Progress in Brain Research

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The word "silence" typically refers to the auditory modality, signifying an absence of sound or noise, being quiet. One may then ask: could we attribute the notion of silence to the domain of dance, e.g., when a movement is absent and the dancer stops moving? Is it at all useful to think in terms of silence when referring to dance? In this chapter, my exploration of these questions is based on recent studies in brain research, which demonstrate the remarkable facility of specific regions in the human brain to perceive visually referred biological and, in particular, human motion, leading to prediction of future movements of the human body...

Absence of consciousness can occur due to a concussion, anesthetization, intoxication, epileptic seizure, or other fainting/syncope episode caused by lack of blood flow to the brain. However, some meditation practitioners also report that it is possible to undergo a total absence of consciousness during meditation, lasting up to 7 days, and that these "cessations" can be consistently induced. One form of extended cessation (i.e., nirodha samāpatti) is thought to be different from sleep because practitioners are said to be completely impervious to external stimulation...

Human sleep is a dynamic and complex process comprising sleep stages with REM and NREM sleep characteristics that come in cycles. During sleep, there is a loss of responsiveness or a perceptual loss of conscious awareness with increasing thresholds for wakefulness as sleep progresses. There are brief bursts of wakefulness or Wake After Sleep Onset (WASO) throughout a nocturnal sleep. Conscious experience during nocturnal sleep is known to occur during lucid dreaming when one is aware during dreams when the dream is occurring...

Covert behavior is defined as behavior that is not directly visible and is thus comparable to a type of behavioral silence that requires modern psychophysiological techniques to reveal. Goal-directed behavior is teleologically purposive. Fundamentally, there are two approaches to accounting for purposeful behavior. One is the cybernetic approach, which views behavior as homeostatic and largely reflexive. The other one views behavior as a cognitive process that involves an interaction between neural events representing the previous experience, the present state of the individual, and the occurrence of particular features in the environment...

This systematic review explores the influence of silence on the autonomic nervous system. The Polyvagal Theory has been used as a reference model to describe the autonomic nervous system by explaining its role in emotional regulation, social engagement, and adaptive physiological responses. PubMed, Scopus, PsycInfo, EMBASE, and Google Scholar were systematically searched up until July 2023 for relevant studies. The literature search yielded 511 results, and 37 studies were eventually included in this review...

The well-known, quantum physics "double-slit" experiment was the first demonstration of wave-particle duality of light-photons naturally behave like waves, but once they are registered by a conscious observer they switch to behaving like particles. In recent years, a new avenue of research has reported a psychophysical interaction occurring when focused attention was employed in the double-slit experiment. In this context, the act of focusing attention to photons passing through the double-slit appears to collapse their wave function thus causing a shift toward particle-like behavior reflected in a decreased intensity of wave interference...

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The use of games for cognitive screening is not new and involves employing simple tasks as well as virtual reality. In this work, we introduce the use of the combinatorial game Clobber, created by the mathematicians Albert, Grossman, Nowakowski and Wolfe in 2001 in a classroom-based experiment and analyzed how it can assess cognitive functions. Specifically, this study tries to address how the use of the Clobber game can target executive functions (EFs) and why it may be a valuable game to assess EFs. Executive functions have an extremely complex nature and combine abilities which involve planning, decision-making, productive action, and self-regulation, among others...

Self-Control is an important skill in everyday life when attention is automatically drawn toward certain stimuli. For instance, food stimuli automatically capture visual attention and are processed preferentially. Therefore, efficient response inhibition is crucial to refrain from careless overeating. In the present proof-of-concept study we use a novel adaptation of a previously evaluated Stop-Signal Game (SSG) to measure reactive, food-specific, response inhibition in healthy adults. We analyzed a sample of 83 participants (60 female, mean age=24...

Technological advancements give researchers the opportunity to explore the internal metric that allows to mentally place numbers in a spatial and ordered way to establish relationships between quantities. In this study, we implement the cMNL, an embodied number line paradigm to investigate the configuration of children's number space mappings under multiple conditions. A sample of 185 primary school children aged 8-10years old completed digitally an embodied number line task encompassing directionality and modality as variables...

Games offer advantages over traditional methods of assessing cognitive function among children and adolescents. However, the validity of game-based assessments has not been systematically evaluated. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the validity of game-based assessments measuring cognitive function among children and adolescents. We systematically searched several databases using pre-defined inclusion criteria. For papers that met the criteria, we extracted and analyzed the cognitive functions measured by each study, the correlation coefficients between game-based and traditional assessments, and factors that could influence the validity of game-based assessments...

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Approximately 40% of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) had limited response to conventional antidepressant treatments, resulting in treatment-resistant depression (TRD), a debilitating subtype that yielded a significant disease burden worldwide. Molecular imaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission tomography (SPECT), can measure targeted macromolecules or biological processes in vivo. These imaging tools provide a unique possibility to explore the pathophysiology and treatment mechanisms underlying TRD...

Neuroinflammation plays a key role in the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder (MDD), including treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Patients with TRD have higher levels of inflammatory biomarkers compared with responders to antidepressants. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the gut-microbiota-brain axis via the vagus nerve plays a key role in neuroinflammation. Preclinical and clinical data suggest that fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) from MDD patients or rodents with depression-like behaviors cause depression-like behaviors in rodents through systemic inflammation...

Antidepressant response, the effectiveness of antidepressants in relieving symptoms of depression, is a complex trait influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. However, despite decades of research, the specific genetic variations that contribute to antidepressant response and treatment-resistant depression (TRD) remain largely unknown. In this review, we summarize the current state of knowledge of the genetics of antidepressant response and TRD, including candidate gene association studies, genome-wide association studies (GWAS), polygenic risk score (PRS) analyses, whole genome sequencing studies, research on other genetic and epigenetic changes, and the potential for precision medicine in this field...

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) refers to depression that persists even after the patient has undergone adequate trials of two or more antidepressants at appropriate doses and duration. While there may be controversy around this definition, it reflects the real-world clinical situation where drug therapy is often the primary treatment strategy for major depressive disorder. It's important to note that when a patient is diagnosed with TRD, a comprehensive evaluation of their psychosocial aspects should be carried out...

Evidence has suggested that the modulation of N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) and 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors (5-HTRs) via the psychedelic drugs, such as ketamine and psilocybin, rapidly alters the state of consciousness and the neuroplasticity. The United State Food and Drug Administration approved the indications of esketamine for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) in 2019 and major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation in 2020. The phase 2 clinical trials also discovered the rapid and sustained antidepressant effects of psilocybin among patients with TRD...

Imaging studies of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) have examined brain activity, structure, and metabolite concentrations to identify critical areas of investigation in TRD as well as potential targets for treatment interventions. This chapter provides an overview of the main findings of studies using three imaging modalities: structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI (fMRI), and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Decreased connectivity and metabolite concentrations in frontal brain areas appear to characterize TRD, although results are not consistent across studies...

Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) often exhibit an inadequate treatment response or failure to achieve remission following treatment with antidepressant drugs. Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is proposed to identify this clinical scenario. Compared to those without TRD, patients with TRD have significantly lower health-related quality of life in mental and physical dimensions, more functional impairment and productivity loss, and higher healthcare costs. TRD imposes a massive burden on the individual, family, and society...