The movements of the fetus in the womb are necessary to connect the body, spinal cord and brain

A Swedish-American research team recently published two articles in the Journal of Neurophysiology in which they use a new model system to explain early spinal cord learning and how the central nervous system learns to control the body. That is, how connections are made between the spinal cord and the body and how other parts of the brain connect to the spinal cord.

Brief facts: Neurophysiology / Basic research / Cause and effect / Computer simulation / Peer review publication

This is important from a deep basic scientific perspective, but also from a clinical one because most brain diseases also affect the ability to move, says Henrik Jörntell, Professor of Neurophysiology at Lund University

Researchers Henrik Jörntell and Jonas Enander believe that a basic and deeper understanding of how the brain works is critical to understanding brain diseases, but also to the emergence of artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning technology increasingly inspired by biology. The ultimate goal is to generate basic knowledge about the different functions of the brain to find new ways to understand the diseases in which neurons are affected. Their basic view is that The brain is a large coherent system where all functions depend on other neurons in different parts of the brain.

– DrOver the past 30 years, brain research has focused primarily on molecular biological approaches and the genes that control different expressions, but we must also take a step back. The brain is an organ made up of hundreds of millions of neurons that interact in a complex manner with complex functions. In order to deeply understand brain diseases, and in the long-term, to develop therapeutic treatments, I believe we must gain a very different basic understanding of how Henrik Jörntell, professor of neurophysiology at Lund University, says that the interaction between neurons in the whole brain is generated and works better than the one we have today.

To reach this understanding, Henrik Jörntell and colleagues are looking for explanatory models of brain development and function. They strive to investigate what we know about how the brain communicates with the body. For example, a basic understanding of how the spinal cord, a part of the central nervous system (CNS) that developed early, develops, It is formed and attached to the body.

It’s a complex interaction between hundreds of millions of neurons. How can they find each other in the right way so that they work as an integrated unit with tens of thousands of different sensors in the body? What we found is that pre-programming doesn’t play any role here, there must be some kind of adaptive trait inherent. We’ve looked at this in our research and believe it’s largely arranged based on learning and adaptability, so that each individual neuron finds a way to make itself useful in a larger network of neurons, says Jonas Inander, a researcher at Linlöpings University, but in At the time the studies were carried out it was part of the Henrik Jörntell research group in Lund.

The spinal cord is an extension of the central nervous system that runs from the brain down to the spine and is surrounded by vertebrae. In their studies, researchers study early learning of the spinal cord and how the brain can form an idea of ​​what its body is and then learn how to control it. Researchers believe that it is the spontaneous movements that actually begin in the womb that are critical to the connection between the body, the spinal cord, and the brain.

– The spinal cord is the only communication path of the brain with the body, but it has no prior knowledge of the biological body, which can look very different, for example, between a choice and a human. Therefore, the spinal cord must quickly learn how the body works, and it also matures very early in development. The result of this learning then determines how our motor systems develop in the rest of the brain, here too By learning, says Henrik Jörntell.

Contact
Henrik Jörntell, Professor of Neurophysiology, Lund University, 070-5378967, [email protected]
Jonas Einander, Ph.D. at Lund University (Postdoctoral Researcher at Linköping University). [email protected]

Publications
A model of sensory function autoregulation: spinal integrative neural integration
Journal of Neurophysiology, May 2022
A model for the self-regulation of sensory function: the monosynaptic spinal ring
Journal of Neurophysiology, May 2022

The studies are funded by research funding from the European Union and the Swedish Research Council.

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Contact the press Faculty of Medicine at Lund University: Katrin Ståhl, 046-222 01 31, 0725-27 97 97, [email protected]

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