Jennifer Raymond, an associate professor in neurobiology at Stanford University, is building a circuit diagram of the brain. By bridging the gap between individual synapses and whole brain learning and memory, her research is offering new insights and strategies for medical rehabilitation and education.
Archives for March 2011
Memory Enhancement Achieved in Rats
March 17, 2011 | by
Memories are fragile; initially forming and then retrieving them are both dependent on new protein synthesis in the brain, and both processes are vulnerable to disruption. A number of agents are known that can impair memory and these can certainly be useful — for example, in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). Enhancing memory, however, has proven more difficult. Yet as noted in The New York Times last week [1], two different research groups have recently reported enhancing memory in rats [2-3]. Of note is the fact that they did so utilizing independent molecular pathways.
Rehabilitation After Stroke: They do it with Mirrors
March 16, 2011 | by
Recent research by Michielsen and colleagues has demonstrated that “mirror therapy”, which can be given at home, results in significant, albeit modest, improvement in arm, wrist and hand movement abilities of stroke patients [1]. Mirror therapy is where the arm with impaired movement is placed behind a mirror and the unimpaired arm is reflected in the mirror, giving the appearance to the patient that when the unimpaired arm is moved, the impaired arm is also moving.
Building a Brain in a Supercomputer
March 16, 2011 | by
Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals. Henry Markram claims these mysteries of the mind can be solved — and soon. He is building a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain and its one hundred trillion — that’s 100,000,000,000,000 — synapses.
Markram is the director of the Blue Brain Project at Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL), one of two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology located in Lausanne, Switzerland. Founded in 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute at the EPFL, Blue Brain is a supercomputing project that to study the brain’s architectural and functional principles, and reverse engineer it in order to understand brain function and dysfunction. Blue Brain can model components of the mammalian brain in precise cellular detail and simulate neuronal activity in 3D. Soon Blue Brain will be able to simulate a whole rat brain in real time.
Neural Stem Cell Therapy for Ischemic Stroke Patients
March 15, 2011 | by
The single largest cause of adult disability in the developed world is ischemic stroke, in which blood flow in or to the brain is blocked. It precipitates immense amounts of social and financial costs. Currently, therapies for stroke focus on prevention or acute phase treatments that arrest the stroke while it is happening. But many patients are not fortunate enough to get acute phase treatment and suffer neurological damage that leads to functional and cognitive impairment. Until now, there have been almost no options for such patients. But last February, a company called ReNeuron received approval to begin a clinical trial of neural stem cell therapy for disabled stroke patients [1]. Two patients have been treated thus far and the therapy appears to be safe.
