The BRAIN Initiative published 21 papers across 3 journals pushing forwards the understanding of human neuroanatomy. A few of the papers were focused primarily on primate neuroanatomy. Here I will focus on the contributions to an understanding of human adult neuroanatomy. Science The main page of the special issue in Science is here There is an accessible introduction here There is a paid-article perspective here Returning to Science, in this paid-article the researchers took 400,000 human cell nuclei and developed a taxonomy. The cells could be characterised from just a few donors. In this pa ..read more

The Brodmann Areas are a system for describing neuroanatomical structures first developed by Dr Korbinian Brodmann. This provides a useful framework when discussing neuroanatomical subjects. The Brodmann Areas have been covered previously on the blog. With the help of Chat GPT, i’ve organised the links below. Chat GPT did the repetitive work of converting the links that identified into the links below, saving me some of the ‘heavy lifting’. I was then able to provide further instructions to order the list numerically. The Most Important 21 Pages in the Field of Neuroscience: Dr. Korbinian Br ..read more

Ababei et al have published an interesting review of renin-angiotensin modulators in Alzheimer’s Type Dementia. The referenced paper is a highly technical article geared towards healthcare professionals and scientists. In summary, they review a broad range of renin-angiotensin modulators from the perspective of influencing cognitive decline both in human and animal studies. The evidence is not just restricted to Alzheimer’s Type Dementia but includes Vascular Dementia in some studies for example. I would say that they provide some intriguing evidence that ticks lots of boxes. The pharmaceutica ..read more

The World Mental Health Federation’s World Mental Health Day 2023 is on October 10th and the official website can be found here. The theme is ‘Mental health is a universal right’. Reading from the campaign booklet the key points are: ‘1. The right to be protected from known harms to mental health; a universal right which ap- plies to the entire population, but especially the vulnerable including children, minorities and the displaced peoples. 2. The right to access quality and affordable care when a person is struggling with their men- tal health. 3. The right to freedom and dignity, including ..read more

I’ve been exploring the use of generative AI for images which has taken me on a journey. With my primary interest being psychiatry and the images being secondary I have limited my approach. Firstly there are the more practical applications. Secondly there is the relationship with the theoretical underpinnings. I am writing about this second strand in this post. In my journey I quickly found with the recent large-scale interest in AI generative art that there is a fundamental premise which is recognised. The value of art is in the human condition and the relationship with others. Therefore no m ..read more

This post refers to the paper ‘Consciousness: Its Neurobiology and the Major Classes of Impairment‘ by Goldfine and Schiff. The Reticular Activating Formation is Considered a Key Structure for Consciousness The paper considers a subset of disorders of consciousness, hitherto referred to as DOC. So just to cut to the chase there are three disorders in this paper that seem to me to fit squarely into DOC: Coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state (MCS). The authors acknowledge locked-in-state as presenting similarly to a DOC without being a DOC so I have included it in the differentia ..read more

Generative AI art is a recent development with the potential to bring in a new era of human creativity. There are two main problems that I see and i’m probably glossing over plenty of other hurdles that others have covered. Barriers are typical of any new technology as it emerges and promises to become useful to society. The first barrier is that of provenance. The issue is one of training sets. So one question is whether the training sets utilise the work of human artists without attribution or permission. There are various legal aspects to these questions that are relevant particularly those ..read more

What is Psychological First Aid? For those that remember World Mental Health Day in 2016, the theme was psychological first aid (PFA). The WHO produced a document ‘Psychological First Aid’, identifying a role for PFA in crisis events (on their site) and outlined the history and application. In this document, the WHO described PFA as ‘First-line psychosocial support after a crisis event’. They identify PFA as being delivered not just by professionals but also by lay people and detail a number of principles of PFA. Turning to another source, a simple definition of crisis is ‘a time of great disa ..read more

Sir Alfred Baring Garrod (1819-1907) In a previous post I have written about Sir Alfred Baring Garrod and his influence in the adoption of Lithium in Psychiatry. The discussion around Garrod’s contribution centres around the hypothesis that the pathological processes occurring in gout extend to the brain and that Lithium would be a suitable therapy. This hypothesis has since been discarded. However it is interesting to review this hypothesis in light of over a century of subsequent research. We saw in a previous post that the brain has specialised receptors (GLUT receptors) for processing Glu ..read more