Weekly Roundup: Chocolate for Brain Health, New Brain Atlas, a Simple Factor for Mental Wellbeing, and The Benefits of Gossip in the Workplace.

I’m still waiting for a piece of research on what how many tabs you have open in your browser means about your brain. My research browser window has about 100 tabs open! I open a research tab for each interesting piece I come across that I think may be interesting to you, subscribers (or interests me personally).

And so it is that on Sunday morning I try to select which ones to include in my roundup.

Let’s start with what in the neuroscience community is big news, and then follow with some more information on brain and mental health followed by the benefits of gossip in the workplace, yes, that is correct, there have actually been a number of studies over the years that have reported on the positive effects of gossip in the workplace (and some negative effects also).

A Full Brain Atlas of the Mammalian Brain

So what took so long you may justifiably ask? We first had pictorial representation of of a neuron in 1865, we’ve had extensive use of magnetic resonance imaging since the start of the 1990s and there have been multiple large scale big budget brain projects launched in the 2010s.

The answer lies in the fiendish complexity what at first glance may seem like just a big data analysis process does not begin to do justice to how a brain is constructed. The brain has different regions and different layers and in each of these regions and layers there are different cells, neurons and glial cells. And this research has also identified more brain cells than previously known which in turn adds to the increasing complexity. So it is no mean feat that a complete atlas of the mouse brain has been published with hierarchies of brain cells, clusters and also the epigenome - how chemical modification to the cells DNA impacts how genes are expressed.

Not bad, not bad at all, and certainly an underestimated milestone in neuroscience research. It’ll be while before we get to the human brain though.

From brains in general to new research that has looked at the benefits on the human brain of cocoa extract, chocolate that is. Now that sounds interesting.

Chocolate for Brain Health

This sounds too good to be true, and it is! Well, maybe not quite we do know that cocoa contains many healthy components, however, chocolate that most people eat is packed full of sugar and other bad stuff. That’s why the general recommendation is stick to dark, often very dark, chocolate.