The human brain, made up of 14 billion to 16 billion cells, is the most important and mysterious organ of the human body.
For a long time, scientists have never stopped exploring the brain, and many advances have been made: paralyzed patients can use brain-controlled robotic arms to perceive the outside world, implanting electrodes into the visual area of the brain can help blind people restore part of their vision, activating brain cells with light can help people retrieve past memories, implanting chips in the brain can enhance people's memory ability...
Last week, brain scientist Wang Zheng's speech on the brain sparked a lot of interest (portal: countless nerve fibers in the brain, which stimulus will cause amnesia?). Stimulate which one is memory-enhancing), so we've summarized eight interesting recent studies on the brain that hopefully give you a deeper understanding of our brains.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >01 Can you tell your brain capacity from the size of your stomach?! </h1>
Brain imaging
It has long been thought that belly fat is particularly harmful to the heart, but now, a new study proves that the accumulation of belly fat is just as bad for the brain.
Studies from the UK found that people with a high waist-to-hip ratio had, on average, slightly lower brain volume than people with healthy weights. Specifically, the more belly fat there is, the less gray matter there is in the brain. Gray matter is brain tissue that contains nerve cells, and a decrease in brain volume or brain atrophy increases the risk of memory loss and dementia.
The researchers said the new findings, published Jan. 9, 2019 in the journal Neurology, suggest that a combination of obesity levels measured by body mass index or BMI and high waist-to-hip ratio could be a red flag for brain atrophy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >02 Why does time fly when you have fun? </h1>
Happy times are always short-lived
The error of the world's most accurate clock can be as small as 1 second every 300 million years.
But our brains do have their own unique sense of time. Why can't the brain maintain a time perception that is consistent with the normal clock? In other words, why does time seem to fly when you have fun, and when you are bored, it feels like a year?
The brain's perception of time depends on "expectations." Dr. Michael Shadlen, a neurologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, says the brain can rehearse the likelihood that something will happen.
Our brains, he says, perceive time as if there were a kind of "horizon." For example, when we read a book, the horizon is at the end of each syllable, at the end of each word, at the end of the next sentence, and so on. Time changes depending on how we predict these horizons.
When you're preoccupied with something, your brain sees both near and far horizons, which makes time seem to pass by as fast as you can. However, when you're bored, you'll pay more attention to the horizon in front of you, as you'll focus on the end of a sentence rather than the end of a story.
Dr. David Igman, a professor at Stanford University and a scientific advisor to Westworld, has also said that the way the brain builds memories is also a factor in the perception of time. The network of neurons encoded for new memories is denser than those of old ones. "As we get older, time seems to pick up," Igman told us. (Portal: Westworld Science Advisor: Are We Living in Reality or In a Dream?) This time, the gyroscope may not save you--visit · David Eagleman）
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >03 To learn your native language, your brain only needs 1.5MB of storage space</h1>
An English-speaking adult learns about 12.5 million bytes of information in the language
In infancy, the language information generated by our brains may not be more complex than "whoops" and "whoops," but soon we begin to internalize words to make those sounds meaningful.
A new study from the Royal Society Open Science shows that learning a language is not easy: an English-speaking adult learns about 12.5 million bytes of information in the language.
The authors write in the research report: "This may seem surprising, but if we quantify the information in numbers, our linguistic knowledge can almost be put into a floppy disk: 1.5 MB of information is almost equal to a one-minute-long song file."
According to the study, much of the 12.5 million bytes of linguistic information stored in the brain is not related to grammar and syntax, but to the meaning of words. Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "A lot of research on language learning has focused on grammar, but our research shows that grammar is only a small part of language learning, and the main difficulty lies in learning the meaning of many words. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >04 Electrical stimulation can bring aging brains back to 20</h1>
Electrical stimulation can bring the aging brain back to a youthful state
A new study suggests that transient electrical stimulation of the brain can reverse some of the conditions of aging in older adults. It's unclear how long this benefit lasts, and the technology isn't ready for non-experimental use. But the researchers hope that their findings will improve cognitive levels in people with Alzheimer's and other types of dementia.
Robert Reinhart, a neuroscientist at Boston University, notes that these findings are important because they not only give us a new understanding of the decline in age-related "brain working memory," but also show us that negative age-related changes are not immutable.
The researchers recruited 42 adults between the ages of 20 and 29 and 42 older adults between the ages of 60 and 76; the scientists asked the participants to complete a memory task while their brain activity would be monitored by an EEG. It was a simple "stubble finding" task where participants saw two very similar pictures on the screen and had to identify the differences in the second picture.
While some participants completed the task, their brains were weakly shocked by a method called non-invasive intracranial AC stimulation.
The experiment was double-blind, so neither the participants nor the researchers knew when the participants received brain stimulation.
Prior to stimulation, older adults did not perform as well as younger people on memory tasks. The accuracy rate for young people averages around 90 percent, while the average score for older people is close to 80 percent. But electrical stimulation narrows that gap.
With the further deepening and development of research, this technology is expected to be used in patients.
Reinhart said the new discovery was a starting point. The research team has already begun to push their research into the field of disease and disorder. "This bodes well for the next step where we can push the results into clinical practice, because it lets us know that some brain diseases are characterized by low connectivity, such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, but there are also diseases characterized by excessive brain connectivity, such as Parkinson's and epilepsy." Now we're starting to have tools that allow us to adjust these connections. ”
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >05 "resurrect" the dead brain</h1>
Scientists "resurrected" the pig's brain
The findings, published April 17, 2019 in the journal Nature, show that the brains of large mammals "maintain their ability to restore circulation and specific cell activity" hours after death. Nenad Sestan, senior author of the study, said, "This led us to find that cell death occurs much longer than we previously thought, a gradual process that, in some cases, can be delayed or even reversed." ”
One afternoon in 2016, researchers at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut discovered electrical activity in the brains taken from dead pigs. This shocking result made Nenad Sestan realize that it might be possible to redefine our understanding of life and death.
Sestan immediately contacted the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funded his research, and bioethicists at Yale, spent the next few months scrutinizing potential ethical implications, such as whether the brain can become conscious and whether doctors need to rethink the definition of brain death.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >06 Implanting electrodes in the brain can treat addiction? </h1>
Doctors at Ruijin Hospital are testing patients
Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai treats symptoms of methamphetamine (commonly known as methamphetamine) addiction by implanting stimulation devices into the brains of patients. At present, more than a dozen patients have implanted "brain pacemakers" in their brains.
A Chinese man reportedly struggled with methamphetamine addiction for years and previously participated in the world's first clinical trials using deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat drug addiction. In the more than 6 months after the operation at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, he did not take drugs again.
Dr. Ashesh Mehta, director of epilepsy surgery at New York University's Northwell Health Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, said deep brain stimulation is the surgical implantation of a pacemaker-like device into a specific area of the brain. The device can emit tiny electric shocks to the target area.
"Theoretically, in people with drug addiction, electrodes targeting brain regions that control drug use can reduce the need for drugs," Dr. Mehta said.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >07 Electrical stimulation of the brain may remind you of something long ago</h1>
A new study has found that electrical stimulation of the brain can enhance memory
Vague memories can be frustrating: Whether you're in the supermarket trying to recall whether you had milk at home or you testified as an eyewitness in court.
Now a new study has found that electrical stimulation of the brain can enhance memory. A report published May 6, 2019 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience showed that study participants improved their ability to recall by 15.4 percent after receiving stimuli in a certain part of the brain.
Jesse Rissman, an assistant professor of psychology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, and his team recruited 72 people for two consecutive days of testing. On the first day, participants were asked to memorize 80 different words and their scenarios. For example, if one of the words is "cake," participants are asked to "imagine themselves or someone else having eaten a cake on the balcony yesterday."
Participants were tested the next day to test their memory profile, and the participants were then divided into three groups: the first group received additional electric shocks to increase the activity of specific parts of the prefrontal cortex; the second group received an electric shock of reverse current (in an attempt to reduce the activity of brain cells); and the third group received false stimuli.
"In real life, the field of application of research will be very narrow, unless you have people walking around with this device tied to their heads," Reesman said. While these preliminary results are very encouraging, we hope to do more experiments to better grasp which types of stimuli are best for enhancing the brain's ability to remember. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >08 How scary is "brain-eating worms"</h1>
Negri amoeba Fow's
Negrifree fows is made up of individual cells and appears harmless. Under the microscope they look like frolicking critters until they come across a swarm of bacteria: these seemingly harmless amoebas suddenly become killers, engulfing the bacteria and slowly breaking them down with a lot of digestive enzymes.
We don't cry for murdered bacteria, but it's a nightmare when the powerful digestive power of The Foreth Negri Amoeba plays out in the human brain.
Negrifres fow is an extremely rare, but also extremely lethal, single-celled organism. Since 1962, only 146 cases have been reported in the United States, but only 4 cases of infection have survived, with a 97% chance of death.
The first symptoms of infection include headache, fever, nausea, and vomiting, as well as changes in smell or taste (due to damage to the olfactory nerve). Infections rapidly expand through the central nervous system, producing neck stiffness, fatigue, loss of balance, seizures, and hallucinations. Patients usually die of infection within five to seven days of symptom onset.
In addition, there are no established drugs that have a definitive efficacy for infections. Compounding the problem is that most drugs have difficulty reaching the brain, and because encephalitis caused by the primary Negeria fowlerii is a rare disease, few cases can be studied.
Text | Huang Yicheng
Layout | Tian Xiaona
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