Brain Age

Found this on Brain Waves.

Cognitive Drug Research teamed up with Portfolio to develop an online test to determine your brain age (it takes 7 minutes). Very cool, but pay attention, you might be surprised to learn how old your brain is, I was 26!! Might want to try a brain fitness product.

Link to the test.

Neuroscience Peer Review

Read about this consortium of journals that enables reviews to be transferred from one journal to another!

I definitely like this concept. This will reduce the time and effort involved in the peer review of submissions and speed publications of the results. This system is completely voluntary for authors. If the reviews from the first journal do not seem likely to facilitate acceptance at another journal, the authors can send the paper directly to the second journal as a fresh submission. However, if the author feels that the reviews may be helpful,transferring them can accelerate the editorial process.

Here is a link to the participating journals.

For reviewers besides reducing the load they also have the option to release their names along with the review in the event that the paper is transferred to another journal. I like transparency and hence support this idea.

Anyways, a definite thumbs up from me for the whole process. The flexibility is the system should suffice everyone to participate in it.

Emotional interactions

Functional grouping and cortical–subcortical interactions in emotion: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies
Hedy Kobera, Lisa Feldman Barrettb, Josh Josepha, Eliza Bliss-Moreaub, Kristen Lindquistb and Tor D. Wager
Article in Press, NeuroImage 2008

Background & Methods: We performed an updated quantitative meta-analysis of 162 neuroimaging studies of emotion using a novel multi-level kernel-based approach, focusing on locating brain regions consistently activated in emotional tasks and their functional organization into distributed functional groups, independent of semantically defined emotion category labels (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). Such brain-based analyses are critical if our ways of labeling emotions are to be evaluated and revised based on consistency with brain data. Consistent activations were limited to specific cortical sub-regions, including multiple functional areas within medial, orbital, and inferior lateral frontal cortices. Consistent with a wealth of animal literature, multiple subcortical activations were identified, including amygdala, ventral striatum, thalamus, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray. We used multivariate parcellation and clustering techniques to identify groups of co-activated brain regions across studies.

Results: These analyses identified six distributed functional groups, including medial and lateral frontal groups, two posterior cortical groups, and paralimbic and core limbic/brainstem groups. These functional groups provide information on potential organization of brain regions into large-scale networks. Specific follow-up analyses focused on amygdala, periaqueductal gray (PAG), and hypothalamic (Hy) activations, and identified frontal cortical areas co-activated with these core limbic structures. While multiple areas of frontal cortex co-activated with amygdala sub-regions, a specific region of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC, Brodmann's Area 9/32) was the only area co-activated with both PAG and Hy. Subsequent mediation analyses were consistent with a pathway from dmPFC through PAG to Hy.

Conclusions: These results suggest that medial frontal areas are more closely associated with core limbic activation than their lateral counterparts, and that dmPFC may play a particularly important role in the cognitive generation of emotional states.