NEWS BRIEFS
Researchers provide insight into how the brain multitasks while walking New research turns the old idiom about not being able to walk and chew gum on its head. In a paper published in NeuroImage, scientists have shown that the healthy brain is able to multitask while walking without sacrificing how either activity is accomplished. During these experiments, Edward Freedman, Ph.D., an associate professor of Neuroscience who led the study, used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, located in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab. The platform combines virtual reality, EEG, and motion capture technology. While participants walk on a treadmill or manipulate objects on a table, 16 high speed cameras record the position markers placed on the person's body with millimeter precision, while simultaneously
measuring their brain activity. Researchers found that walking patterns of participants improved when they performed a cognitive task at the same time. This suggests stability improved while walking and performing another task, compared to when the participants solely focused on walking. “Looking at these findings to understand how a young healthy brain is able to switch tasks will give us better insight into what’s going awry in a brain with a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer’s disease,” said Freedman. MoBI avatar with human traces. (Courtesy Freedman)
A key to restoring sight may be held in a drug that treats alcoholism Researchers may have found a way to revive some vision loss caused by age-related macular degeneration – the leading cause of blindness – and the inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a rare genetic disorder that causes the breakdown and loss of cells in the retina. The drug disulfiram – marketed under the brand name Antabuse – used to treat alcoholism, may hold the key to restoring this vision loss. The research published in Science Advances involved mice and found disulfiram helped restore some vision by suppressing the sensory noise in the inner retina caused by dying photoreceptors in the outer retina. This is brought on by the progression of outer retinal degeneration (such as age-related macular degeneration or RP), in which the light-sensing cells called “photoreceptors” slowly die over years. In past research, as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Michael Telias, Ph.D., assistant professor of Ophthalmology, Neuroscience, and Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and first author on the paper, found that as photoreceptors die off it disrupts the function of the inner retina. This causes the sensory noise that ultimately becomes a barrier between the surviving photoreceptors and the brain. This latest research, led by Richard Kramer, Ph.D., professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Goard, Ph.D., assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, found that disulfiram can target that sensory noise, allowing the surviving photoreceptors in the outer retina to complete the signal to the brain and ultimately restore some vision. Image right: A mouse retinal ganglion cell (green), which becomes hyperactive in degenerative vision disorders. Other retinal cell types are labeled in blue. Hyperactivity interferes with the proper transfer of signals from the retina to the brain. Richard Kramer's lab at UC Berkeley has discovered what causes hyperactivity and has identified drugs that interfere with the process, and by doing so, improve vision. (Image credit: Shubhash Yadav, Kramer lab) NEUROSCIENCE | VOL 13, 2022
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