NS/ Human brain organoids respond to visual stimuli when transplanted into adult rats
Neuroscience biweekly vol. 78, 1st February — 15th February
TL;DR
- In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, researchers show that brain organoids — clumps of lab-grown neurons — can integrate with rat brains and respond to visual stimulation like flashing lights.
- The human brain prepares skilled movements such as playing the piano, competing in athletics, or dancing by ‘zipping and unzipping’ information about the timing and order of movements ahead of the action being performed, a new study reveals.
- Think of a new longer-term memory as a construction site inside the brain. The brain’s neurons restructure themselves and build or demolish connections with other neurons to store the memory for retrieval when needed.
- People who share a political ideology have more similar ‘neural fingerprints’ of political words and process new information in similar ways, according to a new analysis.
- Characterized by antisocial behaviors and low academic achievement, conduct disorder (CD) impacts an estimated 9.5% of individuals in the United States. Childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for CD. Past CD studies have identified structural alterations in various brain regions, such as those implicated in emotion processing, learning, and social cognition. A new study has now assessed whether youths with CD who experienced childhood maltreatment differ at the brain level from those with CD without a history of maltreatment.
- Researchers are one step closer to demonstrating the potential of a brain molecule called fractalkine to halt and even reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers injected fractalkine into mice with chemically induced MS. They found the treatment increased the number of new oligodendrocytes — vital brain and spinal cord cells that produce myelin in both embryonic and adult brains — which are damaged during the MS autoimmune attack.
- The study shows that delivering information at the natural tempo of our neural pulses accelerates our ability to learn. Participants who got a simple 1.5-second visual cue at their personal brainwave frequency were at least three times faster when it came to improving at a cognitive task. When researchers tested participants again the next day, those who had improved faster were still just as good — the learning stuck.
- New research found that using focused-ultrasound-mediated liquid biopsy in a mouse model released more tau proteins and other biomarkers into the blood than without the intervention. This non-invasive method could facilitate the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, the researchers said.
- Research from the University of Houston has shown that playing video games has no effect — positive or negative — on cognitive test performance in preteens.
- Study shows just one quality conversation with a friend during the day makes you happier and less stressed by day’s end.
- And more!
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The latest news and research
Structural and functional integration of human forebrain organoids with the injured adult rat visual system
by Dennis Jgamadze, James T. Lim, Zhijian Zhang, Paul M. Harary, James Germi, Kobina Mensah-Brown, Christopher D. Adam, Ehsan Mirzakhalili, Shikha Singh, Jiahe Ben Gu, Rachel Blue, Mehek Dedhia, Marissa Fu, Fadi Jacob, Xuyu Qian, Kimberly Gagnon, Matthew Sergison, Oceane Fruchet, Imon Rahaman, Huadong Wang, Fuqiang Xu, Rui Xiao, Diego Contreras, John A. Wolf, Hongjun Song, Guo-li Ming, Han-Chiao Isaac Chen in Cell Stem Cell
In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, researchers show that brain organoids — clumps of lab-grown neurons — can integrate with rat brains and respond to visual stimulation like flashing lights.
Decades of research have shown that we can transplant individual human and rodent neurons into rodent brains, and, more recently, it has been demonstrated that human brain organoids can integrate with developing rodent brains. However, whether these organoid grafts can functionally integrate with the visual system of injured adult brains has yet to be explored.
“We focused on not just transplanting individual cells, but actually transplanting tissue,” says senior author H. Isaac Chen, a physician and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. “Brain organoids have architecture; they have structure that resembles the brain. We were able to look at individual neurons within this structure to gain a deeper understanding of the integration of transplanted organoids.”
The researchers cultivated human stem cell-derived neurons in the lab for around 80 days before grafting them into the brains of adult rats that had sustained injuries to their visual cortex. Within three months, the grafted organoids had integrated with their host’s brain: becoming vascularized, growing in size and number, sending out neuronal projections, and forming synapses with the host’s neurons.
The team made use of fluorescent-tagged viruses that hop along synapses, from neuron to neuron, to detect and trace physical connections between the organoid and brain cells of the host rat.
“By injecting one of these viral tracers into the eye of the animal, we were able to trace the neuronal connections downstream from the retina,” says Chen. “The tracer got all the way to the organoid.”
Next, the researchers used electrode probes to measure the activity of individual neurons within the organoid when the animals were exposed to flashing lights and alternating white and black bars.
“We saw that a good number of neurons within the organoid responded to specific orientations of light, which gives us evidence that these organoid neurons were able to not just integrate with the visual system, but they were able to adopt very specific functions of the visual cortex.”
The team was surprised by the degree to which the organoids were able to integrate within only three months.
“We were not expecting to see this degree of functional integration so early,” says Chen. “There have been other studies looking at transplantation of individual cells that show that even 9 or 10 months after you transplant human neurons into a rodent, they’re still not completely mature.”
“Neural tissues have the potential to rebuild areas of the injured brain,” says Chen. “We haven’t worked everything out, but this is a very solid first step. Now, we want to understand how organoids could be used in other areas of the cortex, not just the visual cortex, and we want to understand the rules that guide how organoid neurons integrate with the brain so that we can better control that process and make it happen faster.”
Cortical patterns shift from sequence feature separation during planning to integration during motor execution
by Rhys Yewbrey, Myrto Mantziara, Katja Kornysheva in The Journal of Neuroscience
The human brain prepares skilled movements such as playing the piano, competing in athletics, or dancing by ‘zipping and unzipping’ information about the timing and order of movements ahead of the action being performed, a new study reveals.
Experts discovered that the order and timing of movements in complex sequences are separated by the brain, before being zipped and transferred into specific movement commands, or ‘muscle memory’, as the person begins the action.
They found that high-level sequencing of movement (such as order and timing) can be stored across several motor areas of the brain, often across several days of training and memorizing action sequences, before being activated following a particular trigger such as a musical cue or a starting gun.
Publishing their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Birmingham and Bangor University believe the discovery may help to improve motor rehabilitation for stroke victims.
Principal investigator Dr. Katja Kornysheva, from the Centre for Human Brain Health at the University of Birmingham, commented:
“From handwriting to playing a musical instrument, performing sequences of movements from memory is a hallmark of skilled human behaviour.
“What is surprising is that the brain separates these skills into their constituent features rather than encoding them as an integrated muscle memory, even after extensive training. There is a shift in information states within the brain when performing such tasks.
“Information is retrieved from memory unzipped when we prepare it for execution, before being zipped together to start the task. Perhaps this unzipping mechanism helps us to stay flexible for adjustments, even in the final hundreds of milliseconds before we start the movement, e.g. if we need to change the speed or timing of an upcoming action.”
A series of almost 1000 trials saw right-handed participants — excluding professional musicians — learn and memorize four keyboard sequences that they prepared and subsequently produced after a visual cue. After training, participants produced the keyboard sequences in an MRI scanner which measured activity patterns across the brain during the task. The go cue didn’t appear in some trials which allowed the researchers to separate preparation from the movement itself.
First author Rhys Yewbrey, from Bangor University, commented:
“We also found several brain regions which control timing during movement production, but none seemed to control order without integrating it with timing.
“There was a matching effect in our participants’ behaviour — they were faster in acquiring a sequence with a new order of finger presses when they were familiar with the timing yet struggled to learn a sequence when they had to pair a previously trained order with a new timing. Perhaps timing control staying active during production allows for flexibility even after the movement has started.”
Researchers believe that the brain separates sequence order and timing as ‘what’ elements representing higher-level control, which are combined to define ‘how’ exactly the task should be performed.
These new results help us to better understand how skilled actions are stored and controlled in the brain for everyday skills such as typing, tying shoelaces and playing a musical instrument, and what makes them flexible and resilient to changes in the environment or in neurological disorders.
Short-Term and Long-Term Sensitization Differentially Alters the Composition of an Anterograde Transport Complex inAplysia
by Abhishek Sadhu, Kerriann K. Badal, Yibo Zhao, Adia A. Ali, Supriya Swarnkar, George Tsaprailis, Gogce C. Crynen, Sathyanarayanan V. Puthanveettil in eneuro
Think of a new longer-term memory as a construction site inside the brain. The brain’s neurons restructure themselves and build or demolish connections with other neurons to store the memory for retrieval when needed.
The neurons can’t do the work without help. They need building materials from a distant warehouse. So, trucks hit the highway to transport cargo to the construction site.
The cargo of those trucks varies over time depending on the strength of the memory. Do the neurons need supplies to build a structure that endures hours, days, weeks or even years?
Researchers at The Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology have discovered that these cellular building materials — in this case, sets of proteins — undergo experience-dependent changes while forming short- and long-term memories.
A paper on the discovery by a team of Wertheim UF Scripps Institute scientists was published in eNeuro, an open-access journal of the Society for Neuroscience.
It’s a glimpse into the brain’s plasticity, or its ability to adapt and change its structure as we live our lives and accumulate memories.
Additionally, it enlightens future research about how the brain’s enormously complex systems operate. That has potential implications, scientists said, for better understanding of neurological disorders. Those include Alzheimer’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“This is giving us a much more detailed insight into a process that we know is important for memory,” said senior author Sathyanarayanan V. Puthanveettil, Ph.D. He is an associate professor at The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute.
“The connections of these neurons need to be selectively modified to form long-term memory,” he added. “And for the modification to occur, the neuron needs to send materials from the cell’s soma to its distant synapses. Unique packets of proteins are sent, and this cargo of proteins changes over time as memory is encoded. This is an exciting finding.”
The soma is the main cell body of a neuron where its nucleus resides, while synapses are the place where connections between neurons are built. On a cellular level, it’s a long trip.
Puthanveettil’s team used a species of sea slug called Aplysia to explore how memories are encoded. The slugs have gigantic neurons compared with those in the human brain, making them easier to study.
A neural mechanism for storing certain memories in slugs is thought to be extremely similar to what occurs in the human brain, Puthanveettil said. Memory, of course, is the essence of what it means to be human.
Sometimes memories are short-lived, as when we see a stranger’s face at a party and cannot recall it the next day. A simple biochemical change in the brain creates shorter-term memories that are with us for several minutes to a few hours, he said.
Longer-term memories, however, bring out the full construction crew that indelibly encodes the brain’s circuitry, especially when the brain is sensitized to a strong event — a car crash, a child’s birth, the moment someone learns shocking news.
Puthanveettil said how the brain accomplishes this has been poorly understood, and even now, it will take much more research to fully decipher the cellular building blocks that form memory.
The material that moves between soma and synapse includes numerous proteins, which are crucial workhorses that drive many of the processes and chemical reactions that allow human cells to function and carry out tasks.
Other cellular materials might also change over time, Puthanveettil said. But that will be a topic of future research.
Shared neural representations and temporal segmentation of political content predict ideological similarity
by Daantje de Bruin, Jeroen M. van Baar, Pedro L. Rodríguez, Oriel FeldmanHall in Science Advances
What causes two people from opposing political parties to have strongly divergent interpretations of the same word, image or event?
Take the word “freedom,” for example, or a picture of the American flag, or even the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A person who identifies politically as liberal vs. one who identifies as conservative will likely have opposing interpretations when processing this information — and a new study helps to explain why.
While previous theories posited that political polarization results from selective consumption (and over-consumption) of news and social media, a team led by researchers at Brown University hypothesized that polarization may start even earlier.
Their new study, published in Science Advances, shows that individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural fingerprints of political words, experience greater neural synchrony when engaging with political content, and their brains sequentially segment new information into the same units of meaning. In this way, the researchers said, they show how polarization arises at the very point when the brain receives and processes new information.
“This helps shed light on what happens in the brain that gives rise to political polarization,” said senior study author Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences who is affiliated with the Carney Institute of Brain Science at Brown University. Daantje de Bruin, a graduate student in FeldmanHall’s lab, led the research and conducted the data analysis.
Previous research from FeldmanHall’s lab showed that when watching a potentially polarizing video about hot-button issues like abortion, policing, or immigration, the brain activity of people who identified as Democrat or Republican was similar to the brain activity of people in their respective parties.
That neurosynchrony, FeldmanHall explained, is considered evidence that the brains are processing the information in a similar way. For this new study, the researchers wanted to get an even more detailed picture of why and how the brains of people in the same political party are able to sync up.
To do that, the team used a range of methods that they say have never before been used in conjunction with each other. They conducted a series of experiments with a group of 44 participants, equally split among liberals and conservatives, who agreed to perform various cognitive tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity.
Participants first completed a word reading task in which they were presented with single words (e.g., “immigration,” “abortion”) and asked to determine whether the word was political or non-political (indicated via a button press). Then the participants watched a series of videos, including a neutrally worded news clip on abortion and a heated 2016 vice presidential campaign debate on police brutality and immigration. During the experiments, the participants’ brain activity was measured using fMRI.
One of the methods the researchers used is called representation similarity analysis. When a person sees a simple, static image, like a word, the brain will represent that word with certain activity patterns.
“You can think of it as the brain representing the word by firing neurons in a certain way,” FeldmanHall said. “It’s almost like a fingerprint — a neural fingerprint that encodes the concept of that word within the brain.”
She added that since neural activity patterns store information about the world, how the brain represents this information is considered a metric for how that information is interpreted and used to steer behavior and attitudes.
In the study, the participants were exposed to words that are often politicized, like “abortion,” “immigration” and “gangs,” as well as more ambiguous words, like “freedom.”
The researchers found by analyzing the fMRI data that the neural fingerprint created by a liberal brain is more similar to other liberal brains than the neural fingerprint created by a conservative brain, and vice versa. This is important, FeldmanHall said, because it shows how the brains of partisans are processing information in a polarized way, even when it’s devoid of any political context.
The researchers also used a newer methodology called neural segmentation to explore how the brains of people who identify with a particular party bias the interpretation of incoming information. Brains are constantly receiving visual and auditory input, FeldmanHall said, and the way the brain makes sense of that continuous barrage of information is to separate it into discrete chunks, or segments.
“You can think of it like dividing a book of solid text into sentences, paragraphs and chapters,” she said.
The researchers found that the brains of Democrats separate incoming information in the same way, which then gives similar, partisan meanings to those pieces of information — but that the brains of Republican segment the same information in a different way.
The researchers noted that individuals who shared an ideology had more similar neural representations of political words and experienced greater neural synchrony while watching the political videos, and segmented real-world information into the same meaningful units.
“The reason two liberal brains are synchronizing when watching a complicated video is due in part to the fact that each brain has neural fingerprints for political concepts or words that are very aligned,” FeldmanHall explained.
This explains why two opposing partisans can watch the same news segment and both believe that it was biased against their side — for each partisan, the words, images, sounds and concepts were represented in their brain in a different way (but similar to other partisans who share their ideology). The stream of information was also segmented out in a different format, telling a different ideological story.
Taken together, the researchers concluded, the findings show that political ideology is shaped by semantic representations of political concepts processed in an environment free of any polarizing agenda, and that these representations bias how real-world political information is construed into a polarized perspective.
“In this way, our study provided a mechanistic account for why political polarization arises,” FeldmanHall said.
The researchers are now focusing on how this explanation of polarization can be used to combat polarization.
“The problem of political polarization can’t be addressed on a superficial level,” FeldmanHall said. “Our work showed that these polarized beliefs are very entrenched, and go all the way down to the way people experience a political word. Understanding this will influence how researchers think about potential interventions.”
Testing the Ecophenotype Model: Cortical Structure Alterations in Conduct Disorder With Versus Without Childhood Maltreatment
by Marlene Staginnus, Harriet Cornwell, Nicola Toschi, Maaike Oosterling, Michal Paradysz, Areti Smaragdi, Karen González-Madruga, Ruth Pauli, Jack C. Rogers, Anka Bernhard, Anne Martinelli, Gregor Kohls, Nora Maria Raschle, Kerstin Konrad, Christina Stadler, Christine M. Freitag, Stephane A. De Brito, Graeme Fairchild in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
Characterized by antisocial behaviors and low academic achievement, conduct disorder (CD) impacts an estimated 9.5% of individuals in the United States. Childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for CD. Past CD studies have identified structural alterations in various brain regions, such as those implicated in emotion processing, learning, and social cognition. A new study appearing in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier, has now assessed whether youths with CD who experienced childhood maltreatment differ at the brain level from those with CD without a history of maltreatment.
The research, led by Marlene Staginnus, a PhD student at the University of Bath, UK, tested the ecophenotype model, which proposes that maltreatment-related psychopathology is distinct from forms of psychopathology that do not develop as a result of childhood maltreatment. The study included 146 healthy controls and 114 youths with CD. The researchers collected structural MRI data to study cortical structure, including the volume, area, and thickness of the cortex, the outer layer of the brain.
Graeme Fairchild, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Bath, Bath, UK, the senior author on the paper, said:
“Our findings have important implications for theory, research, and clinical practice for those working in mental health or forensic services for young people. First, they suggest that, despite having the same diagnosis, conduct disordered youths with and without maltreatment differ from each other in brain structure and also differ from healthy youth in different ways. To be more specific, the conduct disordered youth with a history of childhood maltreatment showed far more extensive changes in brain structure than the non-maltreated youth with CD — multiple brain regions were affected, and several different aspects of cortical structure (cortical thickness, surface area, and folding) were altered. The maltreated youth with CD also differed more in comparison to the healthy youth than their non-maltreated counterparts.”
In line with the researchers’ hypotheses, maltreated and non-maltreated CD youths displayed distinct alterations compared to healthy controls. When combining the CD youths with and without maltreatment into a single group, the CD group displayed lower cortical thickness in the right inferior frontal gyrus. However, when the maltreated and non-maltreated youths were separately compared with healthy controls, those who had experienced maltreatment displayed more widespread structural changes in comparison to healthy controls that did their non-maltreated counterparts.
Cameron Carter, MD, editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, said of the study:
“The authors use structural MRI to measure the changes in brain structure associated with CD and highlight the unique contribution of childhood maltreatment to these changes. The study provides neurobiological insights into the heterogeneity of CD with implications for understanding pathophysiology and informing future treatment development.”
These findings may help guide research toward a better understanding of the prevention, assessment, and treatment of CD. They also beckon researchers to explore whether there is a distinct pathway between maltreatment and antisocial behavior, or if such brain differences translate to differences in treatment responsiveness.
Fractalkine enhances oligodendrocyte regeneration and remyelination in a demyelination mouse model
by Monique M.A. de Almeida, Adrianne E.S. Watson, Sana Bibi, Nicole L. Dittmann, Kara Goodkey, Pedram Sharafodinzadeh, Danny Galleguillos, Maryam Nakhaei-Nejad, Jayasankar Kosaraju, Noam Steinberg, Beatrix S. Wang, Tim Footz, Fabrizio Giuliani, Jing Wang, Simonetta Sipione, Julia M. Edgar, Anastassia Voronova in Stem Cell Reports
A University of Alberta researcher is one step closer to demonstrating the potential of a brain molecule called fractalkine to halt and even reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease in which the myelin, or fatty lining of nerve cells, is eroded, leading to nerve damage and slower signaling between the brain and the body. MS symptoms range from blurred vision to complete paralysis, and while there are treatments, the causes are not fully understood and nothing exists to reverse the disease process. More than 90,000 Canadians live with MS, according to the MS Society.
In new research published in Stem Cell Reports, Anastassia Voronova, an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Neural Stem Cell Biology, injected fractalkine into mice with chemically induced MS.
She found the treatment increased the number of new oligodendrocytes — vital brain and spinal cord cells that produce myelin in both embryonic and adult brains — which are damaged during the MS autoimmune attack.
“If we can replace those lost or damaged oligodendrocytes, then they could make new myelin and it is believed that would halt the disease progression, or maybe even reverse some of the symptoms,” Voronova says. “That’s the Holy Grail in the research community and something that we’re very passionate about.”
Voronova’s earlier research tested the safety and efficacy of fractalkine in normal mice and found similar beneficial effects. Other researchers have demonstrated that fractalkine may provide protection for nerves in mouse models before the disease is induced, but this is the first time it has been tested on animals that already have the disease.
Voronova and her team observed new oligodendrocytes, as well as reactivated progenitor cells that can regenerate oligodendrocytes, in the brains of the treated animals. Remyelination occurred in both the white and grey matter. The researchers also observed a reduction in inflammation, part of the damage caused by the immune system. The next steps for the treatment include testing it in other diseased mouse models, including those with neurodegenerative diseases other than MS.
Learning at your brain’s rhythm: individualized entrainment boosts learning for perceptual decisions
by Elizabeth Michael, Lorena Santamaria Covarrubias, Victoria Leong, Zoe Kourtzi in Cerebral Cortex
Scientists have shown for the first time that briefly tuning into a person’s individual brainwave cycle before they perform a learning task dramatically boosts the speed at which cognitive skills improve.
Calibrating rates of information delivery to match the natural tempo of our brains increases our capacity to absorb and adapt to new information, according to the team behind the study.
The University of Cambridge researchers say that these techniques could help us retain “neuroplasticity” much later in life and advance lifelong learning.
“Each brain has its own natural rhythm, generated by the oscillation of neurons working together,” said Prof Zoe Kourtzi, senior author of the study from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. “We simulated these fluctuations so the brain is in tune with itself — and in the best state to flourish.”
“Our brain’s plasticity is the ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions. By harnessing brainwave rhythms, it may be possible to enhance flexible learning across the lifespan, from infancy to older adulthood,” Kourtzi said.
The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, will be explored as part of the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Individualised Cognition: a research collaboration between Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
The neuroscientists used electroencephalography — or EEG — sensors attached to the head to measure electrical activity in the brain of 80 study participants, and sample brainwave rhythms.
The team took alpha wave readings. In the mid-range of the brainwave spectrum, this wave frequency tends to dominate when we are awake and relaxed.
Alpha waves oscillate between eight to twelve hertz: a full cycle every 85–125 milliseconds. However, every person has their own peak alpha frequency within that range.
Scientists used these readings to create an optical “pulse”: a white square flickering on a dark background at the same tempo as each person’s individual alpha wave.
Participants got a 1.5-second dose of personalized pulse to set their brain working at its natural rhythm — a technique called “entrainment” — before being presented with a tricky quick-fire cognitive task: trying to identify specific shapes within a barrage of visual clutter.
A brainwave cycle consists of a peak and a trough. Some participants received pulses matching the peak of their waves, some the trough, while some got rhythms that were either random or at the wrong rate (a little faster or slower). Each participant repeated over 800 variations of the cognitive task, and the neuroscientists measured how quickly people improved.
The learning rate for those locked into the right rhythm was at least three times faster than for all the other groups. When participants returned the next day to complete another round of tasks, those who learned much faster under entrainment maintained their higher performance level.
“It was exciting to uncover the specific conditions you need to get this impressive boost in learning,” said first author Dr Elizabeth Michael, now at Cambridge’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
“The intervention itself is very simple, just a brief flicker on a screen, but when we hit the right frequency plus the right phase alignment, it seems to have a strong and lasting effect.”
Importantly, entrainment pulses need to chime with the trough of a brainwave. Scientists believe this is the point in a cycle when neurons are in a state of “high receptivity.”
“We feel as if we constantly attend to the world, but in fact, our brains take rapid snapshots and then our neurons communicate with each other to string the information together,” said co-author Prof Victoria Leong, from NTU and Cambridge’s Department of Paediatrics.
“Our hypothesis is that by matching information delivery to the optimal phase of a brainwave, we maximize information capture because this is when our neurons are at the height of excitability.”
Previous work from Leong’s Baby-LINC lab shows that brainwaves of mothers and babies will synchronise when they communicate. Leong believes the mechanism in this latest study is so effective because it mirrors the way we learn as infants.
“We are tapping into a mechanism that allows our brain to align to temporal stimuli in our environment, especially communicative cues like speech, gaze and gesture that are naturally exchanged during interactions between parents and babies,” said Leong.
“When adults speak to young children they adopt child-directed speech — a slow and exaggerated form of speaking. This study suggests that child-directed speech may be a spontaneous way of rate-matching and entraining the slower brainwaves of children to support learning.”
The researchers say that, while the new study tested visual perception, these mechanisms are likely to be “domain general”: applying to a wide range of tasks and situations, including auditory learning.
They argue that potential applications for brainwave entrainment may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but are increasingly achievable.
“While our study used complex EEG machines, there are now simple headband systems that allow you to gauge brain frequencies quite easily,” said Kourtzi.
“Children now do so much of their learning in front of screens. One can imagine using brainwave rhythms to enhance aspects of learning for children who struggle in regular classrooms, perhaps due to attentional deficits.”
Other early applications of brainwave entrainment to boost learning could involve training in professions where fast learning and quick decision-making is vital, such as pilots or surgeons.
“Virtual reality simulations are now an effective part of training in many professions,” said Kourtzi. “Implementing pulses that sync with brainwaves in these virtual environments could give new learners an edge, or help those retraining later in life.”
Focused Ultrasound–mediated Liquid Biopsy in a Tauopathy Mouse Model
by Christopher Pham Pacia, Jinyun Yuan, Yimei Yue, Eric C. Leuthardt, Tammie L. S. Benzinger, Arash Nazeri, Hong Chen in Radiology
Several progressive neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, are defined by having tau proteins in the brain. Researchers are seeking to identify the mechanisms behind these tau proteins to develop treatments, however, their efforts to detect biomarkers in blood has been hampered by the protective blood-brain barrier.
At Washington University in St. Louis, new research from the lab of Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and of radiation oncology in the School of Medicine, and collaborators found that using focused-ultrasound-mediated liquid biopsy in a mouse model released more tau proteins and another biomarker into the blood than without the intervention. This non-invasive method could facilitate the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, the researchers said.
The method, known as sonobiopsy, uses focused ultrasound to target a precise location in the brain. Once located, the researchers inject microbubbles into the blood that travel to the ultrasound-targeted tissue and pulsate, which safely opens the blood-brain barrier. The temporary openings allow biomarkers, such as tau proteins and neurofilament light chain protein (NfL), both indicative of neurodegenerative disorders, to pass through the blood-brain barrier and release into the blood.
Chen teamed with co-senior author Arash Nazeri, MD, an assistant professor of radiology at the School of Medicine’s Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR). They collaborated with Tammie LS Benzinger, MD, PhD, a professor of radiology at MIR and a professor of neurological surgery and of biology and biological sciences; Eric Leuthardt, MD, a professor of neurosurgery at the School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering at McKelvey Engineering; as well as first author Christopher Pham Pacia, who earned a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Washington University earlier this year; Jinyun Yuan, a research scientist in Chen’s lab; and Yimei Yue, a research technician in Chen’s lab.
Results of the work, the first to open the door for noninvasive and targeted diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative disorders with focused-ultrasound-mediated liquid biopsy, are published in Radiolog.
Chen, Leuthardt, Pacia and other collaborators have been working on the sonobiopsy technique for several years, first with biomarkers for human brain cancer in preclinical models. Other liquid biopsy methods used to detect biomarkers for neurodegenerative disorders have multiple challenges, including lacking anatomical information on the location of the protein release, rapid clearance from the fluids and a filtering process by the blood-brain barrier. Chen said sonobiopsy is an emerging technique with the potential to address these and other challenges.
In the new research, the team first took blood samples from young mice with abnormal tau proteins in the brain, or tauopathy, receiving either sonobiopsy or sham treatment. They found that sonobiopsy resulted in a 1.7-fold-increase in the normalized phosphorylated pTau-181 tau protein levels and a 1.4-fold increase in normalized pTau-231 compared with the control mouse group that had not had sonobiopsy. In a follow-up study, they performed targeted sonobiopsy by targeting either the hippocampus or cerebral cortex in the early neurodegenerative stages of the tauopathy model and took blood samples before and after sonobiopsy. The targeted sonobiopsy resulted in a 2.3-fold increase in NfL protein, a secondary biomarker for neurodegenerative diseases, in the treated mice compared with the control group.
“In our proof-of-concept study, we sought to determine whether sonobiopsy is able to release phosphorylated tau species and NfL into the bloodstream by opening the blood-brain barrier,” Chen said. “This demonstration showed that sonobiopsy significantly enhanced the release of pTau proteins and a secondary marker of neurodegeneration into the bloodstream for noninvasive diagnosis for neurodegenerative diseases.”
Nazeri said tauopathies such as Alzheimer’s disease are similar to brain tumors.
“While brain tumor behavior and treatment response are dictated by the specific mutations they harbor, the tau protein shows great heterogeneity in the pattern of phosphorylation as well as other post-translational modifications,” Nazeri said. “Current PET imaging and recently developed plasma biomarkers are sensitive to detect tauopathies even in early stages. Sonobiopsy could potentially play a role to further characterize the specific strains of tau protein present in the brain for personalized treatment of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other tauopathies.”
Going forward, the team will examine the qualitative effects of sonobiopsy on plasma biomarkers and characterize the effects of focused ultrasound parameters and determine an optimal blood collection time, as well as determine how sonobiopsy can be applied to release larger brain-derived protein biomarkers.
Video game play: Any association with preteens’ cognitive ability test performance?
by Jadallah M, Green CS, Zhang J. in J Media Psychol
New research findings challenge the fears parents have been hearing for years that children who spend hour after hour playing video games, or choose games of certain genres, would manifest unhealthy results in their cognitive ability.
“Our studies turned up no such links, regardless of how long the children played and what types of games they chose,” said Jie Zhang, associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Houston College of Education and a member of the research team. The work is published in the Journal of Media Psychology.
In reaching the conclusions, researchers examined the video gaming habits of 160 diverse urban public-school preteen students (70% from lower-income households), which represents an age group less studied in previous research. Participating students reported playing video games an average of 2.5 hours daily, with the group’s heaviest gamers putting in as much as 4.5 hours each day.
The team looked for an association between the students’ video game play and their performance on the standardized Cognitive Ability Test 7, known as CogAT, which evaluates verbal, quantitative and nonverbal/spatial skills. CogAT was chosen as a standard measure, in contrast to the teacher-reported grades or self-reported learning assessments that previous research projects have relied on.
“Overall, neither duration of play nor choice of video game genres had significant correlations with the CogAT measures. That result shows no direct linkage between video game playing and cognitive performance, despite what had been assumed,” said May Jadalla, professor in the School of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University and the study’s principal investigator.
But the study revealed another side of the issue, too. Certain types of games described as helping children build healthy cognitive skills also presented no measurable effects, in spite of the games’ marketing messages.
“The current study found results that are consistent with previous research showing that types of gameplay that seem to augment cognitive functions in young adults don’t have the same impact in much younger children,” said C. Shawn Green, professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Does this mean the world can play on? Maybe, the research suggests. But the experts also caution that gaming time took the heaviest players’ away from other, more productive activities — homework, to be specific — in a process, psychologists call displacement. But even in those cases, the differences were slight between those participants' and their peers’ CogAT measures of cognitive abilities.
“The study results show parents probably don’t have to worry so much about cognitive setbacks among video game-loving children, up to fifth grade. Reasonable amounts of video gaming should be OK, which will be delightful news for the kids. Just keep an eye out for obsessive behavior,” said Zhang. “When it comes to video games, finding common ground between parents and young kids is tricky enough. At least now we understand that finding balance in childhood development is the key, and there’s no need for us to over-worry about video gaming.”
Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-Being
by Jeffrey A. Hall, Amanda J. Holmstrom, Natalie Pennington, Evan K. Perrault, Daniel Totzkay in Communication Research
Conversing with a friend just once during the day to catch up, joke around or tell them you’re thinking of them can increase your happiness and lower your stress level by day’s end.
These are among the results of a new study co-authored by University of Kansas professor of Communication Studies and friendship expert Jeffrey Hall.
“Quality Conversation Can Increase Daily Well-Being” was published in the journal Communication Research by Hall and co-authors Amanda Holmstrom, Natalie Pennington, Evan Perrault and Daniel Totzkay. The study was informed by and provides further support for Hall’s Communicate Bond Belong (CBB) theory of relationships. Hall is the director of KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab.
“This paper was an attempt to define quality communication in the context of relationships,” Hall said.”The types of communication we chose to study were ones shown in past research to make people feel more bonded through conversation.”
There were seven:
- Catching up
- Meaningful talk
- Joking around
- Showing care
- Listening
- Valuing others and their opinions
- Offering sincere compliments
Over 900 study participants from five university campuses — before, during and after pandemic lockdowns — were directed to engage in one of the seven communication behaviors on a single day, and then reported back that night about their feelings of stress, connection, anxiety, well-being, loneliness and the quality of their day.
As it turned out, Hall said, it didn’t matter which of these quality conversations someone had. The very act of intentionally reaching out to a friend in one of these ways was what mattered most.
“One of the take-home messages of this study is that there are many paths toward the same goal,” Hall said.
He said the study was also designed to explore the impact of both the quality and quantity of daily communications.
“There’s a lot of good research that says the number of interactions you have as well as the quality of interactions is both associated with being a less lonely, happier, and more connected person,” said Hall. This study found that once is enough, but more is better. Participants who chose to have more quality conversations had better days.
“This means the more that you listened to your friends, the more that you showed care, the more that you took time to value others’ opinions, the better you felt at the end of the day,” he said.
“The experimental design means that it’s not just people who are already having fulfilling lives who have higher-quality conversations,” Hall said. “This study suggests that anyone who makes time for high-quality conversation can improve their well-being. We can change how we feel on any given day through communication. Just once is all it takes.”
The study also brought in Hall’s past research on different ways to connect in the era of social and mobile media. The study found high quality face-to-face communication was more closely associated with well-being than electronic or social media contact.
“If at least one of their quality conversations was face-to-face, that mattered,” Hall said.
The paper also explains why quality communication makes people feel better. CBB theory claims that people use conversations with friends to help get their need to belong met.
“Across these three studies, quality conversation mattered most for connection and stress,” Hall said. “This supports the idea that we use communication to get our need to belong met, and, in doing so, it helps us manage our stress.”
What is exciting about this research, Hall said, is that it shows there are a host of good things that come along with just one good conversation with a friend. This drives home the point that making time for quality conversation makes our days better.
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