neuroscience

TEDMED – One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

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Research paper: Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain, DOI: 10.1126/science.1241224

Important points:

  • Brain has no lymphatic system to clean it
  • During sleep brain cells seem to shrink
  • Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) acts as a detoxing agent removing toxins built up while the brain is conscious.
  • CSF influx only happens during sleep. It is inhibited during wakefulness.

and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing [cerebrospinal fluid – CSF] fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out.

But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it’s only happening in the sleeping brain.

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Education and Neuroscience

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With new findings from neuroscience catching the headlines every day, surely we can tap into these results to improve our education system? The Education and Neuroscience Initiative hopes to address this question – this joint programme of work between the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) aims to: build research and expertise at the interface between neuroscience and education; support the responsible transfer of technologies, resources and practices based upon neuroscience into education; and help teachers to be able to make informed choices based upon the best available evidence. In this post we explain why we are embarking on this work, share some of the learning we’ve gained in the process, and we invite a wider conversation on this topic.

via ThInk : Education and Neuroscience.

Relevant: Education Endowment Foundation

The Human Brain project

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The Human Brain Project (HBP)
The Blue Brain Project EPFL

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ASR syndrome scales and (brain) connectivity associations

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I found an interesting poster on brain connectivity associations of the ASR syndrome categorized by scales (depressed, stomach complaint, withdrawn, attention problems, thought problems, tobacco use, etc…) presented during the 2014 meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP 2014) and wanted to share the graphic (2nd image) with you.

ASR syndrome scales

ASR syndrome scales

Connectivity Associations

Source: Figshare – SOBP 2014 Poster: Connectome-Wide Signatures of Dimensional Psychiatric Symptomatology
License: CC-BY