Researchers Explain Why Familiar Lifts are Easier to Operate Than New Ones

An attempt to unravel what makes our brain switch between habitual and goal-directed actions was made by researchers.

"Pressing the button of the lift at your work place, or apartment building is an automatic action - a habit. You don't even really look at the different buttons; your hand is almost reaching out and pressing on its own. But what happens when you use the lift in a new place? In this case, your hand doesn't know the way, you have to locate the buttons, find the right one, and only then your hand can press a button. Here, pushing the button is a goal-directed action."

To Remember Or Not - Brain Protein CREB Calls The Shots
American scientists have come out with research findings they hope will aid in the treatment of Alzheimer’s patients- by saving bits of memories before they all fade off.

It is with this example that Rui Costa, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme (CNP), explained how critical it is to be able to shift between habits and goal-direct actions, in a fast and accurate way, in everyday life.

To unravel the circuit that underlies this capacity, the capacity to "break habits", was the goal of this study, carried out by Christina Gremel and Rui Costa, at NIAAA, National Institutes of Health, USA and the Champalimaud Foundation, in Portugal.

"We developed a task where mice would shift between making the same action in a goal-directed or habitual manner. We could then, for the first time, directly examine brain areas controlling the capacity to break habits," the study's lead author Christina Gremel from NIAAA, said.

How Live Brain Cell Circuits Spark and Fire Watched by Scientists
By using fruit flies, scientists have shown that a new class of genetically engineered proteins can be used to watch nerve cell electrical activity in live brains.

Evidence from previous studies has shown that two neighbouring regions of the brain are necessary for these different functions - the dorsal medial striatum is necessary for goal-directed actions and the dorsal lateral striatum is necessary for habitual actions.

What was not known, and this new study reveals, is that a third region, the orbital frontal cortex (OFC), is critical for shifting between these two types of actions.

Tamoxifen does not adversely affect the brain
The breast cancer drug tamoxifen does not damage the brains of elderly women, alleviating fears of a neurotoxic effect of such treatment, recent

As explained by Rui Costa, "when neurons in the OFC were inhibited, the generation of goal-directed actions was disrupted, while activation of these neurons, by means of a technique called optogenetics, selectively increased goal-directed actions."

For Costa, the results of this study suggest "something quite extraordinary - the same neural circuits function in a dynamic way, enabling the learning of automatic and goal-directed actions in parallel."

Virus Helps Remove Brain Cancer
Researchers at University of Texas have tested a novel viral smart bomb therapy that can completely eradicate brain tumors in mice, while leaving

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source-ANI