Some scientists think that depression could wear down synapses in the brain; ketamine stimulates growth of these synapses.
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If they saw structures—the synapses—glowing like red, fluorescent lit-up dots inside the bellies of the green microglia, they would know that microglia were eating synapses.
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They'd recently discovered that immune molecules known as complement were sending out "eat me" signals from some brain synapses, and these synapses—tagged with a kind of "kiss of death" signage—were destroyed.
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We thought more glue, stronger synapses, more learning, more addiction.
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Information travels over those connections like it does across human synapses.
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I could feel the synapses in my head sputter and fizzle.
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In many different neurological, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, healthy synapses disappeared.
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Some studies suggest that sleep primes synapses for greater activity during wakefulness.
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It's so bracingly imaginative and intelligent, it practically makes the synapses tingle.
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You have to have corrected the mistake for the synapses to fire.
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Synapses are like intersections on roads that carry information through your brain.
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The more often a thought is processed, the nearer those synapses grow.
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That decline is what you would expect if the synapses were shrinking.
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They also jumpstarted the growth of new connections, or synapses, between individual neurons.
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So there could be as many as 26 categories of sizes of synapses.
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Two synapses communicating are like two people talking to each other, says Savchenko.
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Below are 25 of the best albums that subverted conventions and rewired synapses.
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The drug eventually causes a flood of serotonin between synapses, increasing its signals.
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There also have been hints that exercise might affect synapses in the hippocampus.
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Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli have argued that shrinking synapses produce this change.
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We know that synapses compete against one another, and the strongest synapse wins.
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The overabundance of C4A protein in some people contributes to an excessively exuberant pruning of synapses—thereby decreasing the number of synapses in the brain, which would explain the well-established fact that schizophrenic patients tended to have fewer neuronal connections.
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Less plastic synapses are good at preserving memories but poor at storing new ones.
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"Our brains are constantly evolving and pruning synapses based on our experiences," Primack says.
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Some researchers, for instance, posit chains of neurons, linked by synapses, that fire sequentially.
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Your synapses are wired in a way that you will always feel this compulsion.
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First, the chemical fixative glutaraldehyde is used to rapidly solidify synapses and prevent decay.
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They watched, through that tiny window, as a particular surface protein shrank the synapses.
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Those fresh synapses and new pathways are what I'm always seeking as a listener.
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Strobe lights flash like firing synapses; Synths wobble and throb like a pounding headache.
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She and her colleagues determined the size and shape of 6,920 synapses in total.
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The chemical had been shown to block neurons in dishes from pruning their synapses.
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It's possible that these synapses encode well-established memories that shouldn't be tampered with.
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But Stevens also found them coiled around synapses that had been marked for elimination.
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Science shows that outdoor time fires up new brain synapses and enhances creative thinking.
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This model allows for memory lifetimes that scale in concert with increasing numbers of synapses.
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Making sure neuromorphic chips are firing their electric synapses in order is just the start.
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It's well-known that the brain is constantly rewiring synapses in response to our experiences.
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That's problematic, given that the memory capacity of neurons depends upon the size of synapses.
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"It's not sufficient to understand which synapses, which brain connections, are working improperly," he says.
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Alzheimer's disease, for one, has been tied to, among other things, excessive destruction of synapses.
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Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head.
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The metaphor of the brain is tempting, but "neurons" and "synapses" deserve those scare-quotes.
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All sport the cartoon iconography that signifies increased brainpower: firing synapses, lightning bolts, glowing bulbs.
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Our brains, instinctually empathetic, will fire synapses to mirror the emotions it sees around it.
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How could software and sensors ever compete against a driver's eyes, hands and firing synapses?
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They found that hundreds of proteins increase or decrease inside of synapses during the night.
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Popping synapses in my brain flipped into overtime, as they tried to turn shock into elation.
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The researchers discovered that synapses of all sizes vary in increments as small as eight percent.
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This "synaptic plasticity" means there are 10 times more discrete sizes of synapses than previously thought.
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In chemical synapses, the transfer of an impulse from one neuron to another occurs via neurotransmitters.
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There are more synapses (nerve connections) in your brain than there are stars in our galaxy.
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That is, learning (or encoding new information) is facilitated by strengthened synapses in our neural circuitry.
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They're called synapses, and these connections between neurons form memories and allow us to access information.
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It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses — at least in a dish.
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Stevens was trying to identify the proteins that recognized and eliminated neuronal synapses during visual development.
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"The fantastic thing is when you wake up, the synapses regrow very fast and intensely"), gastrointestinal disorders (gut microbiomes change and are more easily influenceable when in torpor), and perhaps even memory manipulation ("if you interfere with the lost synapses, maybe your memory gets erased," Cerri said).
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Robbie Williams was born with the shame synapses of his brain swapped out for boisterousness and banter.
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Rather than just a single dial, what if synapses could be imagined as arrays of multiple dials?
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Your brain is neurons, synapses, and 100 trillion instantaneous connections that press your foot on the pedal.
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As you develop and learn things, these cells remove the redundant or weak connections between your synapses.
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After doing this many times, you'd expect the relevant synapses to strengthen, something called long-term potentiation.
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He is also clean: The smart drug has remolded his synapses such that they can perform unassisted.
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Depending on the answers, he might generate another series of possibilities, as if strengthening and weakening synapses.
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In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains.
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Then he and his colleagues added a chemical that lit up a surface protein on brain synapses.
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In earlier experiments on neurons in a dish, Homer1A proved to be important for paring back synapses.
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Dr. Diering's research suggests that sleepiness triggers neurons to make Homer1A and ship it into their synapses.
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During the maturation of the brain, microglia recognize these factors as tags and engulf the tagged synapses.
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On the opposite wall, the lines cluster into thatches of electric crayon color — seaweed, waves, electricity, brain synapses.
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It has to be perfect or the vibes may turn sour—all those synapses, messed with for nothing!
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They then placed chemicals on top of the synapses so that they could watch how it functioned overnight.
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The bottom line: Researchers know learning hinges on the strengthening and weakening of the synapses between individual neurons.
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Finally, the researchers looked microscopically at the operations of the synapses joining the neurons in the animals' hippocampi.
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That's similar to what Stevens and Barres were seeing happen to brain synapses that were tagged by complement.
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Your synapses will be safe again when the British mentalist Derren Brown hangs up his tailcoat and blindfold.
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The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones.
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Today we know that synapses are plastic, meaning they can get stronger or weaker with use or neglect.
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The current pilot version is a 2-millimeter-by-2-millimeter mesh of silver nanowires connected by artificial synapses.
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He describes gazing in awe at art and ancient artifacts as psilocybin and mescaline analogues coursed around his synapses.
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Synapses, the chemical or electrical linkages in the brain connecting neurons to other neurons, have a very useful property.
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By 25, they will have many more synapses—new connections in the brain—and could be entirely different characters.
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It could be the charming guitar pace that taps into those synapses responsible for tapping fingers on steering wheels.
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A striking number are involved in relaying signals out of neurons and into neighboring ones through connections called synapses.
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Again, the more often those synapses fire, the closer they draw, and the more instinctual that thought process becomes.
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Afterward, some were also injected with the modified rabies vaccine to track new synapses and connections between the neurons.
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The simultaneous blocking of serotonin uptake and serotonin degradation encourages enormous amounts of the neurotransmitter to flood the synapses.
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Your synapses will be safe once again when the British mentalist Derren Brown hangs up his tailcoat and blindfold.
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These mice slept like ordinary mice, but their synapses didn't change their proteins like the ones in ordinary mice.
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In the future, sleep medicines might precisely target the molecules involved in sleep, ensuring that synapses get properly pruned.
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Driven I RECENTLY reviewed the Porsche 248 Cayman S, a brilliant machine that taps directly into a driver's synapses.
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Ms. Lahiri captures how, for example, the sounds other cultures make can tweak our synapses and linger in the mind.
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" She explained that the loss of gray matter could "represent a fine-tuning of synapses into more efficient neural networks.
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Inflammation can interfere with the way the brain functions, altering neurotransmitters to the behavior of synapses, the connections between neurons.
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This is important because the more you put your synapses to work, the stronger the connection between the cells becomes.
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Many scientists and drugmakers think it plays a prominent role in the devastating disease by eroding synapses between nerve cells.
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The "good" NMDA receptors are in the synapses, or the spaces between neurons, and accordingly called synaptic NMDA or sNMDA.
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But I imagined little pistons in her brain firing, synapses ablaze, racial epithets rushing to the tip of her tongue.
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Exercise also can improve the health and function of the synapses between neurons there, allowing brain cells to better communicate.
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Long-term memories are moderated by synapses, essentially tubes that allow one neuron to pass along a signal to another.
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In laboratory experiments on clumps of neurons, scientists can give them a drug that spurs them to grow extra synapses.
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The mice that had been prevented from pruning their brain synapses during sleep, on the other hand, froze once again.
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During this rehearsal period, synapses between nerve cells are generated in great excess, to be pruned back during later development.
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"When I began my work in Ben's lab, little was known about how specific synapses are eliminated," she told me.
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Our unique selves must live in some balanced state between overedited and underedited brain circuits, between overpruned and underpruned synapses.
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For me that means following my curiosity into worlds I don't understand until the synapses fire and the dots connect.
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Memories are thought to be stored among the synapses that serve as conduits for electrical impulses traveling from neuron to neuron.
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"The more we use circuits, the more the synapses grow, and the faster and more efficient [the brain] is," he says.
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Genes thought to be associated with depression include those that help develop chemical neurotransmitters and those that maintain neurons and synapses.
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So, ketamine appeared to do something to improve the symptoms almost immediately that was separate from rebuilding some of the synapses.
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Stress caused the mice to lose some synapses in their brains, but these were mostly restored after given ketamine, Liston says.
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So after teaching mice to fear the sound, the team viewed the synapses — or connections between neurons — along this new pathway.
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After that, a refining process occurs, leaving the average adult with about half that many, or roughly 500 trillion synapses.6.
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Amphetamines unleash dopamine along with norepinephrine, which rush through the brain's synapses and increase levels of arousal, attention, vigilance and motivation.
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Its skull was translucent, but she could still see the outline of a blue whorled brain, crossed by faint sparking synapses.
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Some researchers are trying to restore lost synapses; others are focusing on microglia, scavenger cells involved in the brain's immune system.
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Deep learning uses artificial neural networks to mathematically approximate the way human neurons and synapses learn by forming and strengthening connections.
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Four years ago, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli got a chance to test their theory by looking at the synapses themselves.
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Customers are encouraged to sniff in numerical order, taking notes on a clipboard about the scents that set their synapses ablaze.
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Many synapses are in fact reabsorbed by the brain in what is very similar to a transitory state of Alzheimer's disease.
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You remember them, and that is half of loving them: when you hear a long-forgotten banger it tickles certain synapses in your brain, the synapses that make you hold a single finger in the air and towards the speaker, turn to anyone you're with and go wide-eyed, your hips are already dancing, you're already bopping your head.
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The tool then erased the newly formed synapses to see how behavior changed — and the mice reverted to their prior "depressed" behavior.
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They discovered that when new memories are formed, the synapses that appear as bright spots along the neuron's branches (dendrites) change shape.
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B.D.N.F. helps neurons to grow and remain vigorous and also strengthens the synapses that connect neurons, allowing the brain to function better.
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Instead of the chemical being pumped out of the brain's synapses, a large amount of the neurotransmitter accumulates for hours on end.
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Some pharmaceutical companies are also working on a pill that could repair the synapses that get the electrical signal to your brain.
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When I tell my dates I grew up without a dad, I can see the synapses in their brains begin to spark.
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Neuroscientists have known for some time that the potency of our synapses depends to some degree on how we live our lives.
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"The thalamus works as a relay station and decodes the impulses before sending the synapses to the relevant brain areas," said Savy.
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Objects such as smartphones or notepads are often just as functionally essential to our cognition as the synapses firing in our heads.
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Bach's Preludio features a frenetic yet measured violin melody that feels like creative process — a wild barrage of synapses firing in the brain.
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The mesh boasts 1 billion artificial synapses per square centimeter, which is within a couple of orders of magnitude of the real thing.
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Intriguingly, nearly 80 percent of the proteins—69 of them—are involved in the synapses, the places where neurons connect to one another.
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Dr. Shatz showed that "neurons that fire together wire together," by investigating how patterns of activity sculpt the synapses in the developing brain.
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The results showed a reduction in brain cell death and restoration of some brain activity and blood vessels, as well as working synapses.
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For example, last year, scientists identified a gene that intensifies the pruning of synapses in the brain and increases the risk for schizophrenia.
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By blocking the reabsorption, or reuptake, of serotonin, SSRIs keep the chemical suspended in tiny gaps between our nerve cells known as synapses.
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What they didn't know until these news studies were conducted, however, was what happened to this explosive growth of these synapses in brains.
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This encompasses a wide variety of changes in neural pathways and synapses that is basically the ability of the brain to reorganize itself.
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They are also involved in the regulation of synapses during early development, which could explain why autism typically appears during childhood, Geschwind said.
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Since I'd already mixed up Jack and Jerry, I wasted a few synapses on imagining a family of goat portraitists, and other possibilities.
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Mice designed to lack tagging proteins—called complement proteins—had problems both in clearing cellular debris and in tagging and pruning their synapses.
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Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 13,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage.
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In your first decade of life, the gray matter grows and expands rapidly as many new synapses, or connections between nerves, are being made.
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It would be as if the same synapses could simultaneously serve as both RAM (fast, volatile memory) and hard-drive memory (slow, long-term).
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Intrigued, the researchers decided to measure and compare the sizes of two similar synapses, which they hoped would refine their understanding of synaptic size.
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And it is already believed that autistic individuals have a surplus of synapses in the brain, due to a slowdown in normal brain pruning.
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And it so happens that C4 is present at neuronal synapses, the connections between neurons that transfer chemical and electrical signals in your brain.
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Perhaps most interesting, the animals that had run and also experienced chronic stress had synapses that resembled those from the normal, unstressed control group.
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And of course, mice are not people, and it is impossible to know if the same changes occur in our synapses when we exercise.
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Each neuron is connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, which means that the number of synapses is between 100 trillion and 1,000 trillion.
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That&aposs because the young teen brain is always developing synapses, or links between brain cells, as a kid or teen learns new skills.
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Back in 2004, Barres and Stevens were examining how synapses originally come to be pruned to form a healthy brain during early, normal development.
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Mice that lacked the C4 gene underpruned the synapses in parts of their brain, which suggested a direct connection between the gene and pruning.
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One candidate might be the astrocytes, cells that support the neurons and synapses, keeping them healthy even in the presence of plaques and tangles.
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As the chips dissolved on my tongue, the embedded video links traveled to my brain, tapping into my synapses and taking hold of my senses.
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But people are complicated, and so are brains—intricate bits of biology packed with neurons and axons and all the synapses that tie them together.
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A system of lighted synapses swarms the roof of a quietly beautiful church in Paris' 1st arrondissement neighborhood, resting into the shape of a cross.
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This is the lowest layer of the retina and serves to link the light-sensitive tissue above to the synapses which lead to the brain.
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Maybe the phenomenon is neurological, with synapses packed so densely that the brain is driven to see way more order than can possibly be there.
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This is a breakthrough, given that there are "more than 100 trillion synapses that mediate neuron signaling in the brain," according to the MIT researchers.
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Recently, though, a genetic variant has been identified that seems to ignite excessive pruning of synapses in a key brain area in people with schizophrenia.
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It was that sharp, pickled flavor—one that he grew up with in Manhattan, eating kosher dills with his family—that clicked in his synapses.
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The connections between neurons, known as synapses, are composed of electrical and chemical signals that move from cell to cell, like notes passed in class.
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Echoing the layout, colors, language, and images, the slides showed graphics of brain synapses and discussed the "work in progress" that is the adolescent brain.
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It requires only functioning hair cells, Liberman said, and is unaffected by nerve damage until more than eighty per cent of the synapses are gone.
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The researchers said they did not yet know what was being reduced in size: neurons, other brain cells, synapses or parts of the circulatory system.
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Perhaps C4A, like the other immunological factors that Stevens had identified in synapse pruning, marks neuronal synapses destined to be eliminated during normal brain development.
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And a sprawling new review published today in Neuron adds an even finer point: Memory exists because your brain's molecules, cells, and synapses can tell time.
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In 2015, he published a study showing they these cells, or neuropods, contained nerve endings or synapses—which meant they might connect somehow to the brain.
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They found "the formation of synapses are important ... but not in the way we thought," says Liston, associate professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Cornell University.
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With a $2 million letter of intent from OpenAI, several patents filed and contracts with TSMC, the company is putting its neurons where its synapses are.
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The moment the thought crossed my synapses it fell right out of my mouth, for better or worse, before I had time to go all Hamlet.
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There is something effortlessly kinetic about Stevens: as she speaks, her hands and fingers trace the arcs of ideas, forming and unforming synapses in the air.
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Dolen studies synaptic plasticity; synapses are the connection site between two neurons and contribute to the ability of our brains to learn new things and behaviors.
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As the network went to work on its pattern-sorting and the engineer judged its performance and tweaked the synapses, it got a little better each time.
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In the first three or so years after birth, when up to 13,21 synapses are formed per second, they are vulnerable to trauma which triggers stress hormones.
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The color blobs are neurons and synapses, the pathways through which the mind moves, every one of them documented in a nanometer-scale map called a connectome.
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In nearly every scene in Sharp Objects, Camille's synapses are triggered by the familiar (and loathed) landscape of her childhood town, dredging up some flash of memory.
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No, it's that we'll be able to simulate the individual synapses in the human brain, much like The Sims kept track of how hungry your character was.
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When he's confronted by a strong, assertive woman outside the mating arena, his synapses tend to short-circuit, leading him to odd and often self-destructive behavior.
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The dusty streaks of supernovas and dead stars in the observable universe are only shrunk by the slimy clump of neurons and synapses in a human skull.
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Whatever it is that brings the synapses together—stacked heels, Alcazar, "Wiggle That Wotsit"—the chances are it probably isn't a load of beardy blokes from Scandinavia.
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But how that change plays out globally among the roughly 100 trillion synapses in the human brain — so we can recognize someone's face, for example — is unknown.
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Over all, it seems that exercise had improved the animals' memories, even in the face of stress, by bulking up their synapses and buffering the negative effects that stress otherwise would have had on those neural connections, says Roxanne Miller, who led the study as part of her doctoral research at B.Y.U. It is not yet clear, though, she says, how exercise changed the animals' synapses at a molecular level.
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I'm not a fan because I try to live mindful and grateful, every day, for having blood circulating throughout my body and synapses still firing in my brain.
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This means that instead of sending information in a series of on / off electrical bursts, they vary the intensity of these signals — just like our brain's synapses do.
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The supercomputer uses a platform called TrueNorth, a brain-inspired group of chips, which mimics a network 16 million neurons with 4 billion synapses worth of processing power.
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When scientists look at tissue from an Alzheimer's patient's postmortem brain, they see not only the unusual plaques and tangles but also surprisingly few brain cells and synapses.
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"We think that the reason ketamine works is that it creates new synapses and neural networks that promote healthier communication between different parts of the brain," Dakwar says.
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Sure, they were silly, nerdy, and aggressively committed to Moogs, but they also sang truthfully and specifically about mental health, even down to the details of serotonin synapses.
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Don Arnold and Richard Roberts, two researchers at the University of Southern California, engineered small probes to light up the synapses of a living neuron in real time.
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There, the Nasty Idea will wrap its arms around the vulnerable mound of synapses responsible for making all of your worst decisions, and it will get to work.
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Over very short intervals memories require changes in the strength of connections at synapses, the meeting points between neurons; over longer periods information is moved around the brain.
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The researchers thought that if they could tune the synapses between the wormbot's neurons in just the right away, the wormbot would be able to balance the pendulum.
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One is training your brain to be more positive; as positive thoughts become more common, those synapses grow closer together and make your brain more apt to optimism.
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And, without any irisin in their brains, the once-healthy mice soon showed signs of worsening memory and poor function in the synapses between neurons in their hippocampus.
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"We're looking at the action of lots of synapses and that is the problem that backprop solves [in machines]," says neuroscientist Aaron Batista from the University of Pittsburgh.
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When microglia go on a full-throttle attack, they take out crucial synapses in the brain that we need to process thoughts, manage complex emotions, and make decisions.
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Synapses grow exuberantly to store the day's memories, and pruning them overnight appears to be a biological necessity, making space for new knowledge in the brain's hard drive.
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In the winter of 2004, having joined the laboratory of Ben Barres, a neuroscientist at Stanford, Stevens began to study the pruning of synapses in the visual system.
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Now we have to figure out how overpruned synapses cause all the diffuse symptoms of the disease—the psychosis, the cognitive collapse, the emotional emptiness, and the withdrawal.
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It's understandable, though, if you mistake the chalky clouds in which he moves throughout this harshly funny, surprisingly poignant one-man show for the smoke of firing synapses.
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Sure, it's well-known that neurons are wired together by synapses and that when one of them fires, it sends an electrical signal to other neurons connected to it.
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In fact, the virtual experience may offer avenues of perception that reality cannot, especially if we find ways to stimulate chemicals in the brains that strengthen synapses around memories.
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A play sparks something deep in his brain, synapses fire, and suddenly you're hearing about the time Scully and his wife went ice skating with Jackie and Rachel Robinson.
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The unstressed runners, on the other hand, now had the strongest, busiest synapses, suggesting that their ability to learn and remember would be higher than in the other animals.
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One of the little-recognized side effects of disability denial is that it inhibits the firing of the synapses that enables people to think of themselves as having rights.
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Nonetheless, among researchers, the discovery has been a cause for optimism, because reconnecting nerve synapses is almost certain to be easier than regenerating functioning hair cells inside human ears.
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The flavorful rise in his mother's hormones — the quickening of her pulse, the drip of adrenaline in her synapses — tells him a poisonous story to which he, alone, is privy.
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Be grateful for friendships Recent research has repeatedly shown that strong friendships and social ties extend our lives, generally keep us healthier and keep our brains active and synapses firing.
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The drug, which comes from a marine source, is designed to address an underlying cause of the disease by inducing growth of synapses in the brain and preventing cell death.
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It was immediately clear that three days of chronic stress had reduced the effectiveness of the synapses in the stressed-out, sedentary animals, compared to those from the control mice.
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Lest you think this is just a coincidence, reading allows you to be a constant learner and it's proven to fire up new brain synapses and improve memory and focus.
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Pruning synapses that grow exuberantly to store the day's memories appears to be a biological necessity, protecting important moments but making space for new knowledge in the brain's hard drive.
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She leaned into her computer screen to show me an image of one: a twelve-limbed microglial cell wrapped around the body of a neuron, eating synapses, presumably, for lunch.
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They pulse and shimmer like a stimulated pack of synapses sending signals down your spinal column to trigger your toes to tap in time with the steady 4/4 tempo.
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LiveScience reports that a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sleep and Consciousness found that sleep allows the synapses in our brains to shrink by about 20%.
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Holding on to a fearful memory in the long term, however, requires the brain to strengthen the nerve connections (synapses) that link memory of the box to experience of the shock.
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A guttural sound emanates from the depths of him, almost like a stifled cough, and then there it is: The synapses fire, he begins to speak, and good luck stopping him.
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Markus H. Schmidt, of the Ohio Sleep Medicine Institute, said that while the brain might prune synapses during sleep, he questioned whether this was the main explanation for why sleep exists.
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If psychiatry enters an era of neurological landscaping—if we could learn to perm and prune our neural synapses with medicines at will—where would we draw the lines of treatment?
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What they found in these traumatic-brain-injury cases was totally different: a dustlike scarring, often at the border between gray matter (where synapses reside) and the white matter that interconnects it.
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But in astrocytes -- supportive cells in the brain that perform many functions, including maintenance of the synapses that connect neighboring cells -- one set of genes was overly expressed in all three disorders.
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Changes in the firing pattern of neurons, the weakening of synapses and the generation of new neurons in the brain have all been shown to contribute to some level of memory loss.
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Stress has been found to induce neural plasticity in the brain, affecting the functional connectivity and the synapses, but chronic stress is believed to play a role in the appearance of mental disorders.
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And if you have a drink, food, a laptop or a tablet on your seat-back tray, well, let's just say you're not alone if fleeting thoughts of murder zip through your synapses.
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For example, in 85033, my lab and Mary Kennedy's lab at Cal Tech were studying the basic function of synapses, the places where brain cells meet, and we discovered a gene called SYNGAP1.
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They reach home plate only about 50 milliseconds apart, but that fraction of a second makes the slower pitch significantly more hittable because of the firing time for synapses in a batter's brain.
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Still, it's only a guess if such whimsical touches like a penguin-shaped cell in the cerebellum, or the kinship between his buoyant synapses and the biomorphic art of surrealist Miró, were deliberate.
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"He seemed hardly able to get the words out as fast as the synapses fired," said Sal Biagini, a friend and fellow actor in the busy dinner theater circuit of the late 1970s.
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Sports, video games, music, friends, bedtime stories, drawing, climbing trees, going sledding, playing with dolls, building with blocks, rough housing with siblings, participating in childhood in whatever way possible, builds synapses and confidence.
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"The strangest finding was that a protein that usually tags and removes pieces of dead cells, bacterial remnants, or cellular debris was also being reworked to tag and remove the synapses," she said.
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In human-brain tissues and in neurons cultured in flasks, they found that the C4 protein accumulated abundantly at synapses; in mice, this accumulation occurred almost precisely at the time that pruning begins.
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"It's designed to make it as realistic as possible, in order for the brain to really make the synapses kick together and go 'Yeah, this is real life,'" said facility director Bob Weitzel.
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That tiny portion houses about 100,000 neurons, 3 to 15 million neuronal connections, or synapses, and enough neural wiring to span the width of Manhattan, were it all untangled and laid end-to-end.
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All neurons use calcium ions to transmit information through the synapses, so by recording how the amount of calcium changes "we can actually watch neurons talking to each other in real time," says Savchenko.
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The Tokyo team even pinpointed a possible mechanism: NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors in the brain, which are critical to the plasticity of the brain's synapses as well as long-term memory formation.
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Such systems use a digital network of billions of artificial "neurons" with virtual "synapses"—the connections between neurons—that strengthen as the network "learns", in this case from 40 gigabytes-worth of online writing.
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When we sleep, these researchers discovered, our brain prunes these newly formed synapses and untangles them so that the important parts of what we learned during the day are stored and accessed more efficiently.
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Stevens and Barres weren't sure what was eating away at these tagged synapses, causing them to disappear in the brain, but Stevens had a hunch that it might have something to do with microglia.
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A livestreamed presentation on Tuesday evening U.S. time revealed that the company's tech involves incredibly fine "threads," covered in electrodes, inserted into the brain by a robot surgeon and implanted next to neurons and synapses.
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Biogen's experimental drug targets a compound in the brain known as beta-amyloid, which was believed by many scientists and drugmakers to play a role in the devastating disease by eroding synapses between nerve cells.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads Like an egg in a sizzling skillet, your brain on Picabia may have its synapses fried at the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) comprehensive retrospective of this underappreciated master.
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The ketamine had a positive effect on depression and led to increased neural activity in about 3 hours, but the new synapses did not form in the brain until 12 hours or later, he adds.
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That's a much greater proportion of synaptic proteins than in the brain taken as a whole, and it hints at the link, much discussed in the sleep community, between regulation of the synapses and sleep.
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That the act didn't "read" to people as a strictly terrorist act may mean it didn't fire the same set of synapses in most people that an attack that just killed Americans randomly might have.
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But only a few past animal studies have closely tracked changes to synapses after exercise and none looked simultaneously at stress, leaving the results unrepresentative of actual life, which always contains some amount of stress.
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Then, to see if any changes to the animals' synapses would be reflected in their lived experience, the researchers had some mice from each group learn a maze with a treat in one hidden corner.
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In the brain, neural synapses are strengthened and weakened through repeated activation; these digital systems aim to achieve something similar through mathematical means, adjusting the "weights" of the connections to move toward the desired output.
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They found that most of these drugs — including LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine), the active ingredient in ecstasy — increased the number of synapses, branches and dendritic spines on the rat neurons.
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Puns are also linguistically fascinating demonstrations of the rich intersection of language and extralinguistic knowledge, and, for some people, irresistible expressions of the synapses that keep firing past the point of mere communication, eloquence or decorum.
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Where the Beatles harnessed that druggy swirl to embody confusion in a chaotic and overwhelming way, the sample tapestry of "Seigfried" unfurls gently, mimicking your synapses firing as you fall into a deep and dream-filled sleep.
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But as a broader exploration of whether a human being can be altered all the way down to his cells and synapses by the nature of the times he lives through, the piece is startling and disturbing.
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In addition to helping with research into these antibodies, Lee hopes that his team's work will also help to improve the understanding of other critical biological functions, such as sperm-egg fertilization and signaling across nerve synapses.
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These new capabilities for machines will depend on the best and brightest talent, and investors who are building and financing companies aiming to deliver the AI chips destined to be the neurons and synapses of robotic brains.
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One protein that's thought to be very important in the synapses during sleep deprivation, Homer-1, doesn't appear on the list of SNIPPs at all, said Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen, a sleep researcher at the University of Helsinki.
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Studies with animals and people show that working out can lead to the creation of new neurons, blood vessels and synapses and greater overall volume in areas of the brain related to memory and higher-level thinking.
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Research on the connectome, which comprises the brain's 90 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses, is widely viewed among neuroscientists as integral to understanding — and potentially treating — a range of disorders, from autism to schizophrenia.
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She and her colleagues did find increases in the activity of certain genes and the levels of some proteins in the brains of the runners that could have contributed to the changes in their synapses, she says.
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The C4-gene variant that contributes to schizophrenia is the same gene that, in all likelihood, is used by the brain to prune synapses and thus enable cognition, the tethering of thoughts to realities, and adaptive learning.
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When so much of your environment is reduced to a three square metre box of nylon upholstered padding and roll-down windows, music seems to flood your synapses in a way it rarely can in the outside world.
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But Gimzewski and Stieg (who had just finished his doctorate in Gimzewski's group) were reminded of synapses, the switches between nerve cells in the human brain, which also change their responses with experience and interact with each other.
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The individual neurons, synapses and other structures are recognized by shape, traced, then colored like they would be in Photoshop, tedious yet crucial work done by students like Anastasia Sorokina and Katrina Norwood, graduate students in Kasthuri's lab.
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The chip itself is conceived as modelled on the human brain — or at least how we know it to work — with pulses and spikes based around synapses, with different parts of the chip taking on different learning functions.
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Ali walked the opposite path, all 6 feet, 3 inches and 200-plus pounds of him, at times a near-perfect athletic machine, dancing and spinning and jumping through life, until Parkinson's disease ate away at his synapses.
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Scientists have only recently started to appreciate the important jobs that astrocytes perform: They help neurons to form synapses and to prune them when no longer needed; they make connections with blood vessels; they sense trauma in the brain.
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But it's proven harder than I thought, especially with a full-time job, a social life, and a lack of the kind of time it takes to essentially learn a new way of making your brain synapses process information.
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It's been a long road but the latest attempt to convince the gadget-buying public they need to strap something onto their face in order to experience thrilling sensations passing through their synapses is gearing up for its first big test.
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We're all just dumb animals acting on the whims of chemicals sloshing around in our disgusting bodies and synapses rapidly firing in our primitive brains—all of which, it should be noted, we have hilariously little understanding of to begin with.
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Duman agrees, saying "translating studies in rodents to humans is always difficult and must be taken with caution," but also notes that prior research — including his own — has similarly linked a reduction in synapses with chronic stress through imaging and autopsies.
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In the study, published today (July 12) in the journal Cell Reports, Olson and his team found that psychodelic drugs increase the number of branches and dendritic spines on neurons, and also increase the number of synapses, or connections between neurons.
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But at just under an hour and a half, The Lost Village is a nonstop Technicolor bonanza, and I can't imagine that repeated viewings wouldn't overstimulate young synapses, even when transferred to tablets and minivan screens to keep little ones distracted.
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Life flung you out like an elemental particle colliding and dividing, spinning into space," Javad muses, standing on the busy Euston Road as "cars and people stream past like synapses across basal ganglia, like a time-lapse photograph of lights.
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He couldn't see these gaps in his microscope, but he called them synapses, and said that if we think, learn and form memories in the brain then that itty-bitty space was most likely the location where we do it.
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" For a frame of reference, Dr. Laeeq Evered, a professor of neuropsychology at the Wright Institute, tells me that "a piece of brain matter the size of a grain of sand contains approximately 100,000 neurons, 53 million axons, and 1 billion synapses.
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During this time, the microglia in the mices' brain began to work against damage that the cocaine was doing by producing tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a)—an inflammatory molecule that researchers found is responsible for repressing the synapses related to drug addiction.
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Read more: Vaping for only a month can cause lung inflammation, even if you're healthy and have never smoked beforeThat's because the young teen brain is always developing synapses, or links between brain cells, as a kid or teen learns new skills.
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The properties of the synapses can increase or decrease in strength, and that's "responsible for the maintenance of the memory," wrote co-author Samuel Schacher, a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center, in an email.
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When artificial intelligence coalesced into a field of study from the fog of information science after World War II, scientists first thought that they could simulate a brain by building neural networks assembled from vast arrays of switches, which would mimic synapses.
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So this is not a "10 Best" list, but rather a tally of the most memorable wines I drank from 643, bottles that were not only delicious but also lodged themselves in my synapses for reasons beyond simply what's in the glass.
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Scientists from Google and the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia have published the largest high-resolution map of brain connectivity in any animal, sharing a 3D model that traces 20 million synapses connecting some 153,000 neurons in the brain of a fruit fly.
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The company says it took two years and hundreds of thousands of hours for scientists at Janelia to "proofread" the 3D map, verifying the route of each of the 20 million chemical synapses using virtual reality headsets and custom 3D editing software.
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Scientists had known for a long time that most hearing impairment involves damage to the synapses and nerve fibres to which hair cells are attached, but they had assumed that the nerve damage followed hair-cell loss, and was a consequence of it.
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When they detected that something was off—an over influx of stress hormones, an infiltrating virus, chemical, or pathogen on the scene—they sometimes went too far, removing healthy, needed, brain synapses, the same way macrophages sometimes went too far in the body.
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It also raises mechanistic questions, one of which has to do with microglia: Is the lymphatic system somehow triggering immune cells in the brain—microglia—to carry out an overactive immune response, creating neuroinflammation, or triggering microglia to eat away at synapses?
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The tony setting and accouterments of "Big Little Lies" (which the show's creator, David E. Kelley, transposed to California from the source novel's Australia) were custom-made to fire the judgment synapses honed by years of class-conscious dramas and Bravo reality shows.
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More than memories, Josh, then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw with a high-pitched "helllooo," and inspired her to write him poems.
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You take 20063-15 seconds of deep thought—with your mouth agape and eyes fixated blankly, intensely into the middle distance—for your synapses to fire-crawl through the thousands of hours of Lil Wayne music you have locked away in your brain.
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At their best, sports like soccer are the digital age's most reliable suppliers of an old-fashioned brand of entertainment, the special-effects-free kind, in which human beings use only their sinews and synapses to deliver thrills and spills, action and comedy.
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When you take an opioid, whether a pill or an injectable, the drug enters the body and travels through your synapses, through the heart and into your lungs, where the blood gets flushed with oxygen before getting drawn back into the heart once again.
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Marshmello could have taken his the rise of "Alone" as a sign of his ability to break through on his own terms—for his neon corn-syrup slurries to rewire the synapses of listeners generally primed for big Sia hooks on prog-house drops.
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Not because it's sad or even all that emotional, but because the spectacle is so overwhelming that it feels like all your synapses are firing at full capacity and the feeling has to leak out of your body as tears, or yelling, or dancing?
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Antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor work in part by blocking the serotonin transporter, a molecule that works in the synapses between brain cells to clear out the chemical serotonin, which is thought to help impart a sense of well-being in some people.
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The self is not the immortal soul or the complex firing of synapses, not the swelling network of causes and effects that led to you, and certainly not a being whose basic rights are enshrined by law and defended by the rest of humankind.
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At Harvard Medical School, which he joined in 245, his research on nerves and muscle synapses led him to such far-flung destinations as Ecuador, to study the neural damage caused by lead-glazing in the village of La Victoria, and China, to study acupuncture.
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What I didn't know then is that as much as anxiety is a mental illness, growing in dark synapses and neural pathways, it also lives in the body — in the tightening stomach, the knot in the gut, the dizzy head, the tingling extremities, the racing heart.
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But there is so much more to cognition than that: the vast, silent cavern of underground mental machinery, with its tubes and synapses and electric impulses, so many unconscious systems and connections and tricks and deeply grooved pathways that form the pulsing substrate of the self.
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The Stevens and Barres study, published in the journal Cell in 2007, documented one of the most arresting instances of repurposing in biology: a protein designed to ticket germs and junk for destruction had been co-opted by the nervous system to ticket synapses for destruction.
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Its portrayal of Pazuzu as a malevolent concierge who moves into your brain and starts tugging at your synapses seems a little silly at first, but it grows more and more disturbing as the series goes on, thanks to Robert Emmet Lunney's work as the demon.
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Other researchers, like biochemist David Olson at the University of California Davis, have similarly found that psychedelic drugs can change the structure of neurons in the brain to increase the number of dendrites, dendritic spines, and synapses—which all play a part in plasticity of the brain.
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It asserts its authenticity in the plinths and joists of its architecture, in the bold intricacies of character and plot, but also in the only spot that truly matters: the prose, the synapses between subject and utterance, a language that hums along the taut cord of its telling.
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I am reasonably concerned that I've broken my brain and now, like a track-switch that's been pushed by an evil bandit, the train of linked synapses has gone off on a wild journey across my cerebral cortex, and only the heart of misery and madness lies this way.
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Neurons do this as well, but even faster: To communicate among themselves, they use molecules called neurotransmitters that are released at synapses in response to voltage spikes, and they send ultra-rapid electrical pulses over long distances along their axons, encoding information in the pulses' pattern, to control muscle activity.
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He is the archetypal fox to Stevens's hedgehog: where Stevens has spent a decade gnawing at the roots of a single question—how and why synapses are pruned in the brain—McCarroll roams widely, inventing new techniques for studying genes that can be applied across a range of biological problems.
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THE HEAVENS By Sandra Newman The dream that summons an event, the premonition, the unsettling flicker of déjà vu — are these experiences merely cerebral short circuits, synapses firing like random pinballs through our brains, or a signal that time operates with far more capaciousness than we might dare to imagine?
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His epiphany was a 90-minute standing-room-only lecture without notes at Columbia by the art historian Meyer Schapiro in which "connections were made like so many synapses firing — everything from psychoanalysis and religion to politics and semiotics," Mr. Katz wrote in his autobiography, "The Exhibitionist: Living Museums, Loving Museums" (2016).
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The second received a program of "pain neuroscience education," in which they learned about the function of neurons and synapses, the ways in which pain is transmitted along nerve fibers via the spinal cord to the brain, and how pain itself can modify central nervous system functions, producing pain with even the mildest stimulation.
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Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization that seeks to bridge the scientific and religious worlds, told me recently that science can help clergy better aid those they counsel by showing which types of social and behavioral practices are empirically most likely to foster their emotional, moral and spiritual goals.
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Children need twice the amount of glucose, a type of carb, as adults doThe brain's absorption of glucose, a type of carb often found in bread and sweets, peaks during the period of growth between toddlerhood and puberty, when the brain is developing synapses, according to a 2014 study published in the National Academy of Sciences.
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So again, graphene-based biodevices aren't going to be coming to CES next year — perhaps in a couple of decades… They say their next steps will be to investigate how different forms of graphene are able to affect neurons, and whether tuning the material properties might alter the biological response (in terms of synapses and neuronal excitability).
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The brains flushed with this solution four hours after death showed reduced cell death; restored blood vessel structure and circulatory function; preserved anatomical and cell architecture, and restored some cellular inflammatory responses, spontaneous neural activity at synapses and active metabolism when compared with rapidly decomposing brains that were flushed with a solution lacking the same necessary ingredients.
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"'Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later' is O.K. until it's not O.K." Just as Nancy Pelosi urged President Trump to get more sleep so that his synapses would function better, Arianna Huffington, the first woman to go on the board of Uber and a zealot about the subject of sleep, persuaded Kalanick to meditate.
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For us Generation Y-ers, precariously balanced between Generation X and millennials, it will leave your synapses blazing in remembrance of iconic pop culture ephemera: Shag stickers; Rat Fink hot rod kits; the HOUSE33 clothing line that directly referenced California skate culture of the early '90s; the imagery of artist Chris Cooper, whose iconic "smoking devil" design bears more than a passing resemblance to Cruz himself.
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Now, Varma's team in India and Microsoft researchers in Redmond, Washington, (the entire project is led by lead researcher Ofer Dekel) have figured out how to compress neural networks, the synapses of Machine Learning, down from 32 bits to, sometimes, a single bit and run them on a $10 Raspberry Pi, a low-powered, credit-card-sized computer with a handful of ports and no screen.
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" Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness: "It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.
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You could, and I have, engender the same emotional response—firing up those same sad synapses that only light up at the sight of a half-crushed minced pie in a drain and the sound of dogs crying with cold on the beach after an ill-advised Boxing Day dip in the sea, all in the name of charity of course—with a German europop version, or a cover from Greece.
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