(Press-News.org) Contact information: Stuart Wolpert
swolpert@support.ucla.edu
310-206-0511
University of California - Los Angeles
UCLA psychologists report new insights on human brain, consciousness
UCLA psychologists have used brain-imaging techniques to study what happens to the human brain when it slips into unconsciousness. Their research, published Oct. 17 in the online journal PLOS Computational Biology, is an initial step toward developing a scientific definition of consciousness.
"In terms of brain function, the difference between being conscious and unconscious is a bit like the difference between driving from Los Angeles to New York in a straight line versus having to cover the same route hopping on and off several buses that force you to take a 'zig-zag' route and stop in several places," said lead study author Martin Monti, an assistant professor of psychology and neurosurgery at UCLA.
Monti and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the flow of information in the brains of 12 healthy volunteers changed as they lost consciousness under anesthesia with propofol. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 31 and were evenly divided between men and women.
The psychologists analyzed the "network properties" of the subjects' brains using a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, which is often used to study air-traffic patterns, information on the Internet and social groups, among other topics.
"It turns out that when we lose consciousness, the communication among areas of the brain becomes extremely inefficient, as if suddenly each area of the brain became very distant from every other, making it difficult for information to travel from one place to another," Monti said.
The finding shows that consciousness does not "live" in a particular place in our brain but rather "arises from the mode in which billions of neurons communicate with one another," he said.
When patients suffer severe brain damage and enter a coma or a vegetative state, Monti said, it is very possible that the sustained damage impairs their normal brain function and the emergence of consciousness in the same manner as was seen by the life scientists in the healthy volunteers under anesthesia.
"If this were indeed the case, we could imagine in the future using our technique to monitor whether interventions are helping patients recover consciousness," he said.
"It could, however, also be the case that losing consciousness because of brain injury affects brain function through different mechanisms," said Monti, whose research team is currently addressing this question in another study.
"As profoundly defining of our mind as consciousness is, without having a scientific definition of this phenomenon, it is extremely difficult to study," Monti noted. This study, he said, marks an initial step toward conducting neuroscience research on consciousness.
The research was conducted at Belgium's University Hospital of Liege.
Monti's expertise includes cognitive neuroscience, the relationship between language and thought, and how consciousness is lost and recovered after severe brain injury. He was part of a team of American and Israeli brain scientists who used fMRI on former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in January 2013 to assess his brain responses.
Surprisingly, Sharon, who was presumed to be in a vegetative state since suffering a brain hemorrhage in 2006, showed significant brain activity, Monti and his colleagues reported.
The former prime minister was scanned to assess the extent and quality of his brain processing, using methods recently developed by Monti and his colleagues. The scientists found subtle but encouraging signs of consciousness.
###
Co-authors of the current research included Evan Lutkenhoff, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in Monti's laboratory; Mikahil Rubinov of Cambridge University in the U.K.; and Steven Laureys, who leads the Coma Science Group at the Cyclotron Research Center and the department of neurology at Belgium's Sart Tilman Liege University Hospital.
The study was funded primarily by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of more than 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Seven alumni and six faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.
UCLA psychologists report new insights on human brain, consciousness
2013-10-18
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Why lithium-ion-batteries fail
2013-10-18
Lithium-ion batteries are in our cellphones, laptops, and digital cameras. Few portable electronic devices exist that do not rely on these energy sources. Currently battery electrodes contain active materials known as intercalation compounds. These materials store charge in their chemical structure without undergoing substantial structural change. That makes these batteries comparatively long-lived and safe. However, intercalation materials have one drawback: their limited energy density, the amount of energy they can store per volume and mass.
In the search for higher ...
Gravitational waves help understand black-hole weight gain
2013-10-18
Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But here's a real conundrum: how did they grow so big?
A paper in today's issue of Science pits the front-running ideas about the growth of supermassive black holes against observational data — a limit on the strength of gravitational waves, obtained with CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia.
"This is the first time we've been able to use information about gravitational waves to study another aspect of the Universe — the growth of massive black holes," co-author Dr Ramesh Bhat from the Curtin University ...
Iowa State astronomer helps research team see misaligned planets in distant system
2013-10-18
AMES, Iowa – Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star.
Such tilted orbits had been found in planetary systems featuring a "hot Jupiter," a giant planet in a close orbit to its host star. But, until now, they hadn't been observed in multiplanetary systems without such a big interloping planet.
The discovery is reported in a paper, "Stellar Spin-Orbit Misalignment in a Multiplanet System," published in the Oct. 18 ...
Social psychologists say war is not inevitable, psychology research should promote peace
2013-10-18
AMHERST, Mass. – In a new review of how psychology research has illuminated the causes of war and violence, three political psychologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say this understanding can and should be used to promote peace and overturn the belief that violent conflict is inevitable.
Writing in the current special "peace psychology" issue of American Psychologist, lead author Bernhard Leidner, Linda Tropp and Brian Lickel of UMass Amherst's Psychology of Peace and Violence program say that if social psychology research focuses only on how to soften ...
Brain may flush out toxins during sleep
2013-10-18
A good night's rest may literally clear the mind. Using mice, researchers showed for the first time that the space between brain cells may increase during sleep, allowing the brain to flush out toxins that build up during waking hours. These results suggest a new role for sleep in health and disease. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the NIH.
"Sleep changes the cellular structure of the brain. It appears to be a completely different state," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the Center ...
Making sense of conflicting advice on calcium intake
2013-10-18
In recent years, studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding whether calcium supplements used to prevent fractures increase the risk of heart attack.
Now, in an assessment of the scientific literature, reported as a perspective piece in the October 17, 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a UC San Francisco researcher says patients and health care practitioners should focus on getting calcium from the diet, rather than supplements, when possible.
"Osteoporosis may result from inadequate calcium intake and it's quite common for certain segments ...
Mutation in NFKB2 gene causes hard-to-diagnose immunodeficiency disorder CVID
2013-10-18
(SALT LAKE CITY)—A 30-year-old woman with a history of upper respiratory infections had no idea she carried an immunodeficiency disorder – until her 6-year-old son was diagnosed with the same illness.
After learning she has common variable immunodeficiency (CVID), a disorder characterized by recurrent infections, such as pneumonia, and decreased antibodies, the woman, her husband, their three children and parents joined a multidisciplinary University of Utah study and researchers identified a novel gene mutation that caused the disease in the mom and two of her children. ...
Men-only hepatitis B mutation explains higher cancer rates
2013-10-18
A team of researchers has identified a novel mutation in the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in Korea that appears only in men and could help explain why HBV-infected men are roughly five times more likely than HBV-infected women to develop liver cancer. Although some women do progress to cirrhosis and liver cancer, the mutation is absent in HBV in women. The research is published ahead of print in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology.
"This is the first mutation found that can explain the gender disparity in incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma," says Bum-Joon Kim of Seoul ...
District nursing homes win high marks for quality, but antipsychotic prescribing remains problematic
2013-10-18
WASHINGTON, DC (October 17, 2013)—The District of Columbia Department of Health (DOH) has released a study by the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) investigating prescribing of antipsychotics to District seniors. The study combines pharmaceutical marketing data collected by the District with publicly available data on nursing home quality and Medicare drug claims.
"The good news is that nursing homes in the District of Columbia generally are not prescribing antipsychotic medication at rates higher than the rest of the country," ...
Could Sandy happen again? Maybe, says Tufts geologist
2013-10-18
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Almost a year after Hurricane Sandy, parts of New York and New Jersey are still recovering from billions of dollars in flood damage. Tufts University geologist Andrew Kemp sees the possibility of damage from storms smaller than Sandy in the future.
"Rising sea levels exacerbate flooding," says Kemp. "As sea level rises, smaller and weaker storms will cause flood damage." An assistant professor in Tufts' Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Kemp co-authored a study on sea-level change close to New York that was published recently in the Journal ...