By MILT FREUDENHEIM A few months ago, George Miller, 55, a computer sales manager in Lexington, S.C., had reading glasses scattered all over the house. Worse, he found it was impossible to read a menu at night in a dimly lighted restaurant or the many car magazines that came to his house. "It really bothered me a lot because I love to read," Mr. Miller said. So, when he heard about a new experimental eye surgery on the local television news, he researched it on the Internet and called his ophthalmologist. "I'm a little vain," Mr. Miller conceded. Though the new procedure, which uses radio waves to correct near-vision problems, had not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for his problem, he had it done last winter. "It was a no-brainer," said Mr. Miller, who no longer needs reading glasses. "I can't imagine why anyone who could afford it would not do it." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5258 - Posted: 04.11.2004

John Pickrell in England for National Geographic News New genetic findings reveal that ruling dynasties may monopolize leadership of many neighboring communities of Africa's western gorillas—like a primate version of the Mafia. Paternity tests reveal that leaders of adjacent western lowland gorilla territories in Africa are closely related as fathers, sons, and brothers. The results, detailed in the current issue of the science journal Current Biology, may help to explain curiously peaceful interactions among neighboring social groups. The groups were observed in new behavioral studies of the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). The study could also provide clues about the role and development of kinship in early human society, say researchers behind the work. Despite being the most numerous kind of gorilla, the western lowland gorilla species is the shyest and least understood. Up to a hundred thousand western lowland gorillas are thought to inhabit the forests of central Africa. © 2004 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5257 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Contestants on NBC's "The Apprentice" hate the idea of Donald Trump jabbing his hand at them and saying, "You're fired." But they love the idea of getting a job with the billionaire. Two different emotions, but each has the same effect ---- motivating contestants to work hard and/or ingratiate themselves with The Donald. Carl Olson doesn't have a television, so he hasn't seen the reality series. But the Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist can tell you what is going on in the heads of those contestants ---- or at least where it is going on. As he and University of Pittsburgh graduate student Matthew Roesch reported in yesterday's issue of the journal Science, the process of evaluating a reward and the process of determining how hard to work to obtain a reward or avoid a penalty take place in separate parts of the brain's frontal cortex. Copyright ©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Vision
Link ID: 5256 - Posted: 06.24.2010

'WE CAN BUILD BETTER BRAINS' By ANNE McILROY, From Saturday's Globe and Mail Monday is Brain Imaging Day at this exclusive Vancouver private school. The kindergarten class troops down to the assessment room, where one by one the boys and girls slip behind the curtain for a quick session in the magnetic resonance imaging machine. The MRI technician can quickly tell which regions of their brains are the most primed to learn that day. The results determine what each student will focus on that week — improving their memories or spatial skills, or learning music, math or problem solving. It might be a good week for working on understanding facial expressions, or on a second or even third language. Does this sound improbable? It's the future as imagined by Max Cynader, director of the Brain Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. "Forty or 50 years from now, a student will stick her head in a scanner and see what she could best learn that day," he says. "That's a dream. We aren't there, but we can see how to get to there from here." © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5255 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. In her most recent book, "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century," Lauren Slater reports interviews with several famous psychologists and psychiatrists. Unfortunately, many, if not all, of those interviewees deny having said some of the things attributed to them by Slater. Letters from some of the interviewees are available from links at the bottom of this web page. Two of Slater's books, "Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir" and "Spasm - A Memoir with Lies," seem to imply that she has difficulty with the truth. From the Amazon.com synopsis of "Spasm": Between the ages of 13 and 17, Lauren Slater was epileptic. Surgery stopped her seizures; but by then the psychological reflex was ingrained - the habit of invention to fill the gaps in her memory and experience. She'd learned to lie. She may even have lied about her epilepsy. She may never have had it at all. Her memoir is a work of non-fiction that uses the freedoms of fiction to shape the story of its author's life. Slater characterizes her approach to writing as "creative nonfiction." According to one web site, "She teaches creative nonfiction writing for Goucher College's M.F.A. program." How creative may one be while still considering one's work to be nonfiction? Slater seems to feel that artistic license allows for any sort of fabrication.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5254 - Posted: 04.11.2004

By DENISE GRADY The drugs now available to treat the memory and thinking problems of Alzheimer's disease have not lived up to the public's high expectations for them and offer such modest benefits on average that many doctors are unsure about whether to prescribe them. Although the drugs have their advocates, grateful for any sign of improvement, others express disappointment in light of earlier hopes that the drugs approved in the last decade would stop the disease or markedly slow it. At a meeting in late March at Johns Hopkins University, doctors and other health professionals heard Alzheimer's researchers debate the usefulness of the drugs and the prospects of better treatments becoming available any time soon. Some researchers say it may be decades before real progress is made in reducing the toll of the disease. When a frustrated doctor in the audience accused a panel of experts of evading the question of whether the drugs should be prescribed, the auditorium burst into applause. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5253 - Posted: 04.10.2004

By GARDINER HARRIS Pediatricians and family physicians should not prescribe antidepressants for depressed children and adolescents because the drugs barely work and their side effects are often significant, Australian researchers have concluded. The researchers analyzed data from five published trials of three antidepressants, Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, in depressed patients under age 18. They found that the drugs offered only a "very modest" benefit over placebos. At the same time, the drugs carry significant risks, the researchers said in their report, published in today's issue of the British medical journal BMJ. "If the drugs were highly advantageous over placebo, then you'd live with the risks," Jon Jureidini, a child psychiatrist in Adelaide and the study's lead author, said in an interview. "If the drugs were completely safe, then you might argue that there's nothing wrong with giving something that's only slightly better than a placebo." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5252 - Posted: 04.10.2004

By Philip E. Ross Would a rose by any other name really smell as sweet? Do our words shape our thoughts, so that "we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages," as the linguist Benjamin L. Whorf asserted half a century ago? Is language a straitjacket? Perhaps to some extent, allows Paul Kay, 69, emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Those are hardly fighting words, and Kay, dressed in fuzzy shoes and a fuzzy sweater, his feet up on his desk, doesn't seem a pugnacious fellow. Yet he and his former colleague, Brent Berlin (now at the University of Georgia), have been at the center of a 35-year running debate concerning Whorf's hypothesis, called linguistic relativity. "Our work has been interpreted by some people as undermining linguistic relativity, but it applies only to a very restricted domain: color," Kay remarks. Relativity can be demonstrated, somewhat trivially, to any landlubber who sees a mere boat when his mariner friend cannot help seeing a ship, skiff or scow. The stakes are raised considerably, however, when one extends the argument from man-made concepts to natural phenomena, as Whorf did in an essay, published posthumously in 1956. He argued that "we cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way, an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language." © 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Language; Vision
Link ID: 5251 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The very first things we eat may shape our lifelong flavor preferences, new research suggests. A report published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics indicates that feeding experiences during an infant’s first seven months shape receptivity to certain foods later in life. "This research may help us to understand early factors involved in human food preference and diet choice, an area with many important health implications," says lead author Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "We can explore these early influences systematically by studying infants who are breastfeeding, as well as babies whose parents have decided to formula-feed." In the latest study, the researchers used two types of infant formulas: a standard milk-based formula and a second so-called protein hydrolysate formula, in which the proteins are broken down to aid in digestion. The former is quite bland whereas the latter is bitter and sour and quite disagreeable to most adults. © 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Development of the Brain
Link ID: 5250 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Behind well-manicured suburban lawns, Susan Cheever learned to become an alcoholic. At six, she could mix a martini. Later, she could name the drinks dominating cocktail hour, sipping from adult glasses to feed a palate already growling for alcohol. With dependence on drink firmly anchored, Cheever grew to adulthood, slipping behind steering wheels with beer in hand, spinning in and out of marriages and penning memoirs thick with the haze of drinks past. To curtail the devastating impact of alcohol dependency on people like Cheever, now a sober, successful writer, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) have been studying the effects of alcohol exposure in worms. They've discovered a gene that seems to turn off the master switch that triggers drunkenness, a finding that may lead to a drug that would make alcohol less appealing to alcoholics. "Whether one looks at a fruit fly, a worm, a fish or a mammal, they all become intoxicated at essentially the same dose of alcohol," explains Steven McIntire, lead scientist of a UCSF study that was profiled in the March issue of Discover Magazine. "This has led people in the field to believe that there's likely to be a molecule or set of molecules in the brain that alcohol interacts with to cause intoxication." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5249 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Turning certain neurons on or off in fly brains creates wildly erotic or sexually withdrawn animals, a new study shows. The findings point to new players in a complex circuit activated in the fly brain during courtship. Fruit fly males go to great lengths to cozy up to females, singing and even jumping to attract their lover's attention. Researchers had long known that a handful of sex-specific neurons must be present in male brains for the first steps of this courtship ritual to commence. But it still wasn't clear whether other parts of the central nervous system help regulate the flies' elaborate wooing techniques. With this in mind, Sue Broughton, now at University College London, and her colleagues at New York University and the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, selectively switched neurons on and off in adult male flies. To do this, they used specially bred flies with proteins that could be turned off in groups of nerve cells at high temperature. To see how courting is affected when neurons are hyperactivated, they used flies with a version of a protein that was stuck in an altered state. Then they observed whether the animals could still properly court females. Upping the activity of neurons in one region of the brain, they found, made flies court like crazy, while stifling nerve cell activity in the same brain zone left males disinterested. Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 5248 - Posted: 06.24.2010

— Chimps and humans differ by only a tiny percentage in their genetic make-up, but the reason why they're in trees and we're not lies in who has the most active genes, a leading scientist said Monday. Svante Paabo, who has been helping to decipher the genetic code of chimps, said the key lies in the degree to which genes are used in each species. Human and chimpanzee genomes differ by just 1.2 percent, he told the annual meeting in Berlin of the Human Genome Organization. Yet around 10 percent of the genes are differently active, said Paabo, who studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, eastern Germany. Copyright © 2004 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5247 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service A massive research programme to find out whether BSE is circulating in British sheep has turned up its first suspicious result. But while scientists say the sheep did not have conventional BSE, they cannot rule out the possibility that it could have had a new form of mad cow disease that has adapted to sheep. Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has announced that the Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, England, had found "a type of scrapie not previously seen in the UK". Scrapie is a sheep disease similar to BSE which is not generally thought to harm people. DEFRA said the disease-causing prion detected in the sheep's brain "had some characteristics similar to experimental BSE in sheep", but that on other tests it resembled neither BSE nor "previously recognised types of scrapie". The UK's Food Standards Agency said in a statement: "Uncertainties still remain on this issue. However, based on the best scientific evidence to date, we are not advising against eating lamb and sheep meat." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5246 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects around 1 in every 25 school-aged children, managing this condition is of huge social importance. An article published in BMC Psychiatry this week shows that zinc supplements could increase the effectiveness of stimulants used to treat children with the disease. The effects of ADHD on individual children differ, but symptoms include inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Stimulants are the most common treatment prescribed, but recent findings that vitamin and mineral deficiencies correlate with ADHD suggest that dietary supplements could also play a role in disease management. Researchers from Iran carried out a controlled trial to assess the benefits of prescribing supplementary zinc alongside the more conventional methylphenidate treatment. They found that children taking additional zinc sulphate on a daily basis improved faster than those taking a placebo. "The efficacy of zinc sulphate to increase the rate of improvement in children, seems to support the role of zinc deficiency in the pathogenesis of ADHD," say the authors.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5245 - Posted: 04.10.2004

Finding genes linked to mental illness may yield new drugs. HELEN R. PILCHER A massive project to probe the genetics of depression was launched this week at the Human Genome Meeting in Berlin, Germany. The multinational study aims to aid the development of the novel drugs against the condition. "Antidepressant drugs haven't changed much for the past 30 years," says the project’s leader, Bill Deakin of the University of Manchester, UK. "We have to find new molecules that are involved in depression so that new treatments can be developed." Most drugs for depression boost levels of the brain chemical serotonin, which helps nerve cells to communicate effects mood. But this treatment can take weeks to take effect, and even then works only for around half of patients. The study, called NEWMOOD, should yield new drug targets, aid diagnosis and boost understanding of depression’s causes, perhaps helping the 120 million people worldwide who suffer from the condition. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5244 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Chinese spices drive away hungry voles MARK PEPLOW Farmers could stop prairie voles from eating their crops by spraying extracts from Szechuan pepper around the plants. The hot sauce could deter animals that seem immune to other fiery chemicals, such as the capsaicin in chillies. Chemicals in the peppercorn-like plant sting the rodents' mouths and noses and send them looking for less painful foods, scientists report in the journal Pest Management Science1. "Voles are particularly bad in apple orchards — they attack the roots in winter," says lead researcher Gisela Epple, a sensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The rodents breed quickly and live in dense groups, so they can cause a lot of damage, she says. Some farmers use synthetic repellents, but Epple suspects these may be toxic to the voles. Dousing fields with predator scents scares the rodents off for a while, but they soon get used to the smell. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5243 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mapping mental responses to texture could lead to designer foods. HELEN PEARSON Filling our mouths with fat lights up pleasure centres in the brain, scientists have found, which may help us understand why we cannot get enough of certain foods. Plenty of researchers have studied how tastes and smells trigger different spots in the brain. But few have examined how our brains respond to texture, such as the oiliness of cream, the thickness of gravy or the grittiness of nuts. Ivan de Araujo and Edmund Rolls of the University of Oxford placed 12 hungry people inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and fed them differently textured foods through a tube. They watched subjects' reactions as they consumed slurries of tasteless cellulose mixed to the thickness of water, corn oil or runny syrup, and a mouthful of bland vegetable oil. The thicker solutions triggered a brain area that partly overlaps with one known to be activated by taste, they report in the Journal of Neuroscience1. This suggests that the brain builds a picture of what is in the mouth based on both taste and texture, says Rolls. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Keyword: Obesity; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO -- New research bolsters evidence that stimulants like Ritalin used for attention deficit problems may stunt children's growth, but it does not address whether the effect is permanent. Children who took stimulants during the two-year study grew more than half an inch less and gained more than 8 pounds less than those who were not medicated. The study involved 540 youngsters with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who were ages 7 to 9 at the outset of the study and were randomly assigned to receive common treatments that included medication, behavior management, and a combination of the two. Girls generally reach their final height around age 16 and boys around age 18, so it is too soon to tell if the growth delays continued or were permanent, the researchers said. © 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 5241 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Huntington's disease may be more straightforward to fight than doctors have feared, paradoxically because the genetic brain disorder is more complicated than anyone knew, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Their research in fruit flies shows that nerve cells modify the mutated protein responsible for Huntington's disease, and this basic cell process could in theory be altered with a drug. The researchers believe their finding, published in this week's issue of the journal Science, opens a new approach to treating the fatal and incurable disease. Huntington's disease affects about 30,000 people in the United States. It is a dominant genetic defect, meaning that a child who inherits just one copy of the bad gene from a parent has a 50 percent chance of eventually developing Huntington's. It hits late in life, usually after people have had children. It causes uncontrolled movements, loss of intellectual capacity and severe emotional disturbances before killing the patient. Larry Marsh, a developmental geneticist at the University of California Irvine, has been looking for a way to fight the disease and has been focusing on just what goes wrong inside the cells carrying the mutated gene, called huntingtin, which controls production of a protein also called huntingtin. Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 5240 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A quick read of a person's facial expression reveals key information, such as their emotional state. You can tell, for instance, if someone feels happy, sad, surprised, scared, angry, or disgusted. In turn, these insights influence your behavior and interaction with the individual. A sad face may trigger you to offer comfort. An angry scowl could prompt you to cross the street and avoid contact. Once a mystery, researchers now are uncovering how the brain participates in this process. Some of the findings indicate that a small brain area, the amygdala (uh-mig-dah-la), is one major player. In particular, evidence suggests that it may act as the brain's pessimist, perpetually on the lookout for facial cues that signal danger and helping a person form judgments about whether to trust people. Copyright © 2004 Society for Neuroscience

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 5239 - Posted: 06.24.2010