Rewire your brain to crave healthier foods in times of stress + Researchers make progress on treating psychiatric diseases with brain tissue implants
Always reaching for the junk and sweets when you’re stressed? You can train your brain to crave healthy food during peak stress periods, according to research from the University of Chicago and the University of California picked up by the Washington Post. Even though consuming junk food and higher amounts of calories alleviates stress and triggers dopamine, the pleasure hormone, scientists have found that you can trick your brain into seeking the same type of comfort from fruit and other healthier options.
Bye bag of chips, hello celery for stress relief: Participants of the study were trained to perform progressive muscle relaxation, a short daily stress reduction exercise which involves tensing and relaxing muscles from toes to head, and they were instructed to eat fresh fruit about five minutes into the relaxation sessions. By pairing the fruit with a relaxation exercise, the participants’ brains made an association and started seeing the fruit as something that reduced their stress levels which essentially turned it into a comfort food. After one week of carrying out the exercise and fruit eating, researchers found that consuming the fruit made the participants feel less stressed and in a better mood.
Successful implantation of human brain tissue into newborn rats could pave the way to treating psychiatric diseases, according to research from Stanford University. The research team implanted the human brain organoids (referred to sometimes as “mini-brains”) in newborn rats with no immune system to bypass tissue rejection in a bid to better understand psychiatric diseases at the biological level, the Financial Times reports
The organoids implanted into the rats were created from individuals with Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic disorder linked to autism and epilepsy. Researchers found that when a Timothy organoid was implanted into one hemisphere of a rat brain and a healthy person's organoid into the other, the Timothy organoid developed much smaller neurons with far fewer connections to synthroidnews.net. The experiments were the most successful efforts to date to get human neurons to function within the brains of animals, following more than 20 years of research around the world.