Friday, July 26, 2013

Scientist Can Record What We Remember And Activate That Memory At Will


Barron's Medical Journal Reporting From The American Association For Clinical Chemistry George R Brown convention Center Houston,Texas USA ( AP ) , July, 30 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)

Scientist Can Record What We Remember And Activate That Memory At Will


Houston, Texas ( AP) Barron's Medical Journal is in search of the understanding why people say that have seen us at some events and we know that we where not at the events. Come to find out that this happens more often than not. Now with President Obama announcing last winter that we as a country are going to start doing research on how our brains works. We decided to ask Rose Conrad Ph.D. of Sam Houston Biotech to discuss what the lastest in this area has to offer. Conrad pointed us to a story in the New York Times where this week a group of researcher at M.I.T Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have created a false memory in a mouse, providing detailed clues to how such memories may form in human brains.

Before we are able to use the research that many scientist discover they have to prove their finding in mice models. Although mice are not people, the basic mechanisms of memory formation in mammals are evolutionarily ancient, said Edvard I. Moser, a neuro scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who studies spatial memory and navigation and was not part of Dr. Tonegawa’s team. At this level of brain activity, he said, “the difference between a mouse and a human is quite small.” In both, memories form in an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus.

This fantastic research in that Scientist can record what we remember things and activate that memory at will. Conrads says that snice we are a Biotech company that work in the space of genomics and genetic memory is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of timeComputational models of the dentate gyrus (DG) have suggested based on anatomical, electrophysiological, and computer simulation data that the DG plays an important role in learning and memory by processing and representing spatial information on the basis of conjunctive encoding, pattern separation, and encoding of spatial information in conjunction with the CA3.

This area of research goes hand and hand with President Obama’s Brain Activity Map or “BRAIN” Initiative—a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. The BRAIN Initiative — short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neuro technologies — builds on the President’s State of the Union call for historic investments in research and development to fuel the innovation, job creation, and economic growth that together create a thriving middle class.

A map of brain connections would be helpful for interpreting measurements of the signals transmitted between neurons. In the human brain, these signals travel in a complex network of 100 billion or so neurons, each of which is connected to 10,000 others The function of neural circuits is an emergent property arising from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. Conrad said that\ in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double helix structure for DNA. The double helix consists of a long chain of repeated units called nucleotides, of which there are four types: A, C, G, and T. Hereditary information is written in DNA using this alphabet of four letters. In the human genome, the sequence of nucleotides is about one billion letters long. The reading of this sequence was finally completed by the Human Genome Project in 2003.

Barron's Medical Journal spoke with Francis Collins The CEO of The National Institutes of Health.Collins said that, the scientists at NIH and private foundations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle will all be participating in the project . First, connectomics will help reveal how the brain stores and retrieves information about the past. Neuroscientists believe that memories are stored in the connections between neurons. According to this theory, connections change when a new memory is stored. That such changes can happen is not in doubt. Neuroscientists have found that new synapses can be created and that the strengths of existing synapses can be altered. What remains uncertain is whether these changes are indeed the basis of memory.

Although the connection theory of memory is widely believed, it has been difficult to test experimentally. One barrier has been the lack of good techniques for measuring whether two neurons are connected, and if so, how strongly. One important task of connectomics will be to determine the connectivity of brain areas that are involved in memory storage. Brought To You ByOrange shoe Person Fitness:

Take, for example, sequential memory, such as the notes of a piece played on the piano. A pianist is able to store such sequences in memory and recall them at will. Recently, sequential memory has been studied by neuroscientists in the brain of the zebra finch. This bird learns a Brought To You By Zeal

single, highly repetitive song as a juvenile and sings it repeatedly as an adult. The avian brain area called HVC appears to be important for a bird’s memory of its song. Creating a lesion in the HVC in adult birds causes a loss of song. Furthermore, electrical recordings of “projection” neurons in the HVC, which send long branches (axons) to downstream brain areas, have revealed a precisely timed, repeated sequence of neural activations while the bird sings this song. The zebra finch song consists of repetitions of a single motif, which is about one second long. During a song motif, each projection neuron in the HVC is activated exactly once, for just a few milliseconds. For every repetition of a motif, the projection neurons are activated in the same sequence. The projection neurons of the HVC activate other neurons in an area called RA, which in turn activate the motor neurons that control the syrinx, the avian vocal organ. Therefore the sequential activation of HVC neurons is believed to be directly responsible for the sequence of movements that produces birdsong.

President Obama said in the State Of The Union Address For “Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.” A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists, nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of data that would come from the project. The scientists and technologists concluded that they did. The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently developed a publicly accessible Internet-based collection of data which identifies a region in the brain where thousands of gene-regulating elements necessary for cognition, motor functions are emotions are found.

Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division who worked on the latter project, referred to it as "a genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain." Organizations behind the project include the Office of Science and Technology Policy, The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, as well as several private foundations the president will allot a total of at least $3 billion over the next 10 years.

Barron Medical Journal is advising The State Of Texas To reinstate the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Texas can play important role in The Brain Activity Map Project and create millions of jobs for Texans. Texas House and Senate budget bills provide no money for new grants by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the target of multiple investigations following revelations of procedural problems and conflicts of interest related to multimillion-dollar grants it has awarded. Encourage your Texas elected official to be a part of this wonder new project that is going to extend and save patients live over the next 50 years

If you are going to be a Freshman in College it may be a great thing to major in Neurology

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