Sleep & Memory - Neurosurgery Film - Recognizing Facial Recognition
Breedlove, S
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01732-y
Sleep deprivation disrupts memory: here’s why
By Max Kozlov
A crucial brain signal linked to long-term memory falters in rats when they are deprived of sleep — which might help to explain why poor sleep disrupts memory formation1. Even a night of normal slumber after a poor night’s sleep isn’t enough to fix the brain signal.
These results, published today in Nature, suggest that there is a “critical window for memory processing”, says Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study. “Once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it.”
In time, these findings could lead to targeted treatments to improve memory, says study co-author Kamran Diba, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
Neurons in the brain seldom act alone; they are highly interconnected and often fire together in a rhythmic or repetitive pattern. One such pattern is the sharp-wave ripple, in which a large group of neurons fire with extreme synchrony, then a second large group of neurons does the same and so on, one after the other at a particular tempo. These ripples occur in a brain area called the hippocampus, which is key to memory formation. The patterns are thought to facilitate communication with the neocortex, where long-term memories are later stored.
One clue to their function is that some of these ripples are accelerated re-runs of brain-activity patterns that occurred during past events. For example, when an animal visits a particular spot in its cage, a specific group of neurons in the hippocampus fires in unison, creating a neural representation of that location. Later, these same neurons might participate in sharp-wave ripples — as if they were rapidly replaying snippets of that experience.
© 2024 Springer Nature Limited
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This new brain-mapping device could make neurosurgery safer
Jon Hamilton
A flexible film bristling with tiny sensors could make surgery safer for patients with a brain tumor or severe epilepsy.
The experimental film, which looks like Saran wrap, rests on the brain’s surface and detects the electrical activity of nerve cells below. It’s designed to help surgeons remove diseased tissue while preserving important functions like language and memory.
“This will enable us to do a better job,” says Dr. Ahmed Raslan, a neurosurgeon at Oregon Health and Science University who helped develop the film.
The technology is similar in concept to sensor grids already used in brain surgery. But the resolution is 100 times higher, says Shadi Dayeh, an engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who is leading the development effort.
In addition to aiding surgery, the film should offer researchers a much clearer view of the neural activity responsible for functions including movement, speech, sensation, and even thought.
“We have these complex circuits in our brains,” says John Ngai, who directs the BRAIN Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, which has funded much of the film’s development. “This will give us a better understanding of how they work.”
Mapping an ailing brain
The film is intended to improve a process called functional brain mapping, which is often used when a person needs surgery to remove a brain tumor or tissue causing severe epileptic seizures.
© 2024 npr
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2024 Kavli Prize awarded for research on face-selective brain areas
By Olivia Gieger
Three pioneers in face-perception research have won the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.
Nancy Kanwisher, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Winrich Freiwald, professor of neurosciences and behavior at Rockefeller University; and Doris Tsao, professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, will share the $1 million Kavli Prize for their discoveries of the regions—in both the human and monkey brains—responsible for identifying and recognizing faces.
“This is work that’s very classic and very elegant, not only in face-processing and face-recognition work, but the impact it’s had on how we think about brain organization in general is huge,” says Alexander Cohen, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, who studies face recognition in autistic people.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awards the prize every two years.
Kanwisher says she long suspected that something special happens in the brain when we look at faces, because people with prosopagnosia—the inability to recognize faces—maintain the ability to recognize nearly all other objects. What’s more, it is harder to recognize an upside-down face than most other inverted objects, studies have shown.
To get to the root of face processing, Kanwisher spent hours as a young researcher lying still in an MRI machine as images of faces and objects flashed before her. A spot in the bottom right of the cerebral cortex lit up when she and others looked at faces, according to functional MRI (fMRI) scans, she and her colleagues reported in a seminal 1997 paper. They called the region the fusiform face area.
© 2024 Simons Foundation
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