The Fidget Cube gadget will wean you from bad habits. Free Technical Library News

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Fidget Cube gadget will wean you from bad habits

01.10.2016

At first glance, Fidget Cube from Antsy Lab (which means "restless laboratory") is completely useless. Built into a small vinyl cube is a spinning wheel, a switch, three gears, a push ball, and even a joystick, but all these "controls" don't control anything.

The novelty is suitable for those who like to click with a ballpoint pen and bite their nails. Fidget Cube is designed to help you cope with bad habits. This little vinyl cube raised 253 times more money on Kikstarter than the developers originally wanted.

The Fidget Cube is designed in such a way that playing with quiet and loud buttons should be pleasant to the touch, but will not disturb anyone in the vicinity. This idea is not absolutely stupid: almost every one of us occasionally clicks a ballpoint pen absently, causing a quiet annoyance of everyone who has to listen to it.

However, playing with these things can improve concentration. Antsy Lab cites results from a study showing increased levels of concentration in students playing with a stress ball or improved attention in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

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Random news from the Archive

In the newborn brain, neurons travel from place to place. 10.10.2016

During individual development, constant cell migrations occur in the embryo - precursor cells of some tissue or organ crawl to a certain place in order to organize this very organ there. The same thing happens in the brain: just before they are born, a huge number of precursors of neurons come to the cerebral cortex, which mature here into ordinary nerve cells, which form nerve centers, chains, etc.

However, all cells that are formed as a result of migration in the later stages of pregnancy become the so-called excitatory neurons. But besides them, there should be inhibitory neurons, whose task is to suppress the signals of other cells. Inhibition neurons are extremely important: without them, excitatory nerve cells would simply never be able to stop - for example, they would continue to send a contractile signal to a tense muscle.

Without neural inhibition, the nervous system is threatened with overexcitation, which can manifest itself in improper functioning of the muscles, and in emotional instability, and in general in behavior. And in the cerebral cortex, of course, along with neurons of excitation, there are neurons of inhibition. Only neuroscientists could not understand for a long time where they come from - if all the progenitor cells that came here became excitatory.

Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco managed to unravel this mystery - inhibitory neurons in the human cortex appear here after the second wave of cell migration, which occurs - most importantly - after birth. In the brain, as you know, there are several areas where cell reproduction occurs. One of these places is the subventricular zone, which is located in the walls of special cavities - the ventricles of the brain, and which is quite far from the cortex.

Mercedes F. Paredes and her colleagues analyzed post-mortem brain samples from children aged between one day and 7 months and found that neurons located in that part of the subventricular zone, which is especially rich in blood vessels, travel along these same blood vessels until they reach the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex. (When talking about traveling neurons, it should be remembered that, although they already look very similar to young inhibitory cells, they retain the features of migrating progenitors.)

Traveling neurons do not divide, their goal is to reach their place and finally become an inhibitory neuron (although maturation can take quite a long time, up to several months). Over time, the number of "travelers" drops rapidly, and at the age of seven months only a very small number of cells can be found on the migration path. Obviously, starting their journey, they obey some kind of signals, cellular and molecular, and now we have to find out what these signals are - it is possible that many neuropsychiatric diseases subsequently develop because some inhibitory neurons went astray during their postnatal migration .

It is known that new nerve cells appear in animals and in the adult brain, and one of the centers of adult neurogenesis is the aforementioned subventricular zone. However, few people expected to see such a massive migration of neuron precursors, which takes place - we emphasize once again - after birth. And even more so, moving to such an area as the cerebral cortex, which is associated with higher cognitive functions and whose neural pathways are of the highest complexity.

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