Danish scientists challenge the accepted scientific views of how nerves function and of how anesthetics work. Their research suggests that action of nerves is based on sound pulses and that anesthetics inhibit their transmission.

Every medical and biological textbook says that nerves function by sending electrical impulses along their length. “But for us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation. The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced,” says associate professor Thomas Heimburg from the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University. He received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany, where biologists and physicists often work together – at most institutions these disciplines are worlds apart. Thomas Heimburg is an expert in biophysics, and when he came to Copenhagen, he met professor Andrew D. Jackson, who is an expert in theoretical physics. They decided to work together in order to study the basic mechanisms which govern the way nerves work.

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Is it possible to improve our ability to read other’s minds? In the case of mind-reading disabilities such as that found in autism spectrum disorder, it has been suggested that it is possible to train patients to become better at reading other’s minds.

What, then about pharmacological interventions? Is there an “empathy drug” that makes us more empathic? In a priority communication in Biological Psychiatry, Domes et al. report that the administration of oxitocin (relative to placebo effect) improves the ability to infer the mental state of others from social cues of the eye region. Hubmed abstract; Full Text.

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Near death, sleep-wake transition have same likelihood of correlating to out-of-body experiences

Having an out-of-body experience may seem far-fetched to some, but for those with arousal system disturbances in their brains, it may not be a far off idea that they could sense they were really outside their own body watching themselves. In previous studies of more than 13,000 Europeans, almost 6 percent said they have had such an out-of-body experience.

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Brain stimulation provides an interesting tool to study the functions of a given area of the brain. In a study by Vignal et al. published in Brain, artificial stimulation or seizures in specific mesial temporal lobe structures were assessed both in terms of location and phenomenology.

Among the findings, the researchers found that “Forty-five per cent of dreamy states were evoked by stimulation of the amygdala, 37.5% by the hippocampus and 17.5% by the para-hippocampal gyrus.”

Furthermore, they found that their study “demonstrates the existence of large neural networks that produce recall of memories via activation of the hippocampus, amygdala and rhinal cortex.”

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Transcranial application of low-frequency electrical current during early nocturnal sleep potentiates the subject’s ability to remember words memorized the night before, German neuroendocrinologists report in this week’s online issue of Nature.

It is widely believed that sleep is linked with the long-term consolidation of new memories, via slow potential oscillations < 1 Hz that arise from the prefrontal neocortex, the research team at the University of Lubeck explains. However, many consider oscillations in brain potentials to be “mere epiphenomena.”

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A. Revonsuo (2000b) proposed an evolutionary theory of dreaming, stating it is a threat simulation mechanism that allowed early humans to rehearse threat perception and avoidance without biological cost.

The present study aimed to establish the proportion of dreams containing physical threats to the dreamer, whether these represent realistic life-threatening events, and whether the dreamer successfully and realistically escapes. It also examined incidence of threatening events in real life.

A sample of most recent dreams was collected (N = 401). Only 8.48% of dreamers reported realistic life-threatening events in dreams and a realistic escape subsequently occurred in only one third of these reports. Actual severe life-threatening events were experienced by 44.58% of the sample.

These findings contradict key aspects of Revonsuo’s theory. Link Previous SCR article

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Do all people experience stimulation of each sense independently? Accumulating evidence suggests that a special kind of perceptual phenomenon – syhesthesia – leads to a confusion of the specific senses. The problem is to relate these personal accounts to the science of the brain.
In 1915, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin had his “Prometheus” played for the first time. The orchestral piece was originally written for orchestra, piano, pipe organ, choir and light organ — literally an organ that creates light. You may ask what a light organ is, and you would be perfectly right if you guessed that there is no such thing. So why did Scriabin compose a piece of music for a fictive instrument? The answer lies in the concept of “synesthesia”: the perceptual crossover between senses. Scriabin probably did not believe that one could ever play what he had composed for the light organ – he simply did not know of any other way to describe his conception of the music when the “Prometheus” was played. Although it is still debated whether Scriabin was a “true” synesthete, the Prometheus is often regarded as one of many examples of the phenomenon.

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