Berkeley Neuroscience Newsletter

Humans are inherently curious, often seeking out information even when it does not have tangible benefits. To better understand the neural basis of curiosity, Neuroscience PhD Program alum Kenji Kobayashi and Associate Professor Ming Hsu monitored brain activity with fMRI as people played a gambling game. Participants could pay to find out the odds of winning, which they sometimes did even when the information was of little use. They found that information activates the dopamine-producing reward system in the brain — the same system involved in addiction and activated by food and other pleasures. Additionally, the subjective value of information was coded in a similar way to the value of concrete rewards like money. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more from the Berkeley Haas Newsroom.

Sleep characteristics associated with biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease

A collaboration between the Walker, Jagust, and Knight labs has identified specific sleep characteristics associated with accumulation of tau and beta-amyloid (Aβ) in the brain — the main molecular culprits in Alzheimer’s disease. By combining sleep studies to observe brain activity, self-reported sleep history, and brain imaging to measure tau and Aβ, they found a correlation between particular “sleep signatures” and accumulation of these proteins. They also found that people who reported poor sleep during specific decades of mid and later life had greater tau or Aβ, suggesting that these may be important times to address sleep problems. The authors propose that sleep studies could potentially be an easy and affordable way to screen for Alzheimer’s risk and to assess the effectiveness of treatments. Read the paper in The Journal of Neuroscience and the article in Berkeley News.

Shedding light on sleep: discovering new players in the brain

Much of the research on sleep regulation has focused on just one brain area, so Yang Dan and her lab set out to find new sleep areas by screening the entire brain for sleep-active or sleep-promoting neurons. Their results, published in two new papers in Cell and Neuron, reveal several new brain areas that promote non-REM sleep. These include a region in the midbrain hypothesized to be a sleep center over a hundred years ago but then largely forgotten, and the amygdala, which is better known for regulating emotions such as fear. Some of the neurons were excitatory, unlike most of the previously discovered sleep neurons. They also found that the peptide neurotensin is important for sleep, and traced the connections of these new sleep neurons. The newly identified molecules, cells, brain areas, and circuitry provide fertile ground for a more comprehensive understanding of the neurobiology of sleep. Read our article to learn more.

Image courtesy of Chenyan Ma, Dan lab.

Bats as a model for social behavior and communication

In two new papers, the Yartsev lab show that bats may be a good model for studying the neuroscience behind some socially-related characteristics they share with humans. The first study, published in Cell and described in Berkeley News, revealed that bats exhibit correlated brain activity when they interact socially, such as when they fight or groom each other. The aligned brain activity was specific to social interactions, similar to what has been seen in humans, and varied with the amount of social interaction. The second study, published in Nature Communications, showed that adult bats can make long-lasting changes to their communication calls when the background noise is altered. This makes them a valuable model for adult vocal plasticity, which is rare in mammals other than humans.

Photo by Steve Gettle, courtesy of the Organization for Bat Conservation.

Creation of the first detailed functional map of the human cerebellum

The Ivry lab, in collaboration with researchers at Western University in Canada, has published the first highly detailed functional atlas of the cerebellum. Long thought to primarily coordinate movement, the cerebellum has been increasingly recognized as important for higher-order cognitive functions, and may play a role in neurological and psychiatric disorders. To discover the functions of different areas of the cerebellum, the researchers had participants do a wide variety of tasks while monitoring their cerebellar activity with fMRI. The resulting atlas identifies functional boundaries that do not correlate with previously used anatomical boundaries — making the atlas an important resource for future functional studies of the cerebellum. Read the publication in Nature Neuroscience and the article Berkeley News.

Image courtesy of Western University via Berkeley News.

Whether you read or listen to stories, word meanings are represented similarly in your brain

The Gallant lab previously generated a detailed map of where word meanings are represented in the brain when people listen to stories, but is it the same if people read instead? In a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Gallant lab had people listen to stories from “The Moth Radio Hour” podcast while their brain activity was recorded with fMRI. In another fMRI experiment, the same people read those same stories. They found that the semantic maps of word categories generated in the cerebral cortex were essentially the same whether people were reading or listening to the stories. This finding could have implications for the study and treatment of language and speech disorders such as dyslexia, or brain injuries that affect speech. Read more from Berkeley News.

Image by Fatma Deniz.