By JP O'Malley Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes that the link between brain and body is the key to understanding consciousness. In his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, he explains why. Consciousness is what gives an individual a sense of self; it helps one stay in the present, remember the past and plan for the future. Many scientists have argued that consciousness is created by vast networks of nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. While it’s clear that the brain plays a major role in conscious experiences, it doesn’t act alone, argues Damasio, director of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute. Instead, he argues, consciousness is generated by a variety of structures within an organism, some neural, some not. What’s more, feelings — mental experiences of body states — help connect the brain to the rest of the body. “The feelings that we have of, say, hunger or thirst, or pain, or well-being, or desire, etc. — these are the foundation of our mind,” Damasio says. In his view, feelings have played a central role in the life-regulating processes of animals throughout the history of life. In Feeling & Knowing, Damasio suggests that consciousness evolved as a way to keep essential bodily systems steady. This concept is also known as homeostasis, a self-regulating process that maintains stability amid ever-changing conditions. Consciousness emerged as an extension of homeostasis, Damasio argues, allowing for flexibility and planning in complex and unpredictable environments. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022.

Keyword: Consciousness; Emotions
Link ID: 28141 - Posted: 01.08.2022

Leyland Cecco A whistleblower in the Canadian province of New Brunswick has warned that a progressive neurological illness that has baffled experts for more than two years appears to be affecting a growing number of young people and causing swift cognitive decline among some of the afflicted. Speaking to the Guardian, an employee with Vitalité Health Network, one of the province’s two health authorities, said that suspected cases are growing in number and that young adults with no prior health triggers are developing a catalog of troubling symptoms, including rapid weight loss, insomnia, hallucinations, difficulty thinking and limited mobility. The official number of cases under investigation, 48, remains unchanged since it was first announced in early spring 2021. But multiple sources say the cluster could now be as many as 150 people, with a backlog of cases involving young people still requiring further assessment. “I’m truly concerned about these cases because they seem to evolve so fast,” said the source. “I’m worried for them and we owe them some kind of explanation.” At the same time, at least nine cases have been recorded in which two people in close contact – but without genetic links – have developed symptoms, suggesting that environmental factors may be involved. One suspected case involved a man who was developing symptoms of dementia and ataxia. His wife, who was his caregiver, suddenly began losing sleep and experiencing muscle wasting, dementia and hallucinations. Now her condition is worse than his. A woman in her 30s was described as non-verbal, is feeding with a tube and drools excessively. Her caregiver, a nursing student in her 20s, also recently started showing symptoms of neurological decline. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Alzheimers
Link ID: 28140 - Posted: 01.05.2022

By Elizabeth Landau In a narrow medical school hallway, Matt Stewart opened a large cabinet to reveal dozens of shelves stacked with wooden boxes and trays, some at least 100 years old. Stewart, tall and silver-haired, pulled out one of the trays and showed off its contents: Thin slices of human skull bones and the organs of hearing and balance they contain, stained shades of pink. Affixed to microscope slides, the anatomical bits resembled abstract rubber stamp art, no bigger than thumbprints. “Our Johns Hopkins history,” he said, referring to the university’s collection of specimens from more than 5,000 patients. Stewart’s research team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore had a long, complicated journey to make slides like these in 2021. The researchers need these specimens, sliced from the portion of skull that houses the inner ear, to ask a fundamental question about the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2: Does it directly invade the cells of tissues that enable hearing and balance? Ear surgeon Matt Stewart leads a research team at Johns Hopkins University that is investigating how SARS-CoV-2 might infect ear cells that enable hearing and balance. Data on ear problems as they relate to Covid-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, is spotty. To date, case reports and small studies have found that some Covid-19 patients experience significant and rapid hearing loss, ringing in the ears called tinnitus, or balance issues. Estimates vary on the prevalence of these symptoms, but because the coronavirus has infected hundreds of millions of people, even a few percent of Covid patients experiencing hearing loss would add up to a large increase globally. Yet no causal link has been drawn between the novel coronavirus and auditory symptoms. Hearing problems aren’t even on lists of Covid-19 symptoms, short or long-term, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 28139 - Posted: 01.05.2022

By David J. Linden When a routine echocardiogram revealed a large mass next to my heart, the radiologist thought it might be a hiatal hernia—a portion of my stomach poking up through my diaphragm to press against the sac containing my heart. “Chug this can of Diet Dr. Pepper and then hop up on the table for another echocardiogram before the soda bubbles in your stomach all pop.” So I did. However, the resulting images showed that the mass did not contain the telltale signature of bursting bubbles in my stomach that would support a hernia diagnosis. A few weeks later, an MRI scan, which has much better resolution, revealed that the mass was actually contained within the pericardial sac and was quite large—about the volume of that soda can. Even with this large invader pressing on my heart, I had no symptoms and could exercise at full capacity. I felt great. The doctors told me that the mass was most likely to be a teratoma, a clump of cells that is not typically malignant. Their outlook was sunny. Riffing on the musical South Pacific, my cardiologist said, “We’re gonna pop that orange right out of your chest and send you on your way.” While I was recovering from surgery, the pathology report came back and the news was bad—it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma. Because of its location, embedded in my heart wall, the surgeon could not remove all of the cancer cells. Doing so would have rendered my heart unable to pump blood. The oncologist told me to expect to live an additional six to 18 months. (c) 2022 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 28138 - Posted: 01.05.2022

By Tina Hesman Saey Nola Sullivan recently marked an inauspicious anniversary. A little more than a year ago, on November 16, 2020, the 57-year-old pharmacy technician from Kellogg, Idaho, came down with COVID-19. “I lost my taste and smell, with a very bad head cold, body aches, muscle spasm, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea,” she says. It took a month for her muscle spasms and a lingering headache to go away. She missed nearly three months of work. Her senses of smell and taste still haven’t fully returned. And “I still have the fatigue. It’s horrible. I’m nauseous all the time.” Sullivan has another lasting reminder of her battle with the coronavirus, too: diabetes. When she finally returned to work at the pharmacy, “I noticed that I was so thirsty all the time. And I just thought that was part of the COVID,” she says. “I was drinking gallons of water.” As a pharmacy technician, though, she knew that excessive thirst can be sign of diabetes. So she decided to check her blood sugar. A person is considered diabetic when levels of glucose in their blood reach 200 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood. Sullivan’s was over 500. Sullivan is not alone. In a study of more than 3,800 COVID-19 patients, just under half developed high blood sugar levels, including many, like Sullivan, who were not previously diabetic, cardiologist James Lo and colleagues reported November 2 in Cell Metabolism. About 91 percent of the intubated COVID-19 patients had high blood sugar, as did almost 73 percent of people who died of the disease, the researchers reported. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2022

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28137 - Posted: 01.05.2022

Leonard Mlodinow Charles Darwin created the most successful theory in the history of biology: the theory of evolution. He was also responsible for another grand theory: the theory of emotion, which dominated his field for more than a century. That theory was dead wrong. The most important tenet of his theory was that the mind consists of two competing forces, the rational and the emotional. He believed emotions played a constructive role in the lives of non-human animals, but in humans emotions were a vestige whose usefulness had been largely superseded by the evolution of reason. We now know that, on the contrary, emotions enhance our process of reasoning and aid our decision-making. In fact, we can’t make decisions, or even think, without being influenced by our emotions. Consider a pioneering 2010 study in which researchers analysed the work of 118 professional traders in stocks, bonds and derivatives at four investment banks. Some were highly successful, but many were not. The researchers’ goal was to understand what differentiated the two groups. Their conclusion? They had different attitudes toward the role of emotion in their job. The relatively less successful traders for the most part denied that emotion played a significant role. They tried to suppress their emotions, while at the same time denying that emotions had an effect on their decision-making. The most successful traders, in contrast, had a different attitude. They showed a great willingness to reflect on their emotion-driven behaviour. They recognised that emotion and good decision-making were inextricably linked. Accepting that emotions were necessary for high performance, they “tended to reflect critically about the origin of their intuitions and the role of emotion”. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28136 - Posted: 01.05.2022

By Jane E. Brody You’re probably familiar with these major risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, obesity and physical inactivity. And chances are your doctor has checked you more than once for these risks and, I would hope, offered advice or treatment to help ward off a heart attack or stroke. But has your doctor also asked about the level of stress in your life? Chronic psychological stress, recent studies indicate, may be as important — and possibly more important — to the health of your heart than the traditional cardiac risk factors. In fact, in people with less-than-healthy hearts, mental stress trumps physical stress as a potential precipitant of fatal and nonfatal heart attacks and other cardiovascular events, according to the latest report. The new study, published in November in JAMA, assessed the fates of 918 patients known to have underlying, but stable, heart disease to see how their bodies reacted to physical and mental stress. The participants underwent standardized physical and mental stress tests to see if their hearts developed myocardial ischemia — a significantly reduced blood flow to the muscles of the heart, which can be a trigger for cardiovascular events — during either or both forms of stress. Then the researchers followed them for four to nine years. Among the study participants who experienced ischemia during one or both tests, this adverse reaction to mental stress took a significantly greater toll on the hearts and lives of the patients than did physical stress. They were more likely to suffer a nonfatal heart attack or die of cardiovascular disease in the years that followed. I wish I had known that in 1982, when my father had a heart attack that nearly killed him. Upon leaving the hospital, he was warned about overdoing physical stresses, like not lifting anything heavier than 30 pounds. But he was never cautioned about undue emotional stress or the risks of overreacting to frustrating circumstances, like when the driver ahead of him drove too slowly in a no-passing zone. © 2022 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 28135 - Posted: 01.05.2022

Chloe Tenn On October 4, physiologist David Julius and neurobiologist Arden Patapoutian were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on temperature, pain, and touch perception. Julius researched the burning sensation people experience from chilies, and identified an ion channel, TRPV1 that is activated by heat. Julius and Patapoutian then separately reported on the TRPM8 ion channel that senses menthol’s cold in 2002. Patapoutian’s group went on to discover the PIEZO1 and PIEZO2 ion channels that are involved in sensing mechanical pressure. The Nobel Committee wrote that the pair’s work inspired further research into understanding how the nervous system senses temperature and mechanical stimuli and that the laureates “identified critical missing links in our understanding of the complex interplay between our senses and the environment.” This year saw innovations in augmenting the brain’s capabilities by plugging it in to advanced computing technology. For example, a biology teacher who lost her vision 16 years ago was able to distinguish shapes and letters with the help of special glasses that interfaced with electrodes implanted in her brain. Along a similar vein, a computer connected to a brain-implant system discerned brain signals for handwriting in a paralyzed man, enabling him to type up to 90 characters per minute with an accuracy above 90 percent. Such studies are a step forward for technologies that marry cutting-edge neuroscience and computational innovation in an attempt to improve people’s lives. © 1986–2021 The Scientist.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Language
Link ID: 28134 - Posted: 12.31.2021

By Abdulrahman Olagunju How does our brain know that “this” follows “that”? Two people meet, fall in love and live happily ever after—or sometimes not. The sequencing of events that takes place in our head—with one thing coming after another—may have something to do with so-called time cells recently discovered in the human hippocampus. The research provides evidence for how our brain knows the start and end of memories despite time gaps in the middle. As these studies continue, the work could lead to strategies for memory restoration or enhancement. The research has focused on “episodic memory,” the ability to remember the “what, where and when” of a past experience, such as the recollection of what you did when you woke up today. It is part of an ongoing effort to identify how the organ creates such memories. A team led by Leila Reddy, a neuroscience researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, sought to understand how human neurons in the hippocampus represent temporal information during a sequence of learning steps to demystify the functioning of time cells in the brain. In a study published this summer in the Journal of Neuroscience, Reddy and her colleagues found that, to organize distinct moments of experience, human time cells fire at successive moments during each task. The study provided further confirmation that time cells reside in the hippocampus, a key memory processing center. They switch on as events unfold, providing a record of the flow of time in an experience. “These neurons could play an important role in how memories are represented in the brain,” Reddy says. “Understanding the mechanisms for encoding time and memory will be an important area of research.” © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 28133 - Posted: 12.31.2021

By Emily Witt In the fall of 1972, a psychiatrist named Salvador Roquet travelled from his home in Mexico City to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, an institution largely funded by the United States government, to give a presentation on an ongoing experiment. For several years, Roquet had been running a series of group-therapy sessions: over the course of eight or nine hours, his staff would administer psilocybin mushrooms, morning-glory seeds, peyote cacti, and the herb datura to small groups of patients. He would then orchestrate what he called a “sensory overload show,” with lights, sounds, and images from violent or erotic movies. The idea was to push the patients through an extreme experience to a psycho-spiritual rebirth. One of the participants, an American psychology professor, described the session as a “descent into hell.” But Roquet wanted to give his patients smooth landings, and so, eventually, he added a common hospital anesthetic called ketamine hydrochloride. He found that, given as the other drugs were wearing off, it alleviated the anxiety brought on by these punishing ordeals. Clinicians at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center had been studying LSD and other psychedelics since the early nineteen-fifties, beginning at a related institution, the Spring Grove Hospital Center. But ketamine was new: it was first synthesized in 1962, by a researcher named Calvin Stevens, who did consulting work for the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. (Stevens had been looking for a less volatile alternative to phencyclidine, better known as PCP.) Two years later, a doctor named Edward Domino conducted the first human trials of ketamine, with men incarcerated at Jackson State Prison, in Michigan, serving as his subjects. At higher doses, Domino noticed, ketamine knocked people out, but at lower ones it produced odd psychoactive effects on otherwise lucid patients. Parke-Davis wanted to avoid characterizing the drug as psychedelic, and Domino’s wife suggested the term “dissociative anesthetic” to describe the way it seemed to separate the mind from the body even as the mind retained consciousness. The F.D.A. approved ketamine as an anesthetic in 1970, and Parke-Davis began marketing it under the brand name Ketalar. It was widely used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War, and remains a standard anesthetic in emergency rooms around the world. © 2021 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28132 - Posted: 12.31.2021

By Christina Caron Q: Sometimes my eyelid twitches on and off for days — weeks, even. It’s distracting and irritating. How do I get it to stop? And should I be concerned? Eyelid spasms, while annoying, are “rarely a sign of something serious,” said Stephanie Erwin, an optometrist at Cleveland Clinic’s Cole Eye Institute. The most common type of eye twitch is a series of muscle contractions called eyelid myokymia, which produces involuntary and intermittent contractions of the eyelid, typically the lower one. Only one eye is affected at a time because the twitch originates in the muscle surrounding the eye, and not the nerve that controls the blink reflex, which sends the same message to both eyes simultaneously, Dr. Erwin added. The spasms can last from hours to days to months. “If the twitching persists for a long period of time, or is accompanied by additional symptoms, it is a good idea to be checked by an eye doctor to make sure nothing else is going on,” she said. If the twitching spreads to other muscles in the face or if you notice both eyes are twitching at the same time, those are indications of a more serious problem. Other red flags include a drooping eyelid or a red eye. But if just one eyelid is twitching on and off, it is usually a harmless (and often exasperating) case of eyelid myokymia. As for why it happens: “Nobody knows exactly why,” said Dr. Alice Lorch, an ophthalmologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston. But more commonly, it is stress, lack of sleep or excessive caffeine intake that brings on eyelid twitching, the experts said. Dry eye, a common affliction among those who stare at screens most of the day, is another culprit. Studies have indicated that we blink less when looking at digital devices, which makes our eyes feel dry. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Stress
Link ID: 28131 - Posted: 12.31.2021

By Vanessa Barbara JUIZ DE FORA, Brazil — My first encounter with ketamine did not go well. A lifelong depressive — I picked up the habit of despairing sadness in early adulthood, and it remained faithfully with me — I’d turned to a more experimental form of treatment: ketamine infusions, in which a kindly anesthesiologist funnels the drug into a sad person’s veins for around 50 minutes and hopes it perks her up. Forty-five minutes into my first session, I rather anxiously asked my partner, who was in the room with me, if our 3-year-old daughter was fine. He decided it was the perfect time for a joke. Our daughter, he answered, was safe at home — and as a matter of fact, he added, she was already a very independent 15-year-old. I panicked. While under the strong, dissociative effect of the drug, patients sometimes enter what’s called a k-hole, in which their sense of time and space is distorted or eliminated. In that state of oblivion, I found it entirely plausible that my daughter was not a toddler anymore, but a strong-willed teenager. I became very distressed. My heartbeat accelerated. The anesthesiologist hurriedly ended the session as my partner said: “I’m kidding! Sorry! She’s still 3!” It was an inauspicious start, but I was determined to make the best of it. Ketamine, long used as an anesthetic but better known as an illegal party drug and, of course, a horse tranquilizer, has in recent years been gaining traction as an antidepressant. People have written enthusiastic accounts of their experiences, and researchers and psychiatrists, in a cascade of studies, have pointed to its possible benefits, not least the speed with which it can alleviate symptoms. Today, hundreds of clinics around the world provide infusions to people who have found little, if any, improvement with other treatments. That’s where I come in. Over the years, apart from the good old psychotropic medications, I have tried several types of talk therapy, meditation, acupuncture, singing lessons, bungee jumping and transcranial magnetic stimulation. (I still have sweet memories of the woodpecker sounds tapped into my brain.) © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28130 - Posted: 12.29.2021

By Molly Young Two distinguished academics walk into a restaurant in Manhattan. It is their first meeting — their first date, in fact — and the year is 2015. The man wears a down jacket against the icy winter evening. The woman has a shock of glossy white hair. The restaurant is on a cozy corner of the West Village and has foie gras on the menu. What the man doesn’t know is that the interior of his down jacket has suffered a structural failure, and the filling has massed along the bottom hem, forming a conspicuous bulge at his waist. As they greet each other, the woman perceives the bulge and asks herself: Is my date wearing a colostomy bag? They sit down to eat, but the woman is distracted. As they chat about their lives — former spouses, work, interests — the woman has “colostomy bag” on her mind. Is it or isn’t it? The two academics are of an age where such an intervention is, well, not exactly common, but not out of the realm of possibility. At the end of their dinner, the man takes the train back to Philadelphia, where he lives, and the woman returns to her apartment on the Upper West Side. Despite the enigma of the man’s midsection, the date is a success. It wasn’t until their third date that the question got resolved: no colostomy bag. “I was testing her,” Paul Rozin, one of the academics, later joked, “to see if she would put up with me.” (He wasn’t testing her. He was unaware of the bulge.) “I was worried,” said Virginia Valian, the other academic. It was fitting that an imaginary colostomy bag played a starring role in the couple’s first encounter. Paul Rozin is known for many things — he is an eminent psychologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 52 years, and he has gathered honors and fellowships and published hundreds of influential papers and served on editorial boards and as chairman of the university’s department of psychology — but he is best known for his work on the topic of disgust. In the early 1980s, Rozin noticed that there was surprisingly little data available on this universal aspect of life. Odd, he thought, that of the six so-called basic emotions — anger, surprise, fear, enjoyment, sadness, disgust — the last had hardly been studied. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 28129 - Posted: 12.29.2021

Robert Martone We are all time travelers. Each day, we experience new things as we travel forward through time. In the process, the countless connections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate these experiences. It’s as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory. Not only do we travel in physical time; we also experience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memories and then journey into the future by imagining what tomorrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and imagine how we will be. A new study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience(SCAN), explores how a specific brain region helps knit together memories of the present and future self. Injury to that area leads to an impaired sense of identity. The region—called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce a fundamental model of our self and place it in mental time. In doing so, this study suggests, it may be the source of our sense of self. Psychologists have long noticed that our mind handles information about one’s self differently from other details. Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other forms of memory. They benefit from what researchers have called a self-reference effect (SRE), in which information related to one’s self is privileged and more salient in our thoughts. Self-related memories are distinct from both episodic memory, the category of recollections that pertains to specific events and experiences, and semantic memory, which connects to more general knowledge, such as the color of grass and the characteristics of the seasons. © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 28128 - Posted: 12.29.2021

By Nicholas Bakalar Need more incentive to get a flu shot, or to keep taking extra precautions this flu season? A new study suggests there may be a link between influenza infection and an increased risk for Parkinson’s disease. For decades, neurologists have suspected there may be a link between the flu and Parkinson’s disease, a chronic and progressive disorder of the nervous system marked by problems with movement, cognitive changes and a range of other symptoms. Several earlier studies, for example, reported a sharp increase in Parkinson’s cases following the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some cases of Parkinson’s have been linked to environmental exposures to pesticides and other toxic chemicals, and genetics may also play a role, but most cases of Parkinson’s have no known cause. Treatments for Parkinson’s can help delay its progression, but there is no known cure. The new study, using Danish health care databases, included 10,231 men and women who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s between 2000 and 2016. Researchers compared them with 51,196 controls who were matched for age and sex. The researchers tracked influenza infections beginning in 1977 using hospital and outpatient discharge records. The report appeared in JAMA Neurology. Parkinson’s takes years, if not decades, to develop, and initially may produce only subtle symptoms like a hand tremor. It may take years for doctors to diagnose the condition, so any connection between a flu infection and the disease would be evident only many years later. The researchers found that compared with people who had not had a flu infection, those who had the flu had a 70 percent higher risk of Parkinson’s 10 years later, and a 90 percent higher risk 15 years after. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 28127 - Posted: 12.29.2021

By Linda Searing Among people who have covid-19, those who have certain sleep disorders (including sleep apnea) face a 31 percent greater chance of developing a severe case that requires hospitalization, or dying from the disease, than do people who have covid-19 and who do not have sleep-disturbed breathing, according to research published in The study links the increase in risk to breathing disorders that can cause oxygen levels to drop during sleep, creating a low oxygen level called hypoxia. The researchers found that having such a sleep-related breathing disorder did not make people more likely to contract the coronavirus. They wrote, however, that having low oxygen levels “may play a role in worse outcomes once the viral illness evolves,” describing hypoxia as an “amplifier” of covid effects. The findings were based on data from 5,402 adults (average age 56) who had undergone sleep studies and coronavirus testing in 2020 through the Cleveland Clinic Health System. For someone with sleep apnea, which is one of the most common sleep disorders, breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, sometimes 30 times or more an hour and often is accompanied by gasping or snorting sounds. This causes hypoxia. Treatment often involves using what is called positive airway pressure (PAP) while sleeping. The person wears a mask, which has a tube connected to a small PAP machine that sits bedside. It pumps pressurized air into the upper airway, keeping it open and allowing normal breathing. The researchers suggested further studies to determine whether such treatment would improve covid-19 outcomes for people with a sleep disorder. © 1996-2021 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 28126 - Posted: 12.29.2021

By Carl Zimmer Edward O. Wilson, a biologist and author who conducted pioneering work on biodiversity, insects and human nature — and won two Pulitzer Prizes along the way — died on Sunday in Burlington, Mass. He was 92. His death was announced on Monday by the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. When Dr. Wilson began his career in evolutionary biology in the 1950s, the study of animals and plants seemed to many scientists like a quaint, obsolete hobby. Molecular biologists were getting their first glimpses of DNA, proteins and other invisible foundations of life. Dr. Wilson made it his life’s work to put evolution on an equal footing. “How could our seemingly old-fashioned subjects achieve new intellectual rigor and originality compared to molecular biology?” he recalled in 2009. He answered his own question by pioneering new fields of research. As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own. As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer, in 1991. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 28125 - Posted: 12.29.2021

By Karen Brown For decades, Linda Larson has been trying to distance herself from the diagnosis she was given as a teenager: schizophrenia. She accepts that she has the mental disorder but deeply resents the term’s stigma. People hear it and think, “violent, amoral, unhygienic,” she said. Ms. Larson, 74, is part of a group trying to remove that association — by changing the name of the illness. The idea is that replacing the term “schizophrenia” with something less frightening and more descriptive will not only change how the public perceives people with the diagnosis, but also how these people see themselves. Ms. Larson is a member of the Consumer Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which is associated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The group has been working with psychiatrists at Harvard to build momentum for a name change, most recently through a national survey published in the journal Schizophrenia Research. “That term over time has become so associated with hopelessness, with dangerousness, with volatile and erratic behavior, that doctors are afraid to use that term with people and their family members,” said Dr. Raquelle Mesholam-Gately, a Harvard psychologist and the lead author of the new paper. “And people who have the condition don’t want to be associated with that name.” As a result, she said, clinicians often avoid making such a devastating diagnosis and many patients and their families don’t seek treatment until after the illness has wreaked considerable damage. Dr. Mesholam-Gately and her team asked about 1,200 people connected to schizophrenia — including those with the disorder, their family members, mental health providers, researchers and government officials — whether it should be called something else. The survey proposed nine alternative names, based partly on the experience of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Among them: altered perception disorder, attunement disorder, disconnectivity syndrome, integration disorder and psychosis spectrum disorder. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 28124 - Posted: 12.22.2021

By Christof Koch A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.” Years later Hemingway adapted his own experience—that of the soul leaving the body, taking flight and then returning—for his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” about an African safari gone disastrously wrong. The protagonist, stricken by gangrene, knows he is dying. Suddenly, his pain vanishes, and Compie, a bush pilot, arrives to rescue him. The two take off and fly together through a storm with rain so thick “it seemed like flying through a waterfall” until the plane emerges into the light: before them, “unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.” The description embraces elements of a classic near-death experience: the darkness, the cessation of pain, the emerging into the light and then a feeling of peacefulness. Peace Beyond Understanding Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are triggered during singular life-threatening episodes when the body is injured by blunt trauma, a heart attack, asphyxia, shock, and so on. About one in 10 patients with cardiac arrest in a hospital setting undergoes such an episode. Thousands of survivors of these harrowing touch-and-go situations tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and encountering a realm beyond everyday existence, unconstrained by the usual boundaries of space and time. These powerful, mystical experiences can lead to permanent transformation of their lives. © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: Consciousness; Stress
Link ID: 28123 - Posted: 12.22.2021

by Anna Goshua A variety of traits, including developmental delay and intellectual disability, characterize people with mutations in the autism-linked gene MYT1L, according to a new study. The gene encodes a transcription factor important for cells that make myelin, which insulates nerve cells and is deficient in some forms of autism. The work, published 8 November in Human Genetics, represents the most detailed study of the traits associated with MYT1L mutations to date. “We wanted to gather more cases to bring a clearer clinical and molecular picture of the condition for lab scientists, clinicians and also for patients and families,” says study investigator Juliette Coursimault, a physician-researcher in the genetics department at Rouen University Hospital in France. She and her co-researchers described 62 people, whereas previous literature included only 12 cases. The new characterization will “benefit clinicians’ diagnosis and treatment strategies when a patient with MYT1L mutation arrives in their clinic,” says Brady Maher, a lead investigator at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not part of the study. The researchers identified and reviewed data for 22 people with MYT1L mutations who had been described in the academic literature, and collected clinical and molecular data from an additional 40 people, aged 1 to 34 years old, with likely or confirmed pathogenic variants of MYT1L. They recruited the participants through Rouen University Hospital and data-sharing networks such as GeneMatcher, which connects clinicians and researchers. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 28122 - Posted: 12.22.2021