Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-intoxicating phytocannabinoid with increasing popularity due to its purported therapeutic efficacy for numerous off-label conditions including anxiety and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those with ASD are commonly deficient in endogenous cannabinoid signaling and GABAergic tone. CBD has a complex pharmacodynamic profile that includes enhancing GABA and...
Due to the stimulation of neuronal membrane dipoles by action potentials, under suitable conditions coherent dipole oscillations can be formed. We argue that these dipole oscillations satisfy the weak Bose-Einstein condensate criteria of the Froehlich model of biological coherence. They can subsequently generate electromagnetic fields (EMFs) propagating in the inter-neuronal space. When...
Psychotropic drugs and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) are effective for treating certain psychiatric conditions. Drugs and TMS have also been used as tools to explore the relationship between brain function and behavior in humans. Combining centrally acting drugs and TMS has proven useful for characterizing the neural basis of movement. This combined intervention approach also holds...
The medical and recreational use of cannabis has increased in the United States. Its chronic use can have detrimental effects on the neurobiology of the brain-effects that are age-dependent. This was an exploratory study looking at the effects of chronically inhaled vaporized cannabis on brain structure in adult female mice. Adult mice were exposed daily to vaporized cannabis (10.3% THC and...
This paper explores the intersection between neuroscience and philosophy, particularly in the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of mind. While traditional philosophical questions, such as those relating to free will and moral motivation, have been subject to much debate, the rise of neuroscience has led to a reinterpretation of these questions considering empirical evidence. This has led...
Frontiers in NeuroscienceOctober 21, 2022Wenxuan Jiang, Robert Isenhart, Robert L. Sutherland et al.5 citations
Cortical oscillations within or across brain regions play fundamental roles in sensory, motor, and memory functions. It can be altered by neuromodulations such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and pharmacological manipulations such as ketamine. However, the neurobiological basis of the effects of rTMS and ketamine, as well as their interactions, on cortical oscillations is...
Objectives: Mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) can reduce both stress and depressive symptoms. However, the impact of mindfulness on stress level in depressed subjects remains unclear. This study aims to assess electrophysiological correlates of mindfulness in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) at baseline, under stress exposure, and in relaxation following stress exposure....
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) evaluates brain activity using blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast. Resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) examines spontaneous brain function using BOLD in the absence of a task, and the default mode network (DMN) has been identified from that. The DMN is a set of nodes within the brain that appear to be active and in communication when the...
The integrative model of effortful control presented in a previous article aimed to specify the neurophysiological bases of mental effort. This model assumes that effort reflects three different inter-related aspects of the same adaptive function. First, a mechanism anchored in the salience network that makes decisions about the effort that should be engaged in the current task in view of costs...
Evidence suggests classic psychedelics reduce the precision of belief updating and enable access to a range of alternate hypotheses that underwrite how we make sense of the world. This process, in the higher cortices, has been postulated to explain the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics for the treatment of internalizing disorders. We argue reduced precision also underpins change to...
Psychedelic compounds hold the promise of changing the face of neuroscience and psychiatry as we know it. There have been numerous proposals to use them to treat a range of neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, addiction and PTSD; and trials to date have delivered positive results in favor of the novel therapeutics. Further to the medical use, the wider healthy population is...
The theoretical framework of classical thermodynamics unifies vastly diverse natural phenomena and captures once-elusive effects in concrete terms. Neuroscience confronts equally varied, equally ineffable phenomena in the mental realm, but has yet to unite or to apprehend them rigorously, perhaps due to an insufficient theoretical framework. The terms for mental phenomena, the mental variables,...
The ventral tegmental area (VTA) mediates incentive salience and reward prediction error through dopamine (DA) neurons that are regulated by local VTA GABA neurons. In young mice, VTA GABA cells exhibit a form of synaptic plasticity known as long-term depression (LTD) that is dependent on cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptors preceded by metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5) signaling to induce...
Based on a material view and reductionism, science has achieved great success. These cognitive paradigms treat the external as an objective existence and ignore internal consciousness. However, this cognitive paradigm, which we take for granted, has also led to some dilemmas related to consciousness in biology and physics. Together, these phenomena reveal the interaction and inseparable side of...
Hypnosis can be conceived as a unique opportunity to explore how top-down effects can influence various conscious and non-conscious processes. In the field of perception, such modulatory effects have been described in distinct sensory modalities. In the present study we focused on the auditory channel and aimed at creating a radical deafness to elementary sounds by a specific hypnotic...
Hallucinations are conscious perception-like experiences that are a common symptom of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Current neuroscience evidence suggests several brain areas are involved in the generation of hallucinations including the sensory cortex, insula, putamen, and hippocampus. But how does activity in these regions give rise to aberrant conscious perceptions that seemingly...
Anxiety disorder is a mental illness that involves extreme fear or worry, which can alter the balance of chemicals in the brain. This change and evaluation of anxiety state are accompanied by a comprehensive treatment procedure. It is well-known that the treatment of anxiety is chiefly based on psychotherapy and drug therapy, and there is no objective standard evaluation. In this paper, the...
As psychedelic compounds gain traction in psychiatry, there is a need to consider the active mechanism to explain the effect observed in randomized clinical trials. Traditionally, biological psychiatry has asked how compounds affect the causal pathways of illness to reduce symptoms and therefore focus on analysis of the pharmacologic properties. In psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP),...
Ketamine, a non-competitive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist, has been employed clinically as an intravenous anesthetic since the 1970s. More recently, ketamine has received attention for its rapid antidepressant effects and is actively being explored as a treatment for a wide range of neuropsychiatric syndromes. In model systems, ketamine appears to display a combination of...
Hallucinogen-persisting perception disorder (HPPD) features as a diagnostic category in the DSM-5, ICD-11, and other major classifications, but our knowledge of the phenomenology of the perceptual symptoms involved and the changes in consciousness during the characteristic “flashbacks” is limited. We systematically evaluated original case reports and case series on HPPD to define its...
Repurposing ketamine in the therapy of depression could well represent a breakthrough in understanding the etiology of depression. Ketamine was originally used as an anesthetic drug and later its use was extended to other therapeutic applications such as analgesia and the treatment of addiction. At the same time, the abuse of ketamine as a recreational drug has generated a concern for its...
Nightmares are highly dysphoric dreams that are well-remembered upon awakening. Frequent nightmares have been associated with psychopathology and emotional dysregulation, yet their neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. Our neurocognitive model posits that nightmares reflect dysfunction in a limbic-prefrontal circuit comprising medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, hippocampus,...
Sensorimotor rhythm (SMR)-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) provide an alternative pathway for users to perform motor control using motor imagery. Despite the non-invasiveness, ease of use, and low cost, this kind of BCI has limitations due to long training times and BCI inefficiency—that is, the SMR BCI control paradigm may not work well on a subpopulation of users. Meditation is a mental...
Objectives: Nightmares were related to emotion and behavioral problems and also emerged as one of the core features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our study aimed to investigate the associations of frequent nightmares with sleep duration and sleep efficiency among frontline medical workers in Wuhan during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. Methods: A total of 528...
The trend toward cannabis legalization in the United States over the past two decades has unsurprisingly been accompanied by an increase in the number of cannabis users and use patterns that potentially pose wider risks to the public like driving under the influence. As such, it is becoming increasingly important to develop methods to accurately quantify cannabis intoxication and its associated...