Pons-to-cerebellum hypoconnectivity along the psychosis spectrum and associations with sensory prediction and hallucinations in schizophrenia – Eh, but at least we are looking in the right place now.
KCNA2 IgG autoimmunity in neuropsychiatric diseases
Brain energy metabolism is optimized to minimize the cost of enzyme synthesis and transport – The title would have been a ton better without the optimized bit, but enzymes should probably considered a first order signalling system in organisms. Maybe even the the first non-nucleic signalling system, or complex multi-cellular signalling system.
Local synaptic inhibition mediates cerebellar granule cell pattern separation and enables learned sensorimotor associations – It feels like we’re okay with “sensorimotor”, we just need to push it a little bit more abstractly to make “motor” into “salience”. Sensorisalient associations.
Different Purkinje cell pathologies cause specific patterns of progressive gait ataxia in mice – One of the shames of the electric brain conceit is that we lose how important intracellular function and morphology is.
Posterior Cerebellar Resting-State Functional Hypoconnectivity: A Neural Marker of Schizophrenia across Different Stages of Treatment Response – Accepting the lack of precision with “schizophrenia” definitions, the “positive symptoms” and “negative symptoms” aspect appear to be two different mechanics. More specifically, the “negative symptoms” are an artifact of social response to “positive symptoms”.
Time-sensitive changes in the maternal brain and their influence on mother-child attachment – Huh.
Women’s neuroplasticity during gestation, childbirth and postpartum -Uh huh.
Activating lobule VI PCTH+–Med pathway in cerebellum blocks the acquisition of methamphetamine conditioned place preference in mice – Heh, that’s what dumped ventral processing looks like.
Adolescent intermittent ethanol use in male rats do not change cerebellar cell numbers but initiate astroglial reaction – The astrocyte reaction is necessary to get crunk. The alcohol kills the brains of the yoots stuff is probably bunk.
Parvalbumin and somatostatin: biomarkers for two parallel tectothalamic pathways in the auditory midbrain – Words and Music
Dissociable roles of the auditory midbrain and cortex in processing the statistical features of natural sound textures – Music and Words
Involvement of superior colliculus in complex figure detection of mice – “Moreover, it has been shown that superficial layers of mouse SC (sSC) encode visual features of complex objects, and that this code is not inherited from the primary visual cortex.” Before information gets to cortical regions (cerebral or cerebellar), it’s already been chunked in the brainstem. It’s funny considering how important we think cortical areas are to function, how little function we lose from cortical insult.
Revisiting the Role of Serotonin in Sleep-Disordered Breathing – Result of too much lipid trafficking?
Subcortical and default mode network connectivity is impaired in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome – Salience nuke? Interesting that the treatment for this is usually getting people moving/re-establishing movement through the broken/impaired circuits. Can’t wait till we get really high resolution ultrasound or similar imaging, MRI is just too limiting.
Comparative assessment of direct and indirect cold atmospheric plasma effects, based on helium and argon, on human glioblastoma: an in vitro and in vivo study – Cool! (Pun Pun Pun). Probably won’t be able to do helium clinically, but argon is interesting.
Astrocytes: Dual Roles in Chronic Pain and Memory Formation – First I’ve seen like this in the anesthesiology space, slowly but surely getting there. It’s also the reason for the focus on spinal targets (especially C1-C5) for stimulation.
Editorial: Glial cells: mere passive contributors to brain function? – Haha, Betteridge’s in action. It’s really interesting how fast we moved from “neuron synapses” models to “quad partite” models. Like the overwhelming number of individuals in clinical practice barely even know anything other than neurons exist, and the leading edge is already up to “quad partite”. Lol. As a lark, I was wondering if someone invented “penta-partite” yet. FUCKING YEP. The good news is that penta-partite is referring to immune interaction so… progress. Now that we are including immune interactions we have some headroom up to the “octo-partite” synapse…
Rat superior colliculus encodes the transition between static and dynamic vision modes – We’ve had a few of these in a similar vein recently, but the brainstem literally determines what you see and how you see it. It’s interesting that saccades may be a necessary mechanic to constrain the filtering done by the cerebellum, because too much cerebellar data results in problems like hallucinations/psychosis. Could targeting the metabolics of the colliculi be the drug free anti-psychotic solution we’re hoping for?
Beyond genetics: driving cancer with the tumour microenvironment behind the wheel – Saw this on r/scholar, but… YES. One of my current peeves is the idea that genes are determinant of function rather than the environment. It leads to this sort of neo-lemarckian construct that the genes themselves are “picking” traits and ultimately behavior, which is (IMO) as ridiculous as saying a raindrop chooses where it falls. All genes require a specific environment to express a trait. A trait can be expressed without a specific gene in specific environmental conditions.
Microbial transmission in the social microbiome and host health and disease – I’m so angry I didn’t think about this in this context until just now. Everything I’ve been bitching about with regard to mistakes and pitfalls in the philosophy of neuroscience and psych (and maybe medicine in general), and I’m still super vulnerable to them.
China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct – So I’ve been hesitant about admitting this, but I’ve had an active filter regarding work out of China for awhile now, and try to remind in comments that specific articles need more salt than others without explicitly saying that I weight down work from that region heavily. The journal Hindawi is also right there with Cureus as the worst of the worst. The last year has seen a lot of weaponizing of plagiarism and fraud claims in journals, and if you’ve been paying attention at WHO is getting caught up it should be pretty obvious that the problem is as vulgar as it is grotesque.
The problem is that once battle fatigue sets in, what direction do we move in? Do we move in the clinical direction and circle our wagons around these horrifically bad practices and tweak our validity measures to support them? Because there’s so much outright fraud to horribly sloppy methodology, nearly every research is vulnerable and susceptible to defending it as a means of defending themselves indirectly. We always see the first wave of “It can’t happen, the science is rigorous!” and even worse “But muh peer review!”, which completely ignores that it is happening right now, and it is pervasive right now, and those peers have completely failed to adequately review for all of the decades leading up to now for many topics.
Okay actually this needs to be it’s own post/rant because I could bang out 20000 words here.
Molecular profiling of the hippocampus of children with autism spectrum disorder – Speaking of fundamental issues with philosophies and methodology…
GFAP-expressing cells in the adult hypothalamus can generate multiple neural cell lineages in vitro – Why doesn’t “neurogenesis” happen in most of the brain when we still learn? Maybe “neurons” aren’t the external stimuli learny cells after all? Maybe?
Correlated signatures of social behavior in cerebellum and anterior cingulate cortex – We are going to hear a lot more about Cerebellar-Cerebral loops in the upcoming years, I guarantee it.
Microbiota–gut–brain axis and its therapeutic applications in neurodegenerative diseases – I’ll never be okay with shit transplants.
GDF15 is a dynamic biomarker of the integrated stress response in the central nervous system – Eh, but I’m all about exactly this type of biomarker work. They are out there, it’ll be obvious and kind of revolutionary when we find them, like an A1C test.
Cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome with long-term features of autism spectrum disorder: evidence in a 9-year-old girl after vermian medulloblastoma surgery – One off case reports are more curiosities, but I’ve been looking at CCAS as “acquired autism” for a little bit.
Intracerebellar injection of monocytic immature myeloid cells prevents the adverse effects caused by stereotactic surgery in a model of cerebellar neurodegeneration – The “penta-partite” (or would this be a 6 or 7?) synapse.
Distant recurrence in the cerebellar dentate nucleus through the dentato-rubro-thalamo-cortical pathway in supratentorial glioma cases – Speaking of Cerebellar-Cerebral loops… Also, the magnocellular and parvocellular red nuclei are critical checkpoints for salience processing (possibly even initiation points for closely matched “known” stimuli?), and this magnocellular/parvocellular split occurs within nearly all the “major” nuclei in brains which do a lot of direct sensory processing.
Functional Connectivity Differences in Distinct Dentato-Cortical Networks in Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment (pre-print) – Can I be controversial and call “brain fog” as a whole impaired dentate nucleus/deep cerebellar nuclei<->cortical circuits? Specifically an impairment of astrocyte metabolism along those pathways?
NAc-DBS corrects depression-like behaviors in CUMS mouse model via disinhibition of DA neurons in the VTA – Please weight this into the garbage bin, but I’m including it due to personal immaturity.
Harmony in the Molecular Orchestra of Hearing: Developmental Mechanisms from the Ear to the Brain – Very cool review! Also, another good example of how sensory information is binned and chunked long before it reaches the canonical cortexes.
Microstructural Changes in the Brainstem Auditory Pathway in Children With Hearing Loss – Following stuff like this because of how tightly coupled adult hearing loss is with dementia onset. If we ever get a physiological definition of dementia rather than the shitty clinical one we have now, this is going to pop as a huge diagnostic indicator.
Biometric magnetic resonance imaging analysis of fetal brain development in Down syndrome
Acute to long-term characteristics of impedance recordings during neurostimulation in humans – Yes yes yes, I need more of this for the tDCS project.
Astrocytic chloride regulates brain function in health and disease – Should be kind of obvious by now considering the NaK pump, but it’s a review.
Beta oscillations in vision: a (preconscious) neural mechanism for the dorsal visual stream? – I hate “brainwave” stuff.
Neuroanatomy, Red Nucleus – It looks like the midbrain is the salience initiation point, so while more “advanced” vertebrates have more redundancy, the region around the red nucleus is still critical for everything.
Theories about Developmental Dyslexia – Is dyslexia insufficient magnocellular network “strength”? I don’t think so, but it’s testable.
Spatial Frequency Tuning of Body Inversion Effects – Was that my left hand or right hand? Maybe it’s just “autism”.
Magnocellular and parvocellular contributions to brain network dysfunction during learning and memory: Implications for schizophrenia – Sorta old (2022). They argue both magno and parvo “deficits” (dorsal and ventral) exist. IMO, it’s just magno.
Parallel Social Information Processing Circuits Are Differentially Impacted in Autism – Practically ancient (2020). More to support a comment about the differential impact of behavior imparted by parvo and magno cellular pathways.
Efficiency in Magnocellular Processing: A Common Deficit in Neurodevelopmental Disorders – Also ancient, and sort of redundant from above (2020), but stuff like this tickles me because of how often we hear people say things like “the human eye can’t even detect more than (x) refresh rate!” (or ears can’t hear above (x) frequency). It’s more ridiculous now in the context of recent billion hz refresh rate displays, but man people really believed that NTSC video standards were based physiological limitations rather than convenience. That seems irrelevant (and kind of is), but it’s a reference to the method they used in this work,flicker fusion threshold, which demonstrates how wide the tolerances of human visual systems actually are.
Differential mitochondrial bioenergetics and cellular resilience in astrocytes, hepatocytes, and fibroblasts from aging baboons (preprint) – Cellular metabolism as a biomarker of age
Striatum- and Cerebellum-Modulated Epileptic Networks Varying Across States with and without Interictal Epileptic Discharges – Some epilepsy as cerebro-cerebellar decoupling?
Protocol for Cerebellar Stimulation for Aphasia Rehabilitation (CeSAR): A randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled trial (preprint) – Yeah these guys are going to get some good stuff. The issue with this work is that they are too focused on aphasia, if they open their eyes a bit they’ll figure out the effect on cognition and function is FAR more broad than the confines they are testing for.
Editorial: Distributed networks: new outlooks on cerebellar function, volume II – A good review, but something about word clouds makes me crinkle my nose like someone ripped a big fart.
The insular cortex is not insular in thyroid eye disease: neuroimaging revelations of central–peripheral system interaction – Salt it, but interesting…
Adverse childhood experiences differently affect Theory of Mind brain networks in schizophrenia and healthy controls – Of all the crappy subjective scales used in psych research, is there any worse than PANSS? Nay I say. Nay.
Proteomic and transcriptomic profiling of brainstem, cerebellum and olfactory tissues in early- and late-phase COVID-19 – Cognitive effects of COVID-19 are proportional to how aggressively it attacks astrocytes.
Spatio-molecular profiles shape the human cerebellar hierarchy along the sensorimotor-association axis – It’s almost like cerebellar and cerebral cortical regions have similar function.
Mechanoneural interfaces for bionic integration – My body is ready
Compressed cerebellar functional connectome hierarchy in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 – Close to a quarter of all “neuropsychiatric” and migraine effect could be addressed if we got our heads out of our asses about spinocerebellar compression.
Decreased dynamic variability of the cerebellum in the euthymic patients with bipolar disorder – Salt this the same as snail-cthulu.
Effects of uterine Doppler on midbrain growth and cortical development in late onset fetal growth restricted fetuses: a prospective cross-sectional study – Wonder what the overlap here is with stuff like “fetal alcohol syndrome” and/or failure to thrive post natally.
Brainstem anesthesia during awake craniotomy: illustrative case – Reading stuff like this blows my gourd.
A distinct cortical code for socially learned threat – Eh.
Prefrontal cortical dopamine deficit may cause impaired glucose metabolism in schizophrenia – And back to “dopamine deficit”. I think I’m on the verge of excluding the phrase “prefrontal cortex”.
The Role of the Human Cerebellum for Learning from and Processing of External Feedback in Non-Motor Learning: A Systematic Review – The joy and pain of meta-reviews, the realization that you can find support for literally any concept or expectation when it comes to cognitive concepts.
Cerebellar and thalamic connector hubs facilitate the involvement of visual and cognitive networks in essential tremor – Dentate Nucleus as the thalamus equivalent makes perfect sense.
Lithium-loaded GelMA-Phosphate glass fibre constructs: Implications for astrocyte response – Whoa, this is a pretty cool path!
Trans Species RNA Activity: Sperm RNA of the Father of an Autistic Child Programs Glial Cells and Behavioral Disorders in Mice – I hate everything about this article, but it’s an important concept to wrap ones head around. The RNA payload one receives with sperm in vitro is probably *more* important than the actual genetic load. This is the whole point of sexual reproduction, transmission of short timescale behavioral changes to offspring.
Astrocytes are the source of TNF mediating homeostatic synaptic plasticity – The immune system is an equal weight participant in cognition.
Engram reactivation mimics cellular signatures of fear – Man, this hits a lot of different topics of the model. “Targeted reactivation of neurons processing discrete memories drives the behavioral expression of memory…” YES. Behavior is expressed memory. “Studies have confirmed differential roles along the dorsal and ventral axis, where the dorsal HPC (dHPC) is necessary for spatial and temporal encoding, while lesions to the ventral HPC (vHPC) cause emotional dysregulation and impaired stress responses.” The ventral side of the stream is the context stream.
Measurement of synaptic density in Down syndrome using PET imaging: a pilot study – Interesting, and I wish we did a lot more PET work. My interpretation of this is that DS w/intellectual disability means less information is being integrated into the stream. I’m skeptical of the cerebellar results here.
Cerebellar interpositus nucleus exhibits time-dependent errors and predictive responses – Whoa, first time I’ve seen this nuclei directly studied! Exciting! The vermis is possibly the equivalent of the hippocampus, and these are linked up similarly to the CA2 region of the hippocampus. “Our results are consistent with the idea that the cerebellum works under Bayesian rules updating the weights using the previous history.” Yeah, comparison to a “state map”.
Association between urban upbringing and functional brain connectivity in schizophrenia – Something something about a LOT of salt.
Impact of Growth Hormone on Microglial and Astrocytic Function – So. This is a thread I don’t think I’m ready to really divulge yet, but the gist is that ECEs trigger growth hormone reactions which are the underpinning/mechanic of the morphological variance from body plan due to ECEs. More simply, trauma at a young age changes the developmental rate of whatever is being developed at the time, and “big/little astrocyte” response determines the size of effect.
BDNF in Neuropathic Pain; the Culprit that Cannot be Apprehended – I don’t really get this one. The set of y linked gene interactions is “small enough” that we should be able to track this down though.