"Basic drives like thirst and hunger ensure we eat and drink at the right times, giving our bodies the hydration and nutrition needed to survive," explains Rüdiger Klein, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence.
The three scientists and co-first authors Tomas Vega-Zuniga, Anton Sumser, and Olga Symonova combined a range of state-of-the-art techniques to identify a brain region in the mouse that can predict and minimize how movements distort the visual signal.
"Flexibly associating different behaviors with a given situation is a core competence of our brain," explains Alexander Gail, head of the Sensorimotor Research Group and the study.
To overcome this critical bottleneck, researchers have been pursuing the new concept of "liquid biopsies," which involves the easy extraction of blood or other body fluids using non-invasive procedures, and analyzing them for molecules originating from brain and other solid tissues.
Scientists analyzed the brains of 84 people, and the results, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that damage to one type of cell, called an inhibitory neuron, during the early phase may trigger the neural circuit problems that underlie the disease.
The participants were scanned using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record whole-brain connectivity, rather than focusing on specific regions as was done in previous bilingualism studies.
