By Faye Flam, Inquirer Staff Writer What happened in Ben Franklin's brain when he first thought of bifocals and the public library? Which of Wilbur Wright's neurons fired when the frustrated flight pioneer suddenly realized how to shift wing angles to bring the world controlled flight? Insightful thoughts, original ideas, American ingenuity - the engines of progress in science and technology, arts and culture. And yet we don't fully understand their nature, nor have we figured out how to summon them at will from whatever uncharted region of the unconscious mind they are born. But now, science is starting to give us insight into insight. Psychology professor John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University are attempting to capture the seat of insight using an electroencephalogram (EEG) and brain scanning machine. When they asked subjects to solve certain types of word puzzles while hooked to these devices, they found some surprising patterns of brain activity surrounding the moments the right answers popped into the subjects' minds. They published their results earlier this year in a new journal called Public Library of Science. "Maybe if we understood how insights occur we could make them more probable" - even structure educational materials to encourage insightful thoughts in students, Kounios said.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5683 - Posted: 06.22.2004

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor When an unemployed Liverpool builder began recovering from a stroke, he developed a compulsion to write poetry, draw, paint and make sculptures day and night. Tommy McHugh's unstoppable creativity cost him his marriage but, three years on, he feels "more whole" and, with his art being exhibited at local libraries and galleries, he has embarked on a new career. "I can't shut my brain down," he said. "A few hours at night and that is it." Neuro-scientists are puzzled by the origin of his activity. Only two other cases of "sudden artist output" are known after brain damage, both in America. This week McHugh will discuss his obsession in public with Dr Mark Lythgoe, of University College London, at the Science Museum's Dana Centre in London. Dr Lythgoe has co-written a paper on the case with Tom Pollak and Dr Michelle de Haan, both neuro-psychologists, and the international artist Marion Kalmus. McHugh, 54, left school at 14 and had a history of violence and class A drug abuse. His only interest in drawing was in scrawling messy, incomplete tattoos on his arms. He was admitted to hospital in January 2001 with a headache so severe that he was sick. A scan showed bleeding from a blood vessel which doctors staunched with a metal clip and a coil to promote clotting. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 5682 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BARRY MEIER The issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry that hit the desks of its 37,000 readers this month reported test results for the antidepressant drug Celexa, indicating it could help children and teenagers. Before publication, the article received the kind of scrutiny common among medical journals. The study's authors had been asked to divulge their financial ties, if any, to the drug's marketer, Forest Laboratories Inc., which sponsored the clinical trial. And the report was sent to reviewers who examined the trial methodology and checked to make sure that the article reflected other relevant research about the use of antidepressants in youngsters. But neither the article nor the 27 scholarly footnotes that accompanied it mentioned another major drug-industry-sponsored trial completed in 2002, which found that Celexa did not help depressed adolescents any more than a placebo. Nor would the article's reviewers have been likely to find any clues of that trial's existence. The results of that trial were first noted last year on a single line of a chart that appeared on Page 96 of a textbook - one written in Danish. Like most medical journals, The American Journal of Psychiatry does not require company sponsors of drug trials to divulge information about all relevant trials of a medication. But that may soon change, as some leading journal editors try to address what they see as shortcomings in the way clinical tests are designed and analyzed by the drug industry, and how test results are disclosed. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5681 - Posted: 06.21.2004

As anyone watching Nadia weep her way hysterically through an accidentally self-inflicted 24-hour cold turkey on Big Brother will know, people suffering from chronic nicotine withdrawal are not people to be trifled with. Watching the Portuguese transsexual wrestle with her cravings within the confines of the house, a casual observer would have been forgiven for thinking she was attempting to overcome an addiction far more illicit than a 20-a-day tobacco hit. Such was her distress, she threatened to leave the house: "Without my ceeeegarettes," she wailed, "I can have no fun." Seeing such crazed behaviour can only be a deterrent to anyone seriously considering giving up smoking any time soon. To see a reasonably high-functioning, albeit hormonally eccentric, adult reduced to a sobbing mass of raw emotion through lack of nicotine is a grim reminder of the pain and irascibility everyone has to endure when a smoker is giving up. But is it really as bad as all that? Do all smokers mutate into fire-breathing tyrants the minute they stub out? I may be guilty of having selectively remembered the details, but when I gave up, six months ago, I don't recall being quite so possessed by the demon nicotine. Nor do I remember weeping uncontrollably at the slightest provocation, or fantasising about cigarettes 24/7. © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 5680 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A long-held belief among anthropologists is that there's no way to tell exactly when a human female is ovulating. Men hoping to catch her fertile phase, therefore, would have no option but to hang around--and not go gallivanting. But a study in the July issue of Behavioral Ecology shows that the male brain isn't totally clueless. As it turns out, men find a woman's body odor most sexy when she's ovulating. Unlike most female primates, with their swollen buttocks and other not-too-subtle signals, women do not advertise their fertile periods. Or so one theory goes. But studies on human odor in the 1990s turned up telltale signs that men may have subtle ways of gauging their partners' reproductive state. To test whether men can also choose the most fertile scents from a set of unknown women, a group of researchers conceived a study using smelly T-shirts. Seppo Kuukasjärvi of the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and his colleagues asked 81 female students for details of their menstrual cycles and also whether they were taking contraceptive pills. Then they gave the women T-shirts to wear for two consecutive nights, after which the garments were tested by 43 volunteer sniffers of both genders. Male sniffers rated the scents of women in mid-cycle, around the time of ovulation, as most attractive, whereas the female sniffers did not. All sniffers were clueless about the menstrual cycle of pill-using women, though. Because the pill suppresses ovulation by blocking the production of certain hormones that peak at mid-cycle, the sexy smell is probably derived from these hormones, says evolutionary biologist Esa Koskela, one of the paper's authors. Anthropologist Craig Palmer, who studies the evolution of human sexual behavior at the University of Missouri in Columbia, is pleased with the new contribution to the field. But he adds that there's probably a lot more to the story than simply what men smell. For example, he says, women may feel jealous when they smell other women in ovulation. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5679 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Aileen Constans Despite advances in knowledge about the mechanisms of nerve injury and repair, regeneration strategies for peripheral and central nervous system (PNS and CNS) damage are still in their infancies. "Neuroscientists are very good at finding out, okay, this enzyme would work or this trophic factor would work, but translating that to a controlled application that will help lead to clinical translation is a different story," says Ravi Bellamkonda, a biomedical engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Recently a group at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, University of Miami School of Medicine, combined Schwann cell grafts with elevation of cAMP levels to promote axonal growth and improve functional recovery in spinal cord-injured rats.1 Yet such successes are few and far between. A growing number of researchers are turning to tissue engineering as a promising strategy. Incorporating knowledge of the biochemical environment necessary for nerve regeneration with the development of artificial and biological scaffolds that guide regrowth, neural tissue engineering aims to bridge gaps in peripheral nerves, bypass scar tissue in damaged spinal cords, or replace damaged and diseased brain. © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Regeneration; Glia
Link ID: 5678 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower Researchers have debunked the much-publicized idea, known as the Mozart effect, that listening to classical music improves children's ability to reason about spatial relations and other nonverbal tasks. Learning to play a musical instrument or to sing, however, may indeed give youngsters an intellectual edge over their peers, a new study suggests. Six-year-olds who took weekly piano or singing lessons throughout the school year exhibited an average IQ increase of 7.0 points, says psychologist E. Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Other 6-year-olds who either took weekly drama lessons or received no extracurricular lessons displayed an average IQ rise of 4.3 points, Schellenberg reports in the August Psychological Science. The small, but statistically significant IQ advantage for music students became apparent from standardized intelligence tests administered at the start and end of first grade. The apparent benefit of the musical training showed up on the test's verbal and nonverbal sections. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Intelligence; Hearing
Link ID: 5677 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Maths shows why tonal music is easy listening. PHILIP BALL Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist. His analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line. The economist and sociologist Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word "music" than the word "sausage". © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 5676 - Posted: 06.24.2010

SHARON BEGLEY, The Wall Street Journal After Heather Wood had been playing the harp for only two years, she was good enough for the principal harpist of the New Mexico Symphony to agree to give her lessons. By Thursday evening she had made it to performance nirvana: New York's Carnegie Hall. Ms. Wood, who just finished her freshman year at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn., and three other students enchanted an invitation-only audience with a program that ranged from Faure's "Elegie" to Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm." But what got the students to Carnegie Hall was less their way with keys and strings than their brilliance with genomes and fractals. The four are recent winners of the Siemens Westinghouse Competition in science and math. When officials at the Siemens Foundation, Iselin, N.J., systematically asked entrants about their music background, says Executive Vice President Herb Carter, "we were shocked" that nearly three-quarters were gifted musicians. Thursday's recital, arranged by Siemens, was the result. There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that some of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians are gifted musicians. Einstein, for example, played the violin. (The reverse relationship doesn't hold, though: Few musicians can compute a Hamiltonian matrix or explain the Krebs cycle.) The link makes intuitive sense. Heather, who plans to double major in music and math, says the two "use the same kind of logic. Music is made up of numbers and patterns, and pattern recognition is one of the skills I developed in math." ©2004 Associated Press

Keyword: Intelligence; Hearing
Link ID: 5675 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists find promiscuous voles lack key brain function linked to monogamy Alan Zarembo, Los Angeles Times Scientists working with a ratlike animal called a vole have found that promiscuous males can be reprogrammed into monogamous partners by introducing a single gene into a specific part of their brains. Once they have been converted, the voles hang around the family nests and even huddle with their female partners after sex. "A mutation in a single gene can have a profound impact on complex social behavior," said Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University who reported the results in the current issue of the journal Nature. The research helps shed light on monogamy -- a rare social behavior -- and hints that perhaps specific genes could play a role in human relationships. Voles, found in the wild throughout much of North America, have been particularly useful in studying monogamy, which in biology refers more to the complicated social bonds based on partnership than to absolute sexual fidelity. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5674 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study linking a once widely used vaccine preservative to behavioral problems in mice could renew parents' fears that vaccinations increase the risk of autism. As this ScienCentral News video reports, those fears can lead parents to take a much bigger risk with their children's health. Suzanne Walther heard stories about the risks of vaccines, and decided not to have her daughter Mary Catherine vaccinated. Then, when Mary Catherine was a year old, she got very sick. "We were afraid she would not ever walk again and through the ten days that we were in the hospital were not sure she would not be severely impaired by this disease," says Walther. Mary Catherine had bacterial meningitis, a serious infection of the central nervous system that can cause brain damage, hearing loss, blindness, paralysis, coma and even death. It is prevented by the Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) vaccine. "And even when she was in the intensive care unit and all the doctors had the chance to come in and say, 'Wow, you didn't have her vaccinated?', I didn't feel like, 'I'm a bad parent,' says Walther. "The gut-level feeling was anger. I was mad because that disease was out there and my child got it." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5673 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor In the 1956 sci-fi adventure "Forbidden Planet," an American astronaut receives a "brain boost" from an alien machine that temporarily gives him enhanced mental powers. Before he dies from the effects of the boost, he helps unravel the mystery of how the civilization became extinct: It couldn't control its own immense mental powers. More recently, the characters in "The Matrix" film series are shown "downloading" knowledge into their brains nearly instantaneously. In "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" the lead character has the uncomfortable memories of a love affair removed from his mind, with unexpected results. What used to be confined to speculative fiction is fast becoming scientific fact. Brain boosting, or "neural enhancement," is already being done - and much more powerful techniques are on the way. Some observers say we're rushing into this brain-gain revolution without sufficient thought or preparation. "We're about to be handed a bunch of powerful new capabilities ... to refashion ourselves, improve ourselves," notes Martha Farah, a director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, in an e-mail. "We should always think through the ethical consequences of changing ourselves and our lives, for the individual and for society." Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 5672 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ANNE MCILROY He says he loves you, but doesn't want to settle down. Science soon may have an answer. Researchers have found a way to turn naturally promiscuous animals into monogamous ones, a discovery that one day could lead to a "commitment pill" for human males. Led by scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, the team worked with two species of voles. (Voles look like furry mice with short tails.) Male meadow voles are loners who like to play the field; prairie voles tend to get attached to one female. The researchers, in essence, were able to change the meadow vole's natural propensity to philander by inserting a single gene that changed the way the pleasure centre in their brains worked. After a single treatment, they became as monogamous as prairie voles. Human males appear to have a similar system, which involves the hormone vasopressin, in their brains. Theoretically, the discovery opens the door to the possibility of medical treatment for men who have trouble committing to a relationship. Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5671 - Posted: 06.18.2004

By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News Online science staff A single gene can turn the Don Juan of voles into an attentive home-loving husband, Nature magazine has reported. By altering the small animal's brain hormone chemistry, scientists have made a promiscuous meadow vole faithful - just like its prairie vole cousin. The researchers think this will lead to a greater understanding of how social behaviour is controlled in humans. The same hormone activity could play a role in disorders like autism where people can lack simple social skills. Fewer than 5% of mammals are habitually monogamous. Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are among the select few. After mating, the males "fall in love": they stick close to their chosen one, guard her jealously and help her raise their young. Closely related meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus), on the other hand, take a more standard approach. They mate with several females and pay little attention to their babies. Previous studies indicated a hormone called vasopressin encourages pair-bonding in prairie voles. Scientists had also noticed that promiscuous voles have fewer vasopressin (V1a) receptors, in a bit of their forebrain called the ventral pallidum region. To prove vasopressin has a "taming" effect, the researchers gave meadow voles extra V1a receptors in the ventral pallidum region of their brains. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5670 - Posted: 06.17.2004

By Michael Behar The chime on H. Lee Sweeney’s laptop dings again—another e-mail. He doesn’t rush to open it. He knows what it’s about. He knows what they are all about. The molecular geneticist gets dozens every week, all begging for the same thing—a miracle. Ding. A woman with carpal tunnel syndrome wants a cure. Ding. A man offers $100,000, his house, and all his possessions to save his wife from dying of a degenerative muscle disease. Ding, ding, ding. Jocks, lots of jocks, plead for quick cures for strained muscles or torn tendons. Weight lifters press for larger deltoids. Sprinters seek a split second against the clock. People volunteer to be guinea pigs. Gene therapy could do for athletes what photo manipulation has done for this runner. But performance-enhancing drugs would undermine amateur athletics, which by definition are supposed to show how far natural skills can be advanced, says Richard Pound, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency. “I want athletes,” he says, “not gladiators.” Sweeney has the same reply for each ding: “I tell them it’s illegal and maybe not safe, but they write back and say they don’t care. A high school coach contacted me and wanted to know if we could make enough serum to inject his whole football team. He wanted them to be bigger and stronger and come back from injuries faster, and he thought those were good things.” © 2003 The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 5669 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Questions the current diagnosis criteria of low libido in women under 45 years of age. Australian researchers uncover new role for DHEA sulphate in signifying low libido. Researchers at the Australian based Jean Hailes Foundation are addressing the complex role of hormones. Their aim is to understand what is normal and whether women may benefit from therapy. In one of the world's most comprehensive studies into women's health and hormones researchers looked at 1423 randomly selected women aged 18-75. Professor Susan Davis, Director of Research at The Foundation is presenting these findings at the Endocrine Society's 86th Annual Meeting this week and said, "We undertook this study to determine whether women with low libido also had low levels of androgens. Until now experts have agreed that sexual dysfunction in women was illustrated by low levels of free and total testosterone. However this study has shown low testosterone bears no relationship to low libido in women under 45 years of age. "We found a strong relationship between the low scores for desire, arousal and responsiveness and low DHEAS levels in women under 45, " said Professor Davis.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5668 - Posted: 06.17.2004

Could gene therapy cure promiscuous behaviour? HELEN R. PILCHER Want to tame the eye of a philandering love rat? Then help is at hand. New research shows that gene therapy can turn promiscuous male voles into faithful bedfellows. Miranda Lim from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues used a virus to introduce a gene directly into the brain of male meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus). The gene encodes a protein called the vasopressin receptor, which helps to regulate social behaviour and pair bonding. A few days later, the normally promiscuous rodents developed high levels of vasopressin receptors and lost their lust for the ladies. The results are reported in this week's Nature1. The animals' brain chemistry and behaviour resembles that of their relative, the monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster). These faithful creatures mate for life and have many vasopressin receptors in the ventral forebrain, a brain region known to regulate addiction and reward. Increasing the number of vasopressin receptors in this area gives an animal a sense of reward when it forms a close pair bond, explains Lim. So lecherous animals calm their errant ways. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5667 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Gia Scafidi Researchers from USC and the Technion Medical School in Israel have uncovered new clues into the mystery of the brain’s ultra-complicated cells known as neurons. Their findings — appearing in this month’s issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience — contradict a widely accepted idea regarding the “arithmetic” neurons use to process information. “It’s amazing that after a hundred years of modern neuroscience research, we still don’t know the basic information processing functions of a neuron,” said Bartlett Mel, an associate professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and contributing author of the journal’s article. “Historically, it has most often been assumed that a brain cell sums up its excitatory inputs linearly, meaning that the excitation caused by two inputs A and B activated together equals the sum of excitations caused by A and B presented separately.” “We show that the cell significantly violates that rule,” Mel said. The team found that the summation of information within an individual neuron depends on where the inputs occur, relative to each other, on the surface of the cell.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5666 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Men who have difficulty getting an erection could soon use an inhaler to help them have better sex. British scientists are trying to put the active ingredients of an anti-impotence drug into an inhaler. They believe breathing in the drug, rather than swallowing it, will enable men to get an erection more quickly. Wiltshire-based Vectura says its product, which at the moment is called VR004, has proved effective in early clinical trials. The active ingredient in VR004 is apomorphine hydrochloride, which has been available in Europe for the treatment of erectile dysfunction since 2001 as Uprima. The drug works by activating nerve cells in the brain which are linked to sexual response. These dopamine receptors help regulate the nerve signals which allow a man to achieve an erection (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5665 - Posted: 06.16.2004

As the U.S. anti-doping agency continues to call Olympic athletes into question regarding use of steroids, this ScienCentral News video reports that scientists are raising concerns about what they call the future of performance enhancement—genetic doping. Wrestler Kerry McCoy had a lot to be proud of even before winning a spot on the U.S. Olympic team that will compete in Athens this August: a silver medal in the 2003 world championships; winner of two NCAA wrestling championships at Penn State University; and a fifth place finish in the 2000 Olympic games in Sydney. McCoy says he earned his accolades with hard work in the gym, and the mounting charges against athletes accused of using performance-enhancing drugs are disappointing. "You think that once you get in any kind of competitive arena—you know, it's you and another person just trying to see who's the best, because of what time and energy and training you put in," he says. "And if someone wants to take a shortcut by doing something that's not legal or not moral, that's unfortunate. It's a disadvantage to the sport and disadvantage to the athlete, because their experience is really cheapened by not getting the full amount out of themselves." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5664 - Posted: 06.24.2010