Sport and neurogenesis: improving the way we learn.

"NEUROGENESIS", WHAT'S THAT?

Neurogenesis is a natural process that develops throughout our lives within our brain that is creating new neurons and connections between them.

Until recently, it was thought that neurogenesis occurred only in children as they grew up and stopped that process as we were older.

However, works as the one carried out by the team of Dr. Trejo in his laboratory have shown that this is not so: healthy sport also helps this function even in adults. This occurs specifically in a particular area of the brain (hippocampus) that actively participates in the functions of learning, memory, anxiety and depression.

But most important is that until now it was not known that these new neurons are related to diseases like Alzheimer's. These patients have fewer neurons and, among other reasons, that is associated with their reduced ability to memorize.

WHAT'S BUTLER SCIENTIFICS?
Butler Scientifics is a small company founded in Barcelona with the aim of helping researchers around the world to discover more and more important things, and discover them faster.

This support takes the form of collaborations with research teams by sharing raw knowledge on a non-economic basis: we put our software development team serving the research teams and they teach us to do things every day better.

With your contribution we can make this possible!

WHO'S DR. TREJO?

Jose Luis Trejo Pérez is PhD in Biological Sciences and Director of the Laboratory of "Neurogenesis in the Adult Animal" in the Cajal Institute, CSIC (Madrid). He is also Vice President of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience (SENC).

Dr. Trejo and his team have for many years been investigating the formation of new neurons in the adult brain with special attention to the effect of exercise and enriched environment or an environmental stress.

For this purpose, learning and memory, anxiety and depressive behaviors and alterations in certain neurodegenerative diseases are valued.

NEUROGENESIS IS IMPORTANT THEN, RIGHT?

Indeed. To know in detail the creation process of neurons in our brain and its relationship with physical activity is useful for:

• Designing new techniques for children and young people memorize and learn better in school.
• Developing drugs to help improve the lives of patients with stress, anxiety or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.
• Proposing training plans that also encourage the intellectual capacity of the athlete.
• Identifying habits that are more beneficial for our mental health.

WHAT IS THE TOOL TO BE BUILT?

In laboratories like Dr. Trejo's, the results of all the experiments are analyzed daily, and stored on computers in different files, in order to understand and explain the functioning of complex biological systems such as the brain.

These files collect tens to hundreds of different kinds of variables as the number of newly generated neurons, learning ability of the subjects of the experiment, or the level of stress to which they are subject at all times.

That tangle of data results in a number of relationships between variables in many cases exceeds the 100,000 combinations.

The key thing is that a few of those combinations actually hide the explanation of many of the things that happen in our brain but the complexity of these relationships makes that the work teams have increasing difficulties to discover them and thus achieve decisive conclusions for all of us.

That "explanation" is reflected statistically through a concept called "correlation", the manual calculation of the same being very slow and even with commercial statistical packages it is not feasible to evaluate every one of the 100,000 possible combinations.

From Butler Scientifics we want to contribute to this research work and so we intend to develop a software that uses the power of the computer labs to perform a detailed search for relevant facts within a volume of experimental information as large and complex as we have explained.

Although we already have a very basic tool that does some of this work called AutoDiscovery and it has given very promising results in the work of Dr. Trejo, we need to give it a boost to overcome the current limitations such as:

• Be able to analyze the relationship between more than two variables of different nature.

• Be able to work with a larger number of information records.

• Search more complex relations than the basic ones (correlations).

• Add more intelligence to identify the truly relevant results.

DOES IT MEAN THAT WITHOUT THIS SOFTWARE ...

Right ... without this software it is practically impossible to break the current limits regarding the possibilities of finding truly significant discoveries, and give our children the chance to benefit from them.

We believe that experimental data say more than what our eyes can see and so the help of technology is needed.

WHAT WILL YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS BE USED FOR?

The contributions collected will go entirely to this collaborative project, contributing to the improvement of this software and its application within the specific scientific work of Dr. Trejo's team.

The main items we identify are:

• Software improvements (developer + technical laboratory, 4 months) = 10.000€.
• Implementation of the software in the current project (training, adjustment and daily use, 6 months) = 4.000€.
• Cost of rewards = 2.000€.

PROJECT TOTAL = 16.000€

ABOUT THE REWARDS

As professional scientists, Dr. Trejo's team's work is to discover. Discover important things that will improve everyone's life.

The result of that work is always embodied in a scientific publication. In a memory mode, the publication explains everything that has been done in detail and the conclusions that have been reached.

We therefore believe that disseminating the publication resulting from this project is one of the nicest ways to share with you how far you have contributed with your donations.

But we go a step further by also offering the possibility to benefit from (among other):

• A copy of the software that we will develop (especially for those who are professionally related to research, 2 month trial).

• An online lecture live with Dr. Trejo, his team and Butler Scientifics, so you can ask whatever you want.

• A guided tour by ourselves to the laboratory at the Instituto Cajal for those of you who live in or want to visit Madrid and would like to experience how the work is here.

Whatever your contribution is, we will deliver a digital certificate of appreciation to you so you can share it with your family and friends.

As for the appearance on the list of contributors on the site, you can freely decide what information you want to show and, of course, modify or withdraw this information when you consider appropriate.

CAN I CONTRIBUTE FOR FREE?

The best way to contribute to this project is with money but if you can not, it is valuable that you spread this initiative.

Use your email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter or whatever you think best suited to forward it to your friends, family and colleagues!

To make it easier for you, we have prepared this poster (spanish) that summarizes this quite simply:

DOWNLOAD IT AND SHARE IT NOW

CALENDAR

With the current schedule we set the goal of obtaining the most relevant conclusions from the software in the first half of 2014.

The rewards may be delivered at different times, namely:

€ 10 - Digital Certificate of participation - Delivery in 2 días.
€ 15 - Previous + Your name in the list of contributors on our site - Delivery in 1 week.
€ 20 - Previous + Electronic copy of the scientific publication (in PDF) - Delivery within 3 months (approx).
€ 35 - Previous + Dossier of scientific articles related to neuroscience (in PDF) - Delivery in 2 weeks (approx).
€ 50 - Previous + session with personal trainer of the Tri5U team for soft running, 1 hour, in the Carretera de les Aigues (Barcelona) - Delivery in 2 weeks (approx) ().
€ 70 - Previous + Session of ½ h therapeutic massage designed especially for mental relaxation (Barcelona) - Delivery in 2 weeks (approx) ().
€ 100 - Previous + software use license (1 month) - Delivery in 1 week.
€ 130 - Previous + 1 year subscription to online Brain Training + electronic book "Brain Fitness" (in PDF). - Delivery in 1 week.
€ 300 - Previous + ½ h online lecture with the scientific team - Delivery in 1 week ().
€ 600 - Previous + 1h visit the lab (CSIC Madrid) - Delivery in 3 weeks ().
€ 1,000 - Previous + Logo, company name and link to your website on our website + License to use the software as Silver Partner (3 months) - Delivery in 1 week.
€ 1,500 - Previous + 5 licenses to use the software as Silver Partner (3 months) - Delivery in 1 week .
€ 2,000 - Previous + physical / online lecture on Butler Scientifics, collaborative R&D, AutoDiscovery and scientific project. Date to be agreed by both parties.

(*) Depending on availability of the professional involved but we will be flexible in finding dates.

SOME INTERESTING ARTICLES (SPANISH)
• En el cerebro nacen cada día muchas más neuronas de las que se pensaba Diario ABC, Junio 2013
• Alzhéimer: ‘Aburrirse es lo peor para el cerebro’ m24digital, Marzo 2013
• Alargar la vida siendo feliz PaperBlog, Diciembre 2012