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Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed a neural prosthesis for rats that is able to restore their ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked. In a dramatic demonstration, Berger blocked the ability to rats to form long-term memories by using pharmacological agents to disrupt the neural circuitry that communicates between two subregions of the hippocampus, CA1 and CA3, which interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown. The rats were unable to remember which lever to pull to gain a reward, or could only remember for 5-10 seconds, when previously they could remember for a long period of time. The researchers then developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions. Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. The researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats. "These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper. Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help human victims of Alzheimer's disease, stroke, or injury recover function. Ref.: "A Cortical neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing

"Social interactions require fast and efficient person perception, which is best achieved through the process of categorization. However, this process can produce pernicious outcomes, particularly in the case of stigma. This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates involved in forming both explicit ("Do you like or dislike this person?") and implicit ("Is this a male or female?") judgments of people possessing well-established stigmatized conditions (obesity, facial piercings, transsexuality, and unattractiveness), as well as normal controls. Participants also made post-scan disgust ratings on all the faces that they viewed during imaging. These ratings were subsequently examined (modeled linearly) in a parametric analysis. Regions of interest that emerged include areas previously demonstrated to respond to aversive and disgust-inducing material (amygdala and insula), as well as regions strongly associated with inhibition and control (anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortex). Further, greater differences in activation were observed in the implicit condition for both the amygdala and prefrontal cortical regions in response to the most negatively perceived faces. Specifically, as subcortical responses (e.g., amygdala) increased, cortical responses (e.g., lateral PFC and anterior cingulate) also increased, indicating the possibility of inhibitory processing. These findings help elucidate the neural underpinnings of stigma"

"This research provides an understanding of the neural basis for social behavior from the perspective of how we evaluate social experiences and how our social interactions and decisions are motivated. We review research addressing the common neural systems underlying evaluation of social and nonsocial rewards. The human striatum, known to play a key role in reward processing, displays signals related to a broad spectrum of social functioning, including evaluating social rewards, making decisions influenced by social factors, learning about social others, cooperating, competing, and following social norms. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:61-73. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1266"

ScienceDaily (Apr. 26, 2011) - In a paper published in the April 25 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco and colleagues report a game-changing advance in stem cell science: the creation of long-term, self-renewing, primitive neural precursor cells from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) that can be directed to become many types of neuron without increased risk of tumor formation.

"It is a widely accepted principle of distributive justice that goods should be distributed to individuals according to their contribution, i.e., people should receive equal pay for equal work (equity principle)...Recently, neuroscientific studies have begun to address neural processes underlying social and economic phenomena like e.g., reactions to norm violations, status concerns, and reactions to unfair behavior. These studies have convergingly identified brain regions that are important for these aspects of social behavior. One consistent finding is that activations of the dopaminergic mesolimbic ("reward") system, especially the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) do not exclusively reflect material self-interest, but also social aspects

Tamir DI, Mitchell JP. Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. dtamir@fas.harvard.edu Abstract Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self.

Originalpublikation: Rudorf S et al., Neural Correlates of Anticipation Risk Reflect Risk Preferences, Journal of Neuroscience, 2012, DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4235-11.2012 „Diese Studie zeigt erstmals die neurobiologischen Zusammenhänge, wie individuelle Risikopräferenzen die Risikowahrnehmung bestimmen", sagt Prof. Weber. „Das hat auch Auswirkungen auf Handlungen in der Finanzwelt und im Gesundheitsbereich." Im nächsten Schritt wollen die Wissenschaftler untersuchen, welche Konsequenzen diese Resultate auf das ökonomische Verhalten etwa auf dem Aktienmark haben. „Damit ließe sich vielleicht sogar die Beratung von Anlegern mit Blick auf ihr individuelles Risikoverhalten verbessern", sagt Prof. Weber. Ein weiteres wichtiges Feld sei der Gesundheitsbereich. Raucher wissen, dass ihr Handeln sehr gefährlich ist, und rauchen trotzdem. „Wenn die Risikoeinstellung von Rauchern besser bekannt ist, können vielleicht wirksamere Anti-Raucher-Kampagnen entwickelt werden."

While a substantial body of work has been devoted to understanding the role of negative stereotypes in racial attitudes, far less is known about how we deal with contradictions of those stereotypes. This article uses functional brain imaging with contextually rich visual stimuli to explore the neural mechanisms that are involved in cognition about social norms and race. We present evidence that racial stereotypes are more about the stereotypes than about race per se. Amygdala activity (correlated with negative racial attitudes in other studies) appeared driven by norm violation, rather than race.

"Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood. And our Romeos may be poetic lunatics under the influence of Queen Mab until they are well into graduate school. What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness. Photos: The Trials of Teenagers View Slideshow [SB10001424052970204573704577187080963983566] Everett Collection James Dean in the 1955 film 'Rebel Without A Cause' The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults"

"Leah Pyter: Well basically what we know is that patients with cancer have a higher likelihood of also developing depression at some point in their disease progression, so whether that occurred before and is predisposing them to cancer, or it's due to the tumours themselves, or other aspects of having the disease, we don't know. We were only studying right now whether the cancer itself can cause depression. Chris Smith: How could a tumour trigger depression, because a tumour can occur anywhere in the body, therefore at the remote sites in the brain, so how could it trigger changes in brain activity? Leah Pyter: Sure, well what we hypothesized was that the tumours themselves can produce cytokines which has been shown before. Chris Smith: These are inflammatory chemicals that drive the immune system? Leah Pyter: Right, exactly! And there is also a pile of research on how cytokines can access the brain specifically regions of the brain that are associated with depression and anxiety and emotional behaviours, and they can access the brain both tumourally through the blood, or neurally through the vegas nerves. "

"During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness."

ConvNetJS is a Javascript library for training Deep Learning models (mainly Neural Networks) entirely in your browser. Open a tab and you're training. No software requirements, no compilers, no installations, no GPUs, no sweat.

Free Download - StanfordUniversity - January 22, 2009 - Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".

"Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability."

"Scene recognition is one of the hallmark tasks of computer vision, allowing defining a context for object recognition. Here we introduce a new scene-centric database called Places, with 205 scene categories and 2.5 millions of images with a category label. Using convolutional neural network (CNN), we learn deep scene features for scene recognition tasks, and establish new state-of-the-art performances on scene-centric benchmarks. Here we provide the Places Database and the trained CNNs for academic research and education purposes."