By C. Claiborne Ray Many immature mammals practice hunting and fighting skills in preparation for the real thing. Anyone who has raised a litter of kittens has observed their almost continuous cycles of pursuit and evasion, capture and attempted evisceration, and sometimes even a mock version of the killing bite. Fortunately, the rules of the game seem to stop a killer kitten short of committing real bodily harm to a littermate. To the human observer, it looks like fun, but there is an underlying evolutionary utility to such romps. At least one researcher has suggested that such games, if games they are, are not just physical practice, but a way of preparing animals for mental and emotional reaction to unexpected perils. The avian world also includes examples of what appears to be play. Absent the more detailed brain research done in mammals, this is a hard hypothesis to test conclusively. But some scientists believe that birds do things for pure pleasure, not just to practice useful skills, and that birds have the necessary brain receptors for reward and pleasure, as do mammals. As for other animals, there is at least anecdotal evidence that some turtles and octopuses engage in play-like activities. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25845 - Posted: 01.08.2019

By Sandra E. Garcia Imagine being held up at gunpoint. Do you trust you could remember the perpetrator’s face? The gun? Or would you have a better recollection of how loud the birds were chirping at that moment? “The memory does not operate like a videotape machine faithfully recording every single detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The thing that is happening is that you’re focusing on the most dangerous thing,” he said. “That is the function of fear: to alert you to imminent threats.” Stress can play a role in eyewitness cases of mistaken identity, experts said, and it could be a reason there were such conflicting accounts of the suspects in the shooting death of Jazmine Barnes, the 7-year-old Texas girl who was fired upon in a car with her mother and three sisters on Dec. 30. A gunman pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Jazmine’s mother, LaPorsha Washington, 30, was injured. Ms. Washington and her daughters met with investigators to help them create a composite sketch of the gunman, who attacked them before sunrise. The man was described as white, thin and in his 30s or 40s and driving a red pickup truck. On Sunday, the authorities announced they had charged a 20-year-old black man with capital murder in connection with the shooting. In a CNN interview, Ms. Washington said her teenage daughter told her that the man was white and that his hoodie was black. “That’s all she could see at the time because the sun hadn’t really even came out yet,” Ms. Washington said in the interview. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25844 - Posted: 01.07.2019

By Alex Berenson Marijuana seems to be on an unstoppable march to legalization in the United States. New York and New Jersey are racing to join the 10 states that already allow recreational use of cannabis. Some 65 percent of Americans favor legalization, and several potential Democratic candidates for president support ending federal prohibitions on marijuana. This huge shift in public attitudes comes even though most Americans do not use the drug. Only 15 percent of people over 12 used it even once in 2017, according to a large federal survey. That year, only three million people tried it for the first time. Instead, the change has been largely driven by decadeslong lobbying by marijuana legalization advocates and for-profit cannabis companies. Those groups have shrewdly recast marijuana as a medicine rather than an intoxicant. Some have even claimed that marijuana can help slow the opioid epidemic, though studies show that people who use cannabis are more likely to start using opioids later. Meanwhile, legalization advocates have squelched discussion of the serious mental health risks of marijuana and THC, the chemical responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects. As I have seen firsthand in writing a book about cannabis, anyone who raises those concerns may be mocked as a modern-day believer in “Reefer Madness,” the notorious 1936 movie that portrays young people descending into insanity and violence after smoking marijuana. A strange disconnect has resulted. With large studies in peer-reviewed journals showing that marijuana increases the risk of psychosis and schizophrenia, the scientific literature around the drug is far more negative than it was 20 years ago. Comparing two major reports from the National Academy of Medicine, the nonprofit group that advises the federal government on health and medicine, makes the difference clear. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 25843 - Posted: 01.07.2019

By Marina Benjamin Insomnia usually begins with a lament: for the love (and loss) of sleep; over the red-eyed mornings and sludgelike days that tail the wakeful nights; for the rest you crave and cannot get and the cognitive snap that eludes you. Yet if we insist on viewing insomnia merely as a matter of negatives, a condition defined by lack, a nothing, a zero, a blank, then we risk missing what it can potentially reveal. I’ve been an insomniac all my life. As a child, my wakefulness was a matter of personal pride, a badge of honor signifying a shrewd vigilance (should any ghoul dare intrude upon my bedroom by night, it would meet with a grisly fate). Yet my refusal of sleep had less to do with my fear of the dark and the monsters it bred than with everyday suspicion: I simply could not fathom where people went to in sleep. They seemed lost to the world. Terrified of the nullity that sleep imposed, I’d dodge the bedtime curfew each night: at lights out, a minor rebellion. Like Vladimir Nabokov (whose kindred spirit I had yet to encounter), I figured that sleep offered only a dumb conformity. Had I not been a child, I, too, might have described it as a “nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.” I longed for the light of consciousness to burn throughout the dark nights. These days, I’m less inclined to rejoice in the way my head is lit up at night, like an out-of-hours factory, when the whirring generators flip on, powering up the lights and the processing plants for a frenetic shift. Geared up this way, my mind trips ceaselessly from one mundane thought to the next, alighting upon a single word or meaningless riff or song snippet I happened to hear that day. Or it runs backward and forward over endless lists, stitching and unstitching. I compose strings of emails that could wait until morning, line up tasks in a shoulder-shoving queue. Mostly I just fret, worry-beading minor problems and irritations until they form a manacle of woe. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25842 - Posted: 01.07.2019

By Jocelyn Kaiser, Ann Gibbons In early 2017, epidemiologist Rory Collins at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and his team faced a test of their principles. They run the UK Biobank (UKB), a huge research project probing the health and genetics of 500,000 British people. They were planning their most sought-after data release yet: genetic profiles for all half-million participants. Three hundred research groups had signed up to download 8 terabytes of data—the equivalent of more than 5000 streamed movies. That's enough to tie up a home computer for weeks, threatening a key goal of the UKB: to give equal access to any qualified researcher in the world. "We wanted to create a level playing field" so that someone at a big center with a supercomputer was at no more of an advantage than a postdoc in Scotland with a smaller computer and slower internet link, says Oxford's Naomi Allen, the project's chief epidemiologist. They came up with a plan: They gave researchers 3 weeks to download the encrypted files. Then, on 19 July 2017, they released a final encryption key, firing the starting gun for a scientific race. Within a couple of days, one U.S. group had done quick analyses linking more than 120,000 genetic markers to more than 2000 diseases and traits, data it eventually put up on a blog. Only 60,000 markers had previously been tied to disease, says human geneticist Eric Lander, president and director of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "[They] doubled that in a week." © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 25841 - Posted: 01.05.2019

By Paula Span He was a retired factory worker, living with his wife outside a small town in Wales, in the United Kingdom. Once outgoing and sociable, engaged in local activities including a community choir, he’d been jolted by a diagnosis of early dementia. A few months later, at 70, he wouldn’t leave the house alone, fearful that if he needed help, he couldn’t manage to use a cellphone to call his wife. He avoided household chores he’d previously undertaken, such as doing laundry. When his frustrated wife tried to show him how to use the washer, he couldn’t remember her instructions. “He’d lost a lot of confidence,” said Linda Clare, a clinical psychologist at the University of Exeter. “He was actually capable, but he was frightened of making a mistake, getting it wrong.” Dr. Clare directed a recent trial of cognitive rehabilitation in England and Wales in which the patient was enrolled. Cognitive rehabilitation, which Dr. Clare has been researching for 20 years, evolved from methods used to help people with brain injuries. The practice brings occupational and other therapists into the homes of dementia patients to learn which everyday activities they’re struggling with and which abilities they want to preserve or improve upon. Organizing a visit with a friend, perhaps. Keeping track of the day’s appointments and plans. Heating a prepared lunch without burning it. In weekly sessions over several months, the therapists devise individual strategies that can help, at least in the early and moderate stages of the disease. The therapists show patients how to compensate for memory problems and to practice new techniques. Cognitive rehab has its limitations. “We never suggest this can reverse the effects of dementia,” Dr. Clare said. It will not raise participants’ scores on tests of mental ability. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25840 - Posted: 01.05.2019

By Scott Barry Kaufman What is going on in our brains when we are creating? How does our brain look different when we are engaging in art vs. science? How does the brain of genius creators differ from the rest of us? What are some of the limitations of studying the creative brain? The neuroscience of creativity is booming. There is now a society (with an annual conference), an edited volume, a handbook, and now an entire textbook on the topic. Bringing the latest research together from a number of scientists*, Anna Abraham wrote a wonderful resource that covers some of the most hot button topics in the field. She was gracious enough to do a Q & A with me. Enjoy! SBK: How’d you get interested in the neuroscience of creativity? AA: I have always been curious about creativity. At the most fundamental level I think I simply wanted to get my head around the mystery of this marvelous ability that each of us possesses. In particular, I hoped to find out what makes some people more creative than others. When I saw an opportunity to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience in the early 2000s in any topic of my choice, I went all in - it was an exciting and promising approach that had until then only been limitedly used to explore the creative mind. SBK: What is creativity? Does the field have a unified, agreed upon definition of creativity that you are satisfied with? AA: There is a surprising level of unanimity in the field when it comes to a boilerplate definition. Most experts agree that two elements are central to creativity. First and foremost, it reflects our capacity to generate ideas that are original, unusual or novel in some way. The second element is that these ideas also need to be satisfying, appropriate or suited to the context in question. I am reasonably satisfied with this definition but not in how it guides scientific enquiry.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25839 - Posted: 01.05.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi TAMPA, FLORIDA—The pinnacle of beauty to most people is a symmetrical face, one without any major left-right differences. But for blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus), asymmetry may be a lifesaver. That’s because their lopsided skulls may help them feel their way along dark cave walls—similar to a person navigating by touch in the dark. That behavior, presented here this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, suggests being a little “off” can have evolutionary benefits. Lots of cave dwellers are a bit unbalanced. Cave fish tend to have one eye that is larger than the other, for example, and cave crickets have different size antennae. Some researchers wondered whether left-right differences might help these creatures get around. They scanned the skulls of A. mexicanus fish from three caves in Mexico. Their computerized tomography scans revealed most fish skulls bent slightly to the left, giving the right side of their faces slightly more exposure. Other tests showed these fish tended to drift along the right-hand side of cave walls, presumably using the larger side of their faces to feel their way in the dark. Amanda Powers and Josh Gross Next, the researchers counted mechanical sensors known as neuromasts in the heads of embryonic fish. These sensors, or “nerve buttons,” detect water flow and sometimes vibrations. Blind fish had more—and larger—neuromasts than fish of the same species that lived on the surface, they reported. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Laterality; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25838 - Posted: 01.05.2019

By Kelly Servick For many people who are paralyzed and unable to speak, signals of what they'd like to say hide in their brains. No one has been able to decipher those signals directly. But three research teams recently made progress in turning data from electrodes surgically placed on the brain into computer-generated speech. Using computational models known as neural networks, they reconstructed words and sentences that were, in some cases, intelligible to human listeners. None of the efforts, described in papers in recent months on the preprint server bioRxiv, managed to re-create speech that people had merely imagined. Instead, the researchers monitored parts of the brain as people either read aloud, silently mouthed speech, or listened to recordings. But showing the reconstructed speech is understandable is "definitely exciting," says Stephanie Martin, a neural engineer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who was not involved in the new projects. People who have lost the ability to speak after a stroke or disease can use their eyes or make other small movements to control a cursor or select on-screen letters. (Cosmologist Stephen Hawking tensed his cheek to trigger a switch mounted on his glasses.) But if a brain-computer interface could re-create their speech directly, they might regain much more: control over tone and inflection, for example, or the ability to interject in a fast-moving conversation. The hurdles are high. "We are trying to work out the pattern of … neurons that turn on and off at different time points, and infer the speech sound," says Nima Mesgarani, a computer scientist at Columbia University. "The mapping from one to the other is not very straightforward." How these signals translate to speech sounds varies from person to person, so computer models must be "trained" on each individual. And the models do best with extremely precise data, which requires opening the skull. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25837 - Posted: 01.03.2019

In a study of fruit flies, NIH scientists suggested that the body’s immune system may play a critical role in the damage caused by aging brain disorders. The results are based on experiments in which the researchers altered the activity of Cdk5, a gene that preclinical studies have suggested is important for early brain development and may be involved in neurodegenerative diseases, such as ALS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Previously, they found that altering Cdk5 sped up the genetic aging process, causing the flies to die earlier than normal and have problems with walking or flying late in life and greater signs of neurodegenerative brain damage. In this study, published in Cell Reports, they suggested that altering Cdk5 resulted in the death of dopamine releasing neurons, especially in the brains of older flies. Typically, Parkinson’s disease damages the same types of cells in humans. Further experiments in flies suggested the neuron loss happened because altering Cdk5 slowed autophagy, or a cell’s waste disposal system that rids the body of damaged cells in a contained, controlled fashion, which in turn triggered the immune system to attack the animal’s own neurons. This immune system attack is a much “messier” and more diffuse process than autophagy. Genetically restoring the waste system or blocking the immune system’s responses prevented the reduction in dopamine neurons caused by altering Cdk5. The authors concluded that this chain reaction in which a breakdown in autophagy triggers a widely destructive immune reaction may occur in human brain during several neurodegenerative disorders and that researchers may want to look to these systems for new treatment targets and strategies.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25836 - Posted: 01.03.2019

Emily Hanford Jack Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling. Silva is the chief academic officer for Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third-graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test. That year, he set out to do something about that. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which 4 in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?' " he recalls. Bethlehem is not an outlier. Across the country, millions of kids are struggling. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren't reading at a basic level. Fewer than 40 percent are proficient or advanced. One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty. In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either. Silva didn't know what to do. To begin with, he didn't know how students in his district were being taught to read. So, he assigned his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, to find out. Harper attended a professional-development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word she didn't know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25835 - Posted: 01.03.2019

By Jane E. Brody The earsplitting sound of ambulance sirens in New York City is surely hastening the day when I and many others repeatedly subjected to such noise will be forced to get hearing aids. I just hope this doesn’t happen before 2021 or so when these devices become available over-the-counter and are far less expensive and perhaps more effective than they are now. Currently, hearing aids and accompanying services are not covered by medical insurance, Medicare included. Such coverage was specifically excluded when the Medicare law was passed in 1965, a time when hearing loss was not generally recognized as a medical issue and hearing aids were not very effective, said Dr. Frank R. Lin, who heads the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Now a growing body of research by his colleagues and others is linking untreated hearing loss to several costly ills, and the time has come for hearing protection and treatment of hearing loss to be taken much more seriously. Not only is poor hearing annoying and inconvenient for millions of people, especially the elderly. It is also an unmistakable health hazard, threatening mind, life and limb, that could cost Medicare much more than it would to provide hearing aids and services for every older American with hearing loss. Currently, 38.2 million Americans aged 12 or older have hearing loss, a problem that becomes increasingly common and more severe with age. More than half of people in their 70s and more than 80 percent in their 80s have mild to moderate hearing loss or worse, according to tests done by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2001 and 2010. Two huge new studies have demonstrated a clear association between untreated hearing loss and an increased risk of dementia, depression, falls and even cardiovascular diseases. In a significant number of people, the studies indicate, uncorrected hearing loss itself appears to be the cause of the associated health problem. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25834 - Posted: 01.01.2019

Fiona McMillan Your brain has worked hard in 2018, so as the year draws to a close, take a moment to appreciate not only your marvelous network of brain cells, but those found in other species, too. Below is a list of where to find some of the year’s most stunning neuroscience images that reveal the hidden world of neurons in brilliant and breathtaking detail. In order to understand how the brain works, neuroscientists need to take a close look at how neuron networks are wired together. However this isn’t easy, after all just one cubic millimeter in the brain’s cerebral cortex contains around 50,000 neurons each making 6,000 connections with other neurons (give or take a few). Tracing a single network through this incredibly complex web is painstaking work. So, in recent years, researchers developed the Brainbow, a technique that allows individual neurons to be labelled with different fluorescent colors. Unfortunately, it still took months to trace the path of a single neuron across the mouse brain. To address this, in 2018 Takeshi Imai and his colleagues at Kyushu University, Kyoto University and the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan took it to the next level. They developed the Tetbow, a method that produces extremely vivid colors enabling scientists to trace neuronal wiring across the whole mouse brain within a matter of days. Also, it’s really pretty. Tetbow provides colorful view of the olfactory bulbRichi Sakaguchi, Marcus N Leiwe, Takeshi Imai published in eLife Sciences under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 ©2019 Forbes Media LLC

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 25833 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By: Robert Zatorre, Ph.D. Human beings seem to have innate musicality. That is, the capacity to understand and derive pleasure from complex musical patterns appears to be culturally universal.1 Musicality is expressed very early in development.2 In this sense, music may be compared to speech—the other cognitively interesting way that we use sound. But whereas speech is most obviously important for communicating propositions or concepts, obtaining such knowledge, this is not the primary function of music. Rather, it is music’s power to communicate emotions, moods, or affective mental states that seems beneficial to our quality of life. Which brings us to the question that forms the title of this article: why do we love music? On its face, there is no apparent reason why a sequence or pattern of sounds that has no specific propositional meaning should elicit any kind of pleasurable response. Yet music is widely considered amongst our greatest joys.3 Where does this phenomenon come from? There are several approaches to this question. A musicologist might have a very different answer than a social scientist. Since I’m a neuroscientist, I would like to address it from that perspective—recognizing that other perspectives may also offer valuable insights. An advantage of neuroscience is that we can relate our answer to established empirical findings and draw from two especially relevant domains: the neuroscience of auditory perception and of the reward system. To give away the punch line of my article, I believe that music derives its power from an interaction between these two systems, the first of which allows us to analyze sound patterns and make predictions about them, and the second of which evaluates the outcomes of these predictions and generates positive (or negative) emotions depending on whether the expectation was met, not met, or exceeded. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 25832 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By Amy Harmon It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites. In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.” Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there. He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public. Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’ But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 25831 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By Kara Manke A new neurostimulator developed by engineers at UC Berkeley can listen to and stimulate electric current in the brain at the same time, potentially delivering fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s. The device, named the WAND, works like a “pacemaker for the brain,” monitoring the brain’s electrical activity and delivering electrical stimulation if it detects something amiss. These devices can be extremely effective at preventing debilitating tremors or seizures in patients with a variety of neurological conditions. But the electrical signatures that precede a seizure or tremor can be extremely subtle, and the frequency and strength of electrical stimulation required to prevent them is equally touchy. It can take years of small adjustments by doctors before the devices provide optimal treatment. WAND, which stands for wireless artifact-free neuromodulation device, is both wireless and autonomous, meaning that once it learns to recognize the signs of tremor or seizure, it can adjust the stimulation parameters on its own to prevent the unwanted movements. And because it is closed-loop — meaning it can stimulate and record simultaneously — it can adjust these parameters in real-time. © 2019 UC Regents;

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 25830 - Posted: 01.01.2019

Katie Brown When polite people talk, they take turns speaking and adjust the timing of their responses on the fly. So do wild macaques, a team of Japanese ethologists reports. Analysis of 20-minute vocal exchanges involving 15 adult female Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) revealed that the monkeys altered their conversational pauses depending on how quickly others answered, the researchers report in a study in an upcoming issue of Current Zoology. It’s unclear whether the monkeys were actually talking in any way analogous to how humans converse. While macaques have the vocal equipment to form humanlike words, their brains are unable to transform that vocal potential into human talk (SN Online: 12/19/16). The primates instead communicate in grunts, coos and other similar sounds. But the length of pauses between those grunts and coos closely match the length of pauses in human chats, says coauthor Noriko Katsu of the University of Tokyo. The researchers analyzed 64 vocal exchanges, called bouts, between at least two monkeys that were recorded between April and October 2012 at the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto, Japan. The team found that the median length of time between the end of one monkey’s calls and the beginning of another’s was 250 milliseconds — similar to the average 200 milliseconds in conversational pause time between humans. That makes the macaques’ gaps between turns in chattering one of the shortest call-and-response pauses yet measured in nonhuman primates. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 25829 - Posted: 01.01.2019

By Penelope Green On winter nights, the white-noise app on my phone is tuned to Air Conditioner: a raspy, metallic whir that sounds like the mechanical noise that might echo deep inside the ductwork of a huge commercial building. (Among the app’s other offerings are Dishwasher Rinsing, Crowded Room and Vacuum Cleaner.) It lulls me to sleep nonetheless, because it blankets the din in my apartment (the ragged snore of a roommate; the clanking of the steam radiator; the cat’s skidding pursuit of something only he can see). It may also soothe because it replicates an early sound environment, probably that of a Manhattan childhood, though perhaps it suggests something much, much older. Some sleep experts note that babies, their ears accustomed to the whisper of the maternal circulatory system and the slosh of the womb, sleep better accompanied by a device that mimics those familiar whooshings. My app is but one note in the mighty chorus of white-noise generators, an exploding industry of mechanical and digital devices; apps and websites, and Sonos and Spotify playlists that grows ever more refined, as if to block out the increased rate of speeding, the wrecks, on the information superhighway. Car Interior? Oil Tanker? Laundromat? These ballads are in the vast soundscape library created by Stephane Pigeon, a Belgian electrical engineer, and ready to play on Mynoise.net, a sound generator he put online in 2013 that now has one million page views each month. It’s a nearly philanthropic enterprise, as it runs on donations. “I have enough stress,” Dr. Pigeon said. Reddit, among other message boards, offers D.I.Y. white-noise hacks for light sleepers, shift workers and tinnitus sufferers. Rough up the blades of a box fan with a box cutter, suggested Christopher Suarez, a field service technician from Riverside, Calif., whose wife is an insomniac, on one captivating thread there. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Hearing
Link ID: 25828 - Posted: 12.28.2018

Kohske Takahashi We report a novel illusion––curvature blindness illusion: a wavy line is perceived as a zigzag line. The following are required for this illusion to occur. First, the luminance contrast polarity of the wavy line against the background is reversed at the turning points. Second, the curvature of the wavy line is somewhat low; the right angle is too steep to be perceived as an illusion. This illusion implies that, in order to perceive a gentle curve, it is necessary to satisfy more conditions––constant contrast polarity––than perceiving an obtuse corner. It is notable that observers exactly “see” an illusory zigzag line against a physically wavy line, rather than have an impaired perception. We propose that the underlying mechanisms for the gentle curve perception and those of obtuse corner perception are competing with each other in an imbalanced way and the percepts of corner might be dominant in the visual system. Perception of contour and shape is one of basic functions of vision. To this end, visual system processes information in a hierarchical way; first it extracts local orientations, then it integrates the local orientations into intermediate representations of contour, and finally it forms global shape percepts (Loffler, 2008). The intermediate representation of contour would include concavity, convexity, corner angle, curvature, and so forth. Although it is obvious that the physical shape is determined by combination of the local orientations, perceptual shape is susceptible to several factors. Accordingly, as visual illusions demonstrate, percepts are not necessarily veridical. For example, the café wall illusion (Pierce, 1898) demonstrates that parallel horizontal lines are perceived as different angles to each other.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25827 - Posted: 12.28.2018

Incorporating genetic diversity into a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease resulted in greater overlap with the genetic, molecular and clinical features of this pervasive human disease, according to a study funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study also suggests that adding genetic diversity may be key to improving the predictive power of studies using mouse models and increasing their usability for precision medicine research for Alzheimer’s. This research comes out of the newly established Resilience-Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (Resilience-AD) and was published online Dec. 27, 2018 in the journal Neuron. “This is the first study to show that you can replicate many of the molecular features of Alzheimer’s disease in a genetically diverse mouse model,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “It points to a strategy for better use of mouse models for precision medicine research—both basic and translational—for Alzheimer’s disease.” Alzheimer's disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and, eventually, the ability to carry out simple tasks. As many as 5.5 million Americans age 65 and older are estimated to be living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. A key tool among the multiple efforts to find a treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s, mouse models allow researchers to explore genetic, molecular and even behavioral aspects of disease that can’t be done in humans. The researchers, led by Catherine C. Kaczorowski, Ph.D. (link is external), an associate professor and Evnin Family Chair in Alzheimer’s Research at the Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine, and her graduate student, first author Sarah Neuner, noted that mouse models with Alzheimer’s mutations are important for defining high-risk as well as protective genes and disease mechanisms, and to efficiently test new potential interventions and therapeutics.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25826 - Posted: 12.28.2018