Investigating the different mechanisms in related neural activities: a focus on auditory perception and imagery.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the neural representation of imagery is closely related to the perception modality; however, the undeniable different experiences between perception and imagery indicate that there are obvious neural mechanism differences between them, which cannot be explained by the simple theory that imagery is a form of weak perception. Considering the importance of functional integration of brain regions in neural activities, we conducted correlation analysis of neural activity in brain regions jointly activated by auditory imagery and perception, and then brain functional connectivity (FC) networks were obtained with a consistent structure. However, the connection values between the areas in the superior temporal gyrus and the right precentral cortex were significantly higher in auditory perception than in the imagery modality. In addition, the modality decoding based on FC patterns showed that the FC network of auditory imagery and perception can be significantly distinguishable. Subsequently, voxel-level FC analysis further verified the distribution regions of voxels with significant connectivity differences between the 2 modalities. This study complemented the correlation and difference between auditory imagery and perception in terms of brain information interaction, and it provided a new perspective for investigating the neural mechanisms of different modal information representations.

An adhesive elastomeric supramolecular polyurethane healable at body temperature.

In this paper, we report the synthesis and healing ability of a non-cytotoxic supramolecular polyurethane network whose mechanical properties can be recovered efficiently (>99%) at the temperature of the human body (37 °C). Rheological analysis revealed an acceleration in the drop of the storage modulus above 37 °C, on account of the dissociation of the supramolecular polyurethane network, and this decrease in viscosity enables the efficient recovery of the mechanical properties. Microscopic and mechanical characterisation has shown that this material is able to recover mechanical properties across a damage site with minimal contact required between the interfaces and also demonstrated that the mechanical properties improved when compared to other low temperature healing elastomers or gel-like materials. The supramolecular polyurethane was found to be non-toxic in a cytotoxicity assay carried out in human skin fibroblasts (cell viability > 94% and non-significantly different compared to the untreated control). This supramolecular network material also exhibited excellent adhesion to pig skin and could be healed completely in situ post damage indicating that biomedical applications could be targeted, such as artificial skin or wound dressings with supramolecular materials of this type.