Designer Virus Infects Your Brain to Help You Lose Weight

If you want to shift some excess weight, your first instinct might be to reach for the carrot sticks or lace up your running shoes. That’s the old way to lose weight, though – and science has a much better idea: a designer virus. In studies at Johns Hopkins University, rats who were injected with a certain virus ate less and weighed less than rats in the control group. The virus inhibited the neuropeptide Y (NPY) protein in the brain, resulting in decreased hunger.

There were, however, some even more surprising effects of the virus. Rats who received the virus and subsequently ate huge amounts of high-calorie foods didn’t develop the expected white fat build-up; instead, they developed brown fat which is much easier for the body to burn off. The virus is a very, very long way off from being used on humans, but if it makes it to people one day we might be able to look forward to smaller appetites and a greater percentage of “healthy” fat on our bones.

Stunning 3D Movie Shows How Brains Lose Consciousness

If you have ever taken sedatives or been sedated for a surgery, you know that strange, fuzzy feeling of losing consciousness. Your brain gets cloudier and cloudier until everything just goes dark. It is a process that we know how to initiate, but that we don’t yet understand completely. Scientists have held conflicting theories about consciousness over the years: some think it depends on a single region of the brain – a “seat” of consciousness – that can turn the brain off or on like a light switch.

Another school of thought holds that our consciousness is maintained by interactions between groups of brain cells. When the interactions are inhibited, consciousness is lost – like a dimmer switch rather than an on-off switch. Now for the first time, a real-time video shows exactly how the brain looks when losing consciousness. Using a method called functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response (fEITER), a team at the University of Manchester, UK, recorded the brain activity of 20 people as they were given a general anesthetic.

The video shows a significant increase in the activity between certain neuron clusters as the subjects lose consciousness, suggesting that there is no on-off switch. If that were the case, one area would show activity and then all activity would stop. But the activity shown in the video appears to be inhibitory signaling that takes place just before the brain shuts off. More analysis and research of the results are needed to determine just what is happening in the brain before consciousness is lost, but this video is an exciting jump-start for future studies.

Brains on Jazz Feel the Music

The pianist’s languid solo entwines itself with the smoke and the muffled laughter from the bar. Like a shadow, the musician’s fingers glide effortlessly across the keys, and he has no sheet music in front of him. Has he memorized the piece, or is he making it up as he goes along? It’s almost impossible to tell, but if you’re a jazz musician and can imagine yourself playing the music, your brain’s emotional centers might help you answer this question, a new study suggests.

 

Brainy improv. Jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong excel at improvising—and at judging when someone else is too.

The ability to distinguish planned actions from spontaneous ones helps us judge whether a person is deliberately lying and might also help us value creativity. But it’s unclear how the brain makes these judgment calls, especially when it has little context to work with. To study how musicians judge spontaneity, psychologists Annerose Engel and Peter Keller of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, recorded six jazz pianists as each one played improvised jazz over a backing track. Then the researchers transcribed the pieces, handed out the sheet music, had the pianists practice until they could replicate their colleagues’ improv perfectly, and recorded their performances. A computer analysis of the recordings showed that each improvised piece was more erratic in its loudness and speed than its rehearsed counterpart.

So a machine could tell the difference between the improvised solos and the rehearsed reproductions. But could another musician? When a second set of 22 jazz musicians listened to all the improvised and rehearsed pieces in a random order, they could correctly guess which was which only about 55% of the time—only slightly better than chance—the researchers report in Frontiers in Psychology this month. However, the guessers who rated themselves in a questionnaire as more “empathetic” were better at picking out the improvisations. Similar correlations held true of those who had played with bands, as opposed to playing only as soloists.

All the listeners said that to make a judgment, they had to imagine themselves playing the piece in order to predict what would come next. They also paid particular attention to variations in loudness and speed. Brain scans backed this up: They showed that the amygdala—the center of the brain involved in emotion—became active as the listeners tried to put themselves in the player’s shoes. If a musician thought a piece of music was improvised, he activated the same brain networks that he would if they were improvising it themselves, including some motor centers that would let them physically play it.

Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University in Canada, says that the finding that the amygdala helps judge spontaneity is surprising and interesting but doesn’t definitively link spontaneity to emotion. “The coolest experiments are those that raise a lot of questions we didn’t know we needed to ask,” he says.

Engel hopes to follow up by studying the perception of spontaneity in other domains, such as dance or speech. However, she and Keller are both musicians who play several instruments, so jazz is close to their hearts and will likely remain a subject of their work. “It’s always a pleasure when you can combine work with a hobby,” she says.