Chronically microdosing THC, the psychoactive ingredient in weed, boosts memory in aged mice, a study published last month in Nature Medicine claims.I’m a bit late to the party, but I finally had the chance to look more deeply into the paper, and I’ll be blunt: although it made some pretty dope claims, it opens even more questions.What does the study really say? Let’s hash it out.**If you’re young, weed’s probably not the best thing for…

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A team of University of Pennsylvania neuroscientists showed for the first time that electrical stimulation delivered when memory is predicted to fail can improve memory function in the human brain. Here, the blue dots indicate overall electrode placement; the yellow dot (top-right corner) indicates the electrode used to stimulate the subject’s brain to increase memory performance. (Image: Joel Stein and Youssef Ezzyat) The first time I heard that shooting electrical currents across your brain can boost…

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An MIT study of the neural circuits that underlie memory process reveals, for the first time, that memories are formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the long-term storage location in the brain’s cortex. This image shows memory engram cells (green and red) which are crucial for permanent memory storage in the prefrontal cortex. Image: Takashi Kitamura. I keep five copies of my photos—on my hard drive, external hard drive and three different cloud storage services.…

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Artificial Intelligence, for all of its recent wins against human, is still somewhat of a misnomer. While AIs are becoming ridiculously good at specific tasks, they're still a far cry from what humans would consider "intelligent".There're many ways one can describe intelligence and what it encompasses, but one school of thought defines intelligence as the ability to flexibly tackle new problems, based on past experiences and logical reasoning.The problem with our current AIs is that…

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I've always found brainwaves rather mysterious. As someone who works mostly on the molecular level of neuroscience, I'm far more focused on the nitty-gritty of the brain's ongoings, rather than more widespread phenomena including brain waves--the broad electrical activity sweeping across the brain that can be picked up by EEG. You've probably heard of them: alpha, which spring into action when you're awake but relaxed with your eyes closed; theta, when you're moving about either awake…

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A chunk of mouse hippocampus reconstructed after imaging with expansion microscopy. (A similar technique as the one in this post.) Credit Ed Boyden/MIT.First came light-activated neurons. Then came transparent brains and creepy mini-brain blobs. Now scientist have found a way to literally blow brain tissue up like a balloon up to 20 times their normal size, allowing us to peek into mouse brains in unprecedented detail.The method, iterative expansion microscopy (iExM), comes from neuroscientist wizard…

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Not an alien world, but an immune system. Artist's rendition of Cas9 enveloping DNA strands that are about the get chopped. Source: http://www.publico.es/ Quick dispatch from the world of CRISPR.And no, I don't mean that drawer in your fridge ;pCRISPR-Cas9 is the gee-whiz gene-editing tool that's taken the world by storm. Compared to previous methods, it's *relatively* easy to use and has an impressive success rate. (Although CRISPR is often touted as the democratization of genetic…

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And that makes the brain a hell lot more powerful that we previously thought.Scientists and science writers (myself included) often compare the brain to computers. Despite surface similarities, the type of computation greatly differs between the two. Computers run digitally on 0s and 1s; while the brain also has a digital component--a neuron either fires or not--that's only a measly part of how it actually processes information.First, a very brief primer on how neurons work. Most neurons…

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Where do dreams originate in the brain? Dreams are probably one of the most mysterious neurobiological phenomenon that scientists can study. While the field generally agrees that they seem to be doing something--for example, helping the sleeping brain process the previous day's memories--they're really mostly still an enigma.Case in point: until recently, scientists haven't really figured out when dreaming actually happens while we sleep. Every night we go through several sleep cycles, comprised of rapid eye…

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This is a cross post from the npj Science of Learning Community blog.I’ve been teaching myself the guitar lately. Like many people, I start with a song that I like, and once I’m semi-proficient at it, I get bored and immediately move on to the next one. And so it goes, day after day, rinse and repeat. But here's the rub: even with diligent practice, none of songs seem to stick with me.As it happens,…

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