2020: A Year in Neuroscience
14 min readJan 15, 2021
A quick overview of the most considerable publications on neuroscience that came out in the previous year
New methods of imaging, diagnostics, and treatment
- Research on novel nanoelectronics devices has enabled brain neurons and artificial neurons to communicate with each other over the Internet: Scientists created a hybrid neural network where biological and artificial neurons in different parts of the world were able to communicate with each other over the internet through a hub of artificial synapses made using cutting-edge nanotechnology. This is the first time the three components have come together in a unified network.
- Researchers can now scan two people together, showing that touching synchronizes a couple’s brains, making them mirror each other’s movements: They have developed a new method for simultaneous imaging brain activity from two people, allowing them to study social interaction.
- Neuroscientists learned how to read the activity of the deep layers of the brain in motion: Scientists have developed a small head-mounted microscope that allows access to the inner workings of the brain. The new system enables measurement of activity from neuronal populations located in the deep cortical layer with single-cell resolution, in an animal that is freely behaving.
- Researchers develop AI that can turn brain activity into text. They tracked the neural data from people while they were speaking.
- Scientists made human organs transparent to allow 3D maps at cellular level: For the first time, researchers managed to make intact human organs transparent. Using microscopic imaging they could reveal underlying complex structures of the see-through organs at the cellular level. Resulting organ maps can serve as templates for 3D-bioprinting technologies. In the future, this could lead to the creation of on demand artificial organs for many patients in need.
- Researchers created the new human blood-brain barrier on a chip that gets its surprising edge by giving astrocytes 3D living space: It can be the bain of brain drug developers: The interface between the human brain and the bloodstream, the blood-brain-barrier, is so meticulous that animal models often fail to represent it. This improved chip represents important features more accurately.
- Engineers created 3D print soft, rubbery brain implants: MIT engineers were working on developing soft, flexible neural implants that can gently conform to the brain’s contours and monitor activity over longer periods, without aggravating surrounding tissue. Such flexible electronics could be softer alternatives to existing metal-based electrodes designed to monitor brain activity, and may also be useful in brain implants that stimulate neural regions to ease symptoms of epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and severe depression.
- A promise to restore hearing: For the first time, researchers have used base editing to restore partial hearing to mice with a recessive mutation in the gene TMC1 that causes complete deafness, the first successful example of genome editing to fix a recessive disease-causing mutation.
- Dynamic stimulation of the visual cortex now allows blind and sighted people to ‘see’ shapes: A team of investigators has described an approach in which implanted electrodes are stimulated in a dynamic sequence, essentially ‘tracing’ shapes on the surface of the visual cortex that participants were able to ‘see.’
- Optogenetic stimulation of the motor cortex successfully induced arm movements in monkeys: Optogenetics is a recently developed technique that can control cellular functions by illuminating lights to the cells in which light-sensitive proteins are expressed by gene transfer. Optogenetics enabled us to activate or inhibit a specific population of neuronal cells and revolutionized stimulation methods. It has now become an indispensable tool for investigating brain functions. So far, most studies using this technique have been performed in rodents, whereas trials to modify behaviors in monkeys have ended up in failure, except for a few studies targeting eye movements. The research group has succeeded in inducing arm movements in Japanese macaque monkeys by using optogenetics.
- An inexpensive new technique has shown how decisions light up the brain: A technique called COSMOS will help researchers understand how our brains work and aid in the development of new drugs. The inventors have created an instructional website to help other researchers build their own relatively-inexpensive COSMOS systems.
- Scientists have been able to observe the way stem cells in the adult brains of mice divide over the course of months to create new nerve cells. Their study shows that brain stem cells are active over a long period, and thus provides new insights that will feed into stem cell research.
- Researchers have used machine intelligence to improve the accuracy and reliability of a powerful brain-mapping technique. Their development gives researchers more confidence in using the technique to untangle the human brain’s wiring and to better understand the changes in this wiring that accompany neurological or mental disorders such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease.
- Tiny robots can now operate as nerve cell connectors, bridging gaps between two distinct groups of cells: These microscopic patches may lead to more sophisticated ways to grow networks of nerve cells in the laboratory, and perhaps even illuminate ways to repair severed nerve cells in people. Engineers first built rectangular robots that were 300 micrometers long. Slender horizontal grooves, about the width of nerve cells’ tendrils that exchange messages with other cells, lined the top. These microrobots were fertile ground for rat nerve cells, the researchers found. As the cells grew, their message-sending axons and message-receiving dendrites neatly followed the robots’ lined grooves.
- Researchers invented a new type of microscope called reflective matrix microscope, which uses adaptive optics techniques. Non-invasive microscopic techniques such as optical coherence microscopy and two-photon microscopy are commonly used for in vivo imaging of living tissues. When light passes through turbid materials such as biological tissues, two types of light are generated: ballistic photons and multiply scattered photons. The ballistic photons travel straight through the object without experiencing any deflection and hence is used to reconstruct the object image. On the other hand, the multiply scattered photons are generated via random deflections as the light passes through the material and show up as speckle noise in the reconstructed image. As the light propagates through increasing distances, the ratio between multiply scattered and ballistic photons increases drastically, thereby obscuring the image information. In addition to the noise generated by the multiply scattered light, optical aberration of ballistic light also causes contrast reduction and image blur during the image reconstruction process.
- In the September issue of the journal Nature, scientists have described a new nanodevice that acts almost identically to a brain cell. Furthermore, they have shown that these synthetic brain cells can be joined together to form intricate networks that can then solve problems in a brain-like manner.
COVID-19
- MRI study shows neurological changes in Covid patients’ brain 3 months after testing positive: According to the study published in medical journal TheLancet, “neurological symptoms were presented in 55% COVID-19 patients” during the recovery stage. These symptoms were noted during the follow-up visits three months later.
- The 2020 study investigated the breadth of complications of COVID-19 across the UK that affected the brain: Altered mental status was the second most common presentation, comprising encephalopathy or encephalitis and primary psychiatric diagnoses, often occurring in younger patients.
- Researchers presented neurologic manifestations of patients with coronavirus in Wuhan: In a case series of 214 patients with coronavirus disease 2019, neurologic symptoms were seen in 36.4% of patients and were more common in patients with severe infection (45.5%) according to their respiratory status, which included acute cerebrovascular events, impaired consciousness, and muscle injury.
- Some patients with COVID-19 are at higher risk of neurological complications like bleeding in the brain and stroke, according to the study: The researchers said these potentially life-threatening findings were more common in patients with hypertension and diabetes.
- A study identified the olfactory cell types most vulnerable to infection by the coronavirus: Sensory neurons involved in smell are not among the vulnerable cell types.
- Researchers have studied the mechanisms by which the coronavirus can reach the brains of patients with COVID-19. The results show that SARS-CoV-2 enters the brain via nerve cells in the olfactory mucosa.
- SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins disrupt the blood-brain barrier, new research shows: New research shows that the spike proteins that extrude from SARS-CoV-2 promote inflammatory responses on the endothelial cells that form the blood-brain barrier. The study shows that SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins can cause this barrier to become ‘leaky,’ potentially disrupting the delicate neural networks within the brain.
BCIs
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink puts computer chips in pigs’ brains in bid to cure diseases: Elon Musk has unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in her brain to demonstrate his ambitious plans to create a working brain-to-machine interface. Implant could solve ailments such as memory loss, hearing loss, depression and insomnia, Musk said.
- New machine learning algorithm reduces the need for brain-computer interfaces to undergo recalibration: This research will drastically improve brain-computer interfaces and their ability to remain stabilized during use, greatly reducing or potentially eliminating the need to recalibrate these devices during or between experiments.
- Mouse-controlled mouse helped researchers understand intentional control: Researchers have devised a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows mice to learn to guide a cursor using only their brain activity. By monitoring this mouse-controlled mouse moving to a target location to receive a reward, the researchers were able to study how the brain represents intentional control.
- Researchers have demonstrated the ability to implant an ultrathin, flexible neural interface with thousands of electrodes into the brain with a projected lifetime of more than six years. Protected from the ravaging environment of internal biological processes by less than a micrometer of material, the achievement is an important step toward creating high-resolution neural interfaces that can persist within a human body for an entire lifetime.
- Scientists have discovered that mindful meditation can help subjects learn and improve the ability to mind-control BCIs: They conducted a large-scale human study enrolling subjects in a weekly 8-week course in simple, widely-practiced meditation techniques, to test their effectiveness as a potential training tool for BCI control. A total of 76 people participated in this study, each being randomly assigned to the meditation group or the control group, which had no preparation during these 8 weeks. Up to 10 sessions of BCI study were conducted with each subject. The work shows that humans with just eight lessons in mindfulness-based attention and training (MBAT) demonstrated significant advantages compared to those with no prior meditation training, both in their initial ability to control BCI’s and in the time it took for them to achieve full proficiency.
- Researchers develop guidelines to standardize the analysis of electrodes: Freiburg microsystems engineers have developed guidelines to standardize the testing of the performance of electrodes for neural interfaces and bioelectronic systems.
- Stable recordings let the brain and machine learning system build ‘partnership’ over time: In a significant advance, researchers working towards a brain-controlled prosthetic limb at the UC San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences have shown that machine learning techniques helped a paralyzed individual learn to control a computer cursor using their brain activity without requiring extensive daily retraining, which has been a requirement of all past brain-computer interface efforts.
- Neuroscientists have created a device that can integrate and interact with neuron-like cells: This could be an early step toward an artificial synapse for use in brain-computer interfaces.
- Researchers have developed a technique in which a computer models visual perception by monitoring human brain signals: In a way, it is as if the computer tries to imagine what a human is thinking about. As a result of this imagining, the computer is able to produce entirely new information, such as fictional images that were never before seen. The technique is based on a novel brain-computer interface.
- Scientists uncovered blind spots at the intersection of AI and neuroscience: Is it possible to read a person’s mind by analyzing the electric signals from the brain? The answer may be much more complex than most people think. In a new article, researchers say a prominent dataset used to try to answer this question is confounded, and therefore many eye-popping findings that were based on this dataset and received high-profile recognition are false after all.
- Machine learning identified new brain network signatures of major depression: Using machine learning, researchers have identified a novel, distinct patterns of coordinated activity between different parts of the brain in people with major depressive disorder — even when different protocols are used to detect these brain networks.
- By recording the activity of separate populations of neurons simultaneously, researchers have gained an unprecedented insight into how the ‘waxing and waning’ of our mental state influences the decisions we make: The waxing and waning of mental states observed by the team over time could lead a BCI to become less accurate in reading out a person’s thoughts or movement intentions. Their work informs the design of future, more robust BCI and human-machine interfaces.
- Researchers have developed a technique, using artificial intelligence, to analyze opinions and draw conclusions using the brain activity of groups of people. This technique, which the researchers call ‘’brainsourcing’’, can be used to classify images or recommend content, something that has not been demonstrated before.
- When we fall asleep, our brains are not merely offline, they’re busy organizing new memories — scientists have gotten a glimpse of the process. Researchers reported the first direct evidence that human brains replay waking experiences while asleep, seen in the brains of two participants who had been implanted with microelectrode arrays as part of a brain-computer interface pilot clinical trial.
- Fitness tracker bracelets and watches provide useful information, such as step count and heart rate, but they usually can’t provide more detailed data about the wearer’s health. In 2020, researchers have developed smart electronic glasses (e-glasses) that not only monitor a person’s brain waves and body movements but also can function as sunglasses and allow users to control a video game with eye motions.
- A new device developed by engineers can recognize hand gestures based on electrical signals detected in the forearm. The system, which couples wearable biosensors with artificial intelligence (AI), could one day be used to control prosthetics or to interact with almost any type of electronic device.
- Scientists have developed a chip that is powered wirelessly and can be surgically implanted to read neural signals and stimulate the brain with both light and electrical current. The technology has been demonstrated successfully in rats and is designed for use as a research tool.
- Researchers have been able to restore sensation to the hand of a research participant with a severe spinal cord injury using a BCI system. The technology harnesses neural signals that are so minuscule they can’t be perceived and enhances them via artificial sensory feedback sent back to the participant, resulting in greatly enriched motor function.
MISC
- More than 360 scientists from 184 different institutions have contributed to a global effort to find more than 200 regions of the genome and more than 300 specific genetic variations that affect the structure of the cerebral cortex and likely play important roles in psychiatric and neurological conditions.
- Researchers have discovered what type of neural mechanisms are the basis for emotional responses to music. Altogether 102 research subjects listened to music that evokes emotions while their brain function was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
- Professional jazz guitarists do improvisation without active work of the frontal lobes, which provide cognitive control — unlike their less experienced colleagues.
- Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain — called the “visual word form area” (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.
- The range of AI technologies available for dealing with brain disease is growing fast, and exciting new methods are being applied to brain problems as computer scientists gain a deeper understanding of the capabilities of advanced algorithms. Researchers conducted a systematic literature review to understand the state of the art in the use of AI for brain disease.
- Neuroscientists delineated social decision-making in the human brain. These findings suggest that two unique types of learning signals are computed in distinct but interacting regions in the human brain.
- Scientists may have solved one of the most puzzling and persistent mysteries in neuroscience: why some people are ‘right-brained’ while others are ‘left-brained.’ The answer lies in how certain genes on each side of the brain are switched ‘on’ and ‘off’ through a process called epigenetic regulation. The findings may explain why Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders frequently affect one side of the body first, a revelation that has
- On some days, time flies by, while on others it seems to drag on. A study from JNeurosci reveals why: time-sensitive neurons get worn out and skew our perceptions of time.
- Navigating through life requires balancing emotion and reason, a feat accomplished by the brain region “area 32” of the anterior cingulate cortex. The area maintains emotional equilibrium by relaying information between cognitive and emotional brain regions, according to new research in monkeys published in JNeurosci.
- Neuroscientists describe for the first time how relationships between different odors are encoded in the brain. The findings suggest a mechanism that may explain why individuals have common but highly personalized experiences with smell, and inform efforts better understand how the brain transforms information about odor chemistry into the perception of a smell.
- The 2020 study finds that the fusiform face area is active when blind people touch 3D models of faces.
- Transgender and gender-diverse adults are three to six times more likely as cisgender adults (individuals whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth) to be diagnosed as autistic, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre.
That’s a wrap! May 2021 brings us more discoveries!
We’ll keep you informed. Feel free to follow our regular ‘Neuroscience biweekly’ reports. Stay in the loop!
