Understanding the brain and its interaction with the environment // hack the brain
Despite the significant breakthroughs in neuroscience, how the brain actually works remains largely unanswered
Here is a summary of the key points from the article:
- A new neuroscientific framework called the “synergistic model” provides a more holistic understanding of brain function by integrating multiple levels of analysis.
- The model combines biophysical modeling, naturalistic perspectives, and analyses of brain dynamics and connectivity.
- This allows for a more accurate characterization of the complex interactions between the brain, body, and environment.
- The framework can shed light on neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes and brain disorders.
- It enables more personalized diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases by capturing individual variability.
- The model is transdiagnostic, going beyond symptoms to identify shared mechanisms across disorders.
- Environmental factors like pollution and green spaces are incorporated to understand real-world influences on brain function.
- Overall, the synergistic paradigm aims to overcome limitations of fragmented, symptoms-based approaches in neuroscience.
Cognitive neuroscience of diseases faces challenges dealing with complex structure–function associations, disease phenotype heterogeneity, lack of transdiagnostic models, and oversimplified cognitive approaches.
Synergetics offers a unified framework to progressively tackle these challenges, emphasizing the complex dynamics of brain, body, and environmental interactions.
We review recent advances in neuroscience, focusing on low-dimensional spatiotemporal hierarchies, whole-brain modeling and perturbation, interlevel integration, and naturalistic frameworks.
The future of synergetics depends on handling variability, incorporating environmental factors, integrating more levels of analysis, and accessing large multimodal data sets, setting the stage for a transformative approach in clinical neuroscience.
Despite significant improvements in our understanding of brain diseases, many barriers remain. Cognitive neuroscience faces four major challenges: complex structure–function associations; disease phenotype heterogeneity; the lack of transdiagnostic models; and oversimplified cognitive approaches restricted to the laboratory. Here, we propose a synergetics framework that can help to perform the necessary dimensionality reduction of complex interactions between the brain, body, and environment. The key solutions include low-dimensional spatiotemporal hierarchies for brain-structure associations, whole-brain modeling to handle phenotype diversity, model integration of shared transdiagnostic pathophysiological pathways, and naturalistic frameworks balancing experimental control and ecological validity. Creating whole-brain models with reduced manifolds combined with ecological measures can improve our understanding of brain disease and help identify novel interventions. Synergetics provides an integrated framework for future progress in clinical and cognitive neuroscience, pushing the boundaries of brain health and disease toward more mature, naturalistic approaches
Dopamine and serotonin are hypothesized to guide social behaviours. In humans, however, we have not yet been able to study neuromodulator dynamics as social interaction unfolds. Here, we obtained subsecond estimates of dopamine and serotonin from human substantia nigra pars reticulata during the ultimatum game. Participants, who were patients with Parkinson’s disease undergoing awake brain surgery, had to accept or reject monetary offers of varying fairness from human and computer players. They rejected more offers in the human than the computer condition, an effect of social context associated with higher overall levels of dopamine but not serotonin. Regardless of the social context, relative changes in dopamine tracked trial-by-trial changes in offer value — akin to reward prediction errors — whereas serotonin tracked the current offer value. These results show that dopamine and serotonin fluctuations in one of the basal ganglia’s main output structures reflect distinct social context and value signals.
