Nerdy Science Blog

Neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania, University of Glasgow and University of Toronto found that lack of sleep cause people to be forgetful. The neuroscientists study mice and humans and found that sleep deprivation disrupts a specific molecule in the brain’s memory circuitry (hippocampus), which cause the interruption of the storage of episodic memories. Episodic memories are information about who, what, when, and where.

The neuroscientists believes the long-term potentiation (LTP) is the strengthening of connection between neurons that underlies memory. The stimulation of LTP in the brain requires the molecule cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP), which is a molecular messenger involving in regulating activity of memory formation genes by passing signals between proteins. Sleep-deprived mice had 50% less cAMP in their brain cells compared to well-rested mice. The scientists also noticed increased amount of PDE4A5, a type of phosphodiesterase (PDE) enzyme that degrades cAMP, in sleep-deprived mice.

The findings provide a possibility to develop drug that knock out PDE4A5 to enhance the memories of sleepyheads. The results were published in Nature on 22th October 2009. The authors are Christopher G. Vecsey, George S. Baillie, Devan Jaganath, Robbert Havekes, Andrew Daniels, Mathieu Wimmer, Ted Huang, Kim M. Brown, Xiang-Yao Li, Giannina Descalzi, Susan S. Kim, Tao Chen, Yu-Ze Shang, Min Zhuo, Miles D. Houslay, and Ted Abel.

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40 religious and non-religious people were asked to read phrase like “I believe God is with me throughout the day and watches over me”, “God is angry at human behaviour”, “There is no higher purpose”, etc. regardless they agreed or disagreed with the content they were reading.  The team at National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, then scan their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).  From the brain scan, the team found that human brain responds to God as just another person.  There is no difference between the human brain subjects when God is mentioned regardless they are religious or non-religious.  The same part in the brain that is being activated when God is mentioned associated with deciphering the emotions and intentions of others.  The team suggested that religion may be a product of human evolution as human brain evolved, human became capable of handling complex social interactions, and religion is a social behaviour.

This study does not prove the existence of God.  It just tells how God works in our brain. It just tells how god-belief or belief in god(s) works in our brain.  The study will be published in the next issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the authors are Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Giovanna Zamboni, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman.

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Women had no any rights few centuries ago.  Men were the laws.  Men treated women badly and treated them worse than animals.  Women were only babies and biological energies vessels to men.  This could be the problem of men after all.

Susan Fiske and colleaegues at Princeton University studied the male behaviour when they are looking at women in bikinis.  The researcher announced in annual meeting of American Association for Advancement of Science held at Chicago that the brain region that is associated with tool use lighted up when men were shown the photos of skimpily dressed women.  The researcher also found that when these men were shown sexually appealing photos, the brain part for human interaction had no activity.

The study was based on 21 heterosexual male volunteers.  Can this brain scan be a male homosexual detection?  Perhaps the researcher can look into it.

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It is exam period, and I love a MSN personal message of a friend, “undergoing brain cells apoptosis”.

Just in case some of you don’t know what an apoptosis is, simple explanation is that apoptosis is an act of cell suicide.

Juicy and soft.  You can easily smash it.  It is your brain!

Scoochmaroo made an artificial brain with a melon.  Click here to see how she made it, and please use a seedless watermelon.

This is a guest post from Cognitive Therapy Associates (CTA).

“Unemployed and depressed, I have been living off of my girlfriend for months. The relationship isn’t going well. She screams at me daily to get a job and I tell her I’m working on it.

Unfortunately, that is now a lie. I have given up looking for a job long since. I spend my days watching television and eating my girlfriends food. When I know she is on her way back home, I make an escape for a couple hours before returning – this lends credibility to the lie.

For whatever reason, I can’t make myself move forward; this is depressing. Covering my tracks with lies makes me more depressed. I think the extent of my depression is so bad I believe I have brain damage; holes in my cortex like Swiss cheese.

I almost wish I could become a drug addict but drugs, I’ve long learned, don’t function on me like they do others, whether the drugs are for recreational use or prescribed by a doctor, they only make me feel physically ill on top of my sorrow. This is all the more depressing.

It rained today and I realized I had worn holes in the bottom of my only pair of shoes. Good grief! In my shoes, I feel like Charlie Brown would have killed himself! But even suicide is a depressing thought; I am such a coward I could never pull off an ending found so noble by honored cultures of the past. The Japanese samurai had seppuku. The ancient Roman Marc Antony and his Queen, the sensuous Cleopatra, had righteous suicides.

I am neither a noble warrior nor someone defending my love and honor. Suicide would not be sufficiently tragic for my depravity.”

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Perhaps, but fortunately for those who are severely depressed, and are opposed to using pharmaceutical aid on combating their ailments, psychological therapy has been proven, with scientific and empirical evidence, to physically alter the brain.

Depressed lab rats – err, I mean people – were given PET scans to render levels of brain activity prior to treatment. The treatment itself is ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’ (CBT), essentially a method that identifies and helps a person to correct specific errors in what he or she is thinking that produces negative or painful feelings. Dr. Conner, a professional at CBT, says that “intervention for depression takes place at the level of conscious thought”. After 15-20 therapy sessions, the depressed showed improvement in disposition but more importantly PET scans revealed changes in brain chemistry similar to those expressed by drugs and other antidepressants.

With this study, we truly have a case of “mind over matter“.

Scientists found that homosexual men have feminized brain.  They share similar brain as straight women.  The study, led by Dr. Ivanka Savid of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  This could perhaps explain why homosexual men talk and act like women.  However homosexual women did not share similar brain with heterosexual men.

So gay men are just women soul trapped in men body?

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Henrikje van Andel-Schipper who passed away in 2005 at the age of 115 donated her body to science for research purposes.  Scientists analyzed her brain and revealed that it worked perfectly.  Aging are often associated with diseases like Alzheimer’s.  However van Andel’s brain only had few signs of Alzheimer’s.  The findings will be published in August edition of Neurobiology of Aging.

Henrikje van Andel-Schipper was born in 1890.  Her mother expected her to die in infancy as she weighed only 3.5 pounds at that time.  However she survived.  When she was at age 100, she operated for breast cancer and she lived for another 15 years.  She died from stomach cancer at age 115.  Her siblings lived past 70 and she had no children.

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Scientists from Harvard has successfully map the brain by turning brain tissue into high-resolution neural maps.  The researchers have done this by using the new machine, automatic tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome (ATLUM) machine.

(Wired)