May 13, 2025 03:44 PM
How Fast Is Too Fast to See? Study Reveals Your Visual Speed Limit
https://gizmodo.com/how-fast-is-too-fast...2000601005
EXCERPT: As detailed in a study published May 8 in Nature Communications, researchers have revealed that the speed of an individual’s saccades corresponds to the limit at which a moving object becomes too fast for them to see. That means people with faster eye movements can perceive faster-moving objects, with potential implications for activities requiring fast eye movements such as sports, video games, and even photography. The researchers claim to be the first to provide evidence for the theory that a person’s movement impacts their perception... (MORE - missing details)
Measurable brain wave shift may beuniversal marker of unconsciousness under anesthesia
https://picower.mit.edu/news/different-a...wave-phase
INTRO: At the level of molecules and cells, ketamine and dexmedetomidine work very differently, but in the operating room they do the same exact thing: anesthetize the patient. By demonstrating how these distinct drugs achieve the same result, a new study in animals by neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT identifies a potential signature of unconsciousness that is readily measurable to improve anesthesiology care.
What the two drugs have in common, the researchers discovered, is the way they push around brain waves, which are produced by the collective electrical activity of neurons. When brain waves are in phase, meaning the peaks and valleys of the waves are aligned, local groups of neurons in the brain’s cortex can share information to produce conscious cognitive functions such as attention, perception and reasoning, said Picower Professor Earl K. Miller, senior author of the new study in Cell Reports. When brain waves fall out of phase, local communications, and therefore functions, fall apart, producing unconsciousness.
The finding, led by graduate student Alexandra Bardon, not only adds to scientists’ understanding of the dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, Miller said, but also could provide a common new measure for anesthesiologists who use a variety of different anesthetics to maintain patients on the proper side of that line during surgery.
“If you look at the way phase is shifted in our recordings, you can barely tell which drug it was,” said Miller, a faculty member in The Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “That’s valuable for medical practice. Plus if unconsciousness has a universal signature, it could also reveal the mechanisms that generate consciousness.”
If more anesthetic drugs are also shown to affect phase in the same way, then anesthesiologists might be able to use brain wave phase alignment as a reliable marker of unconsciousness as they titrate doses of anesthetic drugs, Miller said, regardless of which particular mix of drugs they are using. That insight could aid efforts to build closed-loop systems that can aid anesthesiologists by constantly adjusting drug dose based on brain wave measurements of the patient’s unconsciousness... (MORE - details)
PAPER: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fullte...25)00456-5
https://gizmodo.com/how-fast-is-too-fast...2000601005
EXCERPT: As detailed in a study published May 8 in Nature Communications, researchers have revealed that the speed of an individual’s saccades corresponds to the limit at which a moving object becomes too fast for them to see. That means people with faster eye movements can perceive faster-moving objects, with potential implications for activities requiring fast eye movements such as sports, video games, and even photography. The researchers claim to be the first to provide evidence for the theory that a person’s movement impacts their perception... (MORE - missing details)
Measurable brain wave shift may beuniversal marker of unconsciousness under anesthesia
https://picower.mit.edu/news/different-a...wave-phase
INTRO: At the level of molecules and cells, ketamine and dexmedetomidine work very differently, but in the operating room they do the same exact thing: anesthetize the patient. By demonstrating how these distinct drugs achieve the same result, a new study in animals by neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT identifies a potential signature of unconsciousness that is readily measurable to improve anesthesiology care.
What the two drugs have in common, the researchers discovered, is the way they push around brain waves, which are produced by the collective electrical activity of neurons. When brain waves are in phase, meaning the peaks and valleys of the waves are aligned, local groups of neurons in the brain’s cortex can share information to produce conscious cognitive functions such as attention, perception and reasoning, said Picower Professor Earl K. Miller, senior author of the new study in Cell Reports. When brain waves fall out of phase, local communications, and therefore functions, fall apart, producing unconsciousness.
The finding, led by graduate student Alexandra Bardon, not only adds to scientists’ understanding of the dividing line between consciousness and unconsciousness, Miller said, but also could provide a common new measure for anesthesiologists who use a variety of different anesthetics to maintain patients on the proper side of that line during surgery.
“If you look at the way phase is shifted in our recordings, you can barely tell which drug it was,” said Miller, a faculty member in The Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “That’s valuable for medical practice. Plus if unconsciousness has a universal signature, it could also reveal the mechanisms that generate consciousness.”
If more anesthetic drugs are also shown to affect phase in the same way, then anesthesiologists might be able to use brain wave phase alignment as a reliable marker of unconsciousness as they titrate doses of anesthetic drugs, Miller said, regardless of which particular mix of drugs they are using. That insight could aid efforts to build closed-loop systems that can aid anesthesiologists by constantly adjusting drug dose based on brain wave measurements of the patient’s unconsciousness... (MORE - details)
PAPER: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fullte...25)00456-5