Brain Activity Tracks Population Information Sharing by Capturing Consensus Judgments of Value.

Information that is shared widely can profoundly shape society. Evidence from neuroimaging suggests that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a core region of the brain's valuation system tracks with this sharing. However, the mechanisms linking vmPFC responses in individuals to population behavior are still unclear. We used a multilevel brain-as-predictor approach to address this gap, finding that individual differences in how closely vmPFC activity corresponded with population news article sharing related to how closely its activity tracked with social consensus about article value. Moreover, how closely vmPFC activity corresponded with population behavior was linked to daily life news experience: frequent news readers tended to show high vmPFC across all articles, whereas infrequent readers showed high vmPFC only to articles that were more broadly valued and heavily shared. Using functional connectivity analyses, we found that superior tracking of consensus value was related to decreased connectivity of vmPFC with a dorsolateral PFC region associated with controlled processing. Taken together, our results demonstrate variability in the brain's capacity to track crowd wisdom about information value, and suggest (lower levels of) stimulus experience and vmPFC-dlPFC connectivity as psychological and neural sources of this variability.

Continuous small-dose aprotinin controls fibrinolysis during orthotopic liver transplantation.

Large doses of aprotinin (1,000,000-2,000,000 kallikrein inhibitor units [KIU] initial dose and a 500,000 KIU/h infusion) have been used during orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) to reduce the incidence and severity of fibrinolysis. This double-blinded study was designed to investigate whether a small-dose infusion of aprotinin (200,000 KIU/h) would control fibrinolysis. A controlled study was undertaken to compare small-dose aprotinin with a placebo in patients undergoing OLT with veno-venous bypass. Forty-four patients were randomized either to the aprotinin group (n = 21), which received an intravenous infusion of 200,000 KIU/h without an initial dose, or to a control group (n = 23), which received normal saline. Coagulation variables, thrombelastograms, and postoperative blood drainage were measured. Blood levels of fibrin degradation products (FDP) were significantly higher in the control group (95% > 20 micrograms/mL) at the end of surgery compared to the aprotinin group (53% > 20 micrograms/mL, P < 0.01). The transfusion of cryoprecipitate units was more in the control group versus the aprotinin (12.6 +/- 12.8 vs 5.7 +/- 7.5; P < 0.04), as was the number of fresh frozen plasma units (6.6 +/- 3.5 vs 3.6 +/- 6.1; P < 0.05). We conclude that an infusion of a small dose of aprotinin can safely control fibrinolysis during liver transplantation with a concomitant reduction in transfusion of blood products.