Sam Talks About...

You may have wondered, why can't humans see in the dark, or could we learn to see radiowaves etc. the short answer to why we don't have these sensory systems is because of the evolutionary cost compared with the very small amount of gain, if any. It would be incredibly energy and time consuming to evolve good enough night vision when we can just go to sleep at night and see during the day. So far our senses have served us well, but what if we could give ourselves new senses with the aid of technology? After all, we can invent new technology much much faster than mother nature can invent X-ray vision eyeballs! Neuronal plasticity is the ability of neurones to change their connectivity with one another in order to gain new functions or to modify existing functions. This neural plasticity is essential for memory and learning and gives us the ability to perceive the world around us. By introducing a new input to the brain, you will trigger the process of neuronal plasticity as ...

The recent publication of a clinical trial for a drug (Aducanumab) being developed to treat Alzheimer's disease has hit the mainstream media big time. In all of this commotion, especially when the reporting may not have been written by someone familiar with the field, it can be easy for people to get swept away by the huge media buzz and feel like "this is it! the new wonder drug everyone has been waiting for is finally here!"  Except that's not quite the case, as it rarely ever is when a scientific story hits the news. Whether its the BBC, online science blogs or your tabloid newspaper of preference, all of these news outlets are competing for your attention and are striving to be the first to break the story.  I won't go through the study myself, because I'm about to point you to two excellent sources that have already done a brilliant job of it, but there are a few things I want people to clearly see: This is quite an early study and the failur...

You probably never really thought about this before, and neither had I really until I read about it about a month ago. But it turns out that your eyes are pretty much the least important player in vision. You might be pretty sceptical at this point, so I want you to close your eyes and imagine a boat. Done it? Okay, good, you just saw something without using your eyes! At this point, you're probably wondering where I'm going with this. ell I'm about to show you how much work has to be put in to be able to see something properly and hopefully you'll realise just how impressive the machinery  in-between your ears really is. First, let's start with how we can go from an array of photoreceptors in the retina to a complex image of the world around us in 3D. First you have the two types of photoreceptors in the primary visual system; rod cells can detect low level light but they do not give very good acuity and they do not give colour vision, cone cells can detect colo...

The ability to identify and control individual brain cells (neurones) has generated huge interest in recent years, it's made for some startling discoveries and some incredible images (like the one below). But we're really only beginning to scratch the surface of the potential these technologies hold, and the techniques here are quite controversial.  This is a real image of individual neurones and the connections they make, all with individual colourings  The actual methods for controlling individual neurones require a lot of complex genetic manipulation, but the general concepts are easier to get to grasps with. The main method used for the genetic manipulation of animal genomes is the cre-lox system. I won't go into the details (you can read a great review by its inventor here ) but this technique allows scientists to insert or remove any gene you want, in any cell, even at specific times (when the cells are still growing or mature for example).  The next ques...

Many of us have terrible sleeping patterns, often as a result of staying up late for assignments, parties or just not realising it’s so late. This may have been especially true throughout fresher’s week and the first few weeks of lectures at university. It can be very easy to get into this habit, and it only takes a couple of late nights in a row to really throw your body clock out of touch with the rest of the world! This is a problem that is very concerning to those who are aware, however very few people are aware of the current lack of sleep being attained by many adolescents. To be clear, I refer to adolescents as those who have started/ gone through puberty but are not yet full adults (i.e. 14-21 year olds). One often cited study found that over 45% of adolescents in the USA have inadequate sleep (less than the recommended 8.5-9.5h per day on a regular basis). This lead to 15-52% of students reporting excessive sleepiness, frequent daytime sleepiness, oversleeping and sle...

This is a common question that I'm sure everyone has asked themselves, and so have scientists for hundreds of years! Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist, was the first to investigate this phenomenon and coined it 'infantile amnesia'. His view was that memories of the first few years of life were repressed because they were too traumatic to deal with at such a young age, as the relevant coping mechanisms for a confusing and often cruel world had not developed yet. Nowadays not many people give much weight to Freud's explanations of childhood development (mostly because it's complete garbage).  In more recent times, Simcock and Hayne (2002) hypothesised that long term memory formation was dependant on language, based on the fact that infantile amnesia seemed to disappear at about the same time as language developed. However, many other animals also exhibit infantile amnesia so language development cannot be the full answer (although it may play a role).  ...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia worldwide, with 500,000 people currently living with the disease in the UK alone and, with an ageing population, this number is only going to increase. Despite huge efforts, there are relatively few treatments for AD and so far these all only treat specific symptoms of the disease and don’t combat the disease itself. For example, some current drugs allow brain cells (neurones) to keep communicating with each other for longer without dying, but inevitably these cells will be overwhelmed by the disease. Other people have tried to treat the disease by replacing the lost cells with new ones , but without removing the disease these cells will still die after a time too.  What is needed is a treatment that actually combats the cause of the disease itself. This has been a very difficult task with AD, as it is not entirely certain how the disease works. It is generally believed that the misfolding of a protein, called β (bet...

With my degree finally finished I'd like to go through a topic that has only been covered by one lecture in my whole degree, but one that has always interested me. Why does it take so long for antidepressants to take effect? They increase levels of a brain chemical (or a neurotransmitter as we call them in neuroscience) called serotonin within a very short period of time, but it can take up to 12 weeks before there is any improvement in symptoms of patients with depression. Well finally I have heard an idea about why that might be.  But first, you need to know a little bit about depression and the drugs that we use to treat it. Clinical depression is a condition in which the patient suffers from incredibly low mood, loss of enthusiasm and they have a generally horrible time. I'm sure most of you have a fairly decent idea of what depression is like, maybe you know someone or are someone who has suffered from it, or is suffering from it now.  The generally accepted idea beh...

Everyone knows that eating a healthy diet is, well healthy. It can cut your risk of practically every disease; such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and there is evidence to show that good nutrition can also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias.  While there is good evidence to show that a varied and healthy diet helps reduce the risk of a diagnosis, there is little to no research carried out into the effects of a healthy diet on biological markers of the disease.  A comparison of normal and healthy brains. However, very recently,  Berti et al  investigated just that. They took 54 middle-aged people with a dementia score of zero and cognitive performance was in the normal range for their age and education level. They gained full dietary information and took a number of brain scans for different markers of AD.  First was brain volume, specifically grey matter volume, which is known to decrease in late...

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the left/right brain myth , which suggests that people who are "left brained" are more logical and analytical and those who are "right brained" are more creative and artistic. Hopefully the vast majority of you also know that this is wrong, although a shocking amount proportion of the general public do seem to actually believe this myth and it even gets incorporated into our education systems . It may be simple to think that, just like you can prefer to use one hand over another (handedness) you also prefer to use one side of the brain (brainedness?). This is wrong.  Anyway, I'm getting off topic. First a quick bit of housekeeping: on 15th March TEDxUoN are hosting an event about "Breaking Boundaries" including 12 amazing speakers, brilliant performance acts and free food! be sure to buy your tickets  and check the TEDx portion of my blog for more details !  Okay, back to the matter at hand. If you read th...