Cerebrum : the Dana forum on brain science最新文献

There's no shortage of statistics about the depth of America's opioid epidemic: 72,000 overdose deaths just last year, more than 2 million with problems, and so on. But numbers only begin to tell the whole story. Beth Macy, who has spent three decades reporting on central Appalachia-which she claims is the birthplace of the modern opioid epidemic-focuses her book on social and economic trends and how they affect ordinary people. Our reviewers, colleagues at the Columbia University Division on Substance Use Disorders, are well qualified to comment.

Millions of people suffer from serious mental illness, but very few receive consistent coordinated care. Since leaving his post in 2015 after 13 years as director of the National Institute of Mental Health, co-author Tom Insel has been on a mission to use technology (such as mining your smartphone) to better understand your state of mind and treat depression, schizophrenia, and other disorders. Insel and co-author Joshua Chauvin, part of the team at a healthcare innovation company, examine the potential and pitfalls of this next digital frontier.

In 1988, Lauren Slater became one of the first patients in the US to take Prozac. She also emerged as one of its most poetic chroniclers when she detailed her heady, complex love affair with the drug in "Prozac Diary" (1998). Thirty years since that first book, Slater explores the discovery, invention, science, and people behind today's drugs that define mind, emotion, and behavior, from the earliest, Thorazine and Lithium, to Ecstasy, "magic mushrooms," and through today's most cutting-edge memory drugs and neural implants.

Trying to kick drug addiction without medicines is said to be like relying on willpower to overcome diabetes or asthma. Enter naltrexone, which has been around since 1984 and reduces the cravings for drugs and alcohol by fine-tuning the brain's chemical reward system. Why has it recently increased in popularity? How does it compare to similar strategies? Has it made a difference? Our authors, who have long studied addiction and the brain, confront a drug and alcohol addiction problem that today kills more Americans each day than gun violence or car accidents.

Editor's Note: Unthinkable's author, a British neuroscientist, tracked down nine people with rare brain disorders to tell their stories. From the man who thinks he's a tiger to the doctor who feels the pain of others just by looking at them to a woman who hears music that's not there, their experiences illustrate how the brain can shape our lives in unexpected and, in some cases, brilliant and alarming ways.

In 1979, while at the National Institutes of Health, now Columbia University professor Nancy Wexler and colleagues traveled to Venezuela to study the world's largest family with Huntington's disease. That led to identifying the disease gene at the tip of human chromosome 4 and the race to find a drug that can treat people who carry the fatal gene prior to the onset of symptoms. Our author believes that a new strategy tied to turning off targeted genes could have profound implications for therapy development for Huntington's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The brain, like other parts of the body, needs to maintain "homeostasis" (a constant state) to function, and that requires continuous removal of metabolic waste. For decades, the brain's waste-removal system remained a mystery to scientists. A few years ago, a team of researchers-with the help of our author-finally found the answer. This discovery-dubbed the glymphatic system- will help us understand how toxic waste accumulates in devastating disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and point to possible strategies to prevent it.

Memories are the internal mental records that we maintain, which give us instant access to our personal past, complete with all of the facts that we know and the skills that we have cultivated. While the mind's capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous, there are desirable and undesirable difficulties in learning. Our authors provide examples of retrieval practice and individual differences in long-term retention and explore quick and slow learners.

Therapeutic vaccines, drugs, and modified human cells that activate the immune system against cancer have improved outcomes and prolonged lives in some types of cancer in the past few years. For patients with glioblastoma, the most common primary brain tumor in adults, immunotherapy is still struggling to overcome this lethal malignancy.

This article is the second of two that addresses the development of the human brain. Last month's article, "The Evolution of Human Capabilities and Abilities," focused on neurons, the basic information-processing units of the nervous system. This month's article examines the evolution of the neocortex, a part of the cerebral cortex concerned with sight and hearing in mammals, regarded as the most developed part of the cortex.