Cerebral cortex and autonomic nervous system responses during emotional memory processing.

Psychiatric symptoms are often accompanied by somatic symptoms induced by the activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The aim of this study was to calculate the time lag between electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) responses, to clarify the changes in the relationship between the cerebral cortex (CC) and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) during emotional recall processing. Twenty-two healthy young adults were examined. Their EEG and ECG data were simultaneously recorded during emotional audiovisual recall tasks using pleasant and unpleasant stimuli for 180 s, with three repetitions (Epochs 1 & 2 and Epoch 3). The EEG data were analyzed using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain a time series of relative power spectra, XE, in the theta 1, theta 2, alpha 1, alpha 2, alpha 3, beta 1, beta 2, and beta 3 bands. Time series of RR (inter-beat) intervals (time intervals between successive R waves) derived from the ECG spectral analysis using FFT was applied to the resampled time series of RR intervals over about 60 s to obtain a time series of power spectra for the ratio low frequency/high frequency (LH/HF), XC, which reflects the activity of the sympathetic nervous function. The time lag between XE and XC was calculated using wavelet-crosscorrelation analysis. The results demonstrated that the brain responded to unfamiliar emotionally pleasant stimuli in Epochs 1 & 2 earlier than the SNS, whereas the brain and SNS responded to unfamiliar unpleasant stimuli nearly simultaneously. The brain was activated rapidly in response to familiar unpleasant stimuli, although SNS responded more rapidly to familiar pleasant stimuli than the brain in Epoch 3. Our results quantitatively describe the relationship between the CC and the ANS during emotional recall.

Attention, Not Performance, Correlates With Afterdischarge Termination During Cortical Stimulation.

Cortical stimulation has been used for brain mapping for over a century, and a standard assumption is that stimulation interferes with task execution due to local effects at the stimulation site. Stimulation can however produce afterdischarges which interfere with functional localization and can lead to unwanted seizures. We previously showed that (a) cognitive effort can terminate these afterdischarges, (b) when termination thus occurs, there are electrocorticography changes throughout the cortex, not just at sites with afterdischarges or sites thought functionally important for the cognitive task used, and (c) thresholds for afterdischarges and functional responses can change among stimulation trials. We here show that afterdischarge termination can occur prior to overt performance of the cognitive tasks used to terminate them. These findings, taken together, demonstrate that task-related brain changes are not limited to one or a group of functional regions or a specific network, and not limited to the time directly surrounding overt task execution. Discrete locations, networks and times importantly underpin clinical behaviors. However, brain activity that is diffuse in location and extended in time also affect task execution and can affect brain mapping. This may in part reflect fluctuating levels of attention, engagement, or motivation during testing.

Comparison of EEG propagation speeds under emotional stimuli on smartphone between the different anxiety states.

The current study evaluated the effect of different anxiety states on information processing as measured by an electroencephalography (EEG) using emotional stimuli on a smartphone. Twenty-three healthy subjects were assessed for their anxiety states using The State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and divided into two groups: low anxiety (I, II) or high anxiety (III and IV, V). An EEG was performed while the participant was presented with emotionally laden audiovisual stimuli (resting, pleasant, and unpleasant sessions) and emotionally laden sentence stimuli (pleasant sentence, unpleasant sentence sessions) and EEG data was analyzed using propagation speed analysis. The propagation speed of the low anxiety group at the medial coronal for resting stimuli for all time segments was higher than those of high anxiety group. The low anxiety group propagation speeds at the medial sagittal for unpleasant stimuli in the 0-30 and 60-150 s time frames were higher than those of high anxiety group. The propagation speeds at 150 s for all stimuli in the low anxiety group were significantly higher than the correspondent propagation speeds of the high anxiety group. These events suggest that neural information processes concerning emotional stimuli differ based on current anxiety state.

Rice production with minimal irrigation and no nitrogen fertilizer by intensive use of treated municipal wastewater.

We designed a new cultivation system of rice with circulated irrigation to remove nitrogen from treated municipal wastewater effectively and assessed the possibility of nitrogen removal in the new system without any adverse effects on rice production through bench-scale experiments through two seasons. Overgrowth of the rice plant, which can lead to lodging and tasteless rice, was found in the first season probably because nitrogen supply based on standard practice in normal paddy fields was too much in the closed irrigation system. In the second season, therefore, the amount of treated wastewater initially applied to the system was reduced but this resulted in a considerably decreased yield. On the other hand, the taste of the rice was significantly improved. The two-season experiments revealed that the new system enabled rice production with minimal irrigation (approximately 50% on the yield base compared to normal paddy fields) and no nitrogen fertilizer. The system also achieved >95% removal of nitrogen from the treated wastewater used for circulated irrigation. The accumulation of harmful metals in the rice was not observed after one season of cultivation in the new system. The accumulation after cultivation using the same soil repeatedly for a longer time should be examined by further studies.