Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Brain Cells and Tunes

Kurzweil recently reported a study by Dr. Sheng and colleagues, researchers at NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke or NINDS. The researchers were studying how brain cells communicate and how they change their tune. Change their tune? That got my attention. According to a senior principal investigator Sheng, “We may have answered a long-standing, fundamental question about how brain cells communicate with each other in a variety of voice tones. Apparently brain cells talk to each other in a variety of tones, sometimes speaking loudly but other times struggling to be heard. Results of this study, published in Cell Reports, indicated that mitochondria, power plants within cells, may release bursts of chemical energy that tune brain cell communication. If you’re interested in reading more, check out the article.

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