Neurology Diagnostics

Archive for the ‘Neurology’ Category

A group of neuroscientists holds that it is possible to predict whether a person will break a promise future economic.

The film “Minority Report” was speculation the ability to predict an offense based on the assumption that people are deterministic machines. Thus, you could arrest a person even after committing a crime. In that film focused on serious crimes such as murder, they are also acts that are more dramatic force. Well, for economic misdemeanors and would be possible. At least that seems to emerge from recent research.

Perhaps you are an intuitive person and learn to see the small details in the face of his interlocutor will betray betray him. That is, at the same time that supposedly is promising something, that person and you plan to break that promise. This capability can be very useful in the business world or in the fickle world views. But if not, and does not have this ability, you could delegate this intuition in a nuclear magnetic resonance machine functional, it will also be much more reliable.

Scientists at the University of Zurich say they have discovered the physiological mechanisms of the brain that are below the broken promises. According to them certain patterns of brain activity predict whether someone will break a promise.

The study was conducted by Thomas Baumgartner, Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher, and published in Neuron last ten days.
The ability to make promises is one of the behaviors that encourage cooperation, trust and companionship. While not generally have a legal obligation to fulfill them, are part of everyday life and everyday situations of economic exchange. However, the promises are not only still, but sometimes unfortunately break.

Economic incentives to cheat are indeed ubiquitous in modern human society and promises can be broken easily in scenarios of economic exchange. Business people, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and ordinary people do not always behave honestly, as recent scandals have shown dramatically in recent times.

Despite the ubiquity of this behavior in human life very little is known about the physiological mechanisms that is below this phenomenon. To better understand this behavior, the researchers mentioned above was fulfilled a series of experiments in social interaction while analyzing the brain activity of volunteers who participated. It was set up situations in which the breaking of a promise would lead to economic benefits for breaking the promise as a cost to his victim.

In the game, an investor had to rely on another to invest real money in a deal. Placing trust in the other he could bring five times the money invested, but at the risk that the other was tempted not to share the profits and keep it all.

The results showed that there was an increase in brain activity in brain areas devoted to processing emotions and control when breaking a promise. The telltale regions were, in particular, the dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala. This pattern of brain activity suggests that breaking promises triggers an emotional conflict in the dishonest because the honorable response suppression.

The most important finding of this study was that researchers were able to predict dishonest behavior of the participants from the pattern of activity. In fact, subjects who kept promises and those who finally broke acted in exactly the same way when the promise was made: for both vowed to keep his word. But betrayed brain activity that finally broke. The same regions above the dishonest betrayed even before breaking the promise.
Although other studies showed that it may identify liars or dishonest with these techniques, this work is the first to show that you can predict such behavior.

According to Thomas Baumgartner The finding indicates that brain activity can reveal the malevolent intentions at a time prior to committing the dishonest act. This result, he said, prompted speculation that the extent of this activity could be applied in the future (distant), not only to catch the culprits, but also to prevent future criminal behavior or fraudulent manner similar to that reported in “Minority Report “.

They get store specific patterns of neural activity in brain tissue in vitro.

Sometimes science gets closer to science fiction, but does so at a speed so slow that we do not realize. The possibility that brain tissue in vitro is still in operation and the ability to store memories seem science fiction, or at least so it seemed.

Now, Ben W. Phillip Larimer and Strowbridge, both of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, have managed to be the first to store specific patterns of neural activity in brain tissue in vitro.
Neuroscientists memory classified into three types: declarative memory (which stores the facts or remember specific events), procedural memory (which is what allows us to play the piano or riding a bicycle) and working memory (a type of short term memory term that allows us, for example, memorize the phone number that we will check). Larimer and Strowbridge were interested in identifying specific neural circuits responsible for memory.

In particular wanted to study a special type of neurons in the hippocampus called mossy cells, and often are damaged in humans with epilepsy. The motivation was that some people with epilepsy experience memory deficits, so they questioned whether there was a fundamental level connection between mossy cells and memory circuit.
So they began to work and isolated mouse brain tissue. In addition, managed to find a way to recreate the working memory in vitro.

The advantage of mossy cells, unlike other neurons, they can maintain their normal activity even if they are arranged in small sheets of tissue. The spontaneous electrical activity of these neurons was critical in discovering the remains of memory in that brain region.

When stimulated with electrodes hippocampus sheets found that spontaneous activity in mossy cells could “remember” which electrodes had been activated. This memory lasted about 10 seconds, which is more or less as long as a souvenir in the working memory in humans. It is no coincidence that this memory effect has occurred in the hippocampus, the brain region associated with short-term memories in humans.
Strowbridge says is the first time anyone has managed to store information on the spontaneous activity of mammalian tissues.

These researchers measured the frequency of “inputs” in synaptic mossy cells to determine how memory is retained in the hippocampus. As in our own memories, the memory that the researchers were able to recreate in vitro tissue slices were stored in many neurons at once. The memory was not as in isolated cells but in a population of cells.
Larimer and Strowbridge also found that the memory effect occurred because of a rare type of cell called semilunar granule cells which, incidentally, were described in 1893 by Ramon y Cajal and have been in academic obscurity for over a century until they were rediscovered by Strowbridge’s group in 2007. Semilunar granule cells are the third type of brain cells that this group has discovered.

Semilunar granule cells have an unusual form of persistent activity while allowing them to maintain memory and connect to the mossy cells. This result was the key of the paper published.
These researchers are now studying how much information can be stored in the hippocampus. It took four years to be capable, in a reproducible manner, to store two bits of information during 10 seconds. They believe their findings should progress faster now that they know what they are looking and have found the brain circuit that really keeps the short-term memory.

One study does relate certain aspects of religious thought with damage to specific brain regions.

For a Christian transcendence, by definition, transcends the self and all earthly things. The feelings of faith, inner peace and spirituality the lives of truth, but is supposed to come given by the hereafter. What if those feelings were produced by the brain itself or a specific part of it? If so, those feelings would be a mere by-product of our brains, induced a sense physically. Well, apparently this is precisely what has been demonstrated recently.
In a recent study in patients with brain tumors shows that part of the parietal cortex regulates these religious issues. These patients have had to remove part of the brain region and after surgery were even more attracted to transcendent experiences.

In recent years scientists have been interested on the neurological aspects of religious thought, leading to various theories about its origin and biological utility. However, nuclear magnetic resonance studies on believers and nonbelievers have not shown so far that there is a specific region that regulates this. Therefore, it was assumed that the religious aspects should be covered by the brain as a whole and not a specific area. The study of Cosimo Urgesi, University of Udine in Italy, and colleagues contradict this conclusion; study was recently published in Neuron.

This group of scientists subjected 88 patients suffering from brain cancer to a questionnaire covering various aspects of significance before and after subjecting them to surgery to extirpate the tumor. The second round of questions is effected between 3 and 7 days postoperatively.

The questionnaire focused on issues and autotrascendecia components: belief in a higher power, ability to lose yourself for a moment, feeling spiritually connected in a profound way with other people or with nature … also asked if they believed in the ESP, miracles and other metaphysical phenomena.
These patients had two types of cancer: gliomas, affecting the cells surrounding the neurons, and meningiomas, which affect only the membrane surrounding the brain. Due to the nature of these two kinds of tumors, the doctors had to remove neurons from 48 patients in the first case because the tumor had spread, while the second case suffered no loss of neurons.

Those patients suffering from gliomas that had the tumor in the back of their brains, including the inferior parietal lobe, temporal cortex and right angle ring, scored higher on the spiritual scale (depending on test) than those suffering the same type of cancer, but they had it on the front. Once received in the operating room the difference in score between each other is emphasized. Also, could see that those who lost certain areas of the parietal cortex due to the operation showed the highest score.

In patients with tumors located in other brain regions, or affected by meningiomas, there was no change or a particular religious or transcendent feeling.
The researchers conclude that these regions normally inhibit the transcendent thought and the damage caused to them by the tumor or surgery triggers these feelings. The posterior parietal cortex is related to the ability to provide the location and position of the human body in space, so their damage may affect this feeling and to convince the person concerned that his ego transcends the reality of the here and now. The results support the idea that the mystical experience arises from the feeling of being disconnected spatially own body.

This could be the first significant result in this field of spirituality, a phenomenon which otherwise is very complex and essential in humans. Apparently, although many patients had previously undergone such operations suffered emotional changes of this type, no investigator had taken the time to rate it, because it is considered that it was something belonging to the personal sphere of people.

According Urguesi, the result shows that some complex characteristics of personality are more malleable than previously thought. He speculates that the low activity of parietal regions in people with brain injuries may predispose to feelings of transcendence and, perhaps, to religions such as Buddhism that emphasize such experiences.
Uffe Schjødt, Aahus University of Denmark and not involved in this study, says that indeed it has been found increased activity of this brain region in those who are praying or meditating, but critical missed opportunity when you can have asked more things to patients before and after the operation, particularly with regard to their religious experiences.

In future studies the researchers intended to measure other aspects of spirituality to determine how long these spiritual feelings in patients and induce this state in healthy subjects by noninvasive techniques based on transcranial magnetic stimulation. With this technique you can “turn off” temporarily a specific brain region and see the effects it produces. This would better define the regions involved in religious sentiment.
In any case, it is still disturbing that a very particular aspect of transcendence as a mere dependent on neural activity. A nightmare for the religious, but also for the atheist, who at one point may fall into that kind of feeling could not help.

They get to reconstruct the 3D motion of a hand from the electrical signals produced by the brain using a non-invasive and portable.

Slowly but surely, the neurosciences advance that is an outrage. Recently, a group of scientists has managed to reconstruct the 3D motion of a hand from the electrical signals produced by the brain using a noninvasive method. The achievement, which was published last March 3 in the Journal of Neuroscience, could pave the way for the use of a portable computer system to control the thought of robotic arms or power wheelchairs. This would be a breakthrough for people with some kind of paralysis.

Until now, scientists had used non-invasive and portable systems for reconstruction of hand movements. In this study, Jose Contreras-Vidal and colleagues from University of Maryland formations sensors placed on the heads of the five participants in the experiment and recorded brain electrical activity using a technique called electroencephalography.
Volunteers were asked to from a central button squeezed eight other buttons in a random sequence of 10 rounds (see picture). While logging the movement of his hands were recording their brain activity.

The researchers then turned to decode brain activity and were able to associate the specific three-dimensional movements of the hand to patterns of electrical activity.
“Our results show that electrical brain activity acquired from the scalp carries enough information to reconstruct the continuous movements of the hand,” says Contreras-Vidal.

The researchers found, in particular that the sensor 34 provided the most accurate information. This sensor was placed on an area of ​​the brain called the sensorimotor cortex, which is the region associated with voluntary movements. In addition, sensors on the inferior parietal lobe also provided useful information. It is known that another region helps guide limb movement. Therefore, these results confirm the validity of the method used.
The study has implications for the future development of technologies to communicate with a computer brain. When this technology is mature may be used by people with severe neuromuscular disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sequelae of stroke or spinal cord injuries, so they can have control over complex tasks without having electrodes implanted in the brain.

Furthermore, this result is important from the standpoint of laboratory or clinical monitoring of brain functions.
An interesting application would be able to help with this type of technique to people with paralysis to control the cursor with the thought that appears on the screen of your computer. Right now there are systems that require lengthy training the patient to be successful. Contreras-Vidal believes the training period could be reduced and need less effort if you take into account this new result.

They get technologically alter the moral judgment that people have about the intentions of others temporarily.

No moral judgment of human society, or even man himself, would disappear. That little voice that tells us what is right and what is wrong is essential to control our behavior and control of others. Moral judgment that allows us to judge others lies a specific region of the brain. What if we could alter the region in the brain of someone? Can we control and moral judgment? Would we have a moral that looser against the actions of others?
Neourocientíficos MIT, led by Rebecca Saxe, have shown that indeed can change the moral judgment of the people through the disruption of this specific area of ​​the brain. The finding may help reveal how the brain constructs morality.

For moral judgments to others often need to infer their intentions, a skill known as “theory of mind”. For example, if a hunter shoots a friend in a hunting need to know what he was thinking: What was jealous secrets or simply mistook his friend with a duck?

Previous studies had shown that the brain region known for temporal parietal junction (TPJ or in the acronym) is strongly activated when we think about others’ intentions, thoughts or beliefs. In the current study investigators temporarily disrupted TPJ activity by inducing a current brain, induction was achieved by applying a magnetic field from outside the skull. They found that the subject’s ability to make moral judgments, which required an understanding of the intentions of others (such as a failed assassination attempt), he looked upset.

According to Liane Young (author of the PNAS paper where this work is published) the study provides a striking proof that the right TPJ, which is located on the surface of the cortex above and behind the right ear, is critical in to develop moral judgments. The result is also surprising, since under normal circumstances people are very safe and is consistent in this class of moral judgments.

“Normally you think that morality is part of a high level behavior. Being able, with a magnetic field applied to a specific brain region, to change this is really astounding, “says Young.
The researchers used a noninvasive technique called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to selectively interfere with brain activity in the right TPJ. A very intense magnetic field applied to a small area of ​​the skull creates weak currents that interfere with the neural activity of neurons located just below, the effect being temporary.
In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to 25 minutes of TMS before they made a test or test which described various scenarios on which they had to make a moral judgment on a scale from 1 (absolutely forbidden) and 7 (quite possible).
In a second experiment we applied a magnetic pulse of half a second at the moment in which subjects were asked to moral judgment. For example, they were asked whether it was permissible for someone to let his girlfriend crossed a bridge that he knew it was unsafe, even if she ended the other side unharmed. In that case a judgment based solely on the result remained the perpetrator without fault, even though apparently he intended to cause harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that altering the right TPJ and the subjects were more likely to judge attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, researchers believe that TMS interfered with the ability of subjects to interpret the intentions of others, forcing them to rely on the information of the final outcome for the trial.

The next step will be the researchers study the role of the right TPJ in judging people who are morally lucky or not. For example, a drunk driver who ran over a pedestrian would be unfortunate compared to another drunk driver who returns home without suffering setbacks, but the former tends to be judged more harshly.

Children with Williams syndrome have associated with gender bias, but not race. This would represent the first example of two biologically separate stereotypes.

Humans have prejudices. A typical bias is that of racial stereotypes. And, at bottom we are all a little racist and we see that is different in a different way to how we see people of our own race. There are probably evolutionary and biological reasons to explain this bias, but will never be an excuse to behave badly with those who are different.
However, it seems that there are people who are free of such prejudice, not only from the moment they are born, but beyond. Children with a neurological disorder called Williams syndrome are friendly because they are afraid of strangers. Now a study shows that these children also develop skills not negative about other ethnic groups, although they show gender stereotypes, that is sexist.

According to Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, director of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim (Germany), is the first evidence showing that different types of stereotypes are differentiated biologically.
Adults with this syndrome show abnormal activity in the amygdala, the brain region associated with social threats and triggering unconscious negative reactions in the presence of other races. The influence of race has been associated with fear. Adults are more likely to associate negative objects and events with people from other ethnic groups with people their own group. But according to Meyer-Lindenberg their study provides important evidence that social fear leads to racial stereotyping.

The researchers showed 20 children 18 photos whites of European origin aged 5 to 16 years with and without the syndrome. They were then asked to choose individuals from the pictures to make gender-related activities, like playing with dolls. Both groups had the same pattern linked to gender stereotype.
Then they spoke of subjects with positive or negative attributes and asked to choose a morality tale characters from a set of pictures of people with different skin tones. One of the stories could be: “Let two young children. One of them, who has a good heart, you see a kitten falling into a lake and is rescued from drowning. Which one is the child with a good heart? ”
Children without the syndrome with positive characteristics favored children of the photos I had pale skin, associating the negative to the dark-skinned, somewhat consistent with previous studies. However, children with the syndrome were not conditioned by skin color. According to Meyer-Lindenberg the conclusion is that social fear is not required for gender stereotyping, but it is important to the racial stereotype.

The results suggest that social fear contributes to racial stereotype, but people with this syndrome have cognitive problems, including mental retardation, so this also could play a role in the affair.
According to John Gabrieli of MIT, although the researchers accounted for socioeconomic factors, children with and without the syndrome may have had different experiences with racial groups and that at some level have been exposed by their parents to gender stereotypes, but not everyone has been exposed to racial stereotypes by parents. This could explain the lack of racial prejudice in children with the syndrome.

Meyer-Lindenberg think you can replicate the finding in larger samples and studying the different neurological mechanisms involved. It also hopes to determine if such stereotypes are genetically determined or based on experience.
The most important of this study, he says, is that two stereotypes are biologically separate.

First records the activity of mirror neurons in humans, finding a greater complexity than that observed so far in monkeys.

The history of mirror neurons is so pretty hard not to believe them, but ultimately not prove its existence. The concept of mirror neurons was introduced when analyzing brain activity in monkeys. You could see that certain motor neurons are activated not only when the monkey moved the arm, but when the monkey saw another move an arm, though he did not. It seemed that these neurons acted as a “mirror” of the actions of others.

From there began to assert the existence of other types of mirror neurons and neurological models were raised based on this idea. According to some mirror neurons would make us human and would be behind our ability to empathize, to feel on the skin of others. These neurons would be the mechanism that would allow us to “read” the minds of others and sympathize with them.

Thus, the suffering we experience at seeing our neighbors suffer after a natural disaster, or even the feelings we have to see the main character suffer a dramatic film, would be controlled by mirror neurons. Another type of erotic films may operate under the same neural mechanisms. It was even proposed that some form of autism could be caused by a malfunction of this type of neurons.

The problem is that there was no evidence of the existence of these neurons, only suspicion of its existence and indirect evidence. Something that hindered research in this field was the dubious morality of studying this issue by implanting electrodes in the brains of healthy people.

Now, in the April issue of the journal Cell, Itzhak Fried and Roy Mukamel, of UCLA, say they have obtained the registration for the first time the activity of mirror neurons in the human brain.
The researchers recorded the activity of single and multiple nerve cells of both the motor regions of the brain and other regions related to vision and memory. Found that most of the neurons respond only to the observation or execution of an action, but 8% of them responded to both cells would be precisely mirror neurons. They also showed that a specific subset of these mirror neurons increased their activity during the execution of an act, but its activity decreased when the action was only observed. These researchers hypothesize that the decreased activity of these cells during the observation can inhibit the observer perform the same act. Perhaps this subset of mirror neurons also help us to distinguish between the actions of others and ours.

The researchers took their data directly from the brain activity of 21 patients who were treated at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center to alleviate epilepsy. It was not implantarles electrodes in the brain to identify the focus of their seizures in order to design a treatment. Seizing the opportunity these researchers studied mirror neurons with the consent of patients.

The experiment included three parts: facial expression, grab something and a control experiment. They recorded the activity of 1,177 neurons in 21 patients while they were watching or performing the same actions. In observing the volunteers found several shares represented at the screen of a laptop. In the phase of activity is asked subjects to perform an action based on the visual representation of a word. In the control task words were presented in the same way, but were asked not to execute.

The researchers found that neurons were activated both when the individual performed the task as when watched. Mirror neurons that they carried out the responses were located in the middle frontal cortex and temporal cortex. This is the first time you see two responses reflect neural systems at the cellular level, both in monkeys and humans.
The new finding shows that mirror neurons are located in more areas of the human brain than previously thought. Because different areas of the brain are specialized for different functions (in this case the middle frontal cortex is specialized in the selection of movement and temporary storage in memory), the finding suggests that mirror neurons provide a rich and complex response to reflect the actions of others.

Because mirror neurons fire both made the action as to see it done by others, it is believed that this reflex is the neural mechanism by which the actions, intentions and emotions of people can be automatically understood.
This study sugiriere that the distribution of these cells that link the activity of self with others, is more widespread than previously thought.

According to Mukamel, in autism dysfunction may be involved in this type of neurons, as in this case the clinical symptoms include difficulties with verbal and nonverbal communication, with the imitation of others and problems having empathy for others. Therefore, a better understanding of the mirror neuron system could help design treatment strategies for this disorder.

The ball-shaped rays are described by many people during storms, but have been reluctant to be studied by science in the natural environment. The first report on ball lightning occurred in 1754 in St. Petersburg, when Dr. Richmann, trying to emulate Benjamin Franklin in the kite experiment, died struck by lightning. However, few have been seen ball lightning, and have rarely been photographed.

Because their existence is difficult to explain by conventional electromagnetism, there are dozens of exotic theories that explain, or try to explain ball lightning. These theories include the possible existence of hot silicate particles or plasma when the beam vaporizes the ground to fall, but theoretical models have been proposed to explain these complex events.
On the other hand, there have been some imitations in the laboratory. But what if we really absence of ball lightning the natural environment, how could we then explain the existing reporting their sightings (some mistaken for a UFO)? According to some physicists that the rays can be actually ball magnetically induced hallucinations, as in the laboratory the phenomenon can be replicated.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a powerful technique used by neuroscientists to study the brain. It was invented in the eighties and since then has been a powerful tool to investigate brain function. With it will be altered reversibly to the normal functioning of certain areas of the brain to learn and how they work.

TMS is based on applying a variable magnetic field (from 1 Hz to 50 Hz) powerful enough to induce currents in neurons. The intensity of this field can be up to 0.5 Tesla in the brain. Because this can be concentrated in a strong magnetic field region can induce currents reduced in specific areas sufficiently small. If, for example, this field is applied to the visual cortex of the subject, it sees light objects disks with the appearance of bubbles, ovals or lines. These “objects” are called phosphenes. Moving the field then the supposed “luminous object” scrolls across the visual field of the subject.

According to Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl, both from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, if it happens in the laboratory may also happen in nature. They calculated that the rapid changes of the magnetic field associated with lightning and lightning are powerful enough to induce hallucinations if given less than 200 meters away.

To be a rare phenomenon as it is, the shock must be a special type in which there are repeated shocks over the same spot for a few seconds (enough to see the phenomenon for a while), a phenomenon that occurs between a 1% and 5% of all the times in which there are downloads.

They also estimate that it is not necessary for the subject to experience this phenomenon is on the outside, but can “see” the phenomenon from the safety of a house or from the cockpit of an airplane. Apparently, outside, at a distance of less than 200, may not be seen on the event, so watching from a safe is more likely.

The hallucinations would experience these subjects would be very similar to those induced in the laboratory when using EMT: balls or bright lines that appear to float in space in front of the subject. This is just what you say people who have reported sightings of ball lightning. Would report on the sighting of a “ball lightning” because of a preconception that it would have on them.

Although this is an interesting idea, that explains a phenomenon that has been repeatedly reported, also makes us wonder in what other circumstances existing magnetic fields can produce hallucinations otherwise. Will there be auditory hallucinations or mystical?

Asked to speculate on the science fiction novels are related to space travel times to neutron stars. While trying to solve the problem of tidal forces, not expressed a possible solution to the possible effects of the magnetic field of these objects on the astronauts. Perhaps the crew instantly jerk back. And there are more possibilities: humans affect an electromagnetic pulse induced by a nuclear explosion in the ionosphere?

Successful in changing the larvae of fruit flies to smell blue and look attracted to him, although normally shun light.

We are able to detect 5000 to 10000 and it smells different at very low concentrations. Some people are able to distinguish odors in a concentration of one part in a billion. Is how to distinguish a grain of sand on a beach over a kilometer in length. However, of the senses we have, perhaps the sense of smell is the least appreciated of all.
But we, as mammals we are, we have relied heavily on this. Perhaps now, after a long evolutionary history, not quite, but still there. About 100 million years protomamíferos, which were nocturnal, depended for guidance of smell. The front part of the brain devoted to smell, began to grow to handle the large amount of information reaching the olfactory bulb and differentiate as a coordinating body. Here’s how it emerged the cerebral hemispheres, which in our case has expanded to occupy most of the telencephalon, although some have to do with the smell.

The telencephalon is the upper region of our brain. It is the largest and newest of our brain, that has changed recently in human evolution, and the seat of our mental capacities most interesting, as consciousness and language.
Therefore, it is not surprising that 3% of our genome is dedicated to the creation of odorant receptors. Each of these genes creates a receptor molecule specific to a scent. We have so many of these genes as any other mammal, but when geneticists took a look at all these thousands of genes found, surprisingly, that 300 of them were silenced or destroyed by mutations. The declining importance of smell in our lives has made these defective genes passed from one generation to another, accumulating over time. Cetaceans have this to end so they have no longer any that is functional.
It is interesting to speculate on how life would be if we had all these functional genes. Maybe one day decide to recover these genes by genetic engineering and see what happens, but meanwhile we have to settle for manipulating gene “inferiors.” Such experiments can help us understand this connection and to know how it works in us.
Recently, researchers at Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum (Germany) have succeeded in modifying the genes of fruit flies so that small larvae (1 mm in length) of these insects are able to “smell the blue “.

These researchers have turned a light receiver in one of the olfactory neurons with 28 larvae of these insects. Usually these animals flee from the light, however, this genetic manipulation has managed to simulate a smell in the brain of these larvae when they see the blue light. Thus, when they receive the light stimulus the insect smell of banana, marzipan or glue, odors that are present in rotting fruit, and that appeal strongly to the larvae. As followers of NeoFronteras can see, the result is vaguely reminiscent of cases of synesthesia, a condition in which some of the senses are crossed in certain people.

Olfactory neurons modified larvae are able to produce a protein that is activated by light. That is, are sensitive to light but not part of an eye or retina. In addition, researchers can freely choose which of the 28 olfactory neurons is sensitive to light using a genetic marker. The teacher explains Klemens Störtkuhl have been able either to activate cells that normally only register repulsive odors and therefore cause aversion response or to activate cells that are sensitive to odors attractive, as the smell of banana , marzipan or glue. Neurons send a nerve signal activated when stimulated with blue light at a frequency of 480 nm and the larva has the impression of perceiving an odor. Checking the behavior of these larvae demonstrates the effect of this manipulation. Beyond that, the rest of the olfactory system of these larvae remains normal.

The experiment shows that it is possible to insert a photoactive protein in olfactory neurons thereby photostimulation produce an olfactory behavior in larvae, although generally unmodified larvae flee from light.
The researchers were also able to measure the effect electrophysiologically. Small electrodes can detect the nerve signal activated by the light from these neurons. The transmission of nerve signal can then be traced through the brain of the larvae, allowing non-invasive observation of neural network. Störtkuhl notes that this method has great advantages in establishing tests that can be implemented in live animals without harm. The researchers hope to understand better the neural network and modes of action of the brain through these kinds of experiments.

The scientists now plan to use the same principles to study adult fruit flies equipped with two photoactive proteins isolated cerebral neurons to react to light. These methods are now used in other animal models and in mice.

When you experience something, this experience creates a mark on our memory , are generated partnerships, build bridges between old memories and new experiences, and create / activate and strengthen the interneuronal circuits that connect the structures involved in that image-sound – perfume , tactile, etc.. Then in a particular part of the brain that experience, complete and associated with emotions and feelings that are really short memory and is stored until it is related to or collected by the individual at another time perhaps similar, perhaps only due partly to the total experience.

In the subject empathic experiences serve as maps to follow the path to understand the other, your brain gives you instant comparison and identification, but found no similar experience to be taken as a model, the subject is able to recreate empathy from the simple yet profound perception of the emotionality of the other, emotional circumstance and naturally derived. And from that understanding will create real and visceral reaction, and organize your answer. This type of reaction is consistent heals, which helps, which accompanies it. The reaction is based on a non-empathic vision, one that falls easily into critical and non-visceral understanding of the other, more affection mediate the help, not heal it requires, creates a sense of loneliness and helplessness to He who receives an injustice rather than a word akin to the situation and emotionality.

It is believed that empathy, as all linked to cognitive capacity implies a higher brain function, and it is known that the limbic system adds perceptual in character. The close amalgam that emerges from these three systems of brain processing (cognitive-perceptual-emotional) level of empathy arises from a given individual and is worth commenting that the average population does not have a high degree of empathy but a functional level that is enough to identify with the other in situations that are part of your past experiences or present but not allowed to come close to understanding the situations that have not lived by himself or in some cases not even dare to consider as a possibility in their lives .

The classic example and clearer is those persons who do not feel able to face change, criticize or highlight weak areas of those who did were able to generate themselves a painful but necessary metamorphosis, and who actually see strongest and capable than themselves but they can not empathize with them because they can not find in their brains a similar action, and the inconsistency arises or incongruent reaction that could hurt an intense emotional relationship may in its essence.

Conclusion

Criticism from a tie is not destructive emotional and social ties, and the inconsistency of the reactions may suggest a lack of self-analysis and self-knowledge by someone who lacks a developed empathic nature, are characteristics that often occur together.

The solution in these cases, focused on the goal of saving a loving relationship, is that “whoever does not see himself or another” to accept his blindness and try to access some form of psychological therapy that achieves a appropriate degree of empathy and congruence sociable in their reactions.