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Neural Transmission
The function of a neuron is to transmit information within the nervous system. Neural transmission occurs when a neuron is activated, or fired (sends out an electrical impulse). Activation (firing) of the neuron takes place when the neuron is stimulated by pressure, heat, light, or chemical information from other cells. The type of stimulation necessary to produce firing depends on the type of neuron.
The fluid inside a neuron is separated from that outside by a polarized cell membrane that contains electrically charged particles known as ions. When a neuron is sufficiently stimulated to reach the neural threshold (a level of stimulation below which the cell does not fire), depolarization, or a change in cell potential, occurs.
The term potential refers to a difference in electrical charges. Neurons have two types of potentials, a resting potential and an action potential. The neural threshold must be reached before a change from resting to action potential occurs
Read & learn:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/psychology/psychology/psychology-biological-bases-of-behavior/neural-transmission
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/neurons_intro.php
#neuroscience #neuraltransmission #humanbrain #science
The function of a neuron is to transmit information within the nervous system. Neural transmission occurs when a neuron is activated, or fired (sends out an electrical impulse). Activation (firing) of the neuron takes place when the neuron is stimulated by pressure, heat, light, or chemical information from other cells. The type of stimulation necessary to produce firing depends on the type of neuron.
The fluid inside a neuron is separated from that outside by a polarized cell membrane that contains electrically charged particles known as ions. When a neuron is sufficiently stimulated to reach the neural threshold (a level of stimulation below which the cell does not fire), depolarization, or a change in cell potential, occurs.
The term potential refers to a difference in electrical charges. Neurons have two types of potentials, a resting potential and an action potential. The neural threshold must be reached before a change from resting to action potential occurs
Read & learn:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/psychology/psychology/psychology-biological-bases-of-behavior/neural-transmission
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/neurons_intro.php
#neuroscience #neuraltransmission #humanbrain #science
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Can't get an image out of your head? Your eyes are helping to keep it there
Even though you are not aware of it, your eyes play a role in searing an image into your brain, long after you have stopped looking at it.
Through brain imaging, Baycrest scientists have found evidence that the brain uses eye movements to help people recall vivid moments from the past, paving the way for the development of visual tests that could alert doctors earlier about those at risk for neurodegenerative illnesses.
The study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, found that when people create a detailed mental image in their head, not only do their eyes move in the same way as when they first saw the picture, their brains showed a similar pattern of activity.
“There’s a theory that when you remember something, it’s like the brain is putting together a puzzle and reconstructing the experience of that moment from separate parts,” says Dr. Bradley Buchsbaum, senior author on the study, scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and psychology professor at the University of Toronto. “The pattern of eye movements is like the blueprint that the brain uses to piece different parts of the memory together so that we experience it as a whole.”
This is the first time a direct connection has been established between a person’s eye movements and patterns of brain activity, which follows up on previous studies linking what we see to how we remember.
In the study, researchers used a mathematical algorithm to analyze the brain scans and eye movements of 16 young adults between the ages of 20 to 28. Individuals were shown a set of 14 distinct images for a few seconds each. They were asked to remember as many details of the picture as possible so they could visualize it later on. Participants were then cued to mentally visualize the images within an empty rectangular box shown on the screen. Brain imaging and eye-tracking technology simultaneously captured the brain activity and eye movements of the participants as they memorized and remembered the pictures.
The study, led by RRI graduate student Michael Bone, discovered the same pattern of eye movements and brain activation, but compressed, when the picture was memorized and then remembered.
“This is likely because when we recall a memory, it’s a condensed version of the original experience. For example, if a marriage proposal took two minutes, when we picture this memory in our head, we re-experience it in a much shorter timeframe,” says Dr. Buchsbaum. “The eye movements are like a short-hand code that your brain runs through to trigger the memory.”
By looking at the patterns of eye movement and brain activity, researchers were able to identify which image a person was remembering during the task.
As next steps, the study will explore distinguishing whether the eye movements lead the brain to reactivate the memory or vice versa. Having a greater understanding of this causal relationship could inform the creation of a diagnostic tool using the eyes to catch when a person’s memory is headed down an unhealthy path, adds Dr. Buchsbaum.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/bcfg-cga021318.php
Journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhy014/4836786
#eyemovements #neuroimaging #brainactivity #memory #mentalimagery #neuroscience #research
Even though you are not aware of it, your eyes play a role in searing an image into your brain, long after you have stopped looking at it.
Through brain imaging, Baycrest scientists have found evidence that the brain uses eye movements to help people recall vivid moments from the past, paving the way for the development of visual tests that could alert doctors earlier about those at risk for neurodegenerative illnesses.
The study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, found that when people create a detailed mental image in their head, not only do their eyes move in the same way as when they first saw the picture, their brains showed a similar pattern of activity.
“There’s a theory that when you remember something, it’s like the brain is putting together a puzzle and reconstructing the experience of that moment from separate parts,” says Dr. Bradley Buchsbaum, senior author on the study, scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and psychology professor at the University of Toronto. “The pattern of eye movements is like the blueprint that the brain uses to piece different parts of the memory together so that we experience it as a whole.”
This is the first time a direct connection has been established between a person’s eye movements and patterns of brain activity, which follows up on previous studies linking what we see to how we remember.
In the study, researchers used a mathematical algorithm to analyze the brain scans and eye movements of 16 young adults between the ages of 20 to 28. Individuals were shown a set of 14 distinct images for a few seconds each. They were asked to remember as many details of the picture as possible so they could visualize it later on. Participants were then cued to mentally visualize the images within an empty rectangular box shown on the screen. Brain imaging and eye-tracking technology simultaneously captured the brain activity and eye movements of the participants as they memorized and remembered the pictures.
The study, led by RRI graduate student Michael Bone, discovered the same pattern of eye movements and brain activation, but compressed, when the picture was memorized and then remembered.
“This is likely because when we recall a memory, it’s a condensed version of the original experience. For example, if a marriage proposal took two minutes, when we picture this memory in our head, we re-experience it in a much shorter timeframe,” says Dr. Buchsbaum. “The eye movements are like a short-hand code that your brain runs through to trigger the memory.”
By looking at the patterns of eye movement and brain activity, researchers were able to identify which image a person was remembering during the task.
As next steps, the study will explore distinguishing whether the eye movements lead the brain to reactivate the memory or vice versa. Having a greater understanding of this causal relationship could inform the creation of a diagnostic tool using the eyes to catch when a person’s memory is headed down an unhealthy path, adds Dr. Buchsbaum.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/bcfg-cga021318.php
Journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhy014/4836786
#eyemovements #neuroimaging #brainactivity #memory #mentalimagery #neuroscience #research
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How the brain responds to injustice
Punishing a wrongdoer may be more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim. That is one suggestion of new research published in JNeurosci, which measured the brain activity of young men while they played a “justice game.”
Study participants played a game in which two players – a “Taker” and a “Partner” – each start out with 200 chips. The Taker can steal up to 100 of the Partner’s chips, and then the Partner can retaliate by spending up to 100 chips to reduce the Taker’s stash by up to 300 chips. Participants played as either a Partner or an Observer, who could either punish the Taker or help the Partner by spending chips to increase the Partner’s stash.
Mirre Stallen and colleagues found that participants were more willing to punish the Taker when they experienced injustice directly as a Partner as opposed to a third-party Observer. The decision to punish was associated with activity in the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in reward processing, and distinguishable from the severity of the punishment.
Before beginning the experiment, all participants were given a nasal spray, with some randomly assigned to receive the hormone oxytocin, which has been suggested to have a role in punishing. Participants in the oxytocin group chose to give more frequent, but less intense, punishments. This finding implicates oxytocin in corrective punishments akin to a “slap on the wrist” to maintain fairness.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/sfn-htb021418.php
Journal article:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/12/2944
#oxytocin #neuroimaging #brainactivity #punishment #socialinjustice #neuroscience
Punishing a wrongdoer may be more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim. That is one suggestion of new research published in JNeurosci, which measured the brain activity of young men while they played a “justice game.”
Study participants played a game in which two players – a “Taker” and a “Partner” – each start out with 200 chips. The Taker can steal up to 100 of the Partner’s chips, and then the Partner can retaliate by spending up to 100 chips to reduce the Taker’s stash by up to 300 chips. Participants played as either a Partner or an Observer, who could either punish the Taker or help the Partner by spending chips to increase the Partner’s stash.
Mirre Stallen and colleagues found that participants were more willing to punish the Taker when they experienced injustice directly as a Partner as opposed to a third-party Observer. The decision to punish was associated with activity in the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in reward processing, and distinguishable from the severity of the punishment.
Before beginning the experiment, all participants were given a nasal spray, with some randomly assigned to receive the hormone oxytocin, which has been suggested to have a role in punishing. Participants in the oxytocin group chose to give more frequent, but less intense, punishments. This finding implicates oxytocin in corrective punishments akin to a “slap on the wrist” to maintain fairness.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-02/sfn-htb021418.php
Journal article:
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/12/2944
#oxytocin #neuroimaging #brainactivity #punishment #socialinjustice #neuroscience
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Brain on a Chip” Reveals How the Brain Folds
Being born with a “tabula rasa” – a clean slate – in the case of the brain is something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born. Babies born without these wrinkles – smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental deficiencies and their life expectancy is markedly reduced. The gene that causes this syndrome helped Weizmann Institute of Science researchers to probe the physical forces that cause the brain’s wrinkles to form. In their findings, reported in Nature Physics, the researchers describe a method they developed for growing tiny “brains on chips” from human cells that enabled them to track the physical and biological mechanisms underlying the wrinkling process.
Tiny brains grown in the lab from embryonic stem cells –called organoids – were pioneered in the last decade by Profs. Yoshiki Sasai in Japan and Juergen Knoblich in Austria. Prof. Orly Reiner of the Institute’s Molecular Genetics Department says that her lab, along with many others, embraced the idea of growing organoids. But Dr. Eyal Karzbrun, in her lab, had to put a bit of a damper on their enthusiasm: The sizes of the organoids they obtained were far from uniform; with no blood vessels, the insides did not have a steady supply of nutrients and started to die; and the thickness of the tissue got in the way of the optical imaging and microscope tracking.
So Karzbrun developed a new approach to growing organoids – one that would enable the group to follow their growth processes in real time: He limited their growth in the vertical axis. This gave him a “pita”-shaped organoid – round and flat with a thin space in the middle. This shape enabled the group to image the thin tissue as it developed and to supply nutrients to all the cells. And by the second week of the tiny “brain’s” growth and development, wrinkles began to appear and then to deepen. Karzbrun: “This is the first time that folding has been observed in organoids, apparently due to the architecture of our system.”
Wrinkles in time
Karzbrun is a physicist by training, and he naturally turned to physical models for the behavior of elastic materials to understand the formation of the wrinkles. Folds or wrinkles in a surface are the result of mechanical instability – compression forces applied to some part of the material. So for example, if there is uneven expansion in one part of the material, another part might be forced to fold in order to accommodate the pressure. In the organoids, the scientists found such mechanical instability in two places: The cytoskeleton – the internal skeleton – of the cells in the center of the organoid contracted; and the nuclei of the cells near the surface expanded. Or, to think of it another way, the outside of the “pita” grew faster than its inside.
While this achievement was impressive, Reiner was not convinced that the wrinkles in the organoids were really modeling the folds in a developing brain. So the group grew new organoids, this time bearing the same mutations carried by babies with smooth brain syndrome. Reiner had identified this gene – LIS1 – back in 1993, and has investigated its role in the developing brain and in the disease, which affects one in 30,000 births. Among other things, the gene is involved in the migration of nerve cells to the brain during embryonic development, and it also regulates the cytoskeleton and molecular motors in the cell.
The organoids with the mutated gene grew to the same proportions as the others, but they developed few folds and the ones they did develop were very different in shape from the normal wrinkles. Working on the assumption that differences in the physical properties of the cell were responsible for these variations, the group investigated the organoid’s cells with atomic force microscopy, with the help of Dr. Sidney Cohen of the Chemical Research Support Department. By measures of elasticity, the normal cells were about twice as stiff as the mutated ones, which were basically soft. Reiner: “We discovered a significant difference in the physical properties of cells in the two organoids, but we observed difference in their biological properties as well. For example, the nuclei in the centers of the mutant organoids moved more slowly, and we saw significant differences in gene expression.”
Source:
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/%E2%80%9Cbrain-chip%E2%80%9D-reveals-how-brain-folds
Journal article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0046-7
Gif: As the organoid develops, the tissue in the outer part folds in a manner similar to those in the developing brain.
#stemcells #brainorganoids #lissencephaly #brainwrinkles #geneexpression #braindevelopment #neuroscience
Being born with a “tabula rasa” – a clean slate – in the case of the brain is something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born. Babies born without these wrinkles – smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental deficiencies and their life expectancy is markedly reduced. The gene that causes this syndrome helped Weizmann Institute of Science researchers to probe the physical forces that cause the brain’s wrinkles to form. In their findings, reported in Nature Physics, the researchers describe a method they developed for growing tiny “brains on chips” from human cells that enabled them to track the physical and biological mechanisms underlying the wrinkling process.
Tiny brains grown in the lab from embryonic stem cells –called organoids – were pioneered in the last decade by Profs. Yoshiki Sasai in Japan and Juergen Knoblich in Austria. Prof. Orly Reiner of the Institute’s Molecular Genetics Department says that her lab, along with many others, embraced the idea of growing organoids. But Dr. Eyal Karzbrun, in her lab, had to put a bit of a damper on their enthusiasm: The sizes of the organoids they obtained were far from uniform; with no blood vessels, the insides did not have a steady supply of nutrients and started to die; and the thickness of the tissue got in the way of the optical imaging and microscope tracking.
So Karzbrun developed a new approach to growing organoids – one that would enable the group to follow their growth processes in real time: He limited their growth in the vertical axis. This gave him a “pita”-shaped organoid – round and flat with a thin space in the middle. This shape enabled the group to image the thin tissue as it developed and to supply nutrients to all the cells. And by the second week of the tiny “brain’s” growth and development, wrinkles began to appear and then to deepen. Karzbrun: “This is the first time that folding has been observed in organoids, apparently due to the architecture of our system.”
Wrinkles in time
Karzbrun is a physicist by training, and he naturally turned to physical models for the behavior of elastic materials to understand the formation of the wrinkles. Folds or wrinkles in a surface are the result of mechanical instability – compression forces applied to some part of the material. So for example, if there is uneven expansion in one part of the material, another part might be forced to fold in order to accommodate the pressure. In the organoids, the scientists found such mechanical instability in two places: The cytoskeleton – the internal skeleton – of the cells in the center of the organoid contracted; and the nuclei of the cells near the surface expanded. Or, to think of it another way, the outside of the “pita” grew faster than its inside.
While this achievement was impressive, Reiner was not convinced that the wrinkles in the organoids were really modeling the folds in a developing brain. So the group grew new organoids, this time bearing the same mutations carried by babies with smooth brain syndrome. Reiner had identified this gene – LIS1 – back in 1993, and has investigated its role in the developing brain and in the disease, which affects one in 30,000 births. Among other things, the gene is involved in the migration of nerve cells to the brain during embryonic development, and it also regulates the cytoskeleton and molecular motors in the cell.
The organoids with the mutated gene grew to the same proportions as the others, but they developed few folds and the ones they did develop were very different in shape from the normal wrinkles. Working on the assumption that differences in the physical properties of the cell were responsible for these variations, the group investigated the organoid’s cells with atomic force microscopy, with the help of Dr. Sidney Cohen of the Chemical Research Support Department. By measures of elasticity, the normal cells were about twice as stiff as the mutated ones, which were basically soft. Reiner: “We discovered a significant difference in the physical properties of cells in the two organoids, but we observed difference in their biological properties as well. For example, the nuclei in the centers of the mutant organoids moved more slowly, and we saw significant differences in gene expression.”
Source:
https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/%E2%80%9Cbrain-chip%E2%80%9D-reveals-how-brain-folds
Journal article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0046-7
Gif: As the organoid develops, the tissue in the outer part folds in a manner similar to those in the developing brain.
#stemcells #brainorganoids #lissencephaly #brainwrinkles #geneexpression #braindevelopment #neuroscience
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Study reveals for first time that talking therapy changes the brain's wiring
A new study from King’s College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has shown for the first time that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) strengthens specific connections in the brains of people with psychosis, and that these stronger connections are associated with long-term reduction in symptoms and recovery eight years later.
CBT - a specific type of talking therapy - involves people changing the way they think about and respond to their thoughts and experiences. For individuals experiencing psychotic symptoms, common in schizophrenia and a number of other psychiatric disorders, the therapy involves learning to think differently about unusual experiences, such as distressing beliefs that others are out to get them. CBT also involves developing strategies to reduce distress and improve well-being.
The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, follow the same researchers’ previous work which showed that people with psychosis who received CBT displayed strengthened connections between key regions of the brain involved in processing social threat accurately.
The new results show for the first time that these changes continue to have an impact years later on people’s long-term recovery.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/kcl-srf011617.php
Journal article:
https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016263a.html
#neuroscience #research #brainwiring
A new study from King’s College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has shown for the first time that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) strengthens specific connections in the brains of people with psychosis, and that these stronger connections are associated with long-term reduction in symptoms and recovery eight years later.
CBT - a specific type of talking therapy - involves people changing the way they think about and respond to their thoughts and experiences. For individuals experiencing psychotic symptoms, common in schizophrenia and a number of other psychiatric disorders, the therapy involves learning to think differently about unusual experiences, such as distressing beliefs that others are out to get them. CBT also involves developing strategies to reduce distress and improve well-being.
The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, follow the same researchers’ previous work which showed that people with psychosis who received CBT displayed strengthened connections between key regions of the brain involved in processing social threat accurately.
The new results show for the first time that these changes continue to have an impact years later on people’s long-term recovery.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/kcl-srf011617.php
Journal article:
https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016263a.html
#neuroscience #research #brainwiring
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The Human Nose Knows More Than We Think
A look at the body of olfactory science shows people’s reputation for having a poor sense of smell is a myth.
Humans do not use smell the way other mammals do, and that contributes to our reputation for being lousy sniffers compared with dogs and other animals. But it turns out the human sense of smell is better than we think.
In a review paper published in Science last week neuroscientist John McGann of Rutgers University analyzed the state of human olfaction research, comparing recent and older studies to make the argument our smelling abilities are comparable with those of our fellow mammals.
McGann traces the origins of the idea that humans have a poor sense of smell to a single 19th-century scientist, comparative anatomist Paul Broca. Broca, known for discovering Broca’s area—the part of the brain responsible for speech production—noted that humans had larger frontal lobes than those of other animals, and that we possessed language and complex cognitive skills our fellow creatures lacked. Because our brains’ olfactory bulbs were smaller than those of other mammals and we did not display behavior motivated by smell, Broca extrapolated these brain areas shrank over evolutionary time as humans relied more on complex thought than on primal senses for survival. He never conducted sensory studies to confirm his theory, however, but the reputation stuck.
Now that more sensory tests are being done, the results are mixed.
Experiments conducted in previous decades have found humans are just as sensitive as dogs and mice to the aroma of bananas. Furthermore, a 2013 study found humans were more sensitive than mice to two urine odor components whereas mice could better detect four other sulfur-containing urine and fecal-gland odors tested. A 2017 study also revealed humans were more sensitive than mice to the smell of mammal blood.
One biological feature that does appear to be linked to smelling ability is the number of olfactory bulb neurons an animal has. This number is not linked to the size of the brain or bulb, however. Human women, whose sense of smell is more sensitive than men’s, have more olfactory neurons than the general population of mice but fewer than rats, and have much larger olfactory bulbs than both rodents. Men rank just below mice in olfactory neuron count, but all these species (as well as several other mammals) differ by just 10 million olfactory neurons or fewer.
The lack of a standard metric for scent is the main challenge, McGann says, in comparing absolute olfactory abilities across species. “It’s tempting to say humans are way more sensitive than mice at smelling human blood, and that sounds like a good ecological story,” he says. “But then you look at a whole range of other odors and realize that actually it just seems like there’s quite a lot of odors that humans are better at detecting than mice, dogs or rats, and other odors that we’re less good at detecting.” It’s impossible, therefore, to make sweeping generalizations about which species has the winning nose.
Interesting reading via Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-nose-knows-more-than-we-think/
Gif via It's Okay to Be Smart
http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/108016979277/how-does-sense-of-smell-work
#neuroscience #smell #research #humanbrain
A look at the body of olfactory science shows people’s reputation for having a poor sense of smell is a myth.
Humans do not use smell the way other mammals do, and that contributes to our reputation for being lousy sniffers compared with dogs and other animals. But it turns out the human sense of smell is better than we think.
In a review paper published in Science last week neuroscientist John McGann of Rutgers University analyzed the state of human olfaction research, comparing recent and older studies to make the argument our smelling abilities are comparable with those of our fellow mammals.
McGann traces the origins of the idea that humans have a poor sense of smell to a single 19th-century scientist, comparative anatomist Paul Broca. Broca, known for discovering Broca’s area—the part of the brain responsible for speech production—noted that humans had larger frontal lobes than those of other animals, and that we possessed language and complex cognitive skills our fellow creatures lacked. Because our brains’ olfactory bulbs were smaller than those of other mammals and we did not display behavior motivated by smell, Broca extrapolated these brain areas shrank over evolutionary time as humans relied more on complex thought than on primal senses for survival. He never conducted sensory studies to confirm his theory, however, but the reputation stuck.
Now that more sensory tests are being done, the results are mixed.
Experiments conducted in previous decades have found humans are just as sensitive as dogs and mice to the aroma of bananas. Furthermore, a 2013 study found humans were more sensitive than mice to two urine odor components whereas mice could better detect four other sulfur-containing urine and fecal-gland odors tested. A 2017 study also revealed humans were more sensitive than mice to the smell of mammal blood.
One biological feature that does appear to be linked to smelling ability is the number of olfactory bulb neurons an animal has. This number is not linked to the size of the brain or bulb, however. Human women, whose sense of smell is more sensitive than men’s, have more olfactory neurons than the general population of mice but fewer than rats, and have much larger olfactory bulbs than both rodents. Men rank just below mice in olfactory neuron count, but all these species (as well as several other mammals) differ by just 10 million olfactory neurons or fewer.
The lack of a standard metric for scent is the main challenge, McGann says, in comparing absolute olfactory abilities across species. “It’s tempting to say humans are way more sensitive than mice at smelling human blood, and that sounds like a good ecological story,” he says. “But then you look at a whole range of other odors and realize that actually it just seems like there’s quite a lot of odors that humans are better at detecting than mice, dogs or rats, and other odors that we’re less good at detecting.” It’s impossible, therefore, to make sweeping generalizations about which species has the winning nose.
Interesting reading via Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-human-nose-knows-more-than-we-think/
Gif via It's Okay to Be Smart
http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/108016979277/how-does-sense-of-smell-work
#neuroscience #smell #research #humanbrain
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LSD alters perception via serotonin receptors
Humans perceive everyday things and experiences differently and attach different meaning to pieces of music, for instance. In the case of psychiatric disorders, this perception is often altered. For patients suffering from addictions, for instance, drug stimuli are more meaningful than for people without an addiction. Or patients with phobias perceive the things or situations that scare them with exaggerated significance compared to healthy people. A heightened negative perception of the self is also characteristic of depressive patients. Just how this so-called personal relevance develops in the brain and which neuropharmacological mechanisms are behind it, however, have remained unclear.
Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry now reveal that LSD influences this process by stimulating the serotonin 2A receptor, one of the 14 serotonin receptors in the brain. Before the study began, the participants were asked to categorize 30 pieces of music as personally important and meaningful or without any personal relevance. In the subsequent experiment, LSD altered the attribution of meaning compared to a placebo: “Pieces of music previously classified as meaningless suddenly became personally meaningful under the influence of LSD,” explains Katrin Preller, who conducted the study in conjunction with Professor Franz Vollenweider and the Neuropsychopharmacology and Brain Imaging research team.
This finding will help develop new courses of pharmacotherapy for psychiatric disorders such as depression, addictions or phobias.
Source & further reading:
http://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2017/LSD-and-Brain.html
Journal article:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)31510-X
#neuroscience #LSD #perception #serotonin #brain #research
Humans perceive everyday things and experiences differently and attach different meaning to pieces of music, for instance. In the case of psychiatric disorders, this perception is often altered. For patients suffering from addictions, for instance, drug stimuli are more meaningful than for people without an addiction. Or patients with phobias perceive the things or situations that scare them with exaggerated significance compared to healthy people. A heightened negative perception of the self is also characteristic of depressive patients. Just how this so-called personal relevance develops in the brain and which neuropharmacological mechanisms are behind it, however, have remained unclear.
Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry now reveal that LSD influences this process by stimulating the serotonin 2A receptor, one of the 14 serotonin receptors in the brain. Before the study began, the participants were asked to categorize 30 pieces of music as personally important and meaningful or without any personal relevance. In the subsequent experiment, LSD altered the attribution of meaning compared to a placebo: “Pieces of music previously classified as meaningless suddenly became personally meaningful under the influence of LSD,” explains Katrin Preller, who conducted the study in conjunction with Professor Franz Vollenweider and the Neuropsychopharmacology and Brain Imaging research team.
This finding will help develop new courses of pharmacotherapy for psychiatric disorders such as depression, addictions or phobias.
Source & further reading:
http://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2017/LSD-and-Brain.html
Journal article:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)31510-X
#neuroscience #LSD #perception #serotonin #brain #research
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