MIT researchers have now demonstrated that making these electrodes much smaller can essentially eliminate this scarring, potentially allowing the devices to remain in the brain for much longer. "What we're doing is changing the scale and making the procedure less invasive," says Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Sc...
What is misophonia? People with misophonia are affected emotionally by common sounds — usually those made by others, and usually ones that other people don’t pay attention to. The examples above (breathing, yawning, or chewing) create a fight-or-flight response that triggers anger and a desire to escape. This disorder is little studied and we don’t know how common it ...
On November 8th, 2017 the first patient in a new clinical study was implanted with a novel drug delivery system, developed by Renishaw, The procedure took place at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. The implantation marks the beginning of a joint clinical study between Renishaw and Herantis Pharma. This phase I - II clinical study will investigate the t...
To survive in a dynamic environment, animals develop adaptive fear responses to dangerous situations, requiring coordinated neural activity in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and amygdala - three brain areas connected to one another. A disruption of this process leads to maladaptive generalized fear in PTSD, which affects 7 percent of the U.S. populatio...
Having a single mental illness like anxiety, depression or schizophrenia is hard enough on its own. But studies consistently show that up to half of people with one mental illness also experience one or more additional forms of mental illness at the same time. The high numbers of patients who suffer from multiple forms of mental illness has many researchers shifting f...
Most people know from their own experience that just a single sleepless night can lead to difficulty in mastering mental tasks the next day. Researchers assume that deep sleep is essential for maintaining the learning efficiency of the human brain in the long term. While we are awake, we constantly receive impressions from our environment, whereby numerous connections be...
"Weight loss strategies are often inefficient because the body works like a thermostat and couples the amount of calories we burn to the amount of calories we eat," says Clémence Blouet from the Metabolic Research Laboratories at University of Cambridge. "When we eat less, our body compensates and burns fewer calories, which makes losing weight harder. We know that the b...
Patients suffering from complete paralysis, but with preserved awareness, cognition, and eye movements and blinking are classified as having locked-in syndrome. If eye movements are also lost, the condition is referred to as completely locked-in syndrome. In the trial, patients with completely locked-in syndrome were able to respond “yes” or “no” to spoken questions, ...
As reported, Neuralink will work to develop "neural lace" technology that would allow people to communicate directly with machines without going through a physical interface. Essentially, people could upload or download their thoughts to or from a computer. While the company is in the very beginning stages, Musk has previously spoken about the idea of a neural lace, e...
The discovery, published in the journal Nature Medicine, provides a better understanding of the condition and can potentially lead to new treatments for this devastating disease affecting more than 5 million people in the U.S. "About 10 years ago, we were surprised to find 'silent seizures' in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease," said co-senior author Jeffrey L. Noeb...
DARPA announced the Targeted Neuroplasticity Training, or TNT, program last March, and work now has begun on the effort to discover the safest and most effective ways to activate a natural process called “synaptic plasticity.” Plasticity is the brain’s ability to strengthen or weaken its neural connections to adapt to changes in the environment. For TNT Program Manage...
A study recently published in PLOS Biology provides information that substantially changes the prevailing idea about the brain formation process in vertebrates and sheds some light on how it might have evolved. The findings show that the interpretation maintained previously regarding the principal regions formed at the beginning of vertebrate brain development is not ...
The Wall Street Journal reported today (Monday, March 27, 2017), citing people familiar with the matter, to pursue “neural lace” brain-interface technology. Neural lace would help prevent humans from becoming “house cats” to AI, he suggests. “I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer,” Musk hinted at the Code Conference last year. It...
That's the key message in a new supplement published in the April issue of the journal Neurosurgery by guest editor Dong H. Kim, MD, director of the Memorial Hermann Mischer Neuroscience Institute at the Texas Medical Center and chair of the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery at McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (...
Bill Kochevar was paralyzed from the shoulders down after a cycling accident in Cleveland in 2006. To help him move again, in 2014, doctors surgically placed two tiny implants into his brain to pick up signals from neurons from the area that controls hand movement. The signals are relayed through external cables to a computer, which sends commands to electrodes in his...
From an analysis of more than 3,400 patients with Parkinson's disease, researchers found that those who engaged in a minimum of 150 minutes of physical activity a week experienced much slower declines in health-related quality of life (HRQL) and mobility over 2 years, compared with patients who exercised less than 150 minutes weekly. What is more, the team found that ...
Non-invasive magnetic brain stimulation can be used to precisely improve a specific type of memory — remembering highly precise contextual and spatial information — Northwestern Medicine scientists shown for the first time. The new research could help in developing new treatments for people with brain injuries or dementia, said Joel Voss, assistant professor of medica...
The brain has more than 100 times higher computational capacity than was previously thought, a UCLA team has discovered. Obsoleting neuroscience textbooks, this finding suggests that our brains are both analog and digital computers and could lead to new approaches for treating neurological disorders and developing brain-like computers, according to the researchers. ...
Imagine a single flexible polymer fiber 200 micrometers across — about the width of a human hair — that can deliver a combination of optical, electrical, and chemical signals between different brain regions, with the softness and flexibility of brain tissue — allowing neuroscientists to leave implants in place and have them retain their functions over much longer periods...
Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories researchers have developed an organic artificial synapse based on a new memristor (resistive memory device) design that mimics the way synapses in the brain learn. The new artificial synapse could lead to computers that better recreate the way the human brain processes information. It could also one day directly interf...
St. Luka's institute of pediatric neurology and epilepsy directed by professor Konstantin Mukhin specializes in diagnostics and treatment of children nervous system diseases, different forms of epilepsy in children and adolescents. We are satisfied to note that three new electroencephalographs-recorders "Encephalan-EEGR-19/26" with a kit for continuous Full HD EEG vid...
