Top Research Papers on Neuroscience

This editorial critically engage with Vidal’s influential proclamation of the era of brainhood, in light of an emerging body of work – undertaken in and across anthropology, science and technology studies, feminist studies, and sociology – on the relationship between neuroscience, the self, and society.

The premise of the paper is that while individual and specialty aspirations need to be acknowledged, considered, and managed, the results from truly working together will be greater than the sum of the individual efforts-synergy.

Because the brain is basic to decision making, it must play a powerful role in their thinking regarding moral issues, and consequently in the way the authors treat each other in their society to maintain order and uphold fairness, individual rights, and equity.

Today’s burgeoning science of the mind, neuroscience stands on the shoulders of giants, great minds that have made history and still influence present day neurobiology because the strength of their contributions was so widespread and enduring. Our contribution will discuss some of the major forebears of neuroscience, and their continued contribution to the field. We will trace some of the fundamental roots of the field going back thousands of years, showing a logical connection between thinking of the past and ideas today. We next discuss our present day work and modest contributions to the th...

The real ginibre ensemble with real eigenvalues and Lhx2 regulates the timing of beta-catenin-dependent cortical neurogenesis in Alzheimer's disease.

Samuel Johnson, the colourful 18th-century English lexicographer, asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’ (Boswell, 1934). Since unlikely to be applicable to the two books discussed here, Dr Johnson's quip leads one to seek alternative motives and ask what led the authors to write these books, and why and for whom each book was written. Dealing first with what inspired the authors, in the preface to his Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century , Dr Schoonover records how an informal group of American writers and scientists met...

Samuel Johnson, the colourful 18th-century English lexicographer, asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’ (Boswell, 1934). Since unlikely to be applicable to the two books discussed here, Dr Johnson’s quip leads one to seek alternative motives and ask what led the authors to write these books, and why and for whom each book was written. Dealing first with what inspired the authors, in the preface to his Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, Dr Schoonover records how an informal group of American writers and scientists met t...

Different from the other atlases, the AL of the H. virescens brain atlas includes exclusively the glomerular layer as a single labelled identity, an advantage for registering the AL glomeruli as separate units into the atlas.

The question of whether ipsilateral M1 activity in older adults is due to age differences in task difficulty is raised, and advances in imaging analyses, such as resting state functional connectivity (fcMRI), provide a way to assess communication between cortical regions without incorporating a task.

The role of the perceptual task on attentional effects is investigated by studying extracellular responses of individual neurons in area MT of two macaque monkeys and it is found that the modulation of fi ring rates by spatial attention and feature-based attention did not depend on whether the monkeys were attending to the motion or the color signal.

Various studies have indicated that plasticity may lead to arrange afferent fiber contacts into spatial clusters, which may provide part of the scaffolding underlying the emergence of functional dendritic compartments.

This report demonstrates major differences at a population level of analysis in shape encoding within those two structures, anterior inferotemporal cortex (AIT) and lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), studied under identical task conditions.

Spatial domain ICA methodology yields results that are consistent with the results of other contemporary methods of detecting large scale temporally coherent networks from the BOLD signal data.

The role of basic motor control abilities in how cognitively healthy older adults learn to play the SF game was examined and performance improvements were largely specific to the previously trained mnemonic technique.

Spike-timing dependent plasticity is a Hebbian learning rule, and is thus a promising candidate to change the way neurons interact, and similar paradigms have been used in vivo to explore the effect of plasticity within the intact nervous system.

The ancient history of neuroscience is summarized to explore the development of theories about the functions and structures of the nervous system yields insights into the mysteries of the brain, neurology, and neuropsychology.

It is found that rTMS to the DLPFC improves naming performance in AD patients not only in the early stage (Cotelli et al., 2006b) but also in a more advanced stage of cognitive decline (Cotelli et al., 2008).

To study whether GEFs are involved in the transduction of the signal downstream of the taste GPCRs, the expression of Ric-8A and Ric-8B in mouse taste cells and their interaction with G-protein subunits found in taste buds were investigated.

Cognitive performance, in this case working memory, was found to be improved in Val/ Val-carriers after pharmacologically induced dopamine release by oral amphetamine administration, whereas performance in Met/ Met-carriers was decreased at high working memory load (Mattay et al., 2003).

The hypothesis that the normal modular community structure of functional brain networks might be somehow disrupted in neuropsychiatric disease, specifically in schizophrenia is tested.

It is suggested that task naming is a suitable cognitive intervention for enhancing the control of task switching in younger and older adults, even if memory load is reduced, and that for the efficient application of this strategy it first has to be coordinated with task switching, which is easier when task switching is already practiced.

A number of studies have found that higher levels of self-reported involvement in cognitively stimulating activities, either early or later in life, are associated with better cognitive function or a reduced risk of cognitive decline or dementia.

Functional Mapping of the Eloquent Cortex Using DES finds that using subdural and/or depth electrodes implanted in epileptic patients for presurgical evaluations, various sensations, or behavioral effects elicited by DES have been reported.

The demand is high for diagnostic methods allowing for better characterization and interpretation of depth-EEG signals, in terms of underlying neuronal networks and pathophysiological mechanisms taking place in these networks (Rampp and Stefan, 2006).

Various studies have indicated that plasticity may lead to arrange afferent fiber contacts into spatial clusters, which may provide part of the scaffolding underlying the emergence of functional dendritic compartments.

This report focuses on one aspect of brain function, resting-state networks that are related to functional networks and can be obtained in sleeping children, and only several studies have examined the RSNs in infants.

The purpose of this paper is to establish guidelines to create the optimal treatment for a child with cerebral palsy in terms of motor improvement and practicality.

It is hypothesized that NSAID use would be associated with greater volume in brain regions typically affected by AD pathology, and analyses were restricted to the hippocampus and parahippocampal gray matter, as these regions are known to be profoundly affected in AD.

Our current study exploits the fact that in the thalamus it is possible to record, with one extracellular electrode, the afferent input together with the thalamic output, and that each relay cell is driven primarily by a single retinal ganglion cell For a series of stimulus sizes we compared the single spike information content (Brenner et al., 2000) in individual LGN cells with that of the retinal ganglion cells that drove the LGN. Although there are some variations among cells, we generally fi nd that, to compensate for its lower fi ring rate, the LGN packs more information than the retina i...

This review focuses on approaches in which connectivity mapping and TMS can be used in conjunction to study neurological and psychiatric disorders in order to provide a sense of the more common available techniques and examples of these approaches.

These studies are providing a better understanding for the role of GABAergic signaling in the maturation and function of the visual cortex, and have opened the door for the development of new treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders such as amblyopia.

The model was restricted to consideration of 2D stimuli, as neural mechanisms for the extraction of depth information include additional mechanisms than those for the other two dimensions (although the final representation of space might not differ for the three dimensions).

The diagnostic origins of and to illuminate what is commonly referred to as schizophrenia are explained and to imagine what the future of 'schizophrenia' may reveal.

FMRI studies in humans and electrophysi-ological studies in animals elaborated the degree of organization of SOA signals, with results in each case demonstrating that SOA exhibits reproducible spatiotemporal patterns that can be linked to underlying neural circuits.

The two most popular techniques for performing resting state fcMRI are seed-based correlations and independent components analysis (ICA), and a consistent observation is that regions with similar functional properties exhibit coherent BOLD fluctuations even in the absence of movement under resting conditions.

This study concluded that the VIB procedure using a global and a local rigid transformation followed by a local nonrigid transformation preserves anatomical variability, whereas the ISA procedure using an affi ne transformation followed by iterative nonrigid registrations reduces the variability.

Functional Mapping of the Eloquent Cortex Using DES finds that using subdural and/or depth electrodes implanted in epileptic patients for presurgical evaluations, various sensations, or behavioral effects elicited by DES have been reported.

Neurons in PFC exhibit robust object-specific sustained activities during the delay periods of visual WM tasks like DMS or DNMS (Miller et al., 1996). However the informational content of WM-related activities in PFC is still unclear (Romanski, 2007). Inferotemporal (IT) neurons have been shown to encode object-specific information (Nakamura et al., 1994) as they are located at the end of the ventral visual pathway (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982). They have been shown to be critical for visual WM (Fuster et al., 1981; Petrides, 2000) and also exhibit sustained activation during the delay perio...

The FFR and the AMFR are the summed synchronized population responses of spiking activity and synaptic potentials of neurons in the auditory brainstem and midbrain (Herdman et al., 2002).

The evidence above suggests that the somatosensory system is important in generating corticomuscular coherence, but this remains controversial.

This work investigated how a pharmacologically induced state change affects the velocity coding of an identified visual interneuron of the blowfly, the H2 cell, using the octopamine agonist chlordimeform (CDM).

Large, distinct and clear differences between the corticostriatal responses from direct and indirect pathway neurons are demonstrated, revealing different integration processes for striatal inhibitory inputs.

In locusts, POL-neurons innervate specifi c, mostly small and distinct neuropils in the brain that are specialized for integration and processing of polarized-light information that can be regarded as elements of a polarization vision pathway in the locust brain.

This work demonstrated a long-lasting up-regulation of FGF-2 mRNA expression in response to spinal transection at the mid trunk level, both in brainstem and in the spinal cord below injury, and showed that FGF-2 was up-regulated in neuroglial, presumably undifferentiated, cells.

Most of the studies reported previously suggest that in older adults, enhancing aerobic fitness leads to significant improvement in attentional control functions, however, some of them that used RT paradigms, reported equivalent improvement after training, in both simple and choice RT tasks.

Together, these findings suggest that androgens may play a role in age-related, hippocampally-infl uenced, cognitive behavior and suggest that differences in endogenous T levels may alter cognitive and affective behaviour.

The two most popular techniques for performing resting state fcMRI are seed-based correlations and independent components analysis (ICA), and a consistent observation is that regions with similar functional properties exhibit coherent BOLD fluctuations even in the absence of movement under resting conditions.

A standard atlas of the bee brain is developed and tested by creating a standard atlas of the bee brain, which can be used to successfully reconstruct components of a neural network from separately acquired neurons and to visualize their spatial relations.

For the purposes of this study, those patients who have symptoms of headaches on a minimum of 10 days a month are addressed, and chronic headaches are generally defined as a patient having a headache 15 days of the month for at least three months.

While the early and middle latency sensory evoked potentials are often passive and involve no response or active cognitive processing by the participant, the later ERP components involve cognitive processing and the latency varies with the time required to process the event.