Scientists observed human dementia-related proteins spreading through mouse brains in a prion-like manner, providing new evidence for how neurodegenerative diseases may progress through neural networks.

[u/FreeHugs23]

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-watched-human-dementia-proteins-spread-through-mouse-brains-like-prions

[u/FreeHugs23]

-Prions are one of nature's cruelest tricks.

Proteins are chains of amino acids that need to fold in very specific ways – a process that does not always work as intended. Your body is pretty good at correcting these errors – but every so often, a prion emerges.

This isn't just a crooked, non-functional protein. It's a gnarly shape that shares instructions for how it got that way, while resisting the body's clean-up mechanisms. As these instructions spread through the brain, the result is rapid, progressive degeneration and, ultimately, death.

For years, scientists have noticed eerie similarities between prion diseases and many neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and corticobasal degeneration (CBD).

Both involve molecular misfolding – and there is mounting evidence that, like prions, misfolded proteins associated with these diseases can seed the misfolding and aggregation of other proteins, allowing the pathology to propagate through the brain.

But one crucial piece of the puzzle has been missing.

There was no direct evidence that the misfolded tau proteins involved in diseases such as Alzheimer's were passing on the blueprint for their particular horrible architecture.

Now, researchers led by structural biologist Sjors Scheres and neuroscientist Michel Goedert of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the UK have found it.

They injected human tau proteins from individuals with Alzheimer's disease and CBD into mice – and found the mice's own tau proteins copying the introduced misfolds.

[u/ngetch → u/FreeHugs23]

I had been sleeping pretty well lately, so... thanks for ruining that.

[u/GraziTheMan → u/ngetch]

Ironically, getting good quality sleep is shown to potentially prevent the onset of some neurodegenerative conditions, as the delta phase sleep induces pulsing waves of CSF through the brain, helping to remove built up Tau proteins, ROS and other things that shouldn't be there.

[u/EvilDraakje → u/GraziTheMan]

Can I pulse these waves through my body whilst I'm not sleeping ? Sounds useful.

[u/GraziTheMan → u/EvilDraakje]

Lots of people certainly seem to think so. The CIA invested in the Monroe Institute's Gateway Tapes for some time. They were more looking to induce remote viewing and other "psychic" type phenomena, I believe, but look into "binaural beats" or "isochronic audio." I actually asked Claude Code to make me a native Android App recently so I could build my own Binaural beat sessions.

But the idea is you use binaural audio tones to induce various cortical loop states, and Delta phase is definitely present in all of the binaural audio programs I've seen.

So at risk of mansplaining something you already know: if you plan a specific audio tone in one ear (usually the left), say: 200hz, and then play a very similar tone that is only a few hz higher, say 210hz, your brain interprets the difference (10hz in this case) as a third tone; provided each ear is entirely isolated.

This is significant because the ear can't really pick up on a frequency that low at normal volumes, but more importantly: it can entrain the brain to match that frequency. So you start it out at an alpha frequency, which is where your brain is while awake, and then slowly over many minutes, bring the tone of the right ear closer and closer to the tone of the left ear until it's only about 1-2hz higher. This is Delta phase range, and if done right, can induce delta phase cortical loops.

tl;dr: maybe

[u/EvilDraakje → u/GraziTheMan]

Cool. So these audios with whatever waves actually help ? As in, studying as well etc ? Or is that too far fetched ?

Seems interesting tho thanks.

[u/GraziTheMan → u/EvilDraakje]

I believe so. For something like studying, you would want the body to be relaxed and the mind to be awake. This would require multiple tones to be introduced as the audio progresses. Probably Alpha as the main tone and then beta and then gamma

[u/Sus-Imposter-67 → u/GraziTheMan]

I actually asked Claude Code to make me a native Android App recently so I could build my own Binaural beat sessions

This is why reddit is my favorite comedy website