Plos One
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Altering the normal association between touch and its visual correlate can result in the illusory perception of a fake limb as part of our own body. Thus, when touch is seen to be applied to a rubber hand while felt synchronously on the corresponding hidden real hand, an illusion of ownership of the rubber hand usually occurs. The illusion has also been demonstrated using visuomotor correlation between the movements of the hidden real hand and the seen fake hand. This type of paradigm has been used with respect to the whole body generating out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions. However, such studies have only ever manipulated a single factor and although they used a form of virtual reality have not exploited the power of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to produce radical transformations in body ownership. ⋯ The results support the notion that bottom-up perceptual mechanisms can temporarily override top down knowledge resulting in a radical illusion of transfer of body ownership. The research also illustrates immersive virtual reality as a powerful tool in the study of body representation and experience, since it supports experimental manipulations that would otherwise be infeasible, with the technology being mature enough to represent human bodies and their motion.
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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the deposition of aggregated beta-amyloid (Abeta), which triggers a cellular stress response called the unfolded protein response (UPR). The UPR signaling pathway is a cellular defense system for dealing with the accumulation of misfolded proteins but switches to apoptosis when endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is prolonged. ER stress is involved in neurodegenerative diseases including AD, but the molecular mechanisms of ER stress-mediated Abeta neurotoxicity still remain unknown. ⋯ Knockdown of PERK enhances Abeta neurotoxicity through reducing the activation of eIF2alpha and Grp8/Bip in neurons. Salubrinal, an activator of the eIF2alpha pathway, significantly increased the Grp78/Bip ER chaperone resulted in attenuating caspase-4 dependent apoptosis in Abeta treated neurons. These results indicate that PERK-eIF2alpha pathway is a potential target for therapeutic applications in neurodegenerative diseases including AD.
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Endovascular technique has benefits vis-a-vis surgical access to organs with less accessible anatomical locations. To minimize surgical risk we propose a novel endovascular technique, to create parenchymal access through endovascular methods. ⋯ We have developed and tested a new system for transvascular tissue access in simulations, ex vivo and in vivo in small and large animals, integrating it with standard clinical catheters and angiographical environment, with absolute hemostasis and without thromboembolic complications. In a clinical setting for stem cell transplantation, local substance administration or tissue sampling, the benefit should be greatest in organs that are difficult or high-risk to access with other techniques, such as the pancreas, the central nervous system (CNS) and the heart.
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Our body schema gives the subjective impression of being highly stable. However, a number of easily-evoked illusions illustrate its remarkable malleability. In the rubber-hand illusion, illusory ownership of a rubber-hand is evoked by synchronous visual and tactile stimulation on a visible rubber arm and on the hidden real arm. Ownership is concurrent with a proprioceptive illusion of displacement of the arm position towards the fake arm. We have previously shown that this illusion of ownership plus the proprioceptive displacement also occurs towards a virtual 3D projection of an arm when the appropriate synchronous visuotactile stimulation is provided. Our objective here was to explore whether these illusions (ownership and proprioceptive displacement) can be induced by only synchronous visuomotor stimulation, in the absence of tactile stimulation. ⋯ We conclude that synchrony between visual and proprioceptive information along with motor activity is able to induce an illusion of ownership over a virtual arm. This has implications regarding the brain mechanisms underlying body ownership as well as the use of virtual bodies in therapies and rehabilitation.
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EEG studies of working memory (WM) have demonstrated load dependent frequency band modulations. FMRI studies have localized load modulated activity to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Recently, an EEG-fMRI study found that low frequency band (theta and alpha) activity negatively correlated with the BOLD signal during the retention phase of a WM task. However, the coupling of higher (beta and gamma) frequencies with the BOLD signal during WM is unknown. ⋯ We conclude that the directions of EEG-BOLD signal correlations vary across brain regions and EEG frequency bands. In addition, some brain regions show both load sensitive BOLD and frequency band effects. Our data indicate that lower as well as higher frequency brain oscillations are linked to neurovascular processes during WM.