Altered brain structural connectivity in patients with longstanding gut inflammation is correlated with psychological symptoms and disease duration.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to identify differences in network properties of white matter microstructure between asymptomatic ulcerative colitis (UC) participants who had a history of chronic gut inflammation, healthy controls (HCs) and a disease control group without gut inflammation (irritable bowel syndrome; IBS). DESIGN: Diffusion weighted imaging was conducted in age and sex-matched participants with UC, IBS, and HCs (N = 74 each), together with measures of gastrointestinal and psychological symptom severity. Using streamline connectivity matrices and graph theory, we aimed to quantify group differences in brain network connectivity. Regions showing group connectivity differences were correlated with measures showing group behavioral and clinical differences. RESULTS: UC participants exhibited greater centrality in regions of the somatosensory network and default mode network, but lower centrality in the posterior insula and globus pallidus compared to HCs (q < 0.05). Hub analyses revealed compromised hubness of the pallidus in UC and IBS compared to HCs which was replaced by increased hubness of the postcentral sulcus. Surprisingly, few differences in network matrices between UC and IBS were identified. In UC, centrality measures in the secondary somatosensory cortex were associated with depression (q < 0.03), symptom related anxiety (q < 0.04), trait anxiety (q < 0.03), and symptom duration (q < 0.05). CONCLUSION: A history of UC is associated with neuroplastic changes in several brain networks, which are associated with symptoms of depression, trait and symptom-related anxiety, as well as symptom duration. When viewed together with the results from IBS subjects, these findings suggest that chronic gut inflammation as well as abdominal pain have a lasting impact on brain network organization, which may play a role in symptoms reported by UC patients, even when gut inflammation has subsided.

Psychobiological factors of resilience and depression in late life.

In contrast to traditional perspectives of resilience as a stable, trait-like characteristic, resilience is now recognized as a multidimentional, dynamic capacity influenced by life-long interactions between internal and environmental resources. We review psychosocial and neurobiological factors associated with resilience to late-life depression (LLD). Recent research has identified both psychosocial characteristics associated with elevated LLD risk (e.g., insecure attachment, neuroticism) and psychosocial processes that may be useful intervention targets (e.g., self-efficacy, sense of purpose, coping behaviors, social support). Psychobiological factors include a variety of endocrine, genetic, inflammatory, metabolic, neural, and cardiovascular processes that bidirectionally interact to affect risk for LLD onset and course of illness. Several resilience-enhancing intervention modalities show promise for the prevention and treatment of LLD, including cognitive/psychological or mind-body (positive psychology; psychotherapy; heart rate variability biofeedback; meditation), movement-based (aerobic exercise; yoga; tai chi), and biological approaches (pharmacotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy). Additional research is needed to further elucidate psychosocial and biological factors that affect risk and course of LLD. In addition, research to identify psychobiological factors predicting differential treatment response to various interventions will be essential to the development of more individualized and effective approaches to the prevention and treatment of LLD.

Neuroenhancement of High-Level Cognition: Evidence for Homeostatic Constraints of Non-invasive Brain Stimulation.

Neuroenhancement aims to improve cognitive performance in typically and atypically functioning populations. However, it is currently debated whether it is also effective in exceptionally high-functioning individuals. Present theories suggest that homeostatic set points for learning and cortical plasticity limit the beneficial effects of neuroenhancement. To examine this possibility, we used transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) to non-invasively stimulate bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (DLPFC) of the world champion in mental calculation, G.M. TRNS did not change G.M.'s calculation performance compared to sham stimulation on an exceptionally complex arithmetic task. However, a sample of mathematicians who were not calculation prodigies (N = 6) showed reduced accuracy on a complex multiplication task in response to tRNS, relative to sham. Our findings suggest that there may be an upper limit for cognitive enhancement and that further attempts to enhance performance using tRNS (at least with the current parameters) may impair optimal functioning. The discussion of potential negative effects of brain stimulation for cognitive enhancement is critical, as it may lead to unintended impairments in different subgroups of the population.

Neurocognitive Correlates of Resilience in Late-Life Depression.

OBJECTIVE: Increasing understanding of the neurocognitive correlates of resilience in late-life depression (LLD) could inform interventions to promote more sustained remission. We investigated cross-sectional relations between baseline resilience and domains of neurocognitive functioning in depressed older adults enrolled in one of four trials. METHODS: Participants (N = 288) completed neurocognitive tests of memory, language performance, and executive functioning as well as measures of subjective memory performance and components of resilience (grit, active coping self-efficacy, accommodative coping self-efficacy, and spirituality). RESULTS: Medium-sized associations were observed between greater resilience (overall resilience, accommodative coping) and lower frequency of self-reported forgetting. Small positive associations were observed between language performance and total resilience, active coping self-efficacy, and accommodative coping self-efficacy. Small negative associations were observed between spirituality and each objective measure of cognitive performance. CONCLUSION: Future longitudinal studies will help elucidate the complex relation between resilience and cognitive functioning in LLD. In addition, randomized controlled trials targeting coping self-efficacy may inform the development of more effective and personalized interventions.

The Neurochemistry of Mathematical Genius: Reduced Frontal Excitation/Inhibition Balance in an Expert Calculator.

Alterations in excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters (glutamate and GABA, respectively) have been found in various neuropsychiatric disorders, but have not been examined in individuals with prodigious cognitive abilities. Understanding exceptional brain processing is critical for developing biomedical interventions for cognitive and neurodevelopmental atypicalities. We tested the 11-fold world champion in mental calculation, G.M., and compared his right middle frontal gyrus, which has been associated with mathematical prodigy, to four healthy control expert calculators, who were not prodigies. We found substantially lower frontal glutamate/GABA compared to non-prodigy controls, but not glutamate or GABA individually, measured with magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We suggest that prefrontal glutamate/GABA is a potential marker of extraordinary cognitive skills.

Resilience and White Matter Integrity in Geriatric Depression.

OBJECTIVE: Greater psychological resilience may protect against developing depression in a growing geriatric population. Identifying the neural correlates of resilience in geriatric depression could provide neurobiologic targets to inform clinical interventions. However, most prior neuroimaging studies have only considered the presence or absence of resilience and have not addressed the multifactorial nature of resilience. The current study aimed to establish the neural correlates of four factors of resilience in the depressed elderly. METHODS: White matter integrity was assessed using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging data collected from 70 older adults with major depressive disorder. We used four resilience factors previously derived in an exploratory factor analysis of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale in a large sample of depressed older adults: 1, grit; 2, active coping self-efficacy; 3, accommodative coping self-efficacy; and 4, spirituality. RESULTS: The resilience factor "grit" was positively associated with fractional anisotropy in the callosal region connecting prefrontal cortex and fractional anisotropy in cingulum fibers; however, the latter did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. CONCLUSION: Structural integrity of major white matter pathways implicated in cognitive control and emotion regulation (i.e., connecting prefrontal cortex) was positively associated with the resilience factor "grit" in our sample of older adults with depression. Prospective studies are needed to determine the utility of the structural integrity of these pathways as a biomarker in predicting risk for depression and treatment response.

Resilience and amygdala function in older healthy and depressed adults.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies suggest that low emotional resilience may correspond with increased or over-active amygdala function. Complementary studies suggest that emotional resilience increases with age; older adults tend to have decreased attentional bias to negative stimuli compared to younger adults. Amygdala nuclei and related brain circuits have been linked to negative affect, and depressed patients have been demonstrated to have abnormal amygdala function. METHODS: In the current study, we correlated psychological resilience measures with amygdala function measured with resting-state arterial spin-labelled (ASL) and blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in older adults with and without depression. Specifically, we targeted the basolateral, centromedial, and superficial nuclei groups of the amygdala, which have different functions and brain connections. RESULTS: High levels of psychological resilience correlated with lower basal levels of amygdala activity measured with ASL fMRI. High resilience also correlated with decreased connectivity between amygdala nuclei and the ventral default-mode network independent of depression status. Instead, lower depression symptoms were associated with higher connectivity between the amygdalae and dorsal frontal networks. LIMITATIONS: Future multi-site studies with larger sample size and improved neuroimaging technologies are needed. Longitudinal studies that target resilience to naturalistic stressors will also be a powerful contribution to the field. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that resilience in older adults is more closely related to function in ventral amygdala networks, while late-life depression is related to reduced connectivity between the amygdala and dorsal frontal regions.

Transcranial random noise stimulation mitigates increased difficulty in an arithmetic learning task.

Proficiency in arithmetic learning can be achieved by using a multitude of strategies, the most salient of which are procedural learning (applying a certain set of computations) and rote learning (direct retrieval from long-term memory). Here we investigated the effect of transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), a non-invasive brain stimulation method previously shown to enhance cognitive training, on both types of learning in a 5-day sham-controlled training study, under two conditions of task difficulty, defined in terms of item repetition. On the basis of previous research implicating the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex in early and late stages of arithmetic learning, respectively, sham-controlled tRNS was applied to bilateral prefrontal cortex for the first 3 days and to the posterior parietal cortex for the last 2 days of a 5-day training phase. The training involved learning to solve arithmetic problems by applying a calculation algorithm; both trained and untrained problems were used in a brief testing phase at the end of the training phase. Task difficulty was manipulated between subjects by using either a large ("easy" condition) or a small ("difficult" condition) number of repetition of problems during training. Measures of attention and working memory were acquired before and after the training phase. As compared to sham, participants in the tRNS condition displayed faster reaction times and increased learning rate during the training phase; as well as faster reaction times for both trained and untrained (new) problems, which indicated a transfer effect after the end of training. All stimulation effects reached significance only in the "difficult" condition when number of repetition was lower. There were no transfer effects of tRNS on attention or working memory. The results support the view that tRNS can produce specific facilitative effects on numerical cognition--specifically, on arithmetic learning. They also highlight the importance of task difficulty in the neuromodulation of learning, which in the current study due to the manipulation of item repetition might have being mediated by the memory system.

Linking GABA and glutamate levels to cognitive skill acquisition during development.

Developmental adjustments in the balance of excitation and inhibition are thought to constrain the plasticity of sensory areas of the cortex. It is unknown however, how changes in excitatory or inhibitory neurochemical expression (glutamate, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA)) contribute to skill acquisition during development. Here we used single-voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) to reveal how differences in cortical glutamate vs. GABA ratios relate to face proficiency and working memory abilities in children and adults. We show that higher glutamate levels in the inferior frontal gyrus correlated positively with face processing proficiency in the children, but not the adults, an effect which was independent of age-dependent differences in underlying cortical gray matter. Moreover, we found that glutamate/GABA levels and gray matter volume are dissociated at the different maturational stages. These findings suggest that increased excitation during development is linked to neuroplasticity and the acquisition of new cognitive skills. They also offer a new, neurochemical approach to investigating the relationship between cognitive performance and brain development across the lifespan.

A familiar font drives early emotional effects in word recognition.

The emotional connotation of a word is known to shift the process of word recognition. Using the electroencephalographic event-related potentials (ERPs) approach it has been documented that early attentional processing of high-arousing negative words is shifted at a stage of processing where a presented word cannot have been fully identified. Contextual learning has been discussed to contribute to these effects. The present study shows that a manipulation of the familiarity with a word's shape interferes with these earliest emotional ERP effects. Presenting high-arousing negative and neutral words in a familiar or an unfamiliar font results in very early emotion differences only in case of familiar shapes, whereas later processing stages reveal similar emotional effects in both font conditions. Because these early emotion-related differences predict later behavioral differences, it is suggested that contextual learning of emotional valence comprises more visual features than previously expected to guide early visual-sensory processing.

Not all brains are created equal: the relevance of individual differences in responsiveness to transcranial electrical stimulation.

A current issue in the research of augmentation of brain functions using transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) is the diversity and inconsistency in outcome results. Similar studies often report different results, depending on the parameters and tasks used. Such inconsistencies have led to significant doubts about the efficacy of the method in the broader scientific community, despite its promising potential for patient recovery and treatment. Evidence on the large variability in individual cortical excitability and response to tES suggests that stimulation may affect individuals differently, depending on the subject's age, gender, brain state, hormonal levels, and pre-existing regional excitability. Certain factors might even lead to the reversal of polarity-dependent effects, and therefore have crucial implications for neurorehabilitation and cognitive enhancement. Research paradigms may have to be refined in the future to avoid the confounding effects of such factors.

The effect of transcranial direct current stimulation: a role for cortical excitation/inhibition balance?

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising tool for cognitive enhancement and neurorehabilitation in clinical disorders in both cognitive and clinical domains (e.g., chronic pain, tinnitus). Here we suggest the potential role of tDCS in modulating cortical excitation/inhibition (E/I) balance and thereby inducing improvements. We suggest that part of the mechanism of action of tDCS can be explained by non-invasive modulations of the E/I balance.

Can transcranial electrical stimulation improve learning difficulties in atypical brain development? A future possibility for cognitive training.

Learning difficulties in atypical brain development represent serious obstacles to an individual's future achievements and can have broad societal consequences. Cognitive training can improve learning impairments only to a certain degree. Recent evidence from normal and clinical adult populations suggests that transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), a portable, painless, inexpensive, and relatively safe neuroenhancement tool, applied in conjunction with cognitive training can enhance cognitive intervention outcomes. This includes, for instance, numerical processing, language skills and response inhibition deficits commonly associated with profound learning difficulties and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The current review introduces the functional principles, current applications and promising results, and potential pitfalls of TES. Unfortunately, research in child populations is limited at present. We suggest that TES has considerable promise as a tool for increasing neuroplasticity in atypically developing children and may be an effective adjunct to cognitive training in clinical settings if it proves safe. The efficacy and both short- and long-term effects of TES on the developing brain need to be critically assessed before it can be recommended for clinical settings.

Interpolation of illusory pain in the human somatosensory system.

Three coins are lined up with the middle coin at room temperature and flanking coins cooled down to 4 degrees C. If digits 2 and 4 are placed on the outer coins and digit 3 on the middle coin, the latter also feels cold; a striking example of perceptual filling in of temperature. We show that if digits 2 and 4 are placed on a thermal grill with alternating hot and cold bars, while digit 3 is placed on cardboard, the sensation of pain will also spread to the middle finger.

The phantom head.

A student volunteer was asked to stand just behind a mannequin so that the student was looking at the back of the mannequin's plastic head. The experimenter stood off to one side and used her two hands to stroke and tap the back of the student's head in perfect synchrony with the back of the mannequin's head. After 1-2 min the majority of naive subjects tested began experiencing the sensations as emerging from the mannequin's head rather than from their own, demonstrating a novel 'phantom-head' illusion. The fact that sensory referral here occurs to a part of the body that is not normally visually accessible challenges the leading Hebbian explanation of the well-studied rubber-hand illusion.