^{By Dr. Inés Urdaneta, Physicist at Resonance Science Foundation}

Using ultrafast and ultrahigh field magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation and the University of Minho have found evidence of resonant waves in rat brain activity. This means that the brain seems to be a resonant chamber where distant brain areas show correlated activations due to collective wave modes [1].

Many theoretical works have proposed models based on standing waves to explain the macroscopic patterns observed [2-5], though the nature of such activations remains unclear. To delve deeper into this mechanism and understand how distant areas exhibit signal correlations, and how they are implicated in brain function, experimental evidence required a better temporal resolution of the fMRI spectras to show the spatial pattern oscillations and prove the hypothesis that these macroscopic patterns result from the distinct or independent transient oscillation modes at...

Researchers have discovered a key process by which new genes from non-protein coding DNA undergoes mutations to enable export from the nucleus into the cellular cytoplasm where the new gene can be translated into novel polypeptides. In the new study the researchers have shown that far from being accessories, new gene products are often integral in key phenotype characteristics, such as larger brains in human-specific de novo genes from non-protein coding DNA. But before such genes can become novel protein products, they must change to escape the nuclear localization fated for long non-coding RNA sequences: the study elucidates the mutations involved in enabling nuclear export where the new gene can access the translational machinery of the ribosome, and demonstrates via knock-out and overexpression experiments the functional role of novo genes from non-protein coding DNA in organism development, like the enlargement of the cerebral cortex in humans.  

By: William Brown,...

By: William Brown, scientist at the Resonance Science Foundation

Spatial Topography of the Brain

A meta-analysis of magnetic resonance imaging data of neuronal activity in advanced meditation practitioners has discovered a reorganization of information processing topography in which brain regions involved in present-awareness have increased activity while ego-centric and subject-object (discriminatory) neuronal information processing layers are mitigated [1]. The researchers identify the neural correlates associated with the feeling of unity of experience—a state that advanced meditation practitioners can experience, often described as a non-dual state of experience that does not maintain the strong distinction between self-other or subject-object information, but rather a unified experience of oneness, or singularity.

The study is based on Qin et al.’s (2020) neural model (Linking bodily, environmental and mental states in the self—A...