Neuroscience

Pain is important. The experience of pain can engage protective behavioral responses to harmful stimuli, and the effective communication of pain can warn others of potentially hazardous situations (and perhaps even the nature of that hazard). To be effectively communicated, however, observers must recognize the pain occurring in others, experience some proximal version of the pain themselves or at least understand its significance (sometimes sympathizing), and respond accordingly.

    In a column posted a few days ago (November 1) I mentioned that my friend John Evans, a Cambridge (England) mathematician, has developed a general formula for estimating biocomplexity. It is quite simple, using only two variables: the number of units in a system, and the number of connections (interactions) each unit has with other units in the system. Today, in fact, biologists publish ‘interactomes” with furry ball figures that illustrate the number of proteins in a given cell and the number of interactions each protein has with other proteins.

John Evans, a mathematician friend of mine in Cambridge England, came up with a formula that specifically allows one to estimate the relative complexity of nervous systems in the animal kingdom, from C. elegans to the human brain. It takes into account not just the number of neurons in the brain, but also the number of synaptic connections that link neurons to one another, and in a second version, the encephalization quotient.

Prenatal sex-based biological differences extend to genetic expression in cerebral cortices and the differences in question are probably associated with later divergences in how our brains develop, according to a new study by Uppsala University researchers Elena Jazin and Björn Reinius in Molecular Psychiatry.

Professor Elena Jazin and doctoral student Björn Reinius at the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology previously say they have demonstrated that genetic expression in the cerebral cortices of human beings and other primates exhibits certain sex-based differences. It is presumed that these differences are very old and have survived the evolutionary process.

Anyone interested in the topic of emotion has no doubt encountered the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio. Here’s a good introductory FORA.tv interview with Dr. Damasio. Event Date: 07/04/09

Infants can correctly identify humans as the source of speech and monkeys as the source of monkey calls even when they are as young as five months old, says a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) study.  

While young children know that humans speak, monkeys grunt and ducks quack, it's not clear when we come to know which vocalizations each of these animals produce.  Much is known about infants' abilities to match properties of human voices to faces, such as emotion, but it is unknown whether infants are able to match vocalizations to the specific species that produces them.

Brain activity considered to be  spontaneous 'white noise' changes after a person learns a new task, according to researchers, and the degree of change reflects how well subjects have learned to perform the task.

The suggestion is that this learning-induced change in the brain's spontaneous activity may reflect  a 'memory trace' for the new skill, which makes it easier to use those parts of the brain together again when the same challenge is presented. 

In addition to helping anatomical connections between different brain regions, the changes in spontaneous brain activity may maintain a record of prior experience that constrains the way the same circuitries are recruited at the time of a task. 

While inflammation often causes damage to the nerves of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, a group of HBI researchers has been studying how neuroinflammation can instead be harnessed to repair the damage caused by this disease.

Dr. V.W. Yong’s laboratory set out to test whether a drug that is used to treat MS symptoms, Copaxone or glatiramer acetate (GA), could also play a role in repairing the covering of nerves that have been damaged by MS.  

Sculpture by Auguste Rodine/ Baltimore Museum of Art (Courtesy of www.theboldsoul.com)


No sooner met but they looked;
No sooner looked but they loved;
No sooner loved but they sighed;
No sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason;
No sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy;
And in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage;
Which they will climb incontinent;
Or else be incontinent before marriage.

-Shakespeare, As You Like It

I was under the impression that the general subject of love, in all its oblique insanity, was the subject of study and much woeful writing by poets, mostly.