Social Health Rising

Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World: Social health is rising now because of the convergence of many forces including: the dramatic increase in connectedness as a result of the opening up of everyone's social graph across the social web; the development of inexpensive, accurate and mobile health diagnostics; new research proving the positive role social relationships play in health outcomes; advances in wellness behavioral economics; a growing emphasis on prevention as a result of healthcare reform; fresh insights into human motivation; the emergence of population level wellness metrics; a growing zeitgeist around health and wellness; and the development of new social web applications that support and motivate healthy behavior.

Having spent the past decade living at the center of neurotechnology innovation, funding, and public policy, I've had ample time to think and write about what neuroscience has to offer the future of humanity.

The Storage of Emotions

Visual, acoustic, and olfactory stimuli associated with a highly charged emotional situation take on the affective qualities of that situation. Where the emotional meaning of a given sensory experience is stored is a matter of debate.

Tiziana Sacco and  Benedetto Sacchetti have found that excitotoxic lesions of auditory, visual, or olfactory secondary sensory cortices impaired remote, but not recent, fear memories in rats. Amnesia was modality-specific and not due to an interference with sensory or emotional processes. In these sites, memory persistence was dependent on ongoing protein kinase M activity and was associated with an increased activity of layers II–IV, thus suggesting a synaptic strengthening of corticocortical connections. Lesions of the same areas left intact the memory of sensory stimuli not associated with any emotional charge.

Tiziana Sacco and  Benedetto Sacchetti  propose that secondary sensory cortices support memory storage and retrieval of sensory stimuli that have acquired a behavioral salience with the experience.

Behaviour: Brain-changing battles

A study in a territorial species of mouse shows how the brain changes after a success in physical conflict.  It can boost fighting ability in animals, possibly because of a post-bout release of testosterone. 

Highlights from The Neurotech Investing and Partnering Conference 2010: Translational Researchers Showcase Innovation

        While venture capitalists have been dialing back on potentially risky early stage investments, translational researchers have been marching ahead. Government funding is pushing new discoveries forward, but sometimes the best of these languish in academic labs where companies and more adventurous investors are less likely to discover them. This year the Neurotech Development Foundation (NDF), a new nonprofit founded to promote the advancement of translational neuroscience research, and several institutes at the NIH (including NINDS, NIMH, and NIA) teamed up to find and showcase the most promising work to Neurotech 2010 attendees in Boston on May 20, 2010.  
         The projects were selected by a steering committee including industry, government and academic representatives.

Rendezvous in Hedonia

Psychiatrist Morten Kringelbach: Our basic pleasures are caused by feelings intimately related to food, sex and social interaction. On a neural level, such sensations are first detected by sensory receptors located throughout the body. These are then decoded in the sensory regions of the brain.  Pleasure is not just a mere stimulation of such receptors, but the result of interactions between anticipation, evaluation and stored away sensations.

Pleasure can therefore be seen as a sweet mix of desire, pleasant sensations and learning.

Understanding the nature of pleasure will help to treat affective disorders.

Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

Dr. Schooler ( University of California, Santa Barbara.): For creativity you need your mind to wander, but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?

Creativity and schizophrenia use similar brain canals

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that the brains of healthy, highly creative people are similar to that of schizophrenic patients in some aspects: in both cases, the dopamine system is involved.