Brain Sciences最新文献

Epilepsy is a chronic neurologic disorder characterized by recurrent and spontaneous seizures (Figure 1) [...].

Background/Objectives: Anxiety disorders (ADs) affect up to 20% of mothers in the postpartum period, characterized by psychological symptoms (e.g., emotion dysregulation; ER) and physical symptoms (e.g., disrupted bodily awareness). Although Cognitive Behavioural Therapy effectively reduces anxiety and mood symptoms, it shows limited efficacy in addressing ER difficulties and rarely targets interoceptive dysfunction-both common in postpartum ADs. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a brief mindfulness-based intervention in improving anxiety, ER, and interoception in mothers with postpartum ADs. A secondary aim is to examine changes in brain connectivity associated with these domains. Methods: This protocol describes a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial involving 50 postpartum mothers with ADs. Participants will be randomized to receive either a 4-week mindfulness intervention plus treatment-as-usual (TAU) or TAU alone. Participants in the mindfulness + TAU group will complete a virtual 4-week group intervention adapted from Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. The TAU group will receive usual care for 4 weeks and then be offered the mindfulness intervention. Self-report measures of anxiety, ER, and interoception will be collected at baseline, post-intervention, and at a 3-month follow-up. Resting-state functional MRI will be conducted at baseline and post-intervention to assess functional connectivity changes. This trial has been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT07262801). Results: Improvements in anxiety, ER, and interoception are anticipated, along with decreased default mode network, and increased salience network connectivity post-intervention is hypothesized. Conclusions: This study will be the first to examine the combined psychological and neural effects of mindfulness in postpartum ADs, offering a potentially scalable mind-body treatment.

Background: p-values are ubiquitous in scientific research, yet they fundamentally fail to quantify the strength of evidence for or against competing hypotheses. This limitation is particularly problematic in neuroimaging meta-analyses, where researchers need to assess how strongly the available data support specific and spatially consistent patterns of brain activation across studies.

Methods: In this work, we present a practical approach that transforms p-values into their corresponding upper bounds on the Bayes factor, which quantify the maximum plausible evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis given the observed data. The method is illustrated within the framework of Activation Likelihood Estimation, the most widely used coordinate-based meta-analytic technique in neuroimaging and applied to a reference dataset comprising 73 finger-tapping experiments.

Results: The results show that effects traditionally classified as statistically significant using the canonical Activation Likelihood Estimation framework actually span a wide range of evidential strengths, with Bayes factor bounds varying approximately from 46 to 410. This finding reveals substantial heterogeneity in weight of evidence that is concealed by conventional threshold-based inference.

Conclusion: By enabling the construction of voxel-wise maps of evidential strength while remaining fully compatible with existing analysis pipelines, the proposed approach helps to avoid common misinterpretations of p-values and improves the interpretability and reliability of neuroimaging meta-analytic conclusions. It therefore provides a conservative, Bayesian-inspired complement to standard significance maps.

Background/objectives: The present study aimed to examine the associations among achievement motivation, meaning in life, and well-being among video game players and to investigate differences between players with approach- and avoidance-oriented motivations.

Methods: The sample consisted of 296 university students who reported playing video games (192 men and 104 women), aged 18 to 35 years (M = 22.62; SD = 2.64). Participants completed a battery of self-report measures, including the Achievement Goal Questionnaire, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, administered anonymously.

Results: Mediation analyses revealed that meaning in life was a significant mediator in the relationship between approach-oriented mastery goals and well-being (Ind = 0.07; 95% CI [0.02, 0.12]). However, no significant mediation effect was found for approach-oriented performance goals (Ind = 0.04; 95% CI [-0.01, 0.09]). Independent-samples t-tests indicated that participants with approach-oriented motivations reported significantly higher levels of meaning in life (t(294) = 4.44; p < 0.001), presence of meaning (t(294) = 5.74; p < 0.001), and well-being (t(294) = 5.52; p < 0.001) compared to those with avoidance-oriented motivations.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that approach-oriented achievement motivations among players are positively associated with meaning in life and are indirectly associated with higher well-being, whereas avoidance-oriented motivations are associated with lower levels of well-being. These results carry potential implications for game design, education, and psychotherapy.

Background: Epileptic seizures are unpredictable, and while existing deep learning models achieve high accuracy, their deployment on wearable devices is constrained by high computational costs and latency. To address this, this work proposes the RGF-Model, a lightweight network that unifies seizure prediction and detection within a single causal framework.

Methods: By integrating Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) with a Ring-Buffer Gated Recurrent Unit (Ring-GRU), the model achieves adaptive task-specific feature conditioning while strictly enforcing causal consistency for real-time inference. A multi-teacher knowledge distillation strategy is employed to transfer complementary knowledge from complex teacher ensembles to the lightweight student, significantly reducing complexity without sacrificing accuracy.

Results: Evaluations on the CHB-MIT and Siena datasets demonstrate that the RGF-Model outperforms state-of-the-art teacher models in terms of efficiency while maintaining comparable accuracy. Specifically, on CHB-MIT, it achieves 99.54% Area Under the Curve (AUC) and 0.01 False Prediction Rate per hour (FPR/h) for prediction, and 98.78% Accuracy (Acc) for detection, with only 0.082 million parameters. Statistical significance was assessed using a random predictor baseline (p < 0.05).

Conclusions: The results indicate that the RGF-Model provides a highly efficient solution for real-time wearable epilepsy monitoring.

Despite unprecedented disconnection from nature and increased urbanisation, the brain still shows an affinity for nature. However, biophilia lacks a neuroscience foundation despite growing evidence of how the brain changes in response to the contrasting influences of urban and natural environments. To address this timely gap, this paper establishes Neurobiophilia through four objectives. First, it identifies seven neuro-needs (7NNs) and establishes their hierarchical order and interconnected outcomes. Second, it maps how natural environments fulfil each of the brain's 7NNs. Third, it explores whether climate change is turning nature into a harmful environment for the brain, specifically with respect to temperature extremes. Fourth, it examines how built environments vary in their enrichment with respect to the 7NNs. This paper highlights critical environmental enrichment challenges in natural environments caused by climate change and in built environments. The novel Neurobiophilia framework established herein identifies these gaps and provides recommendations to achieve neurosustainability through environmental enrichment that sustains adaptive brain responses throughout the lifespan.

Background/Objectives: Wearable affective human-computer interaction increasingly relies on sparse-channel EEG signals to ensure comfort and practicality in real-life scenarios. However, the limited information provided by sparse-channel EEG, together with pronounced inter-subject variability, makes reliable cross-subject emotion recognition particularly challenging. Methods: To address these challenges, we propose a cross-subject emotion recognition model, termed TSCL-LwF, based on sparse-channel EEG. It combines a multi-scale convolutional network (TSCL) and an incremental learning strategy with Learning without Forgetting (LwF). Specifically, the TSCL is utilized to capture the spatio-temporal characteristics of sparse-channel EEG, which employs diverse receptive fields of convolutional networks to extract and fuse the interaction information within the local prefrontal area. The incremental learning strategy with LwF introduces a limited set of labeled target domain data and incorporates the knowledge distillation loss to retain the source domain knowledge while enabling rapid target domain adaptation. Results: Experiments on the DEAP dataset show that the proposed TSCL-LwF achieves accuracy of 77.26% for valence classification and 80.12% for arousal classification. Moreover, it also exhibits superior accuracy when evaluated on the self-collected dataset EPPVR. Conclusions: The successful implementation of cross-subject emotion recognition based on a sparse-channel EEG will facilitate the development of wearable EEG technologies with practical applications.

Background/Objectives: Emotion dysregulation is central to many psychiatric disorders. Laboratory-based tasks designed to assess emotion processing and regulation often rely on standardized affective stimuli whose ecological validity remains unclear. We contextualize this study in our broader research program of neurophenomenological reflection of standard paradigms in experimental cognitive psychology. Methods: This study investigates the lived experience of 27 patients with affective disorders as they performed a cognitive-affective task combining working memory demands with exposure to negative emotional images. Phenomenological interviews were used to collect data on their experience of the task. Results: We identified three key experiential domains: whether the stimuli are capable of eliciting a spontaneous emotional response, voluntary construction of an emotional responses, and its temporal dynamics. Patients reported on two alterations in affectivity that are associated with dysregulation: (a) affective enchantment, characterized by intense emotions combined with superstitious appraisal; and (b) disintwinement (a sense of detachment and emotional blunting). Emotional responses exhibited complex unfolding across moment-to-hour timescales, sometimes persisting and blending across trials (impressionability), reflecting clinical phenomena such as rumination. Additionally, patients employed a range of explicit and implicit regulation strategies, many acquired through therapy or long-term coping. Conclusions: Our findings reveal the limitations of rapid, static image-based paradigms in eliciting authentic and spontaneous affectivity in clinical populations, highlighting the need for more ecologically valid experimental designs. Furthermore, inclusion of reports on such subtle affective states as vital feelings in laboratory-based experimental assessments is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of altered phenomenology of affectivity in affective disorders.

Background: Oxytocin (OT) is a nonapeptide hormone produced in the hypothalamus, released into the brain and peripheral circulation, and plays a key role in social behavior. Recent studies indicate that complement component C4a is an OT-binding protein, which modulates plasma OT concentrations in mice. However, the role of C4a is unclear as to whether it contributes to consolation behavior. Methods: Social behavior, especially allogrooming, which is a form of empathy that depends on detecting the emotional states of others, was measured in wild-type or C4a/Slp knockout (Slp^-/-) male mice. Results: Observer mice of both genotypes exhibited comforting (allogrooming) behavior toward a cage-mate demonstrator during reunion after brief isolation of the demonstrator mice. When demonstrator mice experienced body restraint stress during isolation, the allogrooming behavior was significantly increased in both genotypes, with a markedly greater increase in Slp^-/- than in Slp^+/+ mice. Allogrooming behavior in observer Slp^-/- mice was significantly suppressed by an OT receptor antagonist. Furthermore, immunohistochemical analysis revealed that activation was significantly elevated in OT-positive hypothalamic neurons in observer Slp^-/- mice that interacted with stressed demonstrator mice. OT release from the isolated hypothalamus, stimulated via CD38 and TRPM2 channel activation, was greater in Slp^-/- mice than in Slp^+/+ mice. Conclusions: Our results highlight that the data are consistent with a potential role for C4a in modulating neural circuits, possibly via its peripheral action on OT bioavailability. Direct evidence for C4a's action within the brain remains a hypothesis for future investigation, for example, via site-specific manipulations.

Purpose: While migraine is linked to increased cerebrovascular risk, its association with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) remains underexplored. Methods: We conducted a retrospective case-control study using population-based electronic medical records. NAION patients were compared to propensity score-matched controls regarding migraine prevalence and clinical characteristics. Results: From 2001 to 2022, among 6,566,619 patients, 1629 NAION cases (mean age 67 ± 13 years; 45% female) and 6433 propensity matched controls were identified. The prevalence of migraine was similar in both groups (3.8% vs. 3.3%, p = 0.3). Among migraine patients, those with NAION (n = 62, age 62 ± 11) and controls (n = 212, age 60 ± 11) had comparable baseline characteristics, except for congestive heart failure (9.7% vs. 2.4%, p = 0.027). Within the NAION cohort, migraineurs (n = 64) were younger (62 ± 12 vs. 67 ± 13 years, p < 0.001), and had lower rates of diabetes mellitus (35% vs. 57%, p < 0.001) and peripheral vascular disease (1.6% vs. 9.6%, p = 0.03). Female migraineurs developed NAION at a younger age than females without migraine (60 ± 12 vs. 69 ± 12 years, p < 0.001); no such difference was seen in males. Multinomial logistic regression revealed that migraine was independently associated with younger age at NAION onset, particularly in patients aged <59 (OR = 5.8, p = 0.001) compared with those >70. An independent 1:4 migraine to non-migraine matched cohort (n = 310) showed similar age-dependent trends. Conclusions: While migraine was not more prevalent among NAION patients, females with migraine developed NAION at a younger age and had fewer vascular comorbidities. Congestive heart failure was more prevalent among migraine patients who developed NAION, suggesting a potential contributory role of systemic hypoperfusion.