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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ISSN 0027-8424

70 papers in the library · 3,897 citations · publishing 1974-2026

Papers

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Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America August 31, 2010 Yi-Yuan Tang, Qilin Lu, Xiujuan Geng et al.

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is part of a network implicated in the development of self-regulation and whose connectivity changes dramatically in development. In previous studies we showed that 3 h of mental training, based on traditional Chinese medicine (integrative body-mind training, IBMT), increases ACC activity and improves self-regulation. However, it is not known whether changes...

Thalamic deactivation at sleep onset precedes that of the cerebral cortex in humans.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America February 23, 2010 Michel Magnin, Marc Rey, Hélène Bastuji et al.

Thalamic and cortical activities are assumed to be time-locked throughout all vigilance states. Using simultaneous intracortical and intrathalamic recordings, we demonstrate here that the thalamic deactivation occurring at sleep onset most often precedes that of the cortex by several minutes, whereas reactivation of both structures during awakening is synchronized. Delays between thalamus and...

Baseline brain energy supports the state of consciousness.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America July 7, 2009 Robert G Shulman, Fahmeed Hyder, Douglas L Rothman

An individual, human or animal, is defined to be in a conscious state empirically by the behavioral ability to respond meaningfully to stimuli, whereas the loss of consciousness is defined by unresponsiveness. PET measurements of glucose or oxygen consumption show a widespread approximately 45% reduction in cerebral energy consumption with anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness. Because...

Central and autonomic nervous system interaction is altered by short-term meditation.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America June 2, 2009 Yi-Yuan Tang, Yinghua Ma, Yaxin Fan et al.

Five days of integrative body-mind training (IBMT) improves attention and self-regulation in comparison with the same amount of relaxation training. This paper explores the underlying mechanisms of this finding. We measured the physiological and brain changes at rest before, during, and after 5 days of IBMT and relaxation training. During and after training, the IBMT group showed significantly...

Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America May 26, 2009 Kalina Christoff, Alan M Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood et al. 1,832 citations

Although mind wandering occupies a large proportion of our waking life, its neural basis and relation to ongoing behavior remain controversial. We report an fMRI study that used experience sampling to provide an online measure of mind wandering during a concurrent task. Analyses focused on the interval of time immediately preceding experience sampling probes demonstrate activation of default...

Neural signature of the conscious processing of auditory regularities.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America February 3, 2009 Tristan A Bekinschtein, Stanislas Dehaene, Benjamin Rohaut et al.

Can conscious processing be inferred from neurophysiological measurements? Some models stipulate that the active maintenance of perceptual representations across time requires consciousness. Capitalizing on this assumption, we designed an auditory paradigm that evaluates cerebral responses to violations of temporal regularities that are either local in time or global across several seconds....

GDNF is a fast-acting potent inhibitor of alcohol consumption and relapse.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America June 10, 2008 Sebastien Carnicella, Viktor Kharazia, Jérôme Jeanblanc et al. 132 citations

Previously, we demonstrated that the action of the natural alkaloid, ibogaine, to reduce alcohol (ethanol) consumption is mediated by the glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) in the ventral tegmental area (VTA). Here we set out to test the actions of GDNF in the VTA on ethanol-drinking behaviors. We found that GDNF infusion very rapidly and dose-dependently reduced rat ethanol,...

Anorexia induced by activation of serotonin 5-HT4 receptors is mediated by increases in CART in the nucleus accumbens.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America October 9, 2007 Alexandra Jean, Grégory Conductier, Christine Manrique et al.

Anorexia nervosa is a growing concern in mental health, often inducing death. The potential neuronal deficits that may underlie abnormal inhibitions of food intake, however, remain largely unexplored. We hypothesized that anorexia may involve altered signaling events within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), a brain structure involved in reward. We show here that direct stimulation of serotonin...

Threatening a rubber hand that you feel is yours elicits a cortical anxiety response.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America June 5, 2007 H Henrik Ehrsson, Katja Wiech, Nikolaus Weiskopf et al.

The feeling of body ownership is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. The underlying neural mechanisms can be studied by using the illusion where a person is made to feel that a rubber hand is his or her own hand by brushing the person's hidden real hand and synchronously brushing the artificial hand that is in full view. Here we show that threat to the rubber hand can induce a similar...

Mechanism of the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor-mediated facilitation of synaptic activity in prefrontal cortex.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America June 5, 2007 Jean-Claude Béïque, Mays Imad, Ljiljana Mladenovic et al.

Classic hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide are thought to elicit their psychotropic actions via serotonin receptors of the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A subtype (5-HT(2A)R). One likely site for these effects is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Previous studies have shown that activation of 5-HT(2A)Rs in this region results in a robust increase in spontaneous glutamatergic synaptic activity,...

Neural correlates of the emergence of consciousness of thirst.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America December 9, 2003 Gary F. Egan, Tim Silk, Frank Zamarripa et al.

Thirst was induced by rapid i.v. infusion of hypertonic saline (0.51 M at 13.4 ml/min). Ten humans were neuroimaged by positron-emission tomography (PET) and four by functional MRI (fMRI). PET images were made 25 min after beginning infusion, when the sensation of thirst began to enter the stream of consciousness. The fMRI images were made when the maximum rate of increase of thirst occurred....

A neuronal network model linking subjective reports and objective physiological data during conscious perception.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America July 8, 2003 Stanislas Dehaene, Claire Sergent, Jean-Pierre Changeux

The subjective experience of perceiving visual stimuli is accompanied by objective neuronal activity patterns such as sustained activity in primary visual area (V1), amplification of perceptual processing, correlation across distant regions, joint parietal, frontal, and cingulate activation, gamma-band oscillations, and P300 waveform. We describe a neuronal network model that aims at explaining...

Functional connectivity in the resting brain: A network analysis of the default mode hypothesis

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America December 27, 2002 Michael D. Greicius, B. Krasnow, A. Reiss et al.

Functional imaging studies have shown that certain brain regions, including posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), consistently show greater activity during resting states than during cognitive tasks. This finding led to the hypothesis that these regions constitute a network supporting a default mode of brain function. In this study, we investigate three...

Salvinorin A: a potent naturally occurring nonnitrogenous kappa opioid selective agonist.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America September 3, 2002 Bryan L. Roth, Karen Baner, Richard B Westkaemper et al. 782 citations

Salvia divinorum, whose main active ingredient is the neoclerodane diterpene Salvinorin A, is a hallucinogenic plant in the mint family that has been used in traditional spiritual practices for its psychoactive properties by the Mazatecs of Oaxaca, Mexico. More recently, S. divinorum extracts and Salvinorin A have become more widely used in the U.S. as legal hallucinogens. We discovered that...

Mesolimbic dopaminergic decline after cannabinoid withdrawal.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America August 18, 1998 M Diana, M Melis, A L Muntoni et al.

The mesolimbic dopamine system has recently been implicated in the long-term aversive consequences of withdrawal from major drugs of abuse. In the present study we sought to determine whether mesolimbic dopamine neurons are involved in the neurobiologic mechanisms underlying withdrawal from chronic cannabinoid exposure. Rats were treated chronically with the major psychoactive ingredient of...

Molecular design of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor binding site for phencyclidine and dizolcipine.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America August 15, 1995 A V Ferrer-Montiel, W Sun, M Montal

The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), a pivotal entity for synaptic plasticity and excitotoxicity in the brain, is a target of psychotomimetic drugs such as phencyclidine (PCP) and dizolcipine (MK-801). In contrast, a related glutamate receptor, the alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionate/kainate receptor GluR1, is weakly sensitive to these drugs. Three point mutations on...

Attention: the mechanisms of consciousness.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America August 2, 1994 M I Posner

A number of recent papers and books discuss theoretical efforts toward a scientific understanding of consciousness. Progress in imaging networks of brain areas active when people perform simple tasks may provide a useful empirical background for distinguishing conscious and unconscious information processing. Attentional networks include those involved in orienting to sensory stimuli,...

Implicit knowledge: new perspectives on unconscious processes.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America December 1, 1992 D L Schacter

Recent evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience indicates that brain-damaged patients and normal subjects can exhibit nonconscious or implicit knowledge of stimuli that they fail to recollect consciously or perceive explicitly. Dissociations between implicit and explicit knowledge, which have been observed across a variety of domains, tasks, and materials, raise fundamental questions...

Cannabinoid receptor localization in brain.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America March 1990 M Herkenham, A B Lynn, M D Little et al.

[3H]CP 55,940, a radiolabeled synthetic cannabinoid, which is 10-100 times more potent in vivo than delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol, was used to characterize and localize a specific cannabinoid receptor in brain sections. The potencies of a series of natural and synthetic cannabinoids as competitors of [3H]CP 55,940 binding correlated closely with their relative potencies in several biological...

Mechanism of lysergic acid diethylamide interference with rabbit antibody biosynthesis

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 1974 Edward W. Voss, Jeffrey L. Winkelhake 8 citations

Lymphoid cells from hyperimmune rabbits producing antibodies to a hapten, incubated in the presence of d-lysergic acid diethylamide, continued to synthesize protein at a normal rate. Isoelectric focusing analysis of the low-molecular-weight protein secreted by the cells incubated with lysergic acid diethylamide indicated two components, with pI's of 4.9 and 5.2. Immune cells not exposed to...