Neuroscience
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In the cortex, demarcated unimodal sensory regions often respond to unforeseen sensory stimuli and exhibit plasticity. The goal of the current investigation was to test evoked responses of primary visual cortex (V1) neurons when an adapting auditory stimulus is applied in isolation. ⋯ Our results suggest that neurons specific to either layer dynamically integrate features of sound and modify the organization of the orientation map of V1. Intriguingly, these experiments present novel findings that the mere presentation of a prolonged auditory stimulus may drastically recalibrate the tuning properties of the visual neurons and highlight the phenomenal neuroplasticity of V1 neurons.
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Peripheral neuropathy is one of the main complications of diabetes. The pathogenesis of this affectation is not completely understood. Several studies refer to hyperglycemia as the principal cause of diabetic neuropathy. ⋯ Treatment with metformin for 4 weeks reversed some of the fructose-induced changes in protein expression. Taken together, these data suggest that insulin resistance induced by fructose reproduces several aspects of neuropathic-like pain. Our data also suggest that nociceptive hypersensitivity in this model is due to the modulation of several ionic channels at the primary afferent neurons.
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Accumulating evidence relates finger gnosis (also called finger sense or finger gnosia), the ability to identify and individuate fingers, to cognitive processing, particularly numerical cognition. Multiple studies have shown that finger gnosis scores correlate with or predict numerical skills in children. Neuropsychological cases as well as magnetic stimulation studies have also shown that finger agnosia (defects in finger gnosis) often co-occurs with cognitive impairments, including agraphia and acalculia. ⋯ We also found sex differences in how GMV is associated with finger gnosis. While females showed a more distributed and extensive set of frontal and parietal clusters, males showed two striatal clusters. This study provides the first findings on structural brain features that correlate with finger gnosis.