A curious medical finding that can be detected on MRI brain scans called the 'face of the giant panda sign' where, quite literally, it looks like there's a panda face in the middle of the brain, indicates a specific pattern of neural damage.

The image you can see is the 'face of the giant panda sign' that appeared in a brain scan of a patient with multiple sclerosis who started showing unusual sexual behaviour and is taken from a 2002 study. Click the image if you want to see the whole scan.

The pattern is apparently caused by "high signal in the tegmentum, normal signals in the red nuclei and  lateral portion of the pars reticulata of the substantia nigra, and hypointensity of the superior colliculus".

It is most associated with Wilson's disease, a genetic condition which causes a toxic build-up of copper in the body, but obviously can appear in other disorders as well.

Advances in technology have revealed that our brains are far more altered by experience or training than was thought possible. The memory-storing hippocampus region of the brain in London taxi drivers is bigger, and the auditory areas of musicians more developed, than average. Even learning to juggle can result in a certain amount of rewiring of the brain.

So the Lord Chief Justice’s suggestion that a lifetime spent on the internet will alter the way we think and process information is well founded. But whether these changes will enhance or degrade our powers of imagination, recall and decision-making has divided scientists.

Baroness Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, was among the first to warn that today’s children may grow up with short attention spans and no imagination. Others suggest that the abandonment of books means people will lose the ability to follow a plot from start to finish. However, as yet little or no evidence has emerged to support these fears.

Short-term studies have, if anything, shown internet use to have a positive impact on our mental powers.

A study published this week, for instance, revealed that when “internet naive” adults carried out web searches every day for two weeks, it boosted the activity in brain areas linked to decision-making and working memory.

The reality is likely to be a trade-off: certain abilities will be enhanced at the expense of others. It could be that browsing through the vast quantities of information on the web leaves people better equipped to filter out the irrelevant and focus on the important.

Meanwhile, people may get worse at keeping the bigger picture in mind. Only a long-term psychological study will provide a definitive picture of how internet use affects cognition.

A screenshot from the Whole Brain Catalog program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neuroscientists realized that they had to start collaborating across disciplines and sharing their data if they wanted to make advances in their own field.

However, this realization came with a conundrum: Researchers in the modern era have come up with so many different ways to obtain data -- microscopes, MRI machines, super-charged computers -- that they've literally compiled more data than they know how to share.

"There are thousands of instruments all delivering new forms of data -- torrents of data -- at all levels of biology," said Mark Ellisman, a University of California, San Diego neuroscientist who is world renowned for redefining the patterning of cells in the nervous system. "We are swamped."

Ellisman and his UCSD coll eagues have devised a solution: crowdsource a brain. And this week they unveiled their years-long project -- the Whole Brain Catalog -- at the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience, the largest gathering of brain experts in the world.

The roughly $10 million project, funded by a gift from Gateway co-founder and San Diego resident Ted Waitt and National Institutes of Health grants, is envisioned an open source venue that hopefully will host all the information available on the mouse brain. They use a mouse brain because it is the most commonly studied noggin in the world, and used in a vast majority of research involving human brain disease.

Anyone, researcher or layperson, with something useful to add to the catalog can do so, and there will be a Wikipedia-like policing of the data. "It will be a place where tens of thousands of researchers will come together to assemble this brain, something no single laboratory could do," Ellisman said.

The hope is that it will vastly speed up the understanding of how the brain works and goes awry in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as inspire a new generation of artificial intelligence.

Professor Elena Jazin and doctoral student Björn Reinius at the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology previously demonstrated that genetic expression in the cerebral cortices of human beings and other primates exhibits certain sex-based differences. It is presumed that these differences are very old and have survived the evolutionary process. The purpose of the new study was to determine whether they appear during the process of brain development or first upon the conclusion of that process. Identifying the initial genetic mechanisms that prompt the brain to develop in a female or male direction is a long-range research objective.

The Uppsala University researchers analysed data, on the basis of sex, from another extensive study of the prenatal human brain.

"The results show that many of the genes situated on the Y chromosome are expressed in various parts of the brain prior to birth and probably provide a developmental basis for the sex-based differences exhibited by adult brains," according to Elena Jazin.

More than a third of Y-chromosomal genes appear to be involved in sex-based human brain differentiation. Some of the genetic activity in question is evident in the adult brain, while other of it only appears at earlier stages of brain development. It is yet unknown whether the differences in genetic expression among female and male brains have any functional significance.

"The findings are consistent with other factors, such as environment, also playing a role in how we develop," emphasizes Elena Jazin.

Knowledge of the development of sex-based brain differences is of potential significance for the treatment of brain disturbances and diseases. A large number of psychiatric illnesses, including depression and autism, affect men and women differentially.

Findings from a new UT Southwestern Medical Center study suggest that fat from certain foods we eat makes its way to the brain. Once there, the fat molecules cause the brain to send messages to the body's cells, warning them to ignore the appetite-suppressing signals from leptin and insulin, hormones involved in weight regulation.

The researchers also found that one particular type of fat - palmitic acid - is particularly effective at instigating this mechanism.

"Normally, our body is primed to say when we've had enough, but that doesn't always happen when we're eating something good," said Dr. Deborah Clegg, assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and senior author of the rodent study appearing in the September issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"What we've shown in this study is that someone's entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time. Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets 'hit' with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin," Dr. Clegg said. "Since you're not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat."

Dr. Clegg said that in the animals, the effect lasts about three days, potentially explaining why many people who splurge on Friday or Saturday say they're hungrier than normal on Monday.

Though scientists have known that eating a high-fat diet can cause insulin resistance, little has been known about the mechanism that triggers this resistance or whether specific types of fat are more likely to cause increased insulin resistance. Dr. Clegg said she suspected the brain might play a role because it incorporates some of the fat we eat - whether it is from healthy oils or the not-so-healthy saturated fat found in butter and beef - into its structure.

Based on this suspicion, her team attempted to isolate the effects of fat on the animals' brains. Researchers did this by exposing the animals to fat in different ways: by injecting various types of fat directly into the brain, infusing fat through the carotid artery or feeding the animals through a stomach tube three times a day. The animals received the same amount of calories and fat; only the type of fat differed. The types included palmitic acid, monounsaturated fatty acid and oleic acid.

Palmitic acid is a common saturated fatty acid occurring in foods such as butter, cheese, milk and beef. Oleic acid, on the other hand, is one of the most common unsaturated fatty acids. Olive and grapeseed oils are rich in oleic acid.

"We found that the palmitic acid specifically reduced the ability of leptin and insulin to activate their intracellular signaling cascades," Dr. Clegg said. "The oleic fat did not do this. The action was very specific to palmitic acid, which is very high in foods that are rich in saturated-fat."

Dr. Clegg said that even though the findings are in animals, they reinforce the common dietary recommendation that individuals limit their saturated fat intake. "It causes you to eat more," she said.

"Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.

The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times - within a quarter of a second - and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language. The discoveries came through the researchers' use of a rare procedure in which electrodes were placed in the brains of patients. The technique allowed surgeons to know which small region of the brain to remove to alleviate their seizures, while sparing the healthy regions necessary for language. Recordings for research purposes were then made while the patients were awake and responsive. The procedure, called Intra-Cranial Electrophysiology (ICE), allowed the researchers to resolve brain activity related to language with spatial accuracy down to the millimeter and temporal accuracy down to the millisecond.

This is the first experiment to use ICE to document how the human brain computes grammar and produces words.

Because complex language is unique to humans, it has been difficult to investigate its neural mechanisms. Brain-imaging methods such as functional MRI are generally all that are possible to use in humans, but they blur the activity of thousands or millions of neurons over long periods of time. Consequently, scientists have been unable to determine in detail whether the mechanisms used by linguistic or computational models to produce grammatically correct speech correspond to the mechanisms that the brain actually uses.

What is the difference between a shy person and another who suffers from gelotophobia? One of the aims of a study published recently in the scientific journal Humor, which was led by a team from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the participation of researchers from 73 other countries, was to find out if there is a valid and reliable way of evaluating the fear of being laughed at within different cultures.

"People laugh at others for many different reasons", Victor Rubio, a psychologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid and one of the Spanish researchers taking part in the study, tells SINC.

"This causes an anxiety or fear response in the person affected, leading them to avoid situations in which such circumstances may arise, and this may even become a problem that impacts on their social life", explains the expert.

The lead authors of the research study commissioned 93 scientists to use a questionnaire (translated into 42 languages) on a sample of 22,610 people in order to find out whether they suffered from gelotophobia, which comes from the Greek gelos, 'laugh', and phobos, 'fear'.

"Our study makes it possible to draw a clear distinction between people who suffer from this phobia and those who do not, as well as showing the scale of cultural differences, which are so important in any possible psychological treatment", says Rubio.

Spain, inclined towards the insecurity pole

This phobia was discussed for the first time in Spain at the ninth International Summer School and Symposium on Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, held at the University of Granada last summer.

According to the experts, people can be classified within two opposite poles involved in the fear of being laughed at – the 'insecurity reaction' dimension (trying to hide one's lack of self-confidence from others, or believing that one is involuntarily funny) and 'avoidance reactions', whereby one avoids situations in which one has been laughed at, and the dimension of low-high tendencies to suspect that if others are laughing, they are laughing at you.

Although this phenomenon is shared by all cultures, the study shows there are certain differences. Countries such as Turkmenistan and Cambodia are represented within the first dimension of insecurity reactions, while people in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan are much more likely to avoid situations in which they have been laughed at. Spain is "slightly inclined towards the insecurity pole".

Another strange result is that people in Finland are the least likely to believe that if people laugh in their presence they are laughing at them (8.5%), while 80% of people in Thailand believe this to be the case.

The paper they examine was by Lhan Phan and colleagues in 2005 and involved fourteen participants having their brains scanned whilst they either told the truth or lied about playing cards in their possession. Consistent with several other similar papers, Phan's study showed differential activity in a raft of brain areas when people lied versus told the truth, especially frontal regions involved in working memory and deliberate effort.

Monteleone's team took the brain activity of each individual in Phan's study and compared it with the averaged activity of the other 13 participants to see if the "lying areas" identified at the group level were also extra active when that specific participant was lying.

At the group level, 16 brain regions showed differential activity when lying compared with telling the truth. The brain area that most resembled a true "neural signature" for lying was the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Seventy-one per cent of participants showed heightened activity in this region when they were lying compared with telling the truth. This is better than chance, but far from perfect - really no different from the classic polygraph.

Also, just like the polygraph, brain imaging suffers from the problem of balancing specificity with sensitivity. For example, if the threshold for significant mPFC activity is lowered, then the number of participants showing notable lying-related activity in this region increases, but so too do the number of false alarms - that is, participants who show activity in this region when they're telling the truth. In real life legal settings, these "false positives" could mean innocent people going to jail or worse.

What's more, Monteleone's team warn that it's highly unlikely mPFC activity is a true neural signature for lying. Just as there are many reasons why our pulse might race and our palms get sweaty (thus triggering a polygraph), there are many potential excitors of mPFC activity, including self-consciousness and thinking about other people's mental states.

This also raises the problem of cunning criminals devising simple ways to foil the brain scanner. A participant who performed complex mental arithmetic during truth and lying conditions, or who concentrated on the examiner's mental state throughout a scan, would likely spoil any neat comparison of truth and lying conditions.

The problems don't end there. Monteleone's group further showed that for some lying participants, specific brain regions that appeared to be activated by lying were in fact really part of a far larger spread of brain activation that probably had nothing to do with lying at all. There's also the fact that the playing card lying paradigm is so simple and insipid compared with real-life lying. Also, the researchers observed that a minority of participants showed idiosyncratic brain responses to lying, out of keeping with the general group-level patterns. And finally, there are socio-cultural issues. Problems with language and the cultural appropriateness of deception could both massively distort a person's brain response to lying versus truth-telling.

"...[A]lthough fMRI may permit investigation of the neural correlates of lying," the researchers said, "at the moment it does not appear to provide a very accurate marker of lying that can be generalised across individuals or even perhaps across types of lies by the same individuals."