Sacha Pfeiffer A few weeks ago, at about 6:45 in the morning, I was at home, waiting to talk live on the air with Morning Edition host Michel Martin about a story I'd done, when I suddenly heard a loud metallic hammering. It sounded like a machine was vibrating my house. It happened again about 15 seconds later. And again after that. This rhythmic clatter seemed to be coming from my basement utility closet. Was my furnace breaking? Or my water heater? I worried that it might happen while I was on the air. Luckily, the noise stopped while I spoke with Michel, but restarted later. This time I heard another sound, a warbling or trilling, possibly inside my chimney. Was there an animal in there? I ran outside, looked up at my roof — and saw a woodpecker drilling away at my metal chimney cap. I've seen and heard plenty of woodpeckers hammer on trees. But never on metal. So to find out why the bird was doing this, I called an expert: Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who recently created a course called "The Wonderful World of Woodpeckers." McGowan said woodpeckers batter wood to find food, make a home, mark territory and attract a mate. But when they bash away at metal, "what the birds are trying to do is make as big a noise as possible," he said, "and a number of these guys have found that — you know what? If you hammer on metal, it's really loud!" Woodpeckers primarily do this during the springtime breeding season, and their metallic racket has two purposes, "basically summarized as: All other guys stay away, all the girls come to me," McGowan said. "And the bigger the noise, the better." © 2024 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 29333 - Posted: 06.02.2024

By Andrew Jacobs and Christina Jewett The Food and Drug Administration on Friday raised concerns about the health effects of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing flaws in a company’s studies that could pose major obstacles to approval of a treatment anticipated to help people struggling with the condition. The agency said that bias had seeped into the studies because participants and therapists were readily able to figure out who got MDMA versus a placebo. It also flagged “significant increases” in blood pressure and pulse rates that could “trigger cardiovascular events.” The staff analysis was conducted for an independent advisory panel that will meet Tuesday to consider an application by Lykos Therapeutics for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy. The agency’s concerns highlight the unique and complex issues facing regulators as they weigh the therapeutic value of an illegal drug commonly known as Ecstasy that has long been associated with all-night raves and cuddle puddles. Approval would mark a seismic change in the nation’s tortuous relationship with psychedelic compounds, most of which the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies as illegal substances that have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Research like the current studies on MDMA therapy have corralled the support of various groups and lawmakers from both parties for treatment of PTSD, a condition affecting millions of Americans, especially military veterans who face an outsize risk of suicide. No new therapy has been approved for PTSD in more than 20 years. “What’s happening is truly a paradigm shift for psychiatry,” said David Olson, director of the U.C. Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics. “MDMA is an important step for the field because we really lack effective treatments, period, and people need help now.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29332 - Posted: 06.02.2024

By Liqun Luo The brain is complex; in humans it consists of about 100 billion neurons, making on the order of 100 trillion connections. It is often compared with another complex system that has enormous problem-solving power: the digital computer. Both the brain and the computer contain a large number of elementary units—neurons and transistors, respectively—that are wired into complex circuits to process information conveyed by electrical signals. At a global level, the architectures of the brain and the computer resemble each other, consisting of largely separate circuits for input, output, central processing, and memory.1 Which has more problem-solving power—the brain or the computer? Given the rapid advances in computer technology in the past decades, you might think that the computer has the edge. Indeed, computers have been built and programmed to defeat human masters in complex games, such as chess in the 1990s and recently Go, as well as encyclopedic knowledge contests, such as the TV show Jeopardy! As of this writing, however, humans triumph over computers in numerous real-world tasks—ranging from identifying a bicycle or a particular pedestrian on a crowded city street to reaching for a cup of tea and moving it smoothly to one’s lips—let alone conceptualization and creativity. So why is the computer good at certain tasks whereas the brain is better at others? Comparing the computer and the brain has been instructive to both computer engineers and neuroscientists. This comparison started at the dawn of the modern computer era, in a small but profound book entitled The Computer and the Brain, by John von Neumann, a polymath who in the 1940s pioneered the design of a computer architecture that is still the basis of most modern computers today.2 Let’s look at some of these comparisons in numbers (Table 1). © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 29331 - Posted: 05.29.2024

Rodrigo Duarte Around 8% of human DNA is made up of genetic sequences acquired from ancient viruses. These sequences, known as human endogenous retroviruses (or Hervs), date back hundreds of thousands to millions of years – with some even predating the emergence of Homo sapiens. Our latest research suggests that some ancient viral DNA sequences in the human genome play a role in susceptibility to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Hervs represent the remnants of these infections with ancient retroviruses. Retroviruses are viruses that insert a copy of their genetic material into the DNA of the cells they infect. Retroviruses probably infected us on multiple occasions during our evolutionary past. When these infections occurred in sperm or egg cells that generated offspring, the genetic material from these retroviruses was passed on to subsequent generations, becoming a permanent part of our lineage. Initially, scientists considered Hervs to be “junk DNA” – parts of our genome with no discernible function. But as our understanding of the human genome has advanced, it’s become evident that this so-called junk DNA is responsible for more functions than originally hypothesised. First, researchers found that Hervs can regulate the expression of other human genes. A genetic feature is said to be “expressed” if its DNA segment is used to produce RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules. These RNA molecules can then serve as intermediaries leading to the production of specific proteins, or help to regulate other parts of the genome. Initial research suggested that Hervs regulate the expression of neighbouring genes with important biological functions. One example of this is a Herv that regulates the expression of a gene involved in modifying connections between brain cells. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29330 - Posted: 05.29.2024

By Elie Dolgin The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just reshape how children learn and see the world. It transformed the shape of their eyeballs. As real-life classrooms and playgrounds gave way to virtual meetings and digital devices, the time that children spent focusing on screens and other nearby objects surged — and the time they spent outdoors dropped precipitously. This shift led to a notable change in children’s anatomy: their eyeballs lengthened to better accommodate short-vision tasks. Study after study, in regions ranging from Europe to Asia, documented this change. One analysis from Hong Kong even reported a near doubling in the incidence of pathologically stretched eyeballs among six-year-olds compared with pre-pandemic levels1. This elongation improves the clarity of close-up images on the retina, the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye. But it also makes far-away objects appear blurry, leading to a condition known as myopia, or short-sightedness. And although corrective eyewear can usually address the issue — allowing children to, for example, see a blackboard or read from a distance — severe myopia can lead to more-serious complications, such as retinal detachment, macular degeneration, glaucoma and even permanent blindness. Rates of myopia were booming well before the COVID-19 pandemic. Widely cited projections in the mid-2010s suggested that myopia would affect half of the world’s population by mid-century (see ‘Rising prevalence’), which would effectively double the incidence rate in less than four decades2 (see ‘Affecting every age’). Now, those alarming predictions seem much too modest, says Neelam Pawar, a paediatric ophthalmologist at the Aravind Eye Hospital in Tirunelveli, India. “I don’t think it will double,” she says. “It will triple.” © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29329 - Posted: 05.29.2024

By Matthew Hutson ChatGPT and other AI tools are upending our digital lives, but our AI interactions are about to get physical. Humanoid robots trained with a particular type of AI to sense and react to their world could lend a hand in factories, space stations, nursing homes and beyond. Two recent papers in Science Robotics highlight how that type of AI — called reinforcement learning — could make such robots a reality. “We’ve seen really wonderful progress in AI in the digital world with tools like GPT,” says Ilija Radosavovic, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But I think that AI in the physical world has the potential to be even more transformational.” The state-of-the-art software that controls the movements of bipedal bots often uses what’s called model-based predictive control. It’s led to very sophisticated systems, such as the parkour-performing Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics. But these robot brains require a fair amount of human expertise to program, and they don’t adapt well to unfamiliar situations. Reinforcement learning, or RL, in which AI learns through trial and error to perform sequences of actions, may prove a better approach. “We wanted to see how far we can push reinforcement learning in real robots,” says Tuomas Haarnoja, a computer scientist at Google DeepMind and coauthor of one of the Science Robotics papers. Haarnoja and colleagues chose to develop software for a 20-inch-tall toy robot called OP3, made by the company Robotis. The team not only wanted to teach OP3 to walk but also to play one-on-one soccer. “Soccer is a nice environment to study general reinforcement learning,” says Guy Lever of Google DeepMind, a coauthor of the paper. It requires planning, agility, exploration, cooperation and competition. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 29328 - Posted: 05.29.2024

By Elissa Welle A new study suggests that the brain clears less waste during sleep and under anesthesia than while in other states—directly contradicting prior results that suggest sleep initiates that process. The findings are stirring fresh debate on social media and elsewhere over the glymphatic system hypothesis, which contends that convective flow of cerebrospinal fluid clears the sleeping brain of toxins. The new work, published 13 May in Nature Neuroscience, proposes that fluid diffusion is responsible for moving waste throughout the brain. It uses a different method than the earlier studies—injecting tracers into mouse brain tissue instead of cerebrospinal fluid—which is likely a more reliable way to understand how the fluid moves through densely packed neurons, says Jason Rihel, professor of behavioral genetics at University College London, who was not involved in any of the studies on brain clearance. The findings have prompted some sleep researchers, including Rihel, to question the existence of a glymphatic system and whether brain clearance is tied to sleep-wake states, he says. But leading proponents of the sleep-induced clearance theory are pushing back against the study’s techniques. The new study is “misleading” and “extremely poorly done,” says Maiken Nedergaard, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, whose 2013 study on brain clearance led to the hypothesis of a glymphatic system. She says she plans to challenge the work in a proposed Matters Arising commentary for Nature Neuroscience. Inserting needles into the brain damages the tissue, and injecting fluid, as the team behind the new work did, increases intracranial pressure, says Jonathan Kipnis, professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Kipnis and his colleagues published a study in February in support of the glymphatic system hypothesis that suggests neural activity facilitates brain clearance. “You disturb the system when you inject into the brain,” Kipnis says, “and that’s why we were always injecting in the CSF.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29327 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Mariana Lenharo Crows know their numbers. An experiment has revealed that these birds can count their own calls, showcasing a numerical skill previously only seen in people. Investigating how animals understand numbers can help scientists to explore the biological origins of humanity’s numerical abilities, says Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Rovereto, Italy. Being able to produce a deliberate number of vocalizations on cue, as the birds in the experiment did, “is actually a very impressive achievement”, he notes. Andreas Nieder, an animal physiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a co-author of the study published 23 May in Science1, says it was amazing to see how cognitively flexible these corvids are. “They have a reputation of being very smart and intelligent, and they proved this once again.” The researchers worked with three carrion crows (Corvus corone) that had already been trained to caw on command. Over the next several months, the birds were taught to associate visual cues — a screen showing the digits 1, 2, 3 or 4 — with the number of calls they were supposed to produce. They were later also introduced to four auditory cues that were each associated with a distinct number. During the experiment, the birds stood in front of the screen and were presented with a visual or auditory cue. They were expected to produce the number of vocalizations associated with the cue and to peck at an ‘enter key’ on the touchscreen monitor when they were done. If they got it right, an automated feeder delivered bird-seed pellets and mealworms as a reward. They were correct most of the time. “Their performance was way beyond chance and highly significant,” says Nieder. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 29326 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Steven Strogatz For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Yet for almost as long, it’s been clear that simplistic theory is wrong. Recent research into the true causes of depression is finding clues in other neurotransmitters and the realization that the brain is much more adaptable than scientists once imagined. Treatments for depression are being reinvented by drugs like ketamine that can help regrow synapses, which can in turn restore the right brain chemistry and improve whole body health. In this episode, John Krystal, a neuropharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine, shares the new findings in mental health research that are revolutionizing psychiatric medication. STEVEN STROGATZ: According to the World Health Organization, 280 million people worldwide suffer from depression. For decades, people with chronic depression have been told their problem lies with a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically a deficit in a neurotransmitter called serotonin. And based on this theory, many have been prescribed antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, to correct this chemical imbalance. This theory has become the common narrative, yet almost from the beginning, researchers have questioned the role of serotonin in depression, even though SSRIs do seem to bring a lot of relief to many people. So, if bad brain chemistry isn’t at the root of chronic depression, what is? If the thinking behind SSRIs is wrong, why do they seem to help? And is it possible that as we get closer to the true cause of depression, we may find better treatments for other conditions as well? © 2024 the Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29325 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Laura Sanders It’s a bit like seeing a world in a grain of sand. Except the view, in this case, is the exquisite detail inside a bit of human brain about half the size of a grain of rice. Held in that minuscule object is a complex collective of cells, blood vessels, intricate patterns and biological puzzles. Scientists had hints of these mysteries in earlier peeks at this bit of brain (SN: 6/29/21). But now, those details have been brought into new focus by mapping the full landscape of some 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses and their accompanying 23 centimeters of blood vessels, researchers report in the May 10 Science. The full results, the scientists hope, may lead to greater insights into how the human brain works. “We’re going in and looking at every individual connection attached to every cell — a very high level of detail,” says Viren Jain, a computational neuroscientist at Google Research in Mountain View, Calif. The big-picture goal of brain mapping efforts, he says, is “to understand how human brains work and what goes wrong in various kinds of brain diseases.” The newly mapped brain sample was removed during a woman’s surgery for epilepsy, so that doctors could reach a deeper part of the brain. The bit, donated with the woman’s consent, was from the temporal lobe of the cortex, the outer part of the brain involved in complex mental feats like thinking, remembering and perceiving. This digital drawing of a person's head shows the brain inside. An arrow points to the bottom left side of the brain. After being fixed in a preservative, the brain bit was sliced into almost impossibly thin wisps, and then each slice was imaged with a high-powered microscope. Once these views were collected, researchers used computers to digitally reconstruct the three-dimensional objects embedded in the piece of brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29324 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Jennifer Hassan More people in the United States say they are using marijuana daily or near daily, compared with people who say they are drinking alcohol that often, according to a new study. In 2022, about 17.7 million people reported daily or near-daily marijuana use, compared with 14.7 million people who reported drinking at the same frequency, said the report, which was based on more than four decades of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It was the first time the survey recorded more frequent users of cannabis than alcohol, the report added. The research was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction. The research window spans the years 1979 to 2022, and the 27 surveys that were analyzed involved more than 1.6 million participants during that time frame. The study described the growth in daily or near-daily cannabis use as “striking.” While “far more people drink” than use marijuana, high-frequency drinking among Americans is less common, the report said. The 2022 survey found that the median drinker reported drinking on four to five days in a month, compared with 15 to 16 days in a month for cannabis. The study noted that changing trends in cannabis use “parallel corresponding changes in cannabis policy, with declines during periods of greater restriction and growth during periods of policy liberalization.” It stressed, however, that this did not mean there was a causal link, as “both could have been manifestations of changes in underlying culture and attitudes.” Thirty-eight states and D.C. have legalized medical marijuana programs, and 24 states have approved recreational cannabis use.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29323 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Yasemin Saplakoglu György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan. He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than others, just as you remember only some experiences from your past. Now, as a professor of neuroscience at New York University, Buzsáki has moved on from radio waves to brain waves to ask: How does the brain decide what to remember? By studying electrical patterns in the brain, Buzsáki seeks to understand how our experiences are represented and saved as memories. New studies from his lab and others have suggested that the brain tags experiences worth remembering by repeatedly sending out sudden and powerful high-frequency brain waves. Known as “sharp wave ripples,” these waves, kicked up by the firing of many thousands of neurons within milliseconds of each other, are “like a fireworks show in the brain,” said Wannan Yang, a doctoral student in Buzsáki’s lab who led the new work, which was published in Science in March. They fire when the mammalian brain is at rest, whether during a break between tasks or during sleep. Sharp wave ripples were already known to be involved in consolidating memories or storing them. The new research shows that they’re also involved in selecting them — pointing to the importance of these waves throughout the process of long-term memory formation. It also provides neurological reasons why rest and sleep are important for retaining information. Resting and waking brains seem to run different programs: If you sleep all the time, you won’t form memories. If you’re awake all the time, you won’t form them either. “If you just run one algorithm, you will never learn anything,” Buzsáki said. “You have to have interruptions.” © 2024 the Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29322 - Posted: 05.23.2024

By Amanda Heidt For the first time, a brain implant has helped a bilingual person who is unable to articulate words to communicate in both of his languages. An artificial-intelligence (AI) system coupled to the brain implant decodes, in real time, what the individual is trying to say in either Spanish or English. The findings1, published on 20 May in Nature Biomedical Engineering, provide insights into how our brains process language, and could one day lead to long-lasting devices capable of restoring multilingual speech to people who can’t communicate verbally. “This new study is an important contribution for the emerging field of speech-restoration neuroprostheses,” says Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. Even though the study included only one participant and more work remains to be done, “there’s every reason to think that this strategy will work with higher accuracy in the future when combined with other recent advances”, Stavisky says. The person at the heart of the study, who goes by the nickname Pancho, had a stroke at age 20 that paralysed much of his body. As a result, he can moan and grunt but cannot speak clearly. In his thirties, Pancho partnered with Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, to investigate the stroke’s lasting effects on his brain. In a groundbreaking study published in 20212, Chang’s team surgically implanted electrodes on Pancho’s cortex to record neural activity, which was translated into words on a screen. Pancho’s first sentence — ‘My family is outside’ — was interpreted in English. But Pancho is a native Spanish speaker who learnt English only after his stroke. It’s Spanish that still evokes in him feelings of familiarity and belonging. “What languages someone speaks are actually very linked to their identity,” Chang says. “And so our long-term goal has never been just about replacing words, but about restoring connection for people.” © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Language; Robotics
Link ID: 29321 - Posted: 05.23.2024

By Christina Jewett Just four months ago, Noland Arbaugh had a circle of bone removed from his skull and hair-thin sensor tentacles slipped into his brain. A computer about the size of a small stack of quarters was placed on top and the hole was sealed. Paralyzed below the neck, Mr. Arbaugh is the first patient to take part in the clinical trial of humans testing Elon Musk’s Neuralink device, and his early progress was greeted with excitement. Working with engineers, Mr. Arbaugh, 30, trained computer programs to translate the firing of neurons in his brain into the act of moving a cursor up, down and around. His command of the cursor was soon so agile that he could challenge his stepfather at Mario Kart and play an empire-building video game late into the night. But as weeks passed, about 85 percent of the device’s tendrils slipped out of his brain. Neuralink’s staff had to retool the system to allow him to regain command of the cursor. Though he needed to learn a new method to click on something, he can still skate the cursor across the screen. Neuralink advised him against a surgery to replace the threads, he said, adding that the situation had stabilized. The setback became public earlier this month. And although the diminished activity was initially difficult and disappointing, Mr. Arbaugh said it had been worth it for Neuralink to move forward in a tech-medical field aimed at helping people regain their speech, sight or movement. “I just want to bring everyone along this journey with me,” he said. “I want to show everyone how amazing this is. And it’s just been so rewarding. So I’m really excited to keep going.” From a small desert town in Arizona, Mr. Arbaugh has emerged as an enthusiastic spokesman for Neuralink, one of at least five companies leveraging decades of academic research to engineer a device that can help restore function in people with disabilities or degenerative diseases. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 29320 - Posted: 05.23.2024

By Claudia López Lloreda Fentanyl’s powerful pull comes from both the potent, rapid euphoria people feel while on the drug and the devastating symptoms of withdrawal. Researchers have now zeroed in on brain circuits responsible for these two forces of fentanyl addiction. The study in mice, reported May 22 in Nature, suggests two distinct brain pathways are in play. “Addiction is not a simple disorder — it’s very complex and dynamic,” says Mary Kay Lobo, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore who was not involved with the new research. She appreciates that the study looks not only at reward in the brain, but also at the withdrawal symptoms, which are “this dark side of addiction.” Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are highly addictive (SN: 4/28/23). About one of every four fentanyl users becomes addicted. And in 2022 in the United States alone, there were more than 70,000 deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses, primarily fentanyl. Researchers have known that dopamine-releasing neurons in an area of the midbrain called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, mediate feelings like euphoria. But the circuits driving withdrawal symptoms were less clear. Such symptoms include nausea, pain, irritability and an inability to feel pleasure. To find out more, neuroscientist Christian Lüscher of the University of Geneva and colleagues injected mice with fentanyl for three consecutive days then stopped, inducing withdrawal by giving the mice naloxone. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29319 - Posted: 05.23.2024

By Christina Caron Just before Katie Marsh dropped out of college, she began to worry that she might have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Boredom was like a burning sensation inside of me,” said Ms. Marsh, who is now 30 and lives in Portland, Ore. “I barely went to class. And when I did, I felt like I had a lot of pent-up energy. Like I had to just move around all the time.” So she asked for an A.D.H.D. evaluation — but the results, she was surprised to learn, were inconclusive. She never did return to school. And only after seeking help again four years later was she diagnosed by an A.D.H.D. specialist. “It was pretty frustrating,” she said. A.D.H.D. is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in adults. Yet many health care providers have uneven training on how to evaluate it, and there are no U.S. clinical practice guidelines for diagnosing and treating patients beyond childhood. Without clear rules, some providers, while well-intentioned, are just “making it up as they go along,” said Dr. David W. Goodman, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. This lack of clarity leaves providers and adult patients in a bind. “We desperately need something to help guide the field,” said Dr. Wendi Waits, a psychiatrist with Talkiatry, an online mental health company. “When everyone’s practicing somewhat differently, it makes it hard to know how best to approach it.” Can A.D.H.D. symptoms emerge in adulthood? A.D.H.D. is defined as a neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood and is typically characterized by inattention, disorganization, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Patients are generally categorized into three types: hyperactive and impulsive, inattentive, or a combination of the two. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 29318 - Posted: 05.23.2024

By Ellen Barry The annual gathering of the American Psychiatric Association is a dignified and collegial affair, full of scholarly exchanges, polite laughter and polite applause. So it was a shock, for those who took their seats in Room 1E08 of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, to watch a powerfully built 32-year-old man choke back tears as he described being slammed to the floor and cuffed to a stretcher in a psychiatric unit. Because the man, Matthew Tuleja, had been a Division I football player, he had a certain way of describing the circle of bodies that closed around him, the grabbing and grappling and the sensation of being dominated, pinned and helpless. He was on the ground in a small room filled with pepper spray. Then his wrists and ankles were cuffed to the sides of a stretcher, and his pants were yanked down. They gave him injections of Haldol, an antipsychotic medication he had repeatedly tried to refuse, as he howled in protest. Forcible restraints are routine events in American hospitals. One recent study, using 2017 data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimated the number of restraints per year at more than 44,000. But it is rare to hear a first-person account of the experience, because it tends to happen to people who do not have a platform. Researchers who surveyed patients about restraint and seclusion have found that a large portion, 25 to 47 percent , met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. Listening, rapt, to Mr. Tuleja was a roomful of psychiatrists. It was a younger crowd — people who had entered the field at the time of the Black Lives Matter protests. Many of them lined up to speak to him afterward. “I still can’t forget the first time I saw someone restrained,” one doctor told him. “You don’t forget that.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 29317 - Posted: 05.21.2024

By Meghan Willcoxon In the summer of 1991, the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese was studying how movement is represented in the brain when he noticed something odd. He and his research adviser, Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma were tracking which neurons became active when monkeys interacted with certain objects. As the scientists had observed before, the same neurons fired when the monkeys either noticed the objects or picked them up. But then the neurons did something the researchers didn’t expect. Before the formal start of the experiment, Gallese grasped the objects to show them to a monkey. At that moment, the activity spiked in the same neurons that had fired when the monkey grasped the objects. It was the first time anyone had observed neurons encode information for both an action and another individual performing that action. Those neurons reminded the researchers of a mirror: Actions the monkeys observed were reflected in their brains through these peculiar motor cells. In 1992, Gallese and Rizzolatti first described the cells in the journal Experimental Brain Research and then in 1996 named them “mirror neurons” in Brain. The researchers knew they had found something interesting, but nothing could have prepared them for how the rest of the world would respond. Within 10 years of the discovery, the idea of a mirror neuron had become the rare neuroscience concept to capture the public imagination. From 2002 to 2009, scientists across disciplines joined science popularizers in sensationalizing these cells, attributing more properties to them to explain such complex human behaviors as empathy, altruism, learning, imitation, autism, and speech. Then, nearly as quickly as mirror neurons caught on, scientific doubts about their explanatory power crept in. Within a few years, these celebrity cells were filed away in the drawer of over-promised, under-delivered discoveries. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 29316 - Posted: 05.21.2024

Ian Sample Science editor A device that stimulates the spinal nerves with electrical pulses appears to boost how well people recover from major spinal cord injuries, doctors say. An international trial found that patients who had lost some or all use of their hands and arms after a spinal cord injury regained strength, control and sensation when the stimulation was applied during standard rehabilitation exercises. The improvements were small but were described by doctors and patients as life-changing because of the impact they had on the patients’ daily routines and quality of life. “It actually makes it easier for people to move, including people who have complete loss of movement in their hands and arms,” said Prof Chet Moritz, in the department of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The benefits accumulate gradually over time as we pair this spinal stimulation with intensive therapy of the hands and arms, such that there are benefits even when the stimulator is turned off.” Rather than being implanted, the Arc-Ex device is worn externally and uses electrodes that are placed on the skin near the section of the spinal cord responsible for controlling a particular movement or function. The researchers believe that electrical stimulation helps nerves that remain intact after the injury to send signals and ultimately partially restore some communication between the brain and paralysed body part. More than half of patients who suffer spinal cord injuries still have some intact nerves that cross the injury site. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Robotics; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 29315 - Posted: 05.21.2024

By Matt Richtel With weed these days, it’s a Willy Wonka world: chocolate bars, lollipops, exotic-flavored gummies — to say nothing of joints, vapes, drinks and the rest. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have now legalized the sale of marijuana for recreational use, prompting innovation, lowering prices and making the drug — more potent than ever — more widely available. The Biden administration this week recommended easing the federal regulations on cannabis. What does all of this mean for adolescents? Studies have demonstrated that marijuana use can harm the developing brain. Some new strains have been linked to psychosis. Many health experts have worried that relaxing the laws around cannabis will lead to more use of the drug among minors. But Rebekah Levine Coley, a developmental psychologist at Boston College, is less certain. In April, she and colleagues published a study in JAMA that examined drug use patterns among 900,000 high school students from 2011 to 2021, using self-reported data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They found that fewer minors reported having used cannabis in the previous month in states where the drug had been legalized. But they also found that in the 18 states that had both legalized cannabis and allowed retail sales of the drug, some adolescents who were users of the drug used it more frequently. The net effect was a flat or slight decline in cannabis use among adolescents. Dr. Coley spoke to The New York Times about the study, and its implications for state and federal drug policy. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It seems sensible to assume that legalizing marijuana would lead to more use by young people. Yes, common sense might argue that as cannabis becomes legalized, it will be more accessible. There will be fewer potential legal repercussions, hence availability would increase and use would increase. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29314 - Posted: 05.21.2024