Categories

Category Blog

Entries 12 Total

Genetic Testing and (Maybe) Behavior Analysis Against Alzheimer’s

May 17, ’11 2:23 PM

Alzheimer’s is a tough disease. It’s incurable, and there no treatments to delay or halt its progression. In the Journal of Neuroscience, Paul Thompson and colleagues at UCLA suggest that one of the risk-related genes begin to do damage to the brain 50 years before the disease is perceived.

If that’s true, why don’t we show signs of dementia. It just so happens that in youth, our brains are so rich in connectivity and redundancy that the problematic areas can be “bypassed” without major problems. But later on, with the compounded effect of aging, Alzheimer’s emerges in full force.

The sooner we can identify the presence of the disease, the more strategies we might have for reducing cognitive impairment. Genetic analysis is one direction, but can we use everyday behavior analysis to catch glimpses of the disease years before it’s clinically diagnosed? That’s one of the hypothesis underlying my research work.

More details here.

Comments (0)

Computationally Modeling Schizophrenia

May 11, ’11 3:21 PM

Interesting work coming out of Yale and UT Austin related to modeling Schizophrenia. Using a neural network model (DISCERN), researchers simulated the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion.

“The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience,” says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.”

The results bolster a hypothesis known in schizophrenia circles as the hyperlearning hypothesis, which posits that people suffering from schizophrenia have brains that lose the ability to forget or ignore as much as they normally would. Without forgetting, they lose the ability to extract what’s meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters. They start making connections that aren’t real, or drowning in a sea of so many connections they lose the ability to stitch together any kind of coherent story.

Here is the entire release with details.

Comments (0)