By David Brooks This has been a golden age for brain research. We now have amazing brain scans that show which networks in the brain ramp up during different activities. But this emphasis on the brain has subtly fed the illusion that thinking happens only from the neck up. It’s fed the illusion that the advanced parts of our thinking are the “rational” parts up top that try to control the more “primitive” parts down below. So it’s interesting how many scientists are now focusing on the thinking that happens not in your brain but in your gut. You have neurons spread through your innards, and there’s increasing attention on the vagus nerve, which emerges from the brain stem and wanders across the heart, lungs, kidney and gut. The vagus nerve is one of the pathways through which the body and brain talk to each other in an unconscious conversation. Much of this conversation is about how we are relating to others. Human thinking is not primarily about individual calculation, but about social engagement and cooperation. One of the leaders in this field is Stephen W. Porges of Indiana University. When you enter a new situation, Porges argues, your body reacts. Your heart rate may go up. Your blood pressure may change. Signals go up to the brain, which records the “autonomic state” you are in. Maybe you walk into a social situation that feels welcoming. Green light. Your brain and body get prepared for a friendly conversation. But maybe the person in front of you feels threatening. Yellow light. You go into fight-or-flight mode. Your body instantly changes. Your ear, for example, adjusts to hear high and low frequencies — a scream or a growl — rather than midrange frequencies, human speech. Or maybe the threat feels like a matter of life and death. Red light. Your brain and body begin to shut down. According to Porges’s “Polyvagal Theory,” the concept of safety is fundamental to our mental state. People who have experienced trauma have bodies that are highly reactive to perceived threat. They don’t like public places with loud noises. They live in fight-or-flight mode, stressed and anxious. Or, if they feel trapped and constrained, they go numb. Their voice and tone go flat. Physical reactions shape our way of seeing and being. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 26869 - Posted: 12.04.2019

Shawna Williams In September of this year, pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai announced that they were halting Phase 3 clinical trials of a drug, elenbecestat, aimed at thwarting amyloid-β buildup in Alzheimer’s disease. Although the drug had seemed so promising that the companies elected to test it in two Phase 3 trials simultaneously, preliminary analyses determined that elenbecestat’s risks outweighed its benefits, and the drug shouldn’t be moved to market. The cancellation “amounts to a further step in the unwinding of Biogen’s expensive, painful, and ultimately fruitless investment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug development,” analyst Geoffrey Porges told Reuters at the time. Biogen’s misfortune is just the latest in a slew of late-stage Alzheimer’s drug failures. Six months earlier, the company had halted another set of parallel Phase 3 trials due to lack of efficacy of a different drug candidate, aducanumab (though after further data analysis, Biogen announced that it will seek approval for aducanumab after all). And between 2013 and 2018, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson all terminated Phase 3 or Phase 2/3 trials due to poor early results. Yet some Alzheimer’s researchers say they think they’ve spotted a silver lining in this cloud of bad news—a hint in the data from these studies about how future work might meet with more success. In some of these trials, Alzheimer’s patients who were at earlier stages of the disease did better than those with more advanced cognitive decline, says Colin Masters, a neuroscientist at Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia who was not involved in the trials. This indicates that the key to finding an effective treatment might be to catch subjects before their condition advances too far, he adds. © 1986–2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26868 - Posted: 12.04.2019

By Claudia Wallis For more than 25 years one idea has dominated scientific thinking about Alzheimer's disease: the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It holds that the disorder, which afflicts about one in 10 Americans age 65 or older, is caused by a buildup in the brain of abnormal amyloid-beta protein, which eventually destroys neurons and synapses, producing the tragic symptoms of dementia. There's plenty of evidence for this. First, the presence of sticky clumps or “plaques” containing amyloid is a classic hallmark of the disease (along with tangles of a protein called tau). It was what Alois Alzheimer saw in the autopsied brain of patient zero in 1906. Second, families with inherited defects in amyloid precursor protein (APP) or in genes encoding proteins that process APP are plagued by early-onset Alzheimer's. Third, mice genetically engineered to churn out excess amyloid tend to develop memory problems and do better when the amyloid pileup is stopped. This evidence and more has led grant makers and drug companies to pour billions of dollars into amyloid-targeting therapies. More than a dozen have been tested, and one by one they have flopped. One of the biggest heartbreaks came last March, when a promising antibody to amyloid, called aducanumab, performed no better than placebo in patients with very early Alzheimer's. Meanwhile researchers pursuing nonamyloid approaches were often left out in the cold, struggling to get grants and to have their work published. Science journalist Sharon Begley spent more than a year reporting on the lost opportunities in an article for the Web site Stat entitled “The Maddening Saga of How an Alzheimer's ‘Cabal’ Thwarted Progress toward a Cure for Decades.” Begley notes that the amyloid crowd was “neither organized nor nefarious,” but its outsized influence stifled other avenues of investigation. © 2019 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 26867 - Posted: 12.04.2019

By Virginia Morell Say “sit!” to your dog, and—if he’s a good boy—he’ll likely plant his rump on the floor. But would he respond correctly if the word were spoken by a stranger, or someone with a thick accent? A new study shows he will, suggesting dogs perceive spoken words in a sophisticated way long thought unique to humans. “It’s a very solid and interesting finding,” says Tecumseh Fitch, an expert on vertebrate communication at the University of Vienna who was not involved in the research. The way we pronounce words changes depending on our sex, age, and even social rank. Some as-yet-unknown neural mechanism enables us to filter out differences in accent and pronunciation, helping us understand spoken words regardless of the speaker. Animals like zebra finches, chinchillas, and macaques can be trained to do this, but until now only humans were shown to do this spontaneously. In the new study, Holly Root-Gutteridge, a cognitive biologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, U.K., and her colleagues ran a test that others have used to show dogs can recognize other dogs from their barks. The researchers filmed 42 dogs of different breeds as they sat with their owners near an audio speaker that played six monosyllabic, noncommand words with similar sounds, such as “had,” “hid,” and “who’d.” The words were spoken—not by the dog’s owner—but by several strangers, men and women of different ages and with different accents. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 26866 - Posted: 12.04.2019

By Austin Frakt Some days I’m grumpy; other times, my head hurts or my feet or my arms do. Yet when I play the trumpet, my mood improves and the pain disappears. Why? Alternative medicine — including music therapy — is full of pain-relief claims. Although some are simply too good to be true, the oddities of pain can explain why others hold up, as well as why my trumpet playing helps. One thing we tend to believe about pain, but is wrong, is that it always stems from a single, fixable source. Another is that pain is communicated from that source to our brains by “pain nerves.” That’s so wrong it’s called “the naïve view” by neuroscientists. In truth, pain is in our brain. Or as the author and University of California, San Diego, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran put it, “Pain is an opinion.” We feel it because of how our brain interprets input transmitted to it from all our senses, not necessarily because of the inherent properties of the input itself. There are no nerves dedicated to sensing and transmitting pain. Anyone who has willed themselves to not feel a tickle as ticklish can appreciate the difference between stimulation and our perception of it. Pain can be experienced and relieved in phantom limbs. Discomfort and swelling increase when people believe a painful hand or knee is larger. They decrease when it seems smaller, for example in a distorted image or based on virtual reality technology. Injections are less painful when we don’t watch them. Using our brains, we can exert some control over it. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 26865 - Posted: 12.02.2019

By Laura Sanders “Does the pill cause depression?” the news headline asked. Prompted by a recent study that described a link between taking birth control pills as a teenager and depression in adulthood, the news got some doctors hopping mad. Early research hints that there are reasons to look more closely at hormonal birth control’s side effects. But so far, the link is less than certain. “This is a premature connection,” says pediatrician Cora Breuner of Seattle Children’s Hospital. Putting too much stock in preliminary evidence may lead to fewer teenagers getting birth control and, in turn, more unwanted pregnancies among teens — a situation that can upend young lives, Breuner says. Headlines that frighten teens, their families and doctors are “yet another barrier in place for accessing a completely effective way to prevent unplanned pregnancies.” Ob-gyn and contraception researcher Katharine O’Connell White agrees. “Birth control gets all of the worry and concern,” says White, of Boston University School of Medicine. “But we know that other things are much more dangerous.” Teen pregnancy, for instance. Access to effective birth control is vital for sexually active teenagers, the doctors say. “I don’t think the evidence is there right now to say that this is a threat,” adds epidemiologist and public health researcher Sarah McKetta of Columbia University, who has studied birth control use in teens. Still, she sees value in more research on the issue. “Women deserve good medication … that’s not giving them problems.” If there are risks that come with the pill, then scientists ought to get a handle on them. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 26864 - Posted: 12.02.2019

Davide Castelvecchi The group of nerve agents known as Novichoks are to be added to the Chemical Weapons Convention’s list of controlled substances, in one of the first major changes to the treaty since it was agreed in the 1990s. The compounds, developed by the Soviet Union during the cold war, came to prominence after they were used in a high-profile assassination attempt on a former Russian military officer, Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury, UK, in March last year. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is tasked with enforcing the treaty, announced the decision to explicitly ban Novichoks on 27 November as representatives from the 193 member states met in The Hague this week for a periodic review of the convention. The member states agreed unanimously to classify Novichoks as chemical weapons, the OPCW said. The update to the treaty, which will come into effect in 180 days, was initially proposed by the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. “There is a recognition that we all win with this agreement,” says Alastair Hay, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Leeds, UK, who was at the meeting. “The decision means that OPCW can now keep tabs on these chemicals.” The OPCW has the power to send inspectors to any signatory country to search for evidence of production of banned chemicals. It also can send experts to help countries to investigate crime scenes where chemical agents may have been used. © 2019 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 26863 - Posted: 12.02.2019

By Anna Schaverien and Allison McCann LONDON — Homeless drug users in Scotland will be allowed to inject pharmaceutical-grade heroin twice a day under the supervision of medical officials as part of a new program intended to reduce drug deaths and H.I.V. infection. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week, a $1.5 million facility in Glasgow that opened on Tuesday will allow a handful of drug users to receive doses of the drug alongside other treatment for their physical and psychological health, according to Glasgow City Council. The pilot project, known as heroin-assisted treatment, is the first such licensed operation in Scotland, a country that has been called the “drug death capital of the world.” It has struggled to cope with high rates of fatal drug overdoses and its worst H.I.V. outbreak in decades. The program will target those with the “most severe, longstanding and complex addiction issues,” the City Council said. It aims to reduce the risk of overdoses and the spread of viruses such as H.I.V. by prescribing diamorphine — the clinical name for pharmaceutical-grade heroin — for patients to inject in a secure clinical room under the supervision of trained medics. The clinic opened in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, after Britain’s Home Office granted it a license, and follows a similar initiative that began in Middlesbrough, England, last month. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26862 - Posted: 12.02.2019

Nicola Davis Dolphins, like humans, have a dominant right-hand side, according to research. About 90% of humans are right-handed but we are not the only animals that show such preferences: gorillas tend to be right-handed, kangaroos are generally southpaws, and even cats have preferences for a particular side – although which is favoured appears to depend on their sex. Now researchers have found common bottlenose dolphins appear to have an even stronger right-side bias than humans. “I didn’t expect to find it in that particular behaviour, and I didn’t expect to find such a strong example,” said Dr Daisy Kaplan, co-author of the study from the Dolphin Communication Project, a non-profit organisation in the US. Researchers studying common bottlenose dolphins in the Bahamas say the preference shows up in crater feeding, whereby dolphins swim close to the ocean floor, echolocating for prey, before shoving their beaks into the sand to snaffle a meal. Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Kaplan and colleagues say the animals make a sharp and sudden turn before digging in with their beaks. Crucially, however, they found this turn is almost always to the left, with the same direction taken in more than 99% of the 709 turns recorded between 2012 and 2018. The researchers say the findings indicate a right-side bias, since a left turn keeps a dolphin’s right eye and right side close to the ocean floor. The team found only four turns were made to the right and all of these were made by the same dolphin, which had an oddly shaped right pectoral fin. However the Kaplan said it was unlikely this fin was behind the right turns: two other dolphins had an abnormal or missing right fin yet still turned left.

Keyword: Laterality; Evolution
Link ID: 26861 - Posted: 12.02.2019

By Denise Grady A lifelong swimmer leapt into deep water near his lakeside home, and was horrified to find himself completely unable to swim. Had his wife not rescued him, he might have drowned. He had recently received an electronic brain implant to control tremors and other symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and somehow the signals from the device had knocked out his ability to coordinate his arms and legs for swimming. He was one of nine patients, all good swimmers despite having Parkinson’s, who had the same strange, dangerous side effect from deep brain stimulators. Three of them tried turning off the stimulators, and immediately could swim again, according to an article in the journal Neurology by a medical team from the University of Zurich. At first, doctors thought the case of the man in the lake was an isolated event, Dr. Christian R. Baumann, an author of the paper, said in an interview. But when the same thing happened to another patient, one who had been a competitive swimmer, Dr. Baumann and his colleagues began to ask other patients about swimming. They found seven more cases among about 250 patients. About 150,000 people worldwide have brain implants made by Medtronic, the leading manufacturer, the company said. Most had the implants for relief of Parkinson’s symptoms. The swimming problem is not that common Dr. Baumann said, adding: “I think it’s a minority of patients. We find many who are still wonderfully able to swim and we don’t know why. We have no clue. They are treated in the same region of the brain. But this is life-threatening, and we need to pay more attention in the future.” Now, Dr. Baumann warns all patients with stimulators never to go into deep water alone. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 26860 - Posted: 11.29.2019

By Sofie Bates In multiple sclerosis, barriers that guard the brain become leaky, allowing some disease-causing immune cells to invade. Now scientists have identified a key molecule in the process that helps B cells breach the barriers. ALCAM, a protein produced by B cells, helps the immune cells sneak into the central nervous system, researchers report November 13 in Science Translational Medicine. Tests in mice and in artificial human brain barriers show that B cells without ALCAM, or activated leukocyte cell adhesion molecule, had trouble getting through the brain’s barriers. And in mice with a disease with some characteristics similar to MS, blocking ALCAM seemed to alleviate the disease’s severity. These early results indicate that the protein may be a good target for new treatments for multiple sclerosis in people, the researchers say. “This is a very important puzzle piece in how we understand multiple sclerosis,” says David Leppert, a neurologist at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland who was not involved in the work. “How it translates into clinical applications is yet another question.” Worldwide, over 2.3 million people have multiple sclerosis, including nearly 1 million adults in the United States. Scientists think that rogue immune cells invade the brain and strip away the protective coating on nerve cells — leading to neurological issues and physical disability as the disease progresses. There’s no cure, and treatments don’t work for advanced stages of multiple sclerosis. Scientists have developed over a dozen medications to treat MS symptoms (SN: 11/29/17), one of which uses antibodies to destroy the body’s B cells. But that approach weakens patients’ immune systems, opening the door for future infections or cancer. In the new study, the researchers are instead focusing on preventing disease-causing B cells from entering the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2019

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 26859 - Posted: 11.29.2019

Merrit Kennedy A newly published study from University College London suggests that a single dose of ketamine could help dramatically reduce the alcohol intake of heavy drinkers. Bruce Forster/Getty Images What if a single dose of ketamine could make a heavy drinker dramatically cut back on booze? A team at University College London thinks that ketamine may be able to "rewrite" memories that shape a person's relationship with alcohol. Scientists say that participants who were given ketamine as part of an experimental study dramatically reduced their average alcohol intake for months after the initial dose. Their research was published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Ketamine — sometimes known as a club drug called Special K that can produce hallucinations — has been shown to be a powerful and fast-acting treatment for depression. Researchers also are looking into whether ketamine can help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.K. findings may signal yet another use for the drug for hard-to-treat conditions. In general, the treatment options for alcoholism "aren't particularly effective for the majority of people, particularly over the long term," says Ravi Das, a UCL psychopharmacologist and the study's lead researcher. Das thinks part of the problem is that current remedies don't necessarily help patients deal with positive memories of drinking that could make them want to drink again. "When people become addicted, they're learning that kind of behavior in response to things in their environment," he says. "Those memories, those associative trigger memories, can be really long lasting and really kind of ingrained. And current treatments don't target those." © 2019 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26858 - Posted: 11.29.2019

Suzana Herculano-Houzel Here’s something new to consider being thankful for at the dinner table: the long evolutionary journey that gave you your big brain and your long life. Courtesy of our primate ancestors that invented cooking over a million years ago, you are a member of the one species able to afford so many cortical neurons in its brain. With them come the extended childhood and the pushing century-long lifespan that together make human beings unique. All these bequests of your bigger brain cortex mean you can gather four generations around a meal to exchange banter and gossip, turn information into knowledge and even practice the art of what-not-to-say-when. You may even want to be thankful for another achievement of our neuron-crammed human cortices: all the technology that allows people spread over the globe to come together in person, on screens, or through words whispered directly into your ears long distance. I know I am thankful. But then, I’m the one proposing that we humans revise the way we tell the story of how our species came to be. Back when I had just received my freshly minted Ph.D. in neuroscience and started working in science communication, I found out that 6 in 10 college-educated people believed they only used 10% of their brains. I’m glad to say that they’re wrong: We use all of it, just in different ways at different times. The myth seemed to be supported by statements in serious textbooks and scientific articles that “the human brain is made of 100 billion neurons and 10 times as many supporting glial cells.” I wondered if those numbers were facts or guesses. Did anyone actually know that those were the numbers of cells in the human brain? No, they didn’t. © 2010–2019, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 26857 - Posted: 11.29.2019

By Donald McCarthy I lived only half a childhood. Friendships were difficult, because I often did not know what to say. I had little patience for small talk and a dislike of new situations. Thrust into unfamiliar surroundings, my whole body would warm, my hands would shake, and I would feel a tightening in my chest and a deep, almost primal urge to scream. Even as an adult, I felt like I viewed reality through a foggy window. I thought it was simply me — that my personality was just odd — and I would need to learn to cope with the fact that I did not fit in well with most people. Then, at age 28, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). My diagnosis was a relief. Suddenly, I knew why I felt the way I did, and why I had a hard time living the way others did. But I can only imagine how much better my life would have been if I had been diagnosed as a child and had the chance to understand myself at a younger age. Might I have made emotional connections with my peers, instead of just with Bruce Springsteen songs and characters in Stephen King novels? It turns out I’m not alone. Many people go more than half of their lives before learning that they are autistic; the exact number remains a mystery, as research on adults with autism has been scarce. Although public awareness of ASD and its symptoms has improved in recent decades, many children still slip through the cracks, especially girls and children of color. We as a society have the power and resources to change that; all we need is the will. Consider the science: There is little question among psychologists specializing in autism that an early diagnosis can change a person’s life for the better. Therapy aimed at reworking the way a young person with ASD thinks and comprehends has shown success. Children who undergo therapy see results that allow them to curb undesirable behavior, improve social interactions, and better their own quality of life.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 26856 - Posted: 11.29.2019

Lateshia Beachum A Chinese man sought medical attention for seizures and a headache that lasted nearly a month. Doctors found that tapeworms from undercooked meat were causing his pain. Researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University published a paper last week that details the plight of 46-year-old construction worker Zhu (an alias for the patient) in the eastern Zhejiang province of China who bought pork and mutton about a month ago for a spicy hot pot broth. Days later, the man started feeling dizzy, having headaches and experiencing epilepsy-like symptoms such as limb twitching and mouth foaming while trying to sleep at night, according to the report. Co-workers witnessed one of Zhu’s episodes and dialed for emergency help. He was seen at a hospital where scans and tests showed that he had multiple intracranial calcifications, abnormal deposits of calcium in blood vessels to the brain; and multiple intracranial lesions, according to researchers. Medical staff wanted to examine him further, but he dismissed their concerns because he didn’t want to spend more money, according to the report. The symptoms that sent Zhu to the hospital persisted after he left, researchers reported. He became frightened. He spoke with his relatives about seeking medical treatment before deciding on care at the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University Medical College. Huang Jianrong, the hospital’s chief doctor, consulted Zhu and learned that he had eaten pork and mutton not too long ago, according to the report.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 26855 - Posted: 11.29.2019

By Lisa Sanders, M.D “Where am I?” the 68-year-old man asked. His daughter explained again: He was at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. He had been found on the ground in the parking lot of the grocery store near his apartment. The man nodded, as if taking it all in, but minutes later asked again: Where am I? He had never had any memory issues before, but now he couldn’t remember that it was Saturday. Didn’t remember that he spent the morning moving the last of the boxes he had stored at his daughter’s house to his new apartment. He didn’t even remember that he had spent the past few months hashing out a pretty messy divorce. His soon-to-be ex-wife was also in the E.R., and again and again he asked her: Are we really getting divorced? Why? What happened? Earlier that day, his daughter received a call from the hospital saying that her father had fallen outside the supermarket and was brought in by an ambulance called by a good Samaritan. No one could tell her any more than that, and her father clearly didn’t remember. He had a scrape on his right cheek and over his eye, but otherwise he seemed fine. Except he couldn’t remember the events of the recent past. When asked his name and address, he responded promptly, but the address he gave was the house he shared for many years with his future ex-wife. He seemed stunned to find out he no longer lived there. The doctor in the E.R. was also surprised by the extent of the man’s memory loss. He seemed to have lost both his retrograde memory, recall of the events of the recent past, and his anterograde memory, the ability to form new memories from the present. But on examination, everything else seemed basically normal — except that his blood pressure was high, and he had the scrapes on his face. There was no sign of infection. His kidneys and liver seemed to be working just fine. A head CT scan showed no injuries to the bones of the face, the spinal cord in the neck or the brain. There was no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system. After a few hours, the man’s memory was still not functioning properly, and he was admitted to the hospital. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 26854 - Posted: 11.26.2019

Correspondent Lesley Stahl Who among us hasn't wished we could read someone else's mind, know exactly what they're thinking? Well that's impossible, of course, since our thoughts are, more than anything else, our own. Private, personal, unreachable. Or at least that's what we've always, well, thought. Advances in neuroscience have shown that, on a physical level, our thoughts are actually a vast network of neurons firing all across our brains. So if that brain activity could be identified and analyzed, could our thoughts be decoded? Could our minds be read? Well, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has spent more than a decade trying to do just that. We started our reporting on their work 10 years ago, and what they've discovered since, has drawn us back. In Carnegie Mellon's scanner room, two floors underground, a steady stream of research subjects come to have their brains and thoughts "read" in this MRI machine. It's a type of scanning called functional MRI, FMRI. That looks at what's happening inside the brain as a person thinks. Marcel Just: It's like being an astronomer when the first telescope is discovered, or being a biologist when the first microscope is-- is developed. Neuroscientist Marcel Just says this technology has made it possible for the first time to see the physical makeup of our thoughts. When we first visited Dr. Just's lab ten years ago, he and his team had conducted a study. They put people in the scanner and asked them to think about ten objects, five of them tools like screwdriver and hammer and five of them dwellings like igloo and castle, while measuring activity levels throughout their brains. The idea was to crunch the data and try to identify distinctive patterns of activity for each object. Lesley Stahl: You had them think about a screwdriver. Marcel Just: Uh-huh. Lesley Stahl: And the computer found the place in the brain where that person was thinking "screwdriver?" Marcel Just: Screwdriver isn't one place in the brain. It's many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like… Lesley Stahl: And each of those functions are in different places? Marcel Just: Correct. He showed us that by dividing the brain into thousands of tiny cubes and analyzing the amount of activity in each one, his team was able to identify unique patterns for each object. © 2019 CBS Interactive Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 26853 - Posted: 11.26.2019

By Joanne Chen I grew up in New England, so you’d think I’d be used to winter by now. But after wearing dozens of puffy coats thin over my lifetime, that’s not the case: I hate the relentless chill, the heavy boots, the darkness. It’s enough to make anyone want to curl up under a blanket and snooze until March. But as Wirecutter’s sleep writer, I also know that many sleep-promoting products don’t actually do much. Winter tiredness is as mental as it is physical, and you need to consider things both in and out of the bedroom to reawaken your fun-loving self. To help make your seven to eight hours of sleep feel exactly that, here are four expert-approved strategies. Shorter days are largely to blame for the blahs. Light controls our circadian rhythm. Its presence suppresses the flow of the sleep hormone melatonin; its absence encourages it. When sunlight takes its own sweet time to arrive in the morning and slinks away before dinner, that sleepy feeling prevails, even if we’ve just slept. To mimic the refreshing effects of a bright spring morning — but in the darkness of 6 a.m. in winter — a sunrise alarm clock might help. We recommend the Philips Wake-Up Light HF3520. Its light gradually fills the room and peaks at the designated time. There’s a backup alarm too, which I set to the sound of birds chirping so I can pretend it’s actually May. A more integrated strategy: Outfit your home with smart bulbs instead, which you can program to brighten just as you would a sunrise alarm clock. If the thought of entering a dark home after work makes you want to ditch all household obligations, you can also arrange lights to turn on before you walk through your door. Philips Hue, Wirecutter’s smart-bulb pick, offers lighting “formulas” such as brighter intensities in the morning and warmer glows in the evening. (While you’re at it, why not program your smart speaker to play whatever song fires you up?) For an extra kick, light therapy lamps — like our pick, the Carex Day-Light Classic Plus Lamp — might help. Doctors often recommend these for seasonal affective disorder (S.A.D.), a type of depression triggered by certain seasons. (Talk to yours about whether the device is appropriate for you and how best to use it.) © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 26852 - Posted: 11.26.2019

By Meredith Wadman Tony Magana, chief of neurosurgery at Mekelle University School of Medicine in Ethiopia’s Tigray province, confronts his country’s high prevalence of neural tube defects nearly every day. His team operates on more than 400 babies annually to repair these severe, often lethal birth malformations, in which babies can be born without brains or with their spinal cords protruding from their backs. “Probably every other day we see a child that is so bad we can’t help them,” Magana says. The holes where the spinal cord protrudes “are so big that you can’t close them.” This month, a team of nutrition experts converged in Addis Ababa to lay groundwork for an unproven but possibly highly effective intervention: fortifying Ethiopia’s salt supply with folic acid, a synthetic form of the B vitamin folate. In the first 4 weeks of pregnancy, folate is essential to proper closure of the neural tube, which gives rise to the brain and spinal cord, and since the mid-1990s, more than 80 countries have mandated flour fortification with folic acid. Ethiopia, where fewer than one-third of people eat flour, is not among them. Last year, a pair of studies that surveyed births at 11 public hospitals there shook the global health community. The studies—one co-authored by Magana—found that among every 10,000 births, between 126 and 131 babies suffered from neural tube defects (NTDs). That’s seven times their global prevalence and 26 times the prevalence in high-income, flour-fortifying countries such as the United States. According to Ethiopian government data, 84% of Ethiopian women of reproductive age have folate levels in their red blood cells that put them at risk of giving birth to a child with an NTD. © 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 26851 - Posted: 11.26.2019

A disturbing aspect of Canada's opioid crisis is that more babies are being born to mothers who use fentanyl and other opioid drugs. The Canadian Institute for Health Information says more than 1,800 infants per year are born with symptoms of opioid withdrawal. A study presented Monday at the 105th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America suggests that prenatal exposure to opioids may have a significant impact on the brain development of unborn children. A team of obstetricians, neonatologists, psychologists and radiologists led by Dr. Rupa Radhakrishnan, a radiologist at Indiana University School of Medicine, did functional MRI brain scans on 16 full-term infants. Eight of the infants had mothers who used opioids during pregnancy and eight had mothers who did not use opioids. The brain imaging technique used by the researchers is called resting state functional MRI (fMRI). The technique enabled researchers to measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. The technique permits researchers to measure how well different regions of the brain talk to one another. The researchers found abnormal connections to and from a part of the brain called the amygdala. It's a region that is responsible for the perception and regulation of emotions such as anger, fear, sadness and aggression. This is one of the first studies to suggest that the brain function of infants may be affected by prenatal exposure to opioids. Abnormal function in the amygdala could make it difficult for children exposed to opioids to regulate their emotions. That could have serious implications on their social development and on their behaviour. The researchers say the study is small. They say they aren't certain as to the clinical implications of this study. A long-term outcome study is underway to understand better the functional brain changes caused by prenatal opioid exposure and their associated long-term developmental outcomes. How newborns face opioid withdrawal This research may become even more important should current trends continue, and we see an increase in the number of infants exposed to opioids prenatally. ©2019 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 26850 - Posted: 11.26.2019