be tightly supported by the underlying structure, the connectome-based link estimated by current models is relatively moderate, leaving the structure-function relationship an ongoing challenge in neuroscience. Here, by proposing a novel mapping method based on network eigendecomposition, we present a concise an...

Background: The study is aimed to identify brain functional connectomes predictive of depressed and elevated mood symptomatology in individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) using the machine learning approach Connectome-based Predictive Modeling (CPM). Methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were obtained from 81 adults with BD while t...

Background Sleep spindles are a vital sign implying that human beings have entered the second stage of sleep. In addition, they can effectively reflect a person’s learning and memory ability, and clinical research has shown that their quantity and density are crucial markers of brain function. The “gold standard” of spindle detection is based on ex...