Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – (video) The Blue Brain project at EPFL has refuted the centuries-old belief that the human brain may start life as a blank slate, enriched and developed through experience alone, findings which are potentially of great significance for treatment of neurological disorders. The findings appear to be “common across animals”, says the research team.
EPFL’s researchers have demonstrated that “small clusters of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex interconnect according to a set of immutable and relatively simple rules”, the university says in a press release. In other words, the clusters are basic building blocks that contain within them “a kind of fundamental, innate knowledge”.
Experience builds on these clusters, each of which contains about 50 neurons.
The findings were published ahead of the print edition 7 March in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The authors, under the lead of Blue Brain project head Henry Markram, write in their abstract:
“Neuronal circuitry is often considered a clean slate that can be dynamically and arbitrarily molded by experience. However, when we investigated synaptic connectivity in groups of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex, we found that both connectivity and synaptic weights were surprisingly predictable. . .
“We speculate that these elementary neuronal groups are prescribed Lego-like building blocks of perception and that acquired memory relies more on combining these elementary assemblies into higher-order constructs.”
The EPFL argues that “the discovery redistributes the balance between innate and acquired”, a considerable advance in our understanding of how the brain works:
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The brain of the world’s likely most famous amnesiac, Henry Molaison, has been under intense scrutiny by millions of people since doctors in California began slicing it 2 December to better understand why the man, who died 2 December 2008, suffered from severe amnesia. Molaison spent much of his life, after surgery to stop epileptic seizures, unable to hold new memories more than 20-30 seconds. The UCSD Brain Observatory completed slicing the brain by the end of last week. Doctors will soon begin to analyze the more than 2,400 slices they obtained in a project designed to help medicine understand how memory works.
Links to other sites: CNN, NPR, University of California at San Diego Brain Observatory
Title: Lecture: Brainsex matters in the boardroom
Location: Geneva
Link out: Click here
Description: Geneva Women in International Trade (GWIT) hosts a lecture with Dr. Anne Moir, aimed to answer questions such as: Is competing for topjobs more stressful for women? Or, Do men take more risks, and if so, why?
Date: 18 Jun 2009
Continual rapid news updates and social networking tools like Twitter can cause further indifference to human suffering, some studies show, reports CNN. The media give too little time for the brain to digest violence and suffering in one story before they bombard the viewer with the next and this can have implications on their morality, according to a University of Southern California study. Twitter sees itself as a solution to information overload because the viewer can step in and out of the information flow at will, according to CNN.
Title: Kids activities: The brain is an open book
Location: Geneva
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Description: Intearctive workshops for children and their parents at the University of Geneva. The workshop makes part of the University’s 450th birthday.
Date: 21 Mar 2009
Geneva, Switzerland (swissinfo) – Researchers at the University of Geneva, whose Neurocenter is holding its annual meeting today, have recently made strides in understanding how the brain’s organization is affected by learning and memory functions.
