SfN: Drug calms violent rats
Researchers have found a drug that can reduce aggressive behaviour in feral rats that have been trained to be violent. Check out the news story on Nature News.
Nature Newsblog
Nature Newsblog
November 07, 2007
Sfn: hope in stroke
Amid the dazzling high-tech displays of new-generation brain-machine interfaces (including brain implants with which monkeys can operate robotic arms) was a less glamorous but elegantly simple study which promises to improve quality of life for stroke victims, or victims of traumatic brain injury, whose ability to balance has been obliterated.
Monica Metea of the company Wicab in Wisconsin displayed her company’s new balancing device BrainPort which has been through a pilot study of 17 patients, allowing them to stand, walk, dance without falling over.
It works on the principle of brain plasticity. It’s a slim 2 cm square grid of 100 electrodes connected to a head position-detecting sensor which sits directly above them. The patients sticks the device in their mouths, and quickly learns from the pattern of the pinprick sensations delivered by the electrodes which way is up and which way is down. The brain also learns this in a physical sense. Somehow certain circuits get reconfigured such that even after the device is removed – after 20 minutes or so – the patient maintains his or her sense of balance, for hours, sometimes for days. No need to open up the skull and implant the device directly into delicate brain tissue like the more dramatic stories which will eventually help the paralysed. But applicable to probably millions of people who can’t stand up without falling over.
Another rather astonishing glimmer of hope for stroke victims was the report from neurosurgeon Eric Leuthard from the Washington University School of Medicine. One hemisphere of the brain controls arm and leg movement on the other side – but Leutard’s team has shown that the apparently embryonic signals in a ‘same side’ hemisphere are small but unique. They could theoretically be tapped to replace signals from the ‘opposite side’, if that opposite side has been disabled by the stroke. There’s more to come from this direction.
Leuthard did his work on six epilepsy patients whose skulls he had opened to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy. He took the opportunity (with their permission and cooperation) to do the tests recording on the surface of the brain – not in the service of epilepsy but in the service of stroke patients. He told me he thought that there was almost a moral obligation to do research on human brains in this way while you have the opportunity. I couldn’t agree more.
November 06, 2007
SfN: Social butterfly
I’m sure you’ll consider it an entirely selfless act on my part to put in an appearance at various social events in order to give those of you who couldn’t make it to SfN an idea of how well neuroscientists like to party. So here’s a rundown of just a few of them. Let me assure you that my attendance was definitely not related to the copious amounts of free food. Ahem.
SfN: clocking in
It seems like everyone has discovered circadian biology. Pharmacologists (disclosure – I am a pharmacologist) have always known the power of the time of day. But experimenters in other disciplines rarely take circadian rhythms into serious account. At best they may decide to test human subjects ‘in the morning’ as a sort of lip service. But morning to an early chronotype who rises to go jogging at 5 am is not the same as morning to a late chronotype who prefers to get up at 11 am.
The new awareness is thankfully permeating loads of areas in neuroscience, though I wonder if the balance has not tipped towards exaggeration. Yesterday we heard that sleep deprivation in today’s society may be the root cause of the epidemic of obesity in western countries, particularly the US. There’s fantastic new work showing disturbances of the clocks that are present and ticking in every individual cell including those in tissues involved in metabolism. Upset that rhythm in relevant tissues, and metabolism will be disturbed. But isn’t that a long way from insisting on a causal link with obesity?
Today we heard that sleep and circadian rhythms may be an integral part of the disease process of addiction. Whether it will turn out to be fundamental remains to be seen. But it’s intriguing to learn that drugs like cocaine affect clock genes which also regulate dopamine, the key neurotransmitter in reward.
November 05, 2007
SfN: Get yourself connected
With some trepidation, because equations and their ilk usually make me feel distinctly unwell, I ventured (along with several hundred others) to the featured lecture yesterday evening on neural networks, and what computers can offer neuroscience. And with relief, I’m happy to report it was really rather inspiring.
Maybe it was the palpable and infectious enthusiasm of the speaker, MIT’s Sebastian Seung. Accustomed to hearing about how computer scientists are being inspired to create ever faster machines based on how the brain crunches data, the nub of his own talk, as he phrased it in the Kennedy-esque finale – was: “ask not what the brain can do for computers – ask what computers can do for the brain.”
sfn: sophistication in the brain stem
The circus of the Society of Neuroscience meeting is upon us. San Diego, with no residual smell of burning in the air. I’m milling around the cavernous conference centre – actually one of the more attractive ones of this size – with over 30,000 other delegates, wondering how to choose between the parallel sessions. But there’s a feeling of famine rather than plenty – the awareness of just how much you are missing by going to one particular session.
One of the coolest things I heard today was about the non-uniformity of responsiveness of serotonergic neurons in the raphe nucleus, which is in the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain.
Nearly all serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain emerge from this nucleus. These neurons have been implicated in all sorts of pathological behaviours – depression, aggression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders.
You wonder how serotonin is able to control so many diverse behaviours, but you don’t really expect to find the answer in the brains stem, Zachary Mainen from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory told me. So when he started to do single cell recordings from individual neurons in the raphe nucleus in mice performing a complex behaviour test, he expected to see each of them firing in the same, signature way - no matter whether the mouse was making a decision, searching for a reward, drinking, or just moving. But it wasn;t the case. He found different neurons responded quite independently to the different behaviours.
So cells right down deep in the unsophisticated brain stem, from where it is difficult to record, are possibly tuned for a limited range of tasks. Cool.
November 04, 2007
SfN: The traumas of transit - and it's not just the jetlag
A lot of people have come a lot of miles to attend this year’s SfN in San Diego. So perhaps I had travel in mind when I started off with a couple of posters loosely related to going places – admittedly on rather different scales…
Continue reading "SfN: The traumas of transit - and it's not just the jetlag" »
November 01, 2007
Society for Neuroscience, 2007
Alison Abbott and Kerri Smith will be sending back diary reports from this meeting in San Diego from Sunday 4 November. Check back here for updates.
Meanwhile, you may be interested to read what the society has to say on the effect of wildfires on the region:
"When Neuroscience 2007 kicks off on Saturday in San Diego, attendees can expect another highly rewarding, and safe, meeting. The convention center, downtown, and airport remain open and fully active, while our presence will provide business revenue that helps the region rebuild. Crews continue to make progress on the few fires remaining in outlying areas, and air quality, which remained in the "good" category downtown during the worst of the fires, has continued to improve in other areas as well."
October 18, 2006
SfN: Good news at last
This week I've learnt about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS and Huntington's. Then there was autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I've blogged on suicide and child abuse. So it's some relief to end the conference blog with a poster that has the excellent title of "No disease in the brain of a 115-year-old woman".
SfN: don't shout at the kids
Can verbal abuse to a child can be as damaging in later life as some forms of sexual abuse? Apparently so. The signs of serious criticism and shouting can even show up as long-term changes in the brain, according to a study presented here.
October 17, 2006
SfN: location, location, location
Atlanta was never the first choice. The SFN annual meeting has met in New Orleans every three years, and 2006 was again New Orleans’ turn after San Diego and Washington DC.
But then, Katrina struck, and the society decided last year to move the 2006 meeting to Atlanta. Fair enough.
But the society won’t be returning to New Orleans any time soon, instead meeting in November 2009 in Chicago. Weather considerations aside (they don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing), some say the society has rashly abandoned New Orleans just when it needs the economic boost large conferences can bring.
A few enterprising young scientists here took matters into their own hands and began handing out stickers saying “New Orleans for 2009”, which they urged attendees to affix to their badges. Sadly, they don’t seem to have made much headway. Few attendees have seen them and even fewer are wearing the stickers. Looks like it will be blues, not jazz, in 2009 after all.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted on her behalf by Nicola Jones]
SfN: drop in numbers
There are 25,651 people at the Society for Neuroscience conference this year. Sounds like a lot. But it’s actually a solid drop from last year’s 35,000 attendees—and it shows.
The normally overflowing conference halls are emptier. The lines at the food stalls are a bit shorter. Even in the press room, there are fewer journalists banging away at their keyboards.
Why? Last November’s meeting in Washington DC “was in a different location, it was a different time of year, and the Dalai Lama was a big draw. You can’t discount that,” says Joe Carey, the society’s senior director of communications.
A whopping 14,000 people listened to the Dalai Lama, who last year inaugurated the special Science & Society series. This year’s speaker, architect Frank Gehry, attracted considerably fewer people. And Atlanta is no match for the attractions of San Diego or New Orleans, where past meetings were held.
But that’s not the whole story. Judging by the most common refrain in the hallways here, the real reason is obvious: money. The NIH pay line just dropped to an abysmal 7% and most scientists simply can’t afford to be here.
The average age for someone to win their first independent grant is now 44, prompting the society’s president to announce rather dramatically (at the press breakfast on Sunday), “If the young people don't get the grants, all of us will get old and there'll be no science.” Still, the 25,651 here does include a lot of young grad students and postdocs.
Apoorva Mandavilli
News editor, Nature Medicine
[posted by Nicola Jones on her behalf]
October 16, 2006
SfN: The history man
There are lots of shiny high-tech stands here selling equipment that can track the movement of lab animals or peer into their brains. Sitting a little oddly amongst them is John Gach's stand. He's selling old scientific textbooks, and is doing a very nice trade.
My favourite was his copy of the 1794 Zoonomia, in which Erasmus Darwin discusses ideas about evolution that later influenced his grandson's theory. It's yours for $1,750. Pricey, but there were others that would set you back more. A copy of a monograph by Sigmund Freud on child neurology, signed by the author, is listed at $5,000.
SfN: How to get mice drunk
Mice don't like to booze. That's a problem, since it means that it's hard to use them to study alcohol dependence. But maybe not a problem for much longer, since researchers were describing today how they managed to persuade mice to properly sloshed. The answer? Given them the liquour when the lights go down.
Brain changes may suggest suicide risk
Suicidal behaviour linked to serotonin receptors.
There is growing evidence that suicidal behaviour is a condition is its own right and not just a consequence of other psychiatric disorders, say brain researchers.
Read the story here.
October 15, 2006
SfN: Do you have synesthesia?
Synesthesia is one of those weird brain conditions that fascinates researchers and the public alike. For the uninitiated, synesthetes are people of sound mind and regular intelligence who, for reasons unknown, get their senses mixed up. They hear sounds when they read words, or see colours when they hear sounds. Or experience a change in temperature when they touch things. And so on: just about every possible combination of mixed-up senses has been reported by researchers who study synesthetes. But something about this work has always bugged me: how do the researchers know their subjects aren't just making it up?
Neuroscience 2006: Life without hamburgers is depressing
The Society for Neuroscience annual conference is, as usual, a big crowd-puller. Looking down the huge poster halls you get the impression you can see the curvature of the Earth. Well you could if the place wasn't totally heaving. I started by heading straight for a poster that I hoped was going to make me feel terribly self-satisfied.
Continue reading "Neuroscience 2006: Life without hamburgers is depressing" »
October 13, 2006
Society for Neuroscience
Join Jim Giles at this annual meeting of minds. He'll be sending diary reports back from Atlanta, Georgia, from 15-18 October. Check here for all his entries.
Nature also has a page devoted to this conference here.
And why not also visit the Nature Neuroscience gateway?