Discoveries
Neuroscience
Neuroscience
New technologies are allowing us to explore the brain as never before. We are entering a new era in neuroscience where our knowledge of the brain is beginning to match the urgent need to prevent and treat diseases of the brain.

Neuroscience

Neural Computation
03/2023

AI chatbot ChatGPT mirrors its users to appear intelligent

Consciousness—the internal awareness that you exist—continues to captivate philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Insight into human consciousness can be gathered from the artificial intelligence (AI) language model ChatGPT. This trained computer chatbot can generate text, answer questions, provide translations, and learn based on the user’s feedback. Large language models like ChatGPT may have many applications in science and business, but how much do these tools understand what we say to them, and how do they decide what to say back? Professor Terrence Sejnowski explored the relationship between the human interviewer and language models to uncover why chatbots respond in particular ways, why those responses vary, and how to improve them in the future.

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Nature
Communications/
Nature
Biotechnology
03/2023

Wearable microscopes advance spinal cord imaging in mice

The spinal cord acts as a messenger, carrying signals between the brain and body to regulate everything from breathing to movement. While the spinal cord is known to play an essential role in relaying pain signals, technology has limited scientists’ understanding of how this process occurs on a cellular level. Now, Associate Professor Axel Nimmerjahn; co-first authors Pavel Shekhtmeyster, Erin Carey, and Daniela Duarte; and colleagues have created wearable microscopes to enable unprecedented insight into the signaling patterns that occur within the spinal cords of mice. The lab’s technological advancement will help researchers better understand the neural basis of sensations and movement in healthy and disease contexts, such as chronic pain, itch, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or multiple sclerosis (MS).

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Neuron
04/2023

Not all itches are the same, according to the brain

In addition to broader inquiry into consciousness, scientists also ask questions about neuron communication. Itch is a protective signal that animals use to prevent parasites from introducing potentially hazardous pathogens into the body. Itchiness due to something like a crawling insect is known as “mechanical” and is distinct from “chemical” itchiness generated by an irritant, such as a mosquito’s saliva if the mosquito were to bite a person’s arm. While both scenarios cause the same response (scratching), recent research by Professor Martyn Goulding, Associate Professor Sung Han, and colleagues has revealed that, in mice, a dedicated brain pathway drives the mechanical sensation and is distinct from the neural pathway that encodes the chemical sensation. Their findings open up new avenues for therapeutic interventions for patients who experience a range of chronic itch conditions, including atopic dermatitis and psoriasis.

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Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
04/2023

Mitochondria power-supply failure may cause age-related cognitive impairment

The brain is divided into areas, each containing many millions of neurons connected across thousands of synapses. These synapses, which enable communication between neurons, depend on even smaller structures: message-sending boutons (swollen bulbs at the branch-like tips of neurons), message-receiving dendrites (complementary branch-like structures for receiving bouton messages), and power-generating mitochondria. Professor John Reynolds, co-first authors Courtney Glavis-Bloom and Casey Vanderlip, and colleagues found that brains lose synapses as they age and the synapses that remain show a breakdown in coordination between the size of boutons and the mitochondria they contain. Their findings open an entirely new way of thinking about cognitive decline that could lead to new targets for future therapeutics.

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The Journal of Neuroscience
05/2023

How aggression-promoting brain peptide works in fruit flies

Tiny proteins and molecules impact neuron communication to alter brain activity. In addition to communicating via chemicals called neurotransmitters, the brain also uses proteins called neuropeptides. Though their importance is widely recognized, the way neuropeptides move around the brain and influence neurons has remained poorly understood—until now. Associate Professor Kenta Asahina and colleagues have found the variable influence that neuropeptides can have on brain activity, which illuminates how the brain communicates in flies—an important step to understanding the underlying causes of human conditions, like autism spectrum or attention deficit disorders.

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Cell
05/2023

New way to model human brain immune cells and neurological disorders

Situated at the intersection of the human immune system and the brain are microglia, specialized brain immune cells that play a crucial role in development and disease. Although the importance of microglia is undisputed, modeling and studying them has remained a difficult task. To overcome this barrier, Professor Rusty Gage, Associate Professor Axel Nimmerjahn, co-first authors Simon Schafer and Abed Mansour, and colleagues developed an organoid model—a three-dimensional collection of cells that mimics features of human tissues. This model allows researchers to study human microglial development and function for the first time in living human-derived tissue. The scientists also examined patient-derived microglia from children with a type of autism spectrum disorder to determine whether brain environment influences the development of more reactive microglia.

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