Roger Sperry, the maverick brain scientist who was haunted by psyche

This paper describes the scientific figure of Roger Sperry as a maverick researcher, an original thinker who arrived at definitive notions about the working of the brain mostly by distancing himself from the prevalent views of his peers. After solving the riddle of the functions of the corpus callosum, he won a Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for identifying the different cognitive abilities of the disconnected right and left hemispheres of the human brain. He could have won another Nobel prize for his work on the prenatal formation of behavioral neuronal networks and their growth and development after birth. In the last part of his life, he fought a courageous but inconclusive battle for demonstrating that mental and spiritual factors can direct brain activity and behavior without violating the laws of orthodox neurophysiology. Some nodal points in his scientific career and some sources of inspirations for his thinking are identified and discussed within the historical background of the neurosciences of the twentieth century

Neuropsychology of Consciousness: Some History and a Few New Trends

Consciousness is a global activity of the nervous system. Its physiological and pathological mechanisms have been studied in relation to the natural sleep-wake cycle and various forms of normal or morbid unconsciousness, mainly in neurophysiology and clinical neurology. Neuropsychology has been more interested in specific higher brain functions, such as perception and memory and their disorders, rather than in consciousness per se. However, neuropsychology has been at the forefront in the identification of conscious and unconscious components in the processing of sensory and mnestic information. The present review describes some historical steps in the formulation of consciousness as a global brain function with arousal and content as principal ingredients, respectively, instantiated in the subcortex and the neocortex. It then reports a few fresh developments in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience which emphasize the importance of the hippocampus for thinking and dreaming. Non-neocortical structures may contribute to the contents of consciousness more than previously believed

Inter-hemispheric integration of tactile-motor responses across body parts

In simple detection tasks, reaction times (RTs) are faster when stimuli are presented to the visual field or side of the body ipsilateral to the body part used to respond. This advantage, the crossed-uncrossed difference (CUD), is thought to reflect interhemispheric interactions needed for sensorimotor information to be integrated between the two cerebral hemispheres. However, it is unknown whether the tactile CUD is invariant when different body parts are stimulated. The most likely structure mediating such processing is thought to be the corpus callosum (CC). Neurophysiological studies have shown that there are denser callosal connections between regions that represent proximal parts of the body near the body midline and more sparse connections for regions representing distal extremities. Therefore, if the information transfer between the two hemispheres is affected by the density of callosal connections, stimuli presented on more distal regions of the body should produce a greater CUD compared to stimuli presented on more proximal regions. This is because interhemispheric transfer of information from regions with sparse callosal connections will be less efficient, and hence slower. Here, we investigated whether the CUD is modulated as a function of the different body parts stimulated by presenting tactile stimuli unpredictably on body parts at different distances from the body midline (i.e., Middle Finger, Forearm, or Forehead of each side of the body). Participants detected the stimulus and responded as fast as possible using either their left or right foot. Results showed that the magnitude of the CUD was larger on the finger (∼2.6 ms) and forearm (∼1.8 ms) than on the forehead ( 0.9 ms). This result suggests that the interhemispheric transfer of tactile stimuli varies as a function of the strength of callosal connections of the body parts

Autologous anti-GD2 CAR T cells efficiently target primary human glioblastoma

Glioblastoma (GBM) remains a deadly tumor. Treatment with chemo-radiotherapy and corticosteroids is known to impair the functionality of lymphocytes, potentially compromising the development of autologous CAR T cell therapies. We here generated pre-clinical investigations of autologous anti-GD2 CAR T cells tested against 2D and 3D models of GBM primary cells. We detected a robust antitumor effect, highlighting the feasibility of developing an autologous anti-GD2 CAR T cell-based therapy for GBM patients

British roots of Italian neurophysiology in the early 20th century

The recent Congress of the Italian Society of Neuroscience in Verona attracted several hundred participants, attesting to the vitality of a scientific enterprise that was started 23 years ago with the Society's first meeting in Rome. During the first Congress in Rome, four eminent Italian scientists were appointed honorary members of the Society in recognition of their outstanding contributions to neuroscience: the neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, the neuropharmacologists Daniele Bovet and Vittorio Erspamer, and the neurophysiologist Giuseppe Moruzzi. Their world-famous work inspired and provided the climate that encouraged the development of the neurosciences in Italy, and inspires Italian neuroscientists to this day. I have benefited from Moruzzi's teaching throughout my scientific career, and my purpose here is to tell how Moruzzi's teacher Mario Camis, and Moruzzi himself, benefited in turn from the teachings of the British founders of modern neurophysiology, Charles Scott Sherrington and Edgar Douglas Adrian