Not CAT scans; actual cats.

{credit}Manxui Ma{/credit}

Faced with a difficult task, people will often compare their situation to ‘herding cats’. I can only imagine the degree of herding that had to go on in a study reported in a poster yesterday here at the meeting of the OHBM (Organization for Human Brain Mapping).

Most people using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), a non-invasive way of looking at brain activity, like to study humans. But scanning animals is also helpful because you can use stronger magnets to get really detailed pictures of brain networks; it’s also helpful for comparing findings across species, or matching up the decades of work on animals to the results being churned out of fMRI scanners today.

One problem is that any movement of the head once your subject is in the scanner can really mess up your signal. So scientists usually anaesthetize animals before they are scanned. The only animals that have been scanned while awake are monkeys and dogs, mainly because you can train them fairly effectively to keep still. Now, Manxiu Ma and colleagues from the Human Brain Mapping Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have tried it with two cats.

Why cats? Well, this is really a proof-of-concept — but plenty of anatomical work has been done in cats to looking at the effects on the brain of changing input — covering one eye from birth, for example, and watching to see how the visual cortex changes. So they’re already a model in neuroscience. In addition, they’re small, which means that you can use comparatively stronger magnets and see the brain in more detail. With human scanners there’s a trade-off between size and power. Continue reading →

Organization for Human Brain Mapping Meeting, Beijing, China

{credit}S. Bludau{/credit}

Katrin Amunts and her colleagues at the Research Centre Jülich in Germany are explorers. Explorers of the brain — striking out and finding new territories; rewriting and adding to our brain maps.

What, you thought we’d already got a map of the brain? “We have not got a complete map, and there is no such thing as a single map of the brain,” says Amunts. With major collaborator Karl Zilles, and joined by a host of keen-eyed lab members, over the past 20 years she’s been working on a project to map the brain in fine detail and using a variety of methods.

At a talk in the neuroanatomy session here at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Amunts’ colleague Sebastian Bludau reported the discovery of two brain areas. They’re at the very front of the brain, in a region called the frontal pole that we know is involved in such tasks as processing social information and working memory. He has christened them FP1  and FP2.

Of course, we already knew that the frontal pole was there. In the early 1900s, a neuroscientist called Korbinian Brodmann gave it the name ‘Area 10’ when he published a series of maps of the brain based on his painstaking explorations under the microscope. He looked at the ways cells differed through the brain and delineated areas on the basis of their cells.

But Brodmann’s Area 10 was rather large. Recent studies suggested there was more going on within it, Amunts says. Studies of brain function reported that the lateral half, on the outside surface of the brain, was active when people use working memory, whereas a region tucked into a fold on the inside dealt with social cognition and emotion processing. Continue reading →