(Press-News.org) Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have found how even brief exposure to sudden sounds or mild trauma can form permanent, long-term brain connections, or memories, in a specific region of the brain. Moreover, the research team, working with rats, says it was able to chemically stimulate those biological pathways in the locus coeruleus -- the area of the brain best known for releasing the "fight or flight" hormone noradrenaline -- to heighten and improve the animals' hearing.
The NYU team says their new study, summarized in the cover article in the journal Nature Neuroscience online Aug. 24, is believed to be the first to explore an apparent connection between hearing and memory formation in the locus coeruleus as well as the first to successfully improve hearing in rats by manipulating the centrally located brain region whose neural network projects throughout the body.
"Our study gives us deeper insight into the functions of the locus coeruleus as a powerful amplifier in the brain, controlling how and where the brain stores and transforms sudden, traumatizing sounds and events into memories," says senior study investigator and neuroscientist Robert C. Froemke, PhD, an assistant professor at NYU Langone and its Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. "Our findings, if confirmed by future studies in animals and people, should help us better understand how to improve hearing and memory abilities in those suffering from hearing loss or possibly even Alzheimer's disease, as well as how to alter or minimize memories involved in disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder."
According to the investigators, their findings provide insight into how and where traumatizing events stick in our minds and may possibly explain why it may take years to learn dates in history class but only seconds to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, from a shock or sudden event. They also say these study results may help explain how electrical impulses, such as those produced by cochlear implants for the hearing impaired, can better be used to improve hearing, and how traumatizing memories can be reshaped or dampened to lessen symptoms of PTSD.
As part of the Froemke team's four-year investigation, led by Ana Raquel O. Martins, PhD, PharmD, the researchers chemically stimulated the locus coeruleus in rats while simultaneously playing them a sound paired with a food reward. After a two-week training period to ensure that the rats associated the sound with food, the same sound was played much more quietly. The researchers recorded activity in the same regions of their brain, as well as in the auditory cortex area responsible for interpreting sounds. They found that the locus coeruleus and auditory cortex still responded to the sound, even at nearly imperceptible levels, for the subsequent and remaining two weeks of the experiments.
However, chemically stimulating the locus coeruleus led to 100 percent neural activity in the auditory cortex, even in the absence of the same triggering sounds. Neural activity in the auditory cortex in response to the sounds was at least 10 times greater than when activity in the locus coeruleus was chemically suppressed.
According to Froemke, the results clearly demonstrate that the memory of the sound and its associated reward was encoded by the locus coeruleus, which helped improve the rats' ability to perceive the sound.
In another set of experiments, the investigators paired a specific sound with a series of mild shocks to the animals and found that when the shocks stopped, but the sound continued to play, their locus coeruleus response remained the same, at 20 neuron spikes per second.
Froemke says he next plans to investigate how information is encoded within the locus coeruleus and to identify which cells are activated by cochlear implants and in animal models of PTSD. He is also planning experiments to identify patterns formed in the locus coerelus during other behavioral events involving hearing, such as mothers responding to the cries and calls of their offspring.
INFORMATION:
Funding support for the study was provided by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders grants DC009635 and DC012557, the Hirschl/Weill-Caulier Career Research Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.
Media Contact:
Shira Polan / David March
Phone: 212-404-3528
david.march@nyumc.org
This news release is available in German.
An international team of scientists led by the University of Bayreuth and with participation of DESY has created the highest static pressure ever achieved in a lab: Using a special high pressure device, the researchers investigated the behaviour of the metal osmium at pressures of up to 770 Gigapascals (GPa) - more than twice the pressure in the inner core of the Earth, and about 130 Gigapascals higher than the previous world record set by members of the same team. Surprisingly, osmium does not change its crystal structure ...
BOSTON -- In response to the growing opioid crisis, several states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, have granted pharmacists the authority to provide naloxone rescue kits without a prescription to at-risk patients. This model of pharmacy-based naloxone (PBN) education and distribution is one of the public health strategies currently being evaluated at hundreds of pharmacies in both states to determine the impact on opioid overdose death rates.
Led by researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC), Rhode Island Hospital, and the University of Rhode Island College ...
For software programmers, security tools are analytic software that can scan or run their code to expose vulnerabilities long before the software goes to market. But these tools can have shortcomings, and programmers don't always use them. New research from National Science Foundation-funded computer science researcher Emerson Murphy-Hill and his colleagues tackles three different aspects of the issue.
"Our work is focused on understanding the developers who are trying to identify security vulnerabilities in their code, and how they use (or don't use) tools that can help ...
URBANA, Ill. - Men and persons age 65 and older who have access to natural surroundings, whether it's the green space of a nearby park or a sandy beach and an ocean view, report sleeping better, according to a new University of Illinois study published in Preventive Medicine.
"It's hard to overestimate the importance of high-quality sleep," said Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, a U of I professor of kinesiology and community health and a faculty member in the U of I's Division of Nutritional Sciences. "Studies show that inadequate sleep is associated with declines in mental ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A new study of the records of millions of nursing home residents affirms the value of influenza vaccination among the elderly. The Brown University analysis found that between 2000 and 2009, the better matched the vaccine was for the influenza strain going around, the fewer nursing home residents died or were hospitalized.
Although flu vaccination is a standard of care and a measure of quality in nursing homes, some public health experts question the evidence of whether they do any good, said Vincent Mor, corresponding author of ...
The Global Precipitation Measurement or GPM mission core satellite gathered rainfall data on Tropical Depression Kilo as it heads toward Johnston Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. On August 24, a Tropical Storm Warning was posted for Johnston Island
Kilo formed as depression and strengthened into a tropical storm to southeast of the Hawaiian Islands on August 20, 2015. By 5 a.m. EDT on Sunday, August 23, Kilo weakened to a tropical depression. Today, August 24, the tropical depression nearing Johnston Island.
The National Hurricane Center noted that Johnston Island ...
Washington D.C., August 24, 2015 - Children who have been abused typically experience more intense emotions than their peers who have not been abused. This is often considered a byproduct of living in volatile, dangerous environments. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) set to find out what happens when these children are taught how to regulate their emotions. Could that better help them cope with difficult situations?
The team of researchers from the University of Washington studied what happens ...
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 2015 -- You're tired and you need an energy boost, but you don't want the jitters from caffeine. What to do? In this Reactions video, we give you some chemistry-backed tips -- one of which involves cats -- to boost your productivity and stay awake without refilling the coffee cup. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/SvEQBURrPow
INFORMATION:
Subscribe to our weekly series at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on Twitter @ACSReactions.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 158,000 ...
We humans have been using self-medication to cure the illnesses since the dawn of our species. There is some evidence that also other animals can exhibit this type of behavior, but the evidence has been hard to come by.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki, Finland, have now shown that black ant Formica fusca can change their taste for food once exposed to the fungal pathogens. In the compound of interest was hydrogen peroxide, which can be found in the damaged plants, other insects and cadavers.
"When ants are feeding on the diet containing extra free radicals ...
People are motivated to participate in the sharing economy because of its ecological sustainability, the enjoyment derived from the activity, the sense of community, and saving money and time. Ecological sustainability is one of the basic principles of the sharing economy - not to purchase everything individually but rather consumer collaboratively by sharing goods and services. Another canonical principle of the sharing economy is 'paying it forward'. However, collaborative consumption may involve the same hurdles as any other type of green consumption, researcher from ...
