Neuroscience general. Good discussion, Q&A, papers, what

Why can't neuroscientists make the perfect drug? You feel bliss, no negative side effects, no dopamine downregulation or anything of the sort.

You take one pill it lasts for 30 minutes maybe. When the time has passed you can go on with your day or take another pill and go for another just as good 30 minutes.

>>6662679
That's not really a job for neuroscientists

bump for potentially good thread

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is getting a implant that stimulates the brain, providing the individual pleasure; acquirable?
like can i buy one, i know the technology exists

>>6662679

Pharmacologists might be able to help.

>>6662679
I'm not in pharma, and I'm not in therapy, but I know that cognitive/behavioral therapy works for a lot of people.

I do basic neuro, examining how feedforward (bottom-up/stimulus-controlled) and feedback (top-down/attentionally controlled) cortical connections enable identification and recognition.

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I already asked this twice in two stupid fake neuroscience threads.
What's the name of the blood vessels inside of the hippocampus and where are they located?

Undergrad here, currently scrambling to find a decent idea for a project I can do. My professor is trying to get me to sit on a rig doing patch clamping, so I would want my experiment to based around the technique.

I'm diving head on into molecular neuroscience stuff trying to memorize firing patterns for neuron types, where those neuron types are in the brain, and understanding things like kinetic data and IV plots, different receptors, their subunits, their significance....

...and I feel kinda fucked. Like, I have no idea how to ask a question about an organ that is seemingly composed of nothing but an infinite amount of the tiniest of mechanisms that you basically need a biochem degree to really understand. I mean, I have taken up to Cal III and I love reading about the mathematical models, but I feel like my lab is super bio focused and I don't know if I have enough knowledge of my ROI to find something worth doing or the experimental mindset to engage it properly.

So to anyone with experience in just getting started with independent research, any tips on what it takes to find a worthwhile study to do? Any experience with patching in general?

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>>6663249
You do realize your brain is a fine mesh of blood vessels, right?

pic related, that's all blood vessel, and it doesn't even show the capillaries.

>>6663229
Doubt you can buy it; all the animal models I've seen require sticking an electrode into the mesolimbic reward circuit, which would require drilling through your cortex

>>6663255
>Switch to behavioral neuro
>Get monkeys drunk and give rats cocaine
>Don't even try explain cellular mechanisms

>I don't give a fuck

>>6663262
I got one of my monkeys drunk once, in undergrad. Tequila. We were best friends.

>>6662679
Because if you activate a neuron it changes how the neuron fires the next time due to how neurogenesis works. Fire together wire together etc etc. Your brain is complicated dude, it has more possible stated than there are atoms in the visible universe.

>>6663229
yes you could mad scientist it up. but you'd probably just sit there and push the button to activate it till you died like all the rats they give access to the button

>>6663267
Yes, we really don't know anything about how the brain works to produce cognition. We're trying to figure out how different top-down cognitive processes impact perception, and how recognition decays over time.

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>>6663262
Funny enough this is exactly what I do. Saw a meth head in the wild the other day with some friends and my reaction was to excitedly point and cry out "OH MY GOD LOOK HE'S ACTING JUST LIKE MY RATS!" He really was too. Put a rat on meth and they get stuck in a behavioral loop until it wears off, and one of the most common stereotyped behaviors they exhibit is bobbing their heads up and down while they do the same thing with their arms. Meanwhile this human meth head was weightlifting a rock by rocking it up and down against his chest while he bobbed his head in rhythm, and he was totally into it.
>Friend: "Is he going to be okay?"
>Me: "Bah he'll be fine. He'll be stuck doing that for a couple more hours and he'll feel like shit afterward but he'll be fine."

>>6663249
the hippocampus is supplied from the posterior cerebral artery and drains int the basal vein of Rosenthal

>>6663281
You must be in one of the labs where you can just copypasta new numbers into papers and publish them, barely adjusting the discussion to emphasize putative mechanisms, which you really know nothing about.

>>6663262
>>6663281
Shit, never thought I'd be this jelly of neuroscience.
Good luck, gentlemen; and god speed.

>>6663286
thx

>>6663279
Are you referring to cognition the hypothetical construct which is used to explain behavioral phenomena? I love it when people use the right words.

I would agree that one technically can't do anything with 'consciousness' due to the other minds problem. But then say, "yeah but even math has axioms, and it works pretty fucking well." But is important to remember we made an assumption, we didn't prove anything.

But that's a sidenote. I must say, I do have a problem with the general top down vs bottom up paradigm; in that in the way it is applied. It oversimplifies the difference between the level of complexity that is holistic brain function and the level that is the individual neuron. Top down vs bottom up can be applied at each level of complexity within the neurological landscape. Furthermore, I would argue that at each lvl of complexity, when viewing from each lvl of complexity there is an intermediate level which mediates between the two which can be broken down into another dualistic viewpoint, but which is intelligible as a separate entity. I.e. cognition, various brain areas, neurons. I believe that the inability to jump from level to level is a serious impediment to our understanding of the human mind, and other theoretical minds. What sayest /sci/?

I'm working on a program for a professor that makes pretty 3D pictures of radiation therapy for the brain.

That's at least tangentially related to neuroscience, right?
>tfw only a cs student

>> I just want to do Neuroscience
> Still have to take a course in epithelium and social psychology

I hate my uni.

Can neuroscience stop my depression :(

>>6663412
aren't epithelia and brain from the same germ layer?

>>6663294
Ya, freal. If I got to grad school for comp neuro can I evne get close to the drunk monkey life or nah?

When will neuroscience solve the hard problem of consciousness?

>>6663498
it can't, see the other minds problem. But we do have really good theories to explain the relationship between behavior and stimulus

Can someone willing give me a brief mechanistic explanation on how cholinergic and noradrenergic systems differentially mediate aspects of attention?

>>6662679

We don't understand nearly enough about the brain yet to produce a drug as perfect as Soma. If we ever did, it probably wouldn't even be a drug. It would be more like wireheading.

>>6663229
You cant buy it, but you can volunteer at your local Neuroscience department to be a human guinea pig. Chances are someone will want to use your brain for something.

http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/research-old/how-to-volunteer-for-research-studies

mcgovern.mit.edu/research/be-in-a-study

>>6663281

fuck the rest of those, I would suck your dick for some of that sweet, sweet Ketamine

>>6664222
What do you mean attention? these 2 systems primary regulate sensomotor response to environmental uncertainty. It does play a role in attention but only insofar as balancing sensory input and goal-directed predictions in response to environmental changes; like driving without getting distracted by everything on the side of the road, it balances new sensory information with predictions to where u are moving, what to avoid, and when to panic when something very odd happens.

Its not like dopaminergic or serotonergic systems which play a role in the more nebulous categories of motivation and focus.

>>6664265
I guess I meant sustained attention on some task and shifts in attention, in particular. I've read that acetylcholine signals expected uncertainty while noradrenaline signals unexpected uncertainty, but I'm a little confused on how it works.

>>6663341

We likely will never have a one-to-one mapping between cognition and neural pathways, but that's ok. I don't see it as an impediment to understanding how the brain works. It's more of an issue for neuropharmacology (i.e., eliminating unwanted side effects of drugs without reducing efficacy). Is that what you are getting at?

>>6663341
I agree in essence, but I think the concept of levels or tiers is part and parcel to the oversimplification of holistic function you rightly implicate. I don't have an alternative to offer, however, beyond the notion of a far more dynamic model.

>>6664299
Essentially correct, according to current models

The cholinergic system, originating in the BF(basal forebrain), drives expected uncertainty; the known degree of unreliability of predictive relationships in the environment. It does so by enhancing and suppressing signals in interneruon pathways between the PFC (prefrontal cortex) and PPC (posterior parietal cortex).

The noradrenergic system, originating in the LC (locus coeruleus), works on unexpected uncertainty; large changes in the environment that violate prior expectations. Its primary mechanism enhances the decay of the synaptic connections (“forgetting”) between VC and PFC, and PFC and PPC (posterior parietal cortex). Basically as you "forget" those changes, the response becomes more severe when you experience it again.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22319488

>>6664455
Thanks!

>>6664361
yeah, that's more or less what I'm getting at. it's stupid to try. The impediment I'm getting at is that people overcomplicate the problem by including all this extraneous information. The 1-1 model would be so complicated no one would really understand it properly, it would be unwieldy. People create useful models that accurately explain the things they need to explain, anything else is a complete waste of time.

In another thread I got in an arguement over wether infinite sets can exist outside of math. It died before we really got into it. I said yes they can exist because sets are groups of distinct objects. If there are infinite distinct objects in the universe, that is an infinite set. He started talking about zfc and which logic I'm using, which was the kind of convolution I'm getting at. But this happens all over neuroscience/psychology. I read an article as an undergrad about how we need to abandon the lock and key model of neurotransmitters because scent is effected by the quantum vibration of the molecules and not just the shape that fits into the "lock." Is lock and key "correct?" Not entirely, is it useful to know that GABA interacts with GABA receptors because they're shaped to fit? Yes. There is a reason we still teach the Bohr model of atoms, it's effective for a lot of problems people need to solve.

>>6664368
There is no solution, the idea that there is one, is the problem. You just need to make models that solve the problems you want to solve. Any model you make is necessarily inaccurate

>>6665724
And thus your solution....

Does free will exist?

>>6662668
That's a really nice paper.

can anyone tell me more about the corticolthalamocortical loop that is happening in the brain. I can find the research paper on google

Why isn't psychedelia researched or at least sought to be researched more in the context of neuroscience?
An empirical psychedelic experience tells me more about how my brain functions conceptually than reading neuroscientific publishings. An actual neuroscientist who knows his stuff would gain a maximal advantage from connecting the dots during a psychedelic experience and also from researching what that experience is all about in terms of its neural constituents.

I have a question regarding learning and understanding for the neuroscientists here;

from my understanding, information goes from one hemisphere or location to the next through synapses and the like, and the entire brain is like a highway of highly stimulated areas and lesser stimulated, but stilll stimulated areas.

So, does an imbalance of stimulated areas cause things like confusion or not being able to understand a concept? Or could it be an issue with things like the nutrition and health? Both?


Also, why are some subjects usually treated as two different sides of the same coin? Like thinking mathematically to an advanced extent and analyzing a powerful work of film or literature.

Are both acts considered incompatible to people because of culture, or because the hemispheres that are stimulated when doing different activities are too far from one another?

>>6666629

Look up the TED talks by Rupert Sheldrake and the one titled "My Stroke of Insight" by that psychiatrist named Jill or something. Interesting stuff, if you haven't seen it already!

>>6666895
>Rupert Sheldrake
The guy pursues theories on crystals talking to eachother, and purports it takes less energy to make new things based on how many already exist nearby. He purses falsehoods.

How accepted is neuroscience within the scientific community at large? I've seen some people say that, at this point, we can't make any definitive claims based on brain scans.

>>6666900

He does quite, but he also gives a lot to ask oneself about, and a lot to debate among just about all groups of individuals that call themselves scientists. He's also quite spot on with his analysis of how science appreciation has become a terrible movement thag dumbs down science and associates it with atheism and political statements.

I wouldn't exactly call him for answers to scientific phenomena, but I would certainly like him to keep on challenging current paradigms; it gives us something quite challenging to debate and look into at times.

>>6666888
Confusions and learnings and shit happen by quite a few different means. More basic, most regions have signals, noise, intended targets, unintended targets, long-term builders, short-term builders, long-term changers, short-term destroyers. Short-to-long-term convertors.

The use of nicotine for example can, in a visual task, improve response time and minimum perception at the cost of accuracy.

Guanfacine is a compound which can reduce noise at the norepinephrine receptors in the brain, which can selectively modulate long-term attention for what is and is not relevant, without significantly affect processing speed or capacity.

Alcohol has a well-documented effect of improving memory, only after an event happened, and only once above a certain alcohol level. It interferes with the brains ability to process and store new information, which reduces noise for the encoding process of the previous events.

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>>6666906
soon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVy0n_rdBI&list

>>6666907
Since you seem like a reasonable person, you might want to read one of Hitler's arguments "On Nature and Race." Reminds me a little bit of Rupert because it's like "Oh, this sounds reasonable, yeah that sounds like a good idea, Jesus Christ what the fuck is going on"

>>6666922
I see and understand what you're trying to say; but it is only through the harsh judgement of others that science can really progress. But without giving ourselves to judge as we judge others, without having an open mind AND being skeptical as well, by accepting everyone one person says just because they're famous or idols and denying something else because it goes against everything we know; science cannot progress to its fullest and true extent. And what is actually true, through it all, will remain true, until it's proven fasle.

And we should always keep ourselves busy examining what is "true", what is "false". That is science! And I thank Sheldrake and Hitler for giving us things to definitely prove false, haha. If only enough people knew it was earlier, if only there were more scientists and confident, reasonable people.

Anyways, I figured this is getting off thread, so that's all I will say on this matter.