Neuroscience
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Recently, the empirical interest in religiousness and spirituality has grown, showing the association between the activity of a complex network of subcortical and fronto-parietal areas and explicit and implicit religious/spiritual representations. Importantly, while the causal link between parietal stimulation and implicit religiousness/spirituality has been demonstrated, the role of subcortical and medial cortical areas has not been directly investigated. Here, we assessed how implicit and explicit religious or spiritual representations are modulated by transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (tVNS), a novel non-invasive method to stimulate subcortical and medial cortical structures. ⋯ Active-tVNS, compared to sham-tVNS, affected implicit spiritual, but not religious or control self-representations, reducing the strength of the automatic association between the self and the spiritual dimension. Explicit self-representations were left unchanged. Findings shed new light on the neurobiological mechanisms of implicit spirituality.
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A single session of aerobic exercise may offer one means to "prime" motor regions to be more receptive to the acquisition of a motor skill; however, the mechanisms whereby this priming may occur are not clear. One possible explanation may be related to the post-translational modification of plasticity-related receptors and their associated intracellular signaling molecules, given that these proteins are integral to the development of synaptic plasticity. In particular, phosphorylation governs the biophysical properties (e.g., Ca2+ conductance) and the migratory patterns (i.e., trafficking) of plasticity-related receptors by altering the relative density of specific receptor subunits at synapses. ⋯ We observed a robust (1.2-2.0× greater than sedentary) increase in tyrosine phosphorylation of AMPA (GluA1,2) and NMDA (GluN2A,B) receptor subunits, and a clear indication that exercise preferentially affects pPKA over pCaMKII. The changes were found, specifically, following moderate, but not maximal, acute aerobic exercise in both motor cortex and hippocampus. Given the requirement for these proteins during the early phases of plasticity induction, the possibility exists that exercise-induced priming may occur by altering the phosphorylation of plasticity-related proteins.