By RICHARD C. SALTUS You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards. When those capacities are damaged or underdeveloped, even people with intelligence and talent may flounder. They are often misunderstood as being willfully disorganized or lazy, possessing a bad attitude or, from a parental viewpoint, "doing this on purpose to drive me crazy." More and more, however, neuroscientists are saying such puzzling underachievers may suffer from neurological abnormalities affecting "the brain's C.E.O." This control center, really an array of "executive functions," orchestrates resources like memory, language and attention to achieve a goal, be it a fraction of a second or five years from now.

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 4163 - Posted: 08.26.2003

Researchers know that certain kinds of experiences, such as those involved in learning, can physically change brain structure and affect behavior. Now, new research in rats shows that exposure to stimulant drugs such as amphetamine or cocaine can impair the ability of specific brain cells to change as a consequence of experience. “The ability of experiences to alter brain structure is thought to be one of the primary mechanisms by which the past can influence behavior and cognition,” says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. “However, when these alterations in brain structure are produced by drugs of abuse, they may lead to the development of compulsive patterns of drug-seeking behaviors that are the hallmark of addiction.” NIDA-funded researchers Dr. Bryan Kolb and colleagues at the University of Lethbridge in Canada and Dr. Terry Robinson and colleagues at the University of Michigan conducted this study, which will be published during the week of August 25th on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Web site.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4162 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bethesda, MD – Could your child be preordained to be an overweight couch potato? New Zealand physiologists are proposing that the well-known association between obesity, metabolic syndrome, sedentary behavior, and overeating might have a common biological cause. Obesity is an increasingly prevalent, costly, and important health problem worldwide. In Western societies such as the United States, the incidence of obesity is approximately 32 percent of the adult population, and the prevalence in children has risen by approximately 40 percent in the last 16 years. It is also rising rapidly in developing countries such as India and China as Western diets and lifestyle are adopted. Although the causes of obesity are multifactorial, these recent increases have been too sudden to be explained by genetic factors. Population studies conducted in the last decade suggest that environmental factors active during embryonic and fetal development are of substantial consequence for the risk of developing metabolic and cardiovascular disorders in adulthood. The biological basis underlying this concept of "fetal programming" remains speculative but may involve permanent alterations in gene expression that may in turn modify tissue differentiation and hormonal and metabolic regulation.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An elephant never forgets—or does it? Scientists have long believed that animals do not have so-called episodic memory—the kind that allows humans to remember past events. But recent experiments with scrub jays, chimpanzees, and gorillas have led to rethinking of the nature of memory in animals. Animal memory researchers first face the challenge of communicating between species. "You can't exactly ask the animals where they were, and what they were doing, when Bambi's mother was shot," says Nicola Clayton, a professor of comparative cognition at University of Cambridge in England and a leading researcher in the field of animal memory. Over the past six years Clayton has devised a series of ingenious experiments that seem to show that scrub jays can recall past events and use the information to plan for the future. © 2003 National Geographic Society.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 4160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Although most people take it for granted, learning how to see is a very difficult task. An intriguing case study published in the September issue of Nature Neuroscience describes a man's recovery from 40 years of blindness and should help scientists better understand how the human visual system functions. Ione Fine of the University of California at San Diego and her colleagues followed Michael May, a 43-year-old man who had been blind since the age of three and a half, as he recovered from experimental stem-cell surgery. The procedure restored sight to his right eye in March of 2000. Ever since, he has been struggling to adapt to a viewable world, a common problem for people who have regained their sense of vision after years of blindness. May finds it particularly difficult to interpret faces and facial expressions--during testing, he could only correctly identify a face as male or female 70 percent of the time, and expressions as happy, neutral or sad 61 percent of the time. In addition, seeing only the face of his own wife is still not enough for him to identify her, and he relies on clues such as hair length or gait to help him recognize people. © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4159 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ERICA GOODE Three drugs commonly prescribed for schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses increased patients' risk of developing diabetes when compared with older antipsychotic medications, researchers said yesterday, presenting the results from a long-awaited study of patients treated at veterans hospitals and clinics across the country. The drugs — Zyprexa, made by Eli Lilly, Risperdal, made by Jannsen Pharmaceutica, and Seroquel, made by AstraZeneca — were associated with higher rates of diabetes than older generation drugs for schizophrenia like Haldol, the study found. But the increased risk was statistically significant only for Zyprexa and Risperdal, the researchers said, possibly because of the smaller number of subjects who took Seroquel. Younger patients, under age 54, who took Zyprexa or Risperdal showed the highest risk of developing diabetes, the study, led by Francesca Cunningham of the Department of Veterans Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 4158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study completed at the University of California, San Diego describes the effects of long-term blindness on the human visual system. "The Effects of Long-Term Deprivation on Visual Perception and Visual Cortex," will appear in the Aug. 25 online issue of Nature Neuroscience and in the September printed edition of the journal. The collaborative study was led by Ione Fine and Donald MacLeod in the UCSD Psychology Department, and combined psychophysical and neuroimaging techniques to measure the effects of long-term blindness on the visual cortex of the brain. Other researchers involved in the study include Alex Wade, Alyssa Brewer and Brian Wandell, Stanford University and Geoffrey Boynton, Salk Institute. The two-year study focused on the experiences of Michael May, who, after having been completely blind since the age of 3 1/2, successfully underwent an experimental limbal stem cell transplant in his right eye at the age of 43 . After regaining his sight in March of 2000, May, like many others who have regained their sight after decades of blindness, could see the world, but could not interpret what he was seeing. Two years after surgery, he still lives in a world of abstract shapes and colors instead of the environment of recognizable objects with three-dimensional shapes that normally sighted people take for granted.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 4157 - Posted: 08.25.2003

Scientists believe they may have found out why we all smell and taste things very differently. Our ability to smell and taste is regulated by around 1,000 genes, over half of which are totally inactive. However, a study by researchers in Israel has identified at least 50 of these genes, which are switched on in some people and not in others. They believe this may explain why some of us adore some smells and tastes while others abhor them. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute say their study shows that nearly every human being displays a different pattern of active and inactive odour-detecting receptors. These receptors determine how our brain reads flavours in food as well as smells. (C) BBC

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 4156 - Posted: 08.24.2003

Bat specimens dating back more than 50 years may help scientists understand high rates of a killer disease on a Pacific island. Guam is known for incredibly high rates of a degenerative disease which has some of the hallmarks of motor neuron, Parkinson's and dementia, but cannot be firmly identified as any of them. Among the Chamorro people on the island, rates of the mysterious condition run at between 50 and 100 times the "normal" rate of motor neuron disease found in other communities. Many theories have been put forward as to the cause of the disease, but the mystery has yet to be solved. In recent years, some researchers have suggested that islanders habit of catching and eating a type of bat called a flying fox may be to blame. It is suggested that the flying foxes feed on seed containing a chemical highly toxic to human brain cells. (C) BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 4155 - Posted: 08.24.2003

By SELENA ROBERTS IT'S the end of training camp, and the breathing is easy for the N.F.L. All is swell, because their plus-sized lugs were misted, spritzed and watered until their rhino hides beaded up in the blazing sun. All is fine, because there were only a few dizzy spells and not one belly flop amongst them. In fact, the league's ever-expanding linemen left camp hydrated and happy this past week, buoyed by the self-esteem any 335-pound guy would have when his Hungry-Man lifestyle is appreciated with a hefty contract in a society that pays supermodels to purge their carbs. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4154 - Posted: 08.24.2003

By NICHOLAS WADE The most improbable item in science fiction movies is not the hardware — the faster-than-light travel, the tractor beams, the levitation — but the people. Strangely, they always look and behave just like us. Yet the one safe prediction about the far future is that humans will be a lot further along in their evolution. Last week population geneticists, rummaging in DNA's ever-fascinating attic, set dates on two important changes in the human form. Dr. Alan R. Rogers of the University of Utah figured out that the ancestral human population had acquired black skin, as a protection against the sun, at least 1.2 million years ago, and therefore that it must have shed its fur some time before this date. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4153 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scans of the brain cells of rats are helping scientists to understand what happens in the mind as the body gets older. The study backs up theories which suggest that physical changes in the brain mean that an old brain finds it harder to "learn new tricks" than a younger one. The findings could eventually contribute to treatments for disease - and help patients whose brains are failing to develop in the normal way. The scientists, from three universities in the US, were trying to look at how the brain formed connections between different cells. It is thought that making these connections are key to the way that the brain develops and "learns". The connections are not fixed - the brain has the ability to rearrange them, although the factors that control how and when it does this are still poorly understood. What the US scientists found was that, in one brain area at least, as the brain of the rat aged, it seemed to lose the ability to carry out these changes quite so often, and many of the junctions of the cells become more rigidly fixed. (C) BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 4152 - Posted: 08.23.2003

St. Paul, MN – Excessive gambling could be an unfortunate yet rare side effect in Parkinson’s patients who take certain dopamine agonists, according to a study in the August 12 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers at Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix, Ariz., examined the data of 1,884 Parkinson’s patients who were seen during a one-year period. Nine patients – seven men and two women – were identified with pathological gambling. “The risk of gambling problems in a Parkinson’s patient is very small,” said study author Mark Stacy, MD, who is now the medical director of the Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Center at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C. “However, it may be appropriate for doctors to inform patients of this potential risk, particularly in their patients taking relatively high dosages of a dopamine agonist, and with a documented history of depression or anxiety disorder.”

Keyword: Parkinsons; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 4151 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Gene therapy has been heralded as a way to not only treat genetic diseases, but to cure them as well. But it has had some major safety setbacks in recent years. In 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene therapy trial for an inherited liver disease called ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency. And last year in France, two children who received gene therapy to treat the immune deficiency known as X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency syndrome (XSCID), or "bubble boy disease," developed leukemia. In both cases, experts blamed the tragic side effects on the viruses used by gene therapists as so-called "vectors" to carry the corrective genes into patients' body cells. "The vector is the vehicle for carrying the gene into the appropriate tissues in the body," explains Mark Kay, professor of pediatrics and genetics at Stanford University. "Viruses…normally carry their own genetic information into cells of the body. That's the process of how viruses make you sick. But what we as genetic therapists do is basically use the vehicle of the virus to carry therapeutic genetic information into cells rather than the viral genetic information." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 4150 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alcoholism researchers have been looking long and hard for genes associated with the disease, and so far they've had little to show for it. But they can toast a new study of America's prime breeding grounds for alcoholism--college campuses. It indicates that youthful binge drinkers are significantly more likely than moderate drinkers to have a particular version of a gene involved in transmission of serotonin, a key brain chemical. The gene in question comes in two versions, or alleles: long and short. People inherit one copy from each parent. Previous research found that people with two short alleles are more prone to anxiety and are more susceptible to depression triggered by adverse experiences (Science, 18 July, p. 291). Now it appears they're also more likely to get drunk. The researchers, from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), took DNA samples from and gave questionnaires to 204 Caucasian college students, asking them how often they drink, how much they drink, and whether they drink to get drunk. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 4149 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The Guardian The phrase "boys will be boys" is often used by parents as a throwaway comment to excuse rough-and-tumble games. Delve deeper and you might question why a girl barely out of nappies can't help but rifle through your make-up bag and why your small son insists on brandishing plastic swords and toy guns around the house. But at what stage in childhood does our gender identity become fixed - and what if there is a mismatch with the biological sex we are given? The fact is that most people conform to the body they are born with, but for a small minority of children, this acceptance can be a daily battle. Gender identity disorder (GID) is when the biological sex of a person does not match their gender identity, but those with GID often describe it as "feeling trapped inside the body of the wrong sex". According to science, our biological sex is determined by our chromosomes and hormones, but accepting the gender we are given is not always so simple. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 4148 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Power has been restored to the entire Northeast, and for many, the biggest blackout in North American history was a stressful ordeal. However, as this ScienCentral News video reports, stress in the short-term could actually be good for us. Whether coping with the blackout of 2003, or watching the stock market rise and fall, we’ve all felt stressed at some point in our lives. Normally, we think stress is bad for us. But some neuroscientists say that in small doses it can actually be good for us. "I think of 'stress' as a word that we give to a challenge of any kind, like getting out of bed in the morning and doing almost anything that we have to do in our daily lives," says Bruce McEwen, professor and head the neuroendocrinology lab at Rockefeller University. "And when we are challenged, our body system produces mediators, hormones like cortisol and adrenaline , which help to get us going and actually do all sorts of good things that keep us alive. They improve our memory, they enhance our immune system, they get our heart rate going and get our energy mobilized. And these are the chemicals in our body that actually help us to cope with things that happen to us everyday." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 4147 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Why do African-American women have a higher risk of obesity, while European-American women have a higher risk of osteoporosis? As this ScienCentral News video reports, genetics researchers are attacking these questions through the touchy topic of race. All human populations are so closely related that there are very few genes that are different between one human and another. However, statistics seem to show that certain races have higher rates of certain diseases. "Black women are more prone to obesity," says Mark Shriver, assistant professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State University. "There's a higher risk, about twofold, than white women. Also, white women are more prone to osteoporosis than black women." © ScienCentral, 2000-2003.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 4146 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service Humans can be trained to crave food in response to abstract prompts just like Pavlov's dogs, reveals new research. But whereas Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues at University College London, UK, trained humans to yearn for vanilla ice cream and peanut butter at the sight of fractal-based computer images. Importantly, the team also showed that the human brain can put a "brake" on the powerful desire for certain foods once the appetite has been sated. This system to turn the "delectable into the distasteful" may be crucial in regulating behaviour, they say. Detecting faults in this system might in future help shed light on compulsive eating disorders and substance addictions, speculates Gottfried, a neurologist. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Obesity
Link ID: 4145 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How your brain weighs the odds of disaster By Eric Haseltine Our prehistoric ancestors faced many lethal hazards. Sanitary conditions in the wild weren't great, so people were in constant danger of becoming ill from tainted foods. Worse, while foraging for snacks, they could easily become something else's dinner. On balance, however, our forebears must have evolved good ways of assessing risk, or I wouldn't be writing this—and you wouldn't be reading it. Recent neurological research suggests that we are innately wired to avoid dangers by calculating odds based on factors that you'd expect as well as others that may surprise you. Let's see how accurate your brain is at calculating risk and what factors it considers in making these assessments. © Copyright 2003 The Walt Disney Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 4144 - Posted: 06.24.2010