I feel your pain: higher empathy is associated with higher posterior default mode network activity.

Empathy is characterized as the ability to share one's experience and is associated with altruism. Previous work using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional MRI (fMRI) has found that empathy is associated with greater activation in brain mechanisms supporting mentalizing (temporoparietal junction), salience (anterior cingulate cortex; insula), and self-reference (medial prefrontal cortex; precuneus). However, BOLD fMRI has some limitations that may not reliably capture the tonic experience of empathy.

Self-regulated analgesia in males but not females is mediated by endogenous opioids.

Converging lines of preclinical and clinical research indicate that females, in stark contrast to males, display an increased prevalence of chronic pain. Females also demonstrate weaker analgesic efficacy in response to opioid therapies when compared with males. These sex-specific differences may be driven by dimorphic endogenous opioidergic responses.

Mindfulness Meditation and Placebo Modulate Distinct Multivariate Neural Signatures to Reduce Pain.

Background: Rather than a passive reflection of nociception, pain is shaped by the interplay between one's experiences, current cognitive-affective states, and expectations. The placebo response, a paradoxical yet reliable phenomenon, is postulated to reduce pain by engaging mechanisms shared with active therapies. It has been assumed that mindfulness meditation, practiced by sustaining nonjudgmental awareness of arising sensory events, merely reflects mechanisms evoked by placebo.

The role of endogenous opioids in mindfulness and sham mindfulness-meditation for the direct alleviation of evoked chronic low back pain: a randomized clinical trial.

Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy.

WITHDRAWN: I feel your pain: Higher empathy is associated with higher posterior default mode network activity.

The authors discovered an error in the primary analysis and have withdrawn the results from this version of the investigation.

Inactivation of Prefrontal Cortex Attenuates Behavioral Arousal Induced by Stimulation of Basal Forebrain During Sevoflurane Anesthesia.

Background: Cholinergic stimulation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) can reverse anesthesia. Conversely, inactivation of PFC can delay emergence from anesthesia. PFC receives cholinergic projections from basal forebrain, which contains wake-promoting neurons.

The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Trauma in Victims of Gun Violence: a Pilot Study.

Objectives: Gun violence is a significant problem in the United States of America. Gun violence produces lifelong psychological adversity, trauma, and grief. In the face of this epidemic, efficacious therapies that assuage gun violence-based trauma and negative health are lacking.

Cortical Acetylcholine Levels Correlate With Neurophysiologic Complexity During Subanesthetic Ketamine and Nitrous Oxide Exposure in Rats.

Background: Neurophysiologic complexity has been shown to decrease during states characterized by a depressed level of consciousness, such as sleep or anesthesia. Conversely, neurophysiologic complexity is increased during exposure to serotonergic psychedelics or subanesthetic doses of dissociative anesthetics. However, the neurochemical substrates underlying changes in neurophysiologic complexity are poorly characterized.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy for functional neurological disorders: A theoretical framework and review of prior reports.

Functional neurological disorders (FNDs), which are sometimes also referred to as psychogenic neurological disorders or conversion disorder, are common disabling neuropsychiatric disorders with limited treatment options. FNDs can present with sensory and/or motor symptoms, and, though they may mimic other neurological conditions, they are thought to occur via mechanisms other than those related to identifiable structural neuropathology and, in many cases, appear to be triggered and sustained by recognizable psychological factors. There is intriguing preliminary evidence to support the use of psychedelic-assisted therapy in a growing number of psychiatric illnesses, including FNDs.

Level of Consciousness Is Dissociable from Electroencephalographic Measures of Cortical Connectivity, Slow Oscillations, and Complexity.

Leading neuroscientific theories posit a central role for the functional integration of cortical areas in conscious states. Considerable evidence supporting this hypothesis is based on network changes during anesthesia, but it is unclear whether these changes represent state-related (conscious vs unconscious) or drug-related (anesthetic vs no anesthetic) effects. We recently demonstrated that carbachol delivery to prefrontal cortex (PFC) restored wakefulness despite continuous administration of the general anesthetic sevoflurane.

Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in Mammalian Brain.

N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic compound identified endogenously in mammals, is biosynthesized by aromatic-L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) and indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase (INMT). Whether DMT is biosynthesized in the mammalian brain is unknown. We investigated brain expression of INMT transcript in rats and humans, co-expression of INMT and AADC mRNA in rat brain and periphery, and brain concentrations of DMT in rats.

Differential Role of Prefrontal and Parietal Cortices in Controlling Level of Consciousness.

Consciousness is determined both by level (e.g., being awake versus being anesthetized) and content (i.

Redistribution of Mature Smooth Muscle Markers in Brain Arteries in Cerebral Autosomal Dominant Arteriopathy with Subcortical Infarcts and Leukoencephalopathy.

Vascular smooth muscle cells (SMCs) undergo a series of dramatic changes in CADASIL, the most common inherited cause of vascular dementia and stroke. NOTCH3 protein accumulates and aggregates early in CADASIL, followed by loss of mature SMCs from the media of brain arteries and marked intimal proliferation. Similar intimal thickening is seen in peripheral arterial disease, which features pathological intimal cells including proliferative, dedifferentiated, smooth muscle-like cells deficient in SMC markers.

Indolethylamine--methyltransferase Polymorphisms: Genetic and Biochemical Approaches for Study of Endogenous ,-dimethyltryptamine.

-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a powerful serotonergic psychedelic whose exogenous administration elicits striking psychedelic effects in humans. Studies have identified DMT and analogous compounds (e.g.

Chronic circadian advance shifts abolish melatonin secretion for days in rats.

Melatonin deficiency has been proposed to underlie higher risks for cardiovascular and several other diseases in humans experiencing prolonged shiftwork. However, melatonin secretion has not been monitored longitudinally during consecutive shifts of the light:dark (LD) cycles in the same individuals (animals or humans) and the extent of melatonin deficiency is unknown in individuals experiencing consecutive LD shifts. We investigated the effect of consecutive LD shifts on melatonin secretion in adult F344 rats using continuous online pineal-microdialysis.

Dystrobrevin increases dystrophin's binding to the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex and provides protection during cardiac stress.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a fatal progressive disease of both cardiac and skeletal muscle resulting from the mutations in the DMD gene and loss of the protein dystrophin. Alpha-dystrobrevin (α-DB) tightly associates with dystrophin but the significance of this interaction within cardiac myocytes is poorly understood. In the current study, the functional role of α-DB in cardiomyocytes and its implications for dystrophin function are examined.

Mars promotes dTACC dephosphorylation on mitotic spindles to ensure spindle stability.

Microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) ensure the fidelity of chromosome segregation by controlling microtubule (MT) dynamics and mitotic spindle stability. However, many aspects of MAP function and regulation are poorly understood in a developmental context. We show that mars, which encodes a Drosophila melanogaster member of the hepatoma up-regulated protein family of MAPs, is essential for MT stabilization during early embryogenesis.