By COLIN McGINN Once scientists returned, at last, to the study of consciousness it was only a matter of time before emotions engaged their attention, not just emotional behavior, but the inner conscious feelings that accompany it: experiences of fear, anger, sadness, joy and more. These, after all, are mainly what constitute human well-being, so it would be nice to understand them, particularly as they relate to the brain, where the mechanics lie. Antonio Damasio, chief neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center, is a leader in this developing field, having written two well-regarded books on emotions and the brain: ''Descartes' Error'' and ''The Feeling of What Happens.'' Now, in ''Looking for Spinoza,'' he sets out to explain what precisely an emotion is, and what parts of the brain give rise to emotions of different kinds. Spinoza, the enigmatic 17th-century philosopher, enters the story because of his interest in emotion and will, and his foreshadowing of the theory Damasio favors. Damasio advances three central claims. The first is that emotions do not cause their bodily symptoms but are caused by the symptoms: we do not cry because we are sad; we are sad because we cry. The emotional behavior comes first, causally and in evolution, with the conscious feelings a later byproduct: ''feelings . . . are mostly shadows of the external manner of emotions,'' he writes. The second claim is that an emotional feeling is identical to the bodily sensations that manifest it: ''A feeling in essence is an idea -- an idea of the body and, even more particularly, an idea of a certain aspect of the body, its interior, in certain circumstances. A feeling of emotion is an idea of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process.'' The thought here is that an emotion, say fear of being attacked by a bear, consists simply of the awareness one has of the bodily symptoms of the emotion -- the racing heart, the adrenaline release, the sweaty palms, the tensed muscles. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 3466 - Posted: 02.23.2003

By LIESL SCHILLINGER In the movie ''Harold and Maude,'' an 80-year old woman coaxes a young man into trying out a rickety machine that plays fragrances the way a Victrola plays tunes. The scents she has hoarded are not Joy or Chanel No. 5, they are everyday smells from a long, fully enjoyed life -- roast beef, old books, mown grass. ''Odorifics,'' Maude calls them. ''Here's one you'll like,'' she exclaims, plunging a canister into the contraption: ''Snowfall on 42nd Street!'' Harold inhales. ''What do you smell?'' she demands. ''Subway?'' he asks. She nods. ''Perfume. Cigarettes.'' He coughs . . . then there's a pause. With quiet wonder, he says, ''Snow.'' When the movie came out in 1971, Maude's odorifics seemed like a pipe dream, because, of course, you can't capture the scent of a subway in a canister. Only it turns out you can. If you drop by the Demeter Fragrance Library in Manhattan's East Village, you can buy cologne in the scents of Pruning Shears, Laundromat or, indeed, Snow. The difference between fantasy and reality turns out to be just a matter of time. But why do these things have a recognizable smell that all of us can agree on? The answer to this question has been debated since classical times, when Parmenides, Democritus, Xenophanes and later Lucretius tried to hash these things out. The debate raged on into the 20th century as scientists like John Amoore, Malcolm Dyson and R. H. Wright tried to establish solid olfactory rules with the aid of technological gadgetry far beyond the grasp of the Greeks and Romans. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3465 - Posted: 02.23.2003

BY TRACY WHEELER Knight Ridder Newspapers AKRON, Ohio - KRT NEWSFEATURES (KRT) - His friends abandoned him. His parents fired him for his own safety. Dating? Not a chance. Epilepsy - and the frequent seizures that came with it - was stealing Mike Tribout's life. ``I didn't want to accept that I had epilepsy,'' the 32-year-old Canton resident says. ``It took me a long time to accept it. Friends who I thought were my friends didn't want anything to do with me. ... I was getting pretty depressed about it. © 2003, Akron Beacon Journal

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 3464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NewScientist.com news service When it comes to pain, a tiny variation in a single gene divides the men from the boys, reveals a new study. US researchers have pinpointed differences in the way people withstand pain - both physical and emotional stress - to a gene which makes a protein important for brain chemistry. The gene makes catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT), an enzyme vital for mopping up the dopamine brain chemical linked with sensing pain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kendall Morgan A single 2-hour exposure to the microwaves emitted by some cell phones kills brain cells in rats, a group of Swedish researchers claims. If confirmed, the results would be the first to directly link cell-phone radiation to brain damage in any animal. No such evidence exists for people. But with cell-phone use skyrocketing, some scientists recommend precautionary measures—for example, avoiding excessive gabbing on the phones. Digital cell phones send out compressed information through microwave pulses of electromagnetic radiation. In the United States, standard phones emit 50 such pulses per second, while so-called GSM phones—which operate under the international standard called Global System for Mobile Communications—emit 217. Those pulses scatter low-level microwave radiation across the brain. To date, convincing evidence linking the phones to serious health problems, such as cancer, is lacking, says Leif G. Salford of Lund University Hospital in Sweden. From Science News, Vol. 163, No. 8, Feb. 22, 2003, p. 115. Copyright ©2003 Science Service. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3462 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A longstanding debate among scholars of human evolution centers on the number of hominid species that existed in the past. Whereas some paleoanthropologists favor a sleek family tree, others view the known fossil record of humans as indicative of a tangled bush. The latter view has gained popularity in recent years, but a new fossil from Tanzania suggests that a bit of pruning might be in order. Researchers writing today in the journal Science report that a specimen unearthed from Olduvai Gorge--a site made famous several decades ago by Louis and Mary Leakey--bridges two previously established species, indicating that they are instead one and the same. © 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 3461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By REUTERS ATLANTA, (Reuters) — Blacks in the United States are more likely to die from a stroke and at a much younger age than whites, Hispanics and people of other races, a new federal report says. The findings, reported today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its first Atlas of Stroke Mortality, confirmed a pattern long noted by public health officials, who have been warning that racial disparities in diet, smoking and access to health care were leading to wide differences in the rates of heart disease, stroke and cancer. Strokes kill about 165,000 Americans every year, the third-highest toll after heart disease and cancer. (About 700,000 Americans have strokes each year.) The major risk factors are high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and smoking. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 3460 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DENVER-- The going theory that males couldn't care less with whom they mate may need an overhaul. New research suggests that males--or at least, male fruit flies--are much more selective about their females than standard evolutionary theory predicts. It's not clear what males are looking for in females, especially because they tend to lack flashy traits such as a colorful tail. Since the late 1960s, scientists have theorized that the parent who invests more heavily in reproduction will be more selective when choosing a mate. Females do tend to be finicky, apparently because they often have large, energy-intensive eggs, and devote lots of time to caring for their offspring. But few studies have tested whether the opposite holds true for males--whether they're naturally promiscuous when sperm are plentiful and parental investment low. Copyright © 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 3459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

IOWA CITY, Iowa,(AScribe Newswire) -- A study led by a University of Iowa professor offers surprising new information about how sound is processed in the brain. The results of research led by Amy Poremba, an assistant professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, define precisely which areas of the cortex in a primate brain are associated with hearing. The study also identifies similarities between the auditory processing system and the better-studied visual system including maps that show which areas of the brain process both auditory and visual information. The results were published in the Jan. 24 issue of the journal Science. Poremba and her team are the first to use many different complex sounds during whole brain mapping to test which parts of the brain are used to process sound. They monitored the brain activity of monkeys hearing a wide variety of sounds including male and female human voices, music, and primate vocalizations.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 3458 - Posted: 02.21.2003

Washington,(ANI): Greater insight into human brain disease may emerge from studies of a new genetic mutation that causes adult fruit flies to develop symptoms akin to Alzheimer's disease. According to a report in the Brown University News Service, the finding of a new genetic mutation that prompts adult fruit flies to develop symptoms similar to Alzheimer's disease may have human implications as Humans have the same gene, say scientists at Brown University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. "This is the first fruit fly mutant to show some of the outward, physical manifestations common to certain major human neurodegenerative diseases," said principal investigator Michael McKeown, a biology professor at Brown University. Copyright © 2001 ANI-Asian News International.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3457 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A common genetic variant influences individual responses and adaptation to pain and other stressful stimuli and may underlie vulnerability to many psychiatric and other complex diseases, reports David Goldman, M.D., Chief, Laboratory of Neurogenetics, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and colleagues at NIAAA and the University of Michigan. COMT val158met Genotype Affects m-Opioid Neurotransmitter Responses to a Pain Stressor appears in the February 21 issue of Science (299:1240, 2003). "Emotional response to stress contributes in many drinkers to the development of alcoholism," said George Kunos, M.D., Ph.D., Scientific Director, Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research, NIAAA. "Dr. Goldman and his colleagues have uncovered a genetic explanation for why some individuals and groups may be especially susceptible to consuming alcohol and to increasing their consumption in response to stress." Earlier reports by first author Jon-Kar Zubieta, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health Research Institute and Department of Radiology, University of Michigan (Science 293:311, 2001) and others showed that responses to pain vary considerably from one person to another, with some of the difference in sensitivity attributable to genetic factors. Subsequent work showed that some of these effects were due to gender-related factors (Journal of Neuroscience 22:5100, 2002). For the current study, Drs. Goldman, Zubieta, and their colleagues used positron emission tomography (PET) targeting the endogenous opioid system to examine the effects of a specific genetic variant on neurochemical brain responses to sustained pain. The researchers also used questionnaires that measure pain-related sensory and affective qualities and internal emotional state to link the neurochemical responses to participants’ psychological and physical experience of the pain challenge.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 3456 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bethesda, Maryland — For the first time, in a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health, the University of Utah and Stanford University, scientists have identified the gene that determines the ability to distinguish a wide class of bitter tastes according to research published in Science , February 21, 2003. How individuals are genetically predisposed to respond or not respond to the bitter taste of substances like nicotine and certain foods may have broad implications for nutritional status and tobacco use. By estimates, more than 10 million American students have been offered “taste” testing to identify their ability to recognize or discriminate bitter taste and to introduce them to inherited traits. In more formal research, anthropologists have tested people around the world, over decades, for this same ability or inability to experience bitter taste. Why are some people “tasters” and others “non-tasters” and why is it important? The ability to taste,tested using a compound phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), is one of the best studied inherited traits in humans. Studies over the past 70 years, have demonstrated that taste variation is common in the U.S. population: about 30% of the population are PTC (a prototype of a class of bitter substances) non-tasters, while 70% are tasters of PTC, experiencing it as intensely bitter. The ability to taste PTC has been known to be dominantly inherited.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 3455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Misshapen 'mad cow' proteins, or prions, found in nasal passages Ulysses Torassa, Chronicle Health Writer People with the human form of "mad cow" disease apparently harbor the infectious protein in their noses, scientists are reporting, raising questions about transmission of the disease and opening a possible avenue for detecting it. Researchers in Italy were able to find evidence of prions -- misshapen disease-causing proteins -- in the nasal passages of all nine people they examined who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. Test results were negative in the case of 11 other people who died from other diseases. The findings appear in today's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. "Our findings call attention to the possibility that endoscopic and surgical procedures involving the upper vault of the nasal cavity represent a risk factor for prion spreading," wrote the researchers at the University of Verona, adding, "We know of no cases of disease transmission by this route." ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Prions; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 3454 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent, in Denver The promiscuous sex life of lesbian Japanese monkeys is challenging one of the central tenets of Charles Darwin. He argued that females are coy, mate rarely and choose mates to ensure the best genetic inheritance for their offspring, while males are promiscuous and fight among themselves for female partners. But after studying Japanese macaques in the wild, Dr Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, begs to differ. He found that bisexuality is common in females and that they often compete with males for sexual partners. "In some populations, female Japanese macaques sometimes prefer same-sex partners," he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver. "That occurs even when they are presented with sexually motivated, opposite-sex alternatives." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 3453 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mystery crustacean could pose risk to European cousins. TOM CLARKE A mysterious species of crayfish discovered in German aquaria can reproduce without mating1. It could pose a serious threat to their European freshwater cousins, new research shows. It's too late to ban the creatures, experts think. But efforts should be made to prevent their accidental release. "The public should be alerted," urges crayfish researcher Gerhard Scholtz of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Scores of the 8-centimetre-long female crayfish, distinguished by their marble-patterned shells, appeared in the German aquarium trade in the 1990s. Rumours of virgin births soon began to circulate among amateur aquarists. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 3452 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Montreal, Montreal Neurological Institute researcher Dr. Wayne Sossin has discovered that nerve cells can bypass the cell’s normal protein-making machinery in the same way that viruses do when they infect a cell. In a study published on-line today in Nature Neuroscience, Dr. Sossin and colleagues describe the first example of regulated IRES (internal ribosome entry site) usage after a physiological stimulus in neurons. When a virus infects a cell, its goal is to make more virus particles. To do this, a virus takes over the cell’s protein making machinery (the ribosome), so that the cell essentially becomes a viral protein factory. It does this by using an internal ribosome entry site (IRES); which shuts down and bypasses the normal mechanisms that regulate binding of messenger RNAs to ribosomes. While many viral messenger RNAs are known to possess an IRES, few normal cellular RNAs do. Abnormal IRES regulation has been correlated with two human diseases- multiple myeloma and Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. This is the first time that scientists have demonstrated that normal nerve cells can use an IRES to produce large quantities of protein under physiological conditions.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 3451 - Posted: 06.24.2010

STANFORD, Calif. - Drug addicts may prefer some drugs over others, but their brains all have something in common. Whether it's uppers or downers, addictive drugs tweak the same addiction-related neurons, causing them to become more sensitive, say researchers at Stanford University Medical Center. "What we have identified is a single change caused by drugs of abuse with different molecular mechanisms," said Robert Malenka, MD, PhD, the Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine. Malenka is the senior author of a paper in the Feb. 20 issue of the journal Neuron which describes the molecular changes that occur as a result of taking addictive drugs. When people take addictive drugs, neurons in a region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) transiently ramp up production of dopamine, a chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter. The new research shows that the drugs also increase the sensitivity of neurons in the VTA. Researchers suspect it's the release of dopamine in addition to this enhanced sensitivity that leads to addiction.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 3450 - Posted: 02.20.2003

The differential diagnosis of idiopathic Parkinson's disease and atypical parkinsonian syndromes may get help from transcranial ultrasound, according to German researchers. Investigators included in their prospective study 25 patients with atypical parkinsonian syndromes -- nine with progressive supranuclear palsy and 16 with mutiple-system atrophy -- and 25 age-matched patients with Parkinson's disease. They found that the substantia nigra in the Parkinson's patients was more likely to be hyperechoic. Specificity and sensitivity for detection of substantia nigra hyperechogenicity was 96% and 91%, respectively. The researchers also found that the positive predictive value for Parkinson's was 100% when the substantia nigra was markedly hyperechoic. They published their findings in the Jan. 14 issue of Neurology. © 2002 CMP Media LLC,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Parkinsons
Link ID: 3449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Recent research challenges notion of female monogamy Carol Cruzan Morton, Special to The Chronicle Bar the doors and break out the chastity belts, boys, because girls of most species sleep around, and it's for their own good, if not yours. For generations, biologists had assumed females to be naturally chaste, while males were renowned for their promiscuity. Even Charles Darwin, who invented the idea of sexual selection, didn't dare challenge the Victorian morals of his day. Man evolved from ape, fine. But an immodest and lustful Mother Nature? Heaven forbid! Now, hundreds of studies and a spate of books are challenging that conventional wisdom. Females of many species, it turns out, have evolved strategies for passing on their genes that involve copulating with multiple males -- and recognition of that fact is literally changing our view of the birds and the bees. ©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 3448 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LINDA CARROLL For years, doctors have reassured epilepsy patients that seizures are relatively benign. While a fall during a seizure may cause injury, the surge of electricity in the brain does no actual damage, patients were told. But mounting evidence now suggests that repeated seizures can indeed harm the brain — or, in rare cases, even lead to death. In the past decade, research in epilepsy has exploded. In part, the boom has been driven by advances in biology and technology, like the mapping of the genome and the continuing miniaturization of electronics. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 3447 - Posted: 06.24.2010