Month: December 2020

If you’ve ever forgotten something mere seconds after it was at the forefront of your mind—the name of a dish you were about to order at a restaurant, for instance—then you know how important working memory is. This type of short-term recall is how people retain information for a matter of seconds or minutes to solve a problem or carry out a task, like the next step in a series of instructions. But, although it’s critical in our day-to-day lives, exactly how the brain manages working memory has been a mystery.

Now, Salk scientists have developed a new computational model showing how the brain maintains information short-term using specific types of neurons. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on December 7, 2020, could help shed light on why working memory is impaired in a broad range of neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, as well as in normal aging.

“Most research on working memory focuses on the excitatory neurons in the cortex, which are numerous and broadly connected, rather than the inhibitory neurons, which are locally connected and more diverse,” says Terrence Sejnowski, head of Salk’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the new work. “However, a recurrent neural network model that we taught to perform a working memory task surprised us by using inhibitory neurons to make correct decisions after a delay.”

In the new paper, Sejnowski and Robert Kim, a Salk and UC San Diego MD/Ph.D. student, developed a computer model of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain known to manage working memory. The researchers used learning algorithms to teach their model to carry out a test typically used to gauge working memory in primates—the animals must determine whether a pattern of colored squares on a screen matches one that was seen

After ‘COVID-19,’ the term that most people will remember best from 2020 is likely to be ‘social distancing.’ While it most commonly applied to social gatherings with family and friends, it has impacted the way many receive medical care. Historically, the United States has been relatively slow to broadly adopt telemedicine, largely emphasizing in-person visits.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the spring of 2020, necessitated increased use of virtual or phone call visits, even prompting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to relax some of its regulations, primarily for video-based telemedicine. These large scale changes made telemedicine exponentially more popular than it had been even at the start of the calendar year.

But while this was a positive for those who otherwise would have delayed or foregone care due to the pandemic, a new study led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, published in JAMA Network Open, uncovered significant inequities, particularly by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, and when someone needed to use a language other than English.

“As we begin to establish novel ways of caring for our patients via telemedicine, it is critical that we make the foundation of this new way forward equitable,” said the study’s senior author, Srinath Adusumalli, MD, an assistant professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania Health System assistant chief medical information officer for connected health. “We hope that regulatory and payer organizations recognize potential inequities that could be introduced by policies they create—which might include not reimbursing for telephone visits, and potentially leading to lack of access to care for particular patient populations, specifically those disproportionately affected by events like the COVID-19 crisis.”

The researchers, who included the study’s lead author, Lauren Eberly, MD, a