NRSC 4132 Blog

You just finished your 30 mile bike ride or just finished that triathlon you always wanted in great time.. Now your exhaustedâ?¦ now what why canâ??t you finish your thought? Is it possible that the muscle fatigued you experiences can impacted you mentally? Studies indicate that the mental and actual movements share overlapping neural substrates (Jeannerod, 2001; Fadiga and Craighero, 2004; Munzert et al., 2009) and preserve the same spatiotemporal characteristics according to Demougeot. Demougeot suggested that if the two components are related that one will have to mentally prepare or exercise the mind to have optimal performance. ..â??Appropriate mental training can enhance motor performance.â?? Demougeot seek to find the answer to have much physically activity or muscle fatigue will start to have an effect on the mental stabilization of oneâ??s cognitions? In their study they measured the temporal features of actual and mental movements before and after muscle fatigueâ?¦ â??A strong prediction is that duration of mental actions should be sensitive to muscle fatigue, because the forward model receives as input the efferent copy of inappropriate motor commands and the perturbed state of the arm, both caused by muscle fatigue.â??

To conduct their study they used seventeen adults who were all health with no neurological problems who they used as participates. The participates then were asked to move their arms, physically and then mentally at different angles in a conducted sequence. They then tested the participate before and after the muscle fatigue.

They discovered that muscle fatigue significantly influenced the mental aspect of the experiment. Demougeot discovered that muscle fatigue significantly influenced alterations in the signaling used in mental cognition. They also discovered actual movements were in general slower immediately after fatigue, but progressively returned to prefatigue values. When applied to their study they discovered that mental movements were faster immediately after fatigue and gradually returned to prefatigue values. Demougeot studied the motor effent outflow signals to justify their thesis and this is what the concluded â??However, its efferent copy is available to the forward model, which naturally predicts very fast movements. Since during mental movements there is not sensory information, and state estimation derives from forward model alone, the brain continues to simulate faster mental movements after fatigue based on inappropriate (large) neural drives. This explains why mental movements were consistently faster than actual movements after fatigue, at least until their complete adaptation. This process, i.e., state estimation without sensory feedback, also explains the slower update of motor controller (i.e., motor commands) during mental compared to actual movements after fatigue. â??

Though neuroimaging Demougeot discovered that muscle fatigue can greatly impact oneâ??s ability to mentally function as proven above. One can also conclude that next time you stay up to study all night for an exam (muscle fatigue) that it could be detrimental to our test grade. Demougeot proved that muscle fatigue influences motor performance and action planning. Itâ??s no longer enough for physically training but mentally training is required now too.

To read full article please follow https://cuvpn.colorado.edu/content/31/29/,DanaInfo=www.jneurosci.org+10712.full

The World Wide Web recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and what a lot of growing up it has done! August 6, 2011 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of the very first web page by Tim Berners-Lee. On it he wrote,? The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.? So think about that for a minute. The World Wide Web was invented so that scientists could collaborate. 20 years on how are we doing?

Today most traditionally published journals have websites and are available in electronic format. There are numerous open access publications such as PloS Biology that are web based and free to peruse. Scientific information is available in all manner of places. There are dedicated search engines such as Scirus as well as huge public databases for research such as PubMed. The scientific community hasn?t done a bad job using the WWW as a new platform for publishing, but what about that last sentiment ?Collaborators welcome,?? Berners-Lee was seeking the input and help of people who he was now connected to by computer. The WWW was a new way to connect and share. It grew because people from across the globe recognized its potential and worked together to make it what it is today: a network linking billions of people and their ideas. While journals are more than happy to use the web as a new platform to publish, scientists still have not fully embraced the notion that the web is also a great tool for collaboration. However, several innovations give me hope that someday researchers will reap the full benefits of the WWW.

For instance, the site Nature Precedings is a preprint repository for the Earth sciences that allows researchers to submit papers and receive feedback in the form of comments and votes to help improve the quality of the work. Not only is this site a permanent citeable archive, it is also a place where researchers are able to go to discuss their work and others?. This type of collaboration is no doubt something Tim Berners-Lee would approve of.

Another great thing about the World Wide Web regarding science, is that now research is available in so many different formats that anyone can keep up on the latest science news. The primary literature is good for some, but even people with no science background can enjoy and learn from a post on Neuroscience News, or any number of well written and entertaining science blogs. I feel that science often gets a bad rap for being tedious and difficult to understand, but the web has done so much to dispel that myth and show people how wonderful, fun, and important science really is. So Happy Birthday WWW! You?re doing a great job. Keep it up.

Reconsolidation theory states that the reactivation of memories destabilizes them unless they are reconsolidated within a certain amount of time. A study by Susanne Diekelmann shows that memory reactivation actually serves different purposed when we are awake and when we are asleep. Apparently memory reactivation during slow wave sleep results in an immediate stabilization while reactivation during wakefulness still results in destabilization. Diekelmann and her lab reactivated memories by presenting subjects with odors, and used fMRI technology to image the brain during reactivation. Participants in this study learned during the evening in the presence of an experimental odor in order to establish a connection between the odor and the material being learned.

During slow wave sleep, the participants were presented with the odor and then awoken a few minutes later to be started learning an interference object location task. Reactivating memories using the presented odor during waking lead to a reduced ability to recall the original object location task when interference preceeded. Using the fMRI, they found that reactivation during slow wave sleep activated hippocampal and posterior cortical regions whereas reactivation during wakefulness activated activated prefrontal cortical areas. Their findings indicate that the reactivations of memory traces have opposite effects on memory during slow wave sleep and awake times.

This study makes me think about Jim Carey in Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where he undergoes a procedure while sleeping to erase all of his memories of his ex-girlfriend. While this plot seems totally unrealistic, it may be something that will be plausible in the future. But according to this study, wouldn't it be more effective to try and erase memories while people are awake? Imagine. What would the world be like if we could selectively choose the things we want to remember and those we want to be erased from our lives? We build our personalities and choices off of previous experiences, and learn from our mistakes. If we erase our mistakes, aren't we just likely to make them again? I mean Jim Carey went looking for his ex-girlfriend again in the movie.

For more information or to read this study check out "Labile or Stable: Opposing Consequences for Memory While Reactivated during Waking and Sleep" in Nature Neuroscience.

In case you don't know what they are, throat lozenges are those chalky, powdery tablets primarily composed of zinc that you take to alleviate sore throat pain. Similar to a cough drop, they've been around for years and seem to be part of many people's remedy regimen to treat such symptoms of the common cold. Pain is one of those feelings that not many of us like to deal with or even think about. Whether you are taking aspirin, acetaminophen, or throat lozenges to manage throat pain, it is known that many options are abound in the marketplace.

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional reaction that usually motivates us to seek some sort of "pain-killer." Sometimes it even gets to the point where we don't care to know or what extent we have to go to alleviate our pain--symptoms of such "pain-killers" disregarded. An extensive amount of funding and research has gone into the clinical aspects of pain management drugs including not only over-the-counter pain medications such as Tylenol and Advil, but chronic pain anesthetics with detrimental side effects. Such drug categories include neurolytic blocks, narcotics, opiates, and other analgesics. Side effects from all of these drugs, acute and severe, range from topical rashes and swelling to addiction and cardiac arrest. Holistic healing, be it through ?mind over matter? or ingesting natural antidotes, may be a way to avoid pain killers that bring severe side effects with them. According to comprehensive research involving zinc in last month's issue of Nature Neuroscience, perhaps there are some natural treatment methods of pain management.

Zinc, as previously mentioned, is a metallic chemical element that is readily available and affordable throughout the marketplace. In fact, it is so copious, that it is the 24th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the second most prevalent trace element in the body according to Nozaki's et al. investigation. Not only is it essential for life and crucial for cellular metabolism, but Nozaki et al. have discovered a role for zinc in brain functions such as neurological disorders and pathological pain management. The trouble with studying this element is the myriad of potential zinc targets on the molecular basis. Nozaki et al. noted that NMDA receptors are one of the potential synaptic targets for zinc effects of excitatory transmission and have key roles in both the physiology and pathology of the nervous system. Notably, these receptors contribute to pain transmission and the development of chronic pain.

As we understand, there are various subunits that comprise the NMDA receptor (NR1 and NR2 subunits). In particular, the NR2A subunit, which is widely expressed in the adult nervous system, has an intense sensitivity for extracellular zinc, or zinc taken in the body beyond endogenous levels of zinc. Using knock-in NR2A-H128S mice, they found that high affinity zinc binding to the NR2A subunit is enough to dampen NMDA receptor function in pain pathways throughout the central nervous system. Though Nozaki et al. have not found the precise location of the site where zinc diffuses in the vicinity of NMDA receptors, they did find that NMDA-dependent spinal long-term potentiation, a well-known substrate for hyperalgesia, is blocked by exogenous zinc.

This is an enormous discovery in terms of future experimentation and the potential role of the natural element zinc in place of dangerous pain-management pharmaceuticals. It's absolutely incredible to me how technology is unveiling Mother Nature's organic remedy for so many of the problems and illnesses in today's society. Not that I doubt the use of western medication and synthetic pharmaceuticals as treatment options for various illnesses, but I strongly condone taking natural elements found on this planet with a far shorter list of side effects. A lesson to consider: keep on sucking on those zinc throat lozenges when you have a sore throat!