Occasionally I get asked why I’m so dour about the utility of implantable technology, especially when it may solve very hard problems. Usually my response is something along the lines of they are awful now, are inaccessible to most, and if the underlying conceits are right we should have non-invasive options able to do the …
The majority of funding for studying how organisms work comes under the auspices of attempting to “cure” or ameliorate the symptoms of a perceived “disease”. Specifically with regard to neuroscience function, the psychiatric “ordered/disordered” conceit drives an overwhelming amount of the work in the field. We’ve invested hundreds of billions chasing down “cures” for psychiatric …
I’ve gone back and forth on this topic, initially being skeptical of their existence at all. I think there’s at least one CPG dump which I’ll edit in when I get the chance. My current understanding is that CPG circuits do NOT generate or initiate salience (which is what I believe the current orthodox understanding …
Wish it was easier to share links to things behind paywalls, have thought of hosting all the papers I read but am reticent about getting DMCA’d over them. Are there better options that are relatively stable (at least for a few years?) Glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons in pontine central gray mediate opposing valence-specific behaviors through …
Stupid, unnecessary prediction: By 2035 at least 12% of all living individuals will be dealing with moderate to severe dementia related conditions. By the same date, roughly 1% of all individuals will be living in cognitive “intentional communities”. (And yes, high hundreds of millions to a billion+). Also yes, it’s completely incomprehensible right now. First …
Isn’t this just the most amazing thing ever? Like we have evidence of non-primate animals not just spreading behavior, but behavior related to abstract concepts/”unnatural” objects. It’s unmistakable evidence that not only are these animals communicating with each other, but doing so with discrete language like constructs across social groups. So much of human ethological …
Neuron-astrocyte omnidirectional signaling in neurological health and disease – It’s kind of shocking how far we’ve come in the past 15 years, and kind of disorienting to realize there’s still no indication of how far we need to go. This is a pretty good review of that! Differential intracellular trafficking of extracellular vesicles in microglia …
Distinct neural mechanisms construct classical versus extraclassical inhibitory surrounds in an inhibitory nucleus in the midbrain attention network – Behavior is initiated long before we are “aware” of it, even tasks which supposedly require extensive post processing like visual cues. Human tau-overexpressing mice recapitulate brainstem involvement and neuropsychiatric features of early Alzheimer’s disease – Dementias …
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg2067 Abstract: Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are heterogeneous in size, composition, and function. We show that the six-transmembrane protein glycerophosphodiester phosphodiesterase 3 (GDE3) regulates actin remodeling, a global EV biogenic pathway, to release an EV subtype with distinct functions. GDE3 is necessary and sufficient for releasing EVs containing annexin A1 and GDE3 from the plasma membrane …
