Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, might just revolutionize how depression and anxiety are treated in cancer patients. In a groundbreaking trial, a single dose combined with therapy significantly reduced emotional suffering, and these effects often lasted over two years. As follow-up studies expand the research to multiple doses and larger samples, scientists are eyeing a possible new standard of care that merges psychedelics with psychological support.
You probably think you’re listening to my voice right now. But what if I told you that you’re actually experiencing a sophisticated hallucination?
Perception isn’t the passive process that most of us imagine it to be, with our senses simply recording reality and sending it up to our brains for processing. Instead, our brains are constantly constructing theories about what’s going on around us—and sometimes our brains get reality wrong.
Here to explain this mind-bending way of looking at, well, the mind, is Daniel Yon, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Daniel is also the author of a recent book called A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality.
Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us.
Thank you for having me.
So why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about your background and how it led you to write your latest book.
Yeah, so I’m an experimental psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist, so that means my day job is to try and understand how your mind and brain work and how what happens inside your skull kind of makes the world that you live in.
Psychological problems such as depression and anxiety increase the risk of cognitive impairment in older adults. But mechanisms on the effect of psychological disorder on cognitive function is inconclusive. Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment. RNT may increase the risk of cognitive impairment. However, there are fewer studies related to RNT and cognitive function, and there is a lack of epidemiological studies to explore the relationship between RNT and cognitive function.
A cross-sectional study of 424 older adults aged 60 years or over was performed form May to November 2023 in hospital. To investigate the RNT level by using the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ), and investigate the cognitive function level by using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scale (MoCA). Multivariable linear regression and subgroup analyses were used to explore the relationship between RNT and cognitive function.
We categorized the total RNT scores into quartiles. The multivariable linear regression analysis showed that after adjusting for all covariates, the participants in the Q3 and Q4 groups exhibited lower cognition scores (Q3:β =-0.180, 95%CI-2.849~-0.860; Q4:β =-0.164, 95%-2.611~-0.666) compared to the Q1 group. The results of the subgroup analyses showed that individuals aged 60 ~ 79 years, junior high school and above are more prone to suffer from cognitive impairment with a high RNT score.
Maryland-based biotech Galimedix Therapeutics is ready to take a big swing on its oral Alzheimer’s disease candidate after no serious adverse events were reported and the small molecule successfully crossed the blood-brain barrier in a phase 1 trial.
The first-ever clinical trial for GAL-101 tested single and multiple ascending doses of the asset in more than 100 healthy volunteers, Galimedix reported in a Sept. 12 release. The company is now initiating fundraising for a phase 2 trial.
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have created a miniaturized microscope for real-time, high-resolution, noninvasive imaging of brain activity in mice. The device is a significant step toward revolutionizing how neuroscientists study the brain.
“What we are doing is creating technology to image brain activity in freely moving and behaving mice to open up the behavior paradigm,” said Weijian Yang, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “The goal is to create a device capable of enabling research into brain activity and behavior in mice in real time—to see how brain activity drives behavior or perception.”
The microscope will advance insights into how the brain works, which is expected to benefit human health by empowering the development of new and improved therapeutic strategies for brain disorders.
A new study has found that a chick’s ability to mentally organize numbers along a line from left to right is not learned but is instead a direct result of brain specialization that occurs before hatching. Researchers found that exposing chick eggs to light in the final days of incubation causes the two hemispheres of the brain to develop distinct functions, which in turn establishes an innate tendency for the chicks to count from left to right.
For many years, scientists and philosophers have debated the origins of the “mental number line,” a common intuition where people visualize smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right. The prevailing theory suggested this was a cultural artifact, learned through years of reading and writing in a left-to-right direction.
However, this idea has been challenged by findings that pre-verbal infants and even some animals exhibit a similar spatial bias for numbers, suggesting a deeper, biological foundation. Researchers have hypothesized that this foundation lies in brain lateralization, the process where the left and right hemispheres of the brain become specialized for different cognitive tasks. While this connection seemed plausible, there was little direct experimental evidence to confirm that brain specialization actually causes this numerical mapping.