Schools and civil society : corporate or community governance

School improvement depends upon mediating the cultural conditions of learning as young people journey between their parochial worlds and the public world of cosmopolitan society. Governing bodies have a crucial role in including or diminishing the representation of different cultural traditions and in enabling or frustrating the expression of voice and deliberation of differences whose resolution is central to the mediation of and responsiveness to learning needs. A recent study of governing bodies in England and Wales argues that the trend to corporatising school governance will diminish the capacity of schools to learn how they can understand cultural traditions and accommodate them in their curricula and teaching strategies. A democratic, stakeholder model remains crucial to the effective practice of governing schools. By deliberating and reconciling social and cultural differences, governance constitutes the practices for mediating particular and cosmopolitan worlds and thus the conditions for engaging young people in their learning, as well as in the preparation for citizenship in civil society

Effects of Insulin Detemir and NPH Insulin on Body Weight and Appetite-Regulating Brain Regions in Human Type 1 Diabetes: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Studies in rodents have demonstrated that insulin in the central nervous system induces satiety. In humans, these effects are less well established. Insulin detemir is a basal insulin analog that causes less weight gain than other basal insulin formulations, including the current standard intermediate-long acting Neutral Protamine Hagedorn (NPH) insulin. Due to its structural modifications, which render the molecule more lipophilic, it was proposed that insulin detemir enters the brain more readily than other insulins. The aim of this study was to investigate whether insulin detemir treatment differentially modifies brain activation in response to food stimuli as compared to NPH insulin. In addition, cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) insulin levels were measured after both treatments. Brain responses to viewing food and non-food pictures were measured using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 32 type 1 diabetic patients, after each of two 12-week treatment periods with insulin detemir and NPH insulin, respectively, both combined with prandial insulin aspart. CSF insulin levels were determined in a subgroup. Insulin detemir decreased body weight by 0.8 kg and NPH insulin increased weight by 0.5 kg (p = 0.02 for difference), while both treatments resulted in similar glycemic control. After treatment with insulin detemir, as compared to NPH insulin, brain activation was significantly lower in bilateral insula in response to visual food stimuli, compared to NPH (p = 0.02 for right and p = 0.05 for left insula). Also, CSF insulin levels were higher compared to those with NPH insulin treatment (p = 0.003). Our findings support the hypothesis that in type 1 diabetic patients, the weight sparing effect of insulin detemir may be mediated by its enhanced action on the central nervous system, resulting in blunted activation in bilateral insula, an appetite-regulating brain region, in response to food stimuli.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00626080

Food Catches the Eye but Not for Everyone: A BMI–Contingent Attentional Bias in Rapid Detection of Nutriments

An organism's survival depends crucially on its ability to detect and acquire nutriment. Attention circuits interact with cognitive and motivational systems to facilitate detection of salient sensory events in the environment. Here we show that the human attentional system is tuned to detect food targets among nonfood items. In two visual search experiments participants searched for discrepant food targets embedded in an array of nonfood distracters or vice versa. Detection times were faster when targets were food rather than nonfood items, and the detection advantage for food items showed a significant negative correlation with Body Mass Index (BMI). Also, eye tracking during searching within arrays of visually homogenous food and nonfood targets demonstrated that the BMI-contingent attentional bias was due to rapid capturing of the eyes by food items in individuals with low BMI. However, BMI was not associated with decision times after the discrepant food item was fixated. The results suggest that visual attention is biased towards foods, and that individual differences in energy consumption - as indexed by BMI - are associated with differential attentional effects related to foods. We speculate that such differences may constitute an important risk factor for gaining weight

Functional connectivity underlying hedonic response to food in female adolescents with atypical AN: the role of somatosensory and salience networks.

Atypical anorexia nervosa (AN) usually occurs during adolescence. Patients are often in the normal-weight range at diagnosis; however, they often present with signs of medical complications and severe restraint over eating, body dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem. We investigated functional circuitry underlying the hedonic response in 28 female adolescent patients diagnosed with atypical AN and 33 healthy controls. Participants were shown images of food with high (HC) or low (LC) caloric content in alternating blocks during functional MRI. The HC > LC contrast was calculated. Based on the previous literature on full-threshold AN, we hypothesized that patients would exhibit increased connectivity in areas involved in sensory processing and bottom-up responses, coupled to increased connectivity from areas related to top-down inhibitory control, compared with controls. Patients showed increased connectivity in pathways related to multimodal somatosensory processing and memory retrieval. The connectivity was on the other hand decreased in patients in salience and attentional networks, and in a wide cerebello-occipital network. Our study was the first investigation of food-related neural response in atypical AN. Our findings support higher somatosensory processing in patients in response to HC food images compared with controls, however HC food was less efficient than LC food in engaging patients' bottom-up salient responses, and was not associated with connectivity increases in inhibitory control regions. These findings suggest that the psychopathological mechanisms underlying food restriction in atypical AN differ from full-threshold AN. Elucidating the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of eating behavior in atypical AN might help designing specific treatment strategies

Thinking about Eating Food Activates Visual Cortex with Reduced Bilateral Cerebellar Activation in Females with Anorexia Nervosa: An fMRI Study

Background: Women with anorexia nervosa (AN) have aberrant cognitions about food and altered activity in prefrontal cortical and somatosensory regions to food images. However, differential effects on the brain when thinking about eating food between healthy women and those with AN is unknown. Methods: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined neural activation when 42 women thought about eating the food shown in images: 18 with AN (11 RAN, 7 BPAN) and 24 age-matched controls (HC). Results: Group contrasts between HC and AN revealed reduced activation in AN in the bilateral cerebellar vermis, and increased activation in the right visual cortex. Preliminary comparisons between AN subtypes and healthy controls suggest differences in cortical and limbic regions. Conclusions: These preliminary data suggest that thinking about eating food shown in images increases visual and prefrontal cortical neural responses in females with AN, which may underlie cognitive biases towards food stimuli and ruminations about controlling food intake. Future studies are needed to explicitly test how thinking about eating activates restraint cognitions, specifically in those with restricting vs. binge-purging AN subtypes

25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016

Abstracts of the 25th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting: CNS-2016 Seogwipo City, Jeju-do, South Korea. 2–7 July 201

25th annual computational neuroscience meeting: CNS-2016

The same neuron may play different functional roles in the neural circuits to which it belongs. For example, neurons in the Tritonia pedal ganglia may participate in variable phases of the swim motor rhythms [1]. While such neuronal functional variability is likely to play a major role the delivery of the functionality of neural systems, it is difficult to study it in most nervous systems. We work on the pyloric rhythm network of the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) [2]. Typically network models of the STG treat neurons of the same functional type as a single model neuron (e.g. PD neurons), assuming the same conductance parameters for these neurons and implying their synchronous firing [3, 4]. However, simultaneous recording of PD neurons shows differences between the timings of spikes of these neurons. This may indicate functional variability of these neurons. Here we modelled separately the two PD neurons of the STG in a multi-neuron model of the pyloric network. Our neuron models comply with known correlations between conductance parameters of ionic currents. Our results reproduce the experimental finding of increasing spike time distance between spikes originating from the two model PD neurons during their synchronised burst phase. The PD neuron with the larger calcium conductance generates its spikes before the other PD neuron. Larger potassium conductance values in the follower neuron imply longer delays between spikes, see Fig. 17.Neuromodulators change the conductance parameters of neurons and maintain the ratios of these parameters [5]. Our results show that such changes may shift the individual contribution of two PD neurons to the PD-phase of the pyloric rhythm altering their functionality within this rhythm. Our work paves the way towards an accessible experimental and computational framework for the analysis of the mechanisms and impact of functional variability of neurons within the neural circuits to which they belong