Giorgia Guglielmi A study that claims to show that a homeopathic treatment can ease pain in rats has caused uproar after it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Groups that promote homeopathy in Italy, where there is currently a debate about how to label homeopathic remedies, have held the study up as evidence that the practice works. But several researchers have cast doubt on its claims. The authors acknowledge some errors flagged in an analysis of the paper by a separate researcher, but stand by its overall conclusions. Senior author, pharmacologist Chandragouda Patil of the R. C. Patel Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research in Dhule, India, also says that the results are preliminary and cannot yet be applied to people, and that he hopes that the team’s findings will encourage other researchers to conduct clinical studies. Researchers have presented evidence in support of homeopathy before — famously, in a 1988 Nature paper2 by French immunologist Jacques Benveniste that was later discredited. This latest claim has attracted attention, in part, because it passed peer review at the journal Scientific Reports. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher Springer Nature, which also publishes Scientific Reports). © 2018 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25549 - Posted: 10.09.2018

Laura Sanders The brain’s hippocampi may be the film editors of our lives, slicing our continuous experiences into discrete cuts that can be stored away as memories. That’s the idea raised by a new study that analyzed brain scan data from people watching films such as “Forrest Gump.” “Research like this helps us identify ‘What is an event, from the point of view of the brain?’ ” says memory psychologist Gabriel Radvansky of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Many laboratory tests of memory involve taking in discrete, dull lists of information. “So much research is done with these little bits and pieces — words, pictures, things like that,” Radvansky says. But those dry tidbits aren’t what the human brain usually handles. “The mind is built to deal with complex events.” As a closer approximation to real life, researchers used brain imaging data collected earlier as part of a larger project: While undergoing a functional MRI, 15 people watched “Forrest Gump,” and 253 people watched Alfred Hitchcock’s television drama “Bang! You’re Dead.” A separate group of 16 observers watched each of the productions and pressed buttons to indicate when they thought one event ended and another began. With the data in hand, cognitive neuroscientists Aya Ben-Yakov and Rik Henson, both of the University of Cambridge, aligned participants’ brain activity with the transition points marked by the 16 observers. A brain structure called the hippocampus, known to be important for memory and navigation, seemed particularly active at these junctures, the team reports October 8 in the Journal of Neuroscience. When the researchers looked at hippocampus behavior over the entire shows, the brain structure was most active when the observers had indicated a shift from one event to another. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25548 - Posted: 10.09.2018

By Daniel T. Willingham You must read this article to understand it, but many people feel reading is not how they learn best. They would rather listen to an explanation or view a diagram. Researchers have formalized those intuitions into theories of learning styles. These theories are influential enough that many states (including New York) require future teachers to know them and to know how they might be used in the classroom. But there’s no good scientific evidence that learning styles actually exist. Over the last several decades, researchers have proposed dozens of theories, each suggesting a scheme to categorize learners. The best known proposes that some of us like words and others like pictures, but other theories make different distinctions: whether you like to solve problems intuitively or by analyzing them, for example, or whether you prefer to tackle a complex idea with an overview or by diving into details. If one of these theories were right, it would bring important benefits. In the classroom, a brief test would categorize children as this type of learner or that, and then a teacher could include more of this or that in their schooling. In the workplace, a manager might send one employee a memo but communicate the same information to another in a conversation. Does such matching work? To find out, researchers must determine individuals’ supposed learning style and then ask them to learn something in a way that matches or conflicts with it. For example, in an experiment testing the visual-auditory theory, researchers determined subjects’ styles by asking about their usual mental strategies: Do you spell an unfamiliar word by sounding it out or visualizing the letters? Do you give directions in words or by drawing a map? Next, researchers read statements, and participants rated either how easily the statement prompted a mental image (a visual learning experience) or how easy it was to pronounce (an auditory learning experience). The auditory learners should have remembered statements better if they focused on the sound rather than if they created visual images, and visual learners should have shown the opposite pattern. But they didn’t. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25547 - Posted: 10.08.2018

Jon Hamilton As a specialist in Alzheimer's prevention, Jessica Langbaum knows that exercising her mental muscles can help keep her brain sharp. But Langbaum, who holds a doctorate in psychiatric epidemiology, has no formal mental fitness program. She doesn't do crossword puzzles or play computer brain games. "Just sitting down and doing Sudoku isn't probably going to be the one key thing that's going to prevent you from developing Alzheimer's disease," she says. Instead of using a formal brain training program, she simply goes to work. "My job is my daily cognitive training," says Langbaum, the associate director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix. And that's true of most working people. "While you're still in the work force you are getting that daily challenge of multitasking, of remembering things, of processing information," she says. Langbaum offers that perspective as someone who has spent years studying the effects of brain training programs, and as someone who has seen Alzheimer's up close. "My grandfather was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment when I was in graduate school getting my Ph.D.," she says. "That transitioned into full-blown Alzheimer's dementia." So Langbaum began to ask herself a question: "How can I in my career help ensure that we aren't suffering from the disease when we reach that age?" And she realized early on that puzzles and games weren't the answer because they tend to focus on one very narrow task. The result is like exercising just one muscle in your body, Langbaum says. That muscle will get stronger, but your overall fitness isn't going to change. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 25546 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Rowan Hooper Let’s start with a number that many have come across in math class: pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It begins with 3.14159 . . . and carries on forever. It is infinite and irrational, never ending and never repeating, and people are drawn into its orbit. To some, the attraction is spiritual; to others, the pull may be explained by the “because it’s there” reasoning of mountaineers. Memory athletes — so called because of their intensive training in games of the mind — in particular are drawn to the endlessness of pi. Akira Haraguchi of Kisarazu, near Tokyo, recited pi to more than 100,000 digits in 2006, a feat that lasted more than 16 hours. To him, pi represents a religious quest for meaning. “Reciting pi’s digits has the same meaning as chanting the Buddhist mantra and meditating,” Haraguchi, who is 72, says. He is widely recognized as the champion of pi, although Guinness World Records has not validated his recitation. The official Guinness record holder is Rajveer Meena, 23, from Rajasthan, India. On March 21, 2015, Meena recited pi to 70,000 decimal places. (It took him 9 hours 7 minutes.) He said he wanted to show that despite a humble background, he could win the world’s toughest memory challenge. Memory wizards have varying motivations and use different techniques, but they all essentially convert the exercise into a story. When they recite the numbers, they are telling themselves a tale in their head and rendering it into digits. Haraguchi uses a system based on the Japanese kana alphabet. Translated roughly into English, the first 50 digits of his translation reads: “Well, I, that fragile being who left my hometown to find a peace of mind, is going to die in the dark corners; it’s easy to die, but I stay positive.” © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25545 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Laura M. Holson Cat lovers of the world rejoice! In the long-simmering dispute over whether dogs are smarter than cats, a recent study published in the journal Learning & Behavior suggests that dogs are no more exceptional than other animals when it comes to canniness and intelligence. The news is sure to ignite debate (watch the fur fly!) among dog owners and scientists who study canine behavior. The authors reviewed existing studies and data on animal cognition and found that while dogs are smart and trainable, they are not “super smart,” despite what most dog owners will tell you. The idea for the study came about when Stephen Lea, an emeritus professor in the psychology department at the University of Exeter in Britain, was editor of Animal Cognition, a journal that seeks to explain cognition among humans and animals in the context of evolution. Dog research, he said in an interview last week, was quite popular in the 1990s and continues to be so. “I was getting a number of papers showing how remarkable the things were that dogs could do,” he said. When it came to other animals, though, scientific studies on intelligence barely trickled in, despite evidence to suggest that horses, chimpanzees and cats had tricks of their own. “Almost everything a dog claimed to do, other animals could do too,” Dr. Lea said. “It made me quite wary that dogs were special.” Sure, there is Chaser, a Border collie from Spartanburg, S.C., who was trained to understand 1,022 nouns. (His owner, John Pilley, a scientist who studied canine cognition, recently died.) Before that was a Border collie named Rico who learned to recognize the names of 200 items. But beyond those examples, Dr. Lea wondered: Had dog lovers (and scientists, for that matter) imbued their pets with extraordinary capabilities they did not possess? © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 25544 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By John Horgan I’m already getting pushback against my free online book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are. Tom Clark knocks me for not giving more credit to straight-forward materialism, or naturalism, as he prefers to call it. Meanwhile, Deepak Chopra, while defending an anti-materialistic view, compares my pluralistic approach “to giving every player in a junior soccer match a trophy.” Good one, Deepak! See “Discussion” for these and other comments. It was precisely because people have divergent views of the mind-body problem that I decided to write a book about it. The mind-body problem is the knottiest of all mysteries. It encompasses puzzles such as consciousness (which David Chalmers calls “the hard problem”), free will, the self, morality and the meaning of life (which Owen Flanagan, a subject of my book, calls “the really hard problem”). Another way of posing the mind-body problem is simply by asking, Who are we, really? Sages as diverse as Buddha, Plato, Kant and Douglas Hofstadter (to whom I devote a chapter of Mind-Body Problems) have offered answers to this question. In the early 1990s, Francis Crick said that science had finally given us the tools to solve the problem once and for all. In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, he spells out the implications of his ultra-materialistic creed “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25543 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Emily Underwood The ornately folded outer layer of the human brain, the cerebral cortex, has long received nearly all the credit for our ability to perform complex cognitive tasks such as composing a sonata, imagining the plot of a novel or reflecting on our own thoughts. One explanation for how we got these abilities is that the cortex rapidly expanded relative to body size as primates evolved — the human cortex has 10 times the surface area of a monkey’s cortex, for example, and 1,000 times that of a mouse. But the cortex is not the only brain region that has gotten bigger and more complex throughout evolution. Nestled beneath the cortex, a pair of egg-shaped structures called the thalamus has also grown, and its wiring became much more intricate as mammals diverged from reptiles. The thalamus — from the Greek thalamos, or inner chamber — transmits 98 percent of sensory information to the cortex, including vision, taste, touch and balance; the only sense that doesn’t pass through this brain region is smell. The thalamus also conducts motor signals and relays information from the brain stem to the cortex, coordinating shifts in consciousness such as waking up and falling asleep. Scientists have known for decades that the thalamus faithfully transmits information about the visual world from the retina to the cortex, leading to the impression that it is largely a messenger of sensory information rather than a center of complex cognition itself. But that limited, passive view of the thalamus is outdated, maintains Michael Halassa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who recently coauthored (with Ralf D. Wimmer and Rajeev V. Rikhye) an article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience exploring the thalamus’s role. © 2018 Annual Reviews, Inc

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25542 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Jane E. Brody Jane R. Madell, a pediatric audiology consultant and speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, N.Y., wants every parent with a child who is born hearing-impaired to know that it is now possible for nearly all children with severe hearing loss to learn to listen and speak as if their hearing were completely normal. “Children identified with hearing loss at birth and fitted with technology in the first weeks of life blend in so well with everyone else that people don’t realize there are so many deaf children,” she told me. With the appropriate hearing device and auditory training for children and their caregivers during the preschool years, even those born deaf “will have the ability to learn with their peers when they start school,” Dr. Madell said. “Eighty-five percent of such children are successfully mainstreamed. Parents need to know that listening and spoken language is a possibility for their children.” Determined to get this message out to all who learn their children lack normal hearing, Dr. Madell and Irene Taylor Brodsky produced a documentary, “The Listening Project,” to demonstrate the enormous help available through modern hearing assists and auditory training. Among the “stars” in the film, all of whom grew up deaf or severely hearing-impaired, are Dr. Elizabeth Bonagura, an obstetrician-gynecologist and surgeon; Jake Spinowitz, a musician; Joanna Lippert, a medical social worker, and Amy Pollick, a psychologist. All started out with hearing aids that helped them learn to speak and understand spoken language. But now all have cochlear implants that, as Ms. Lippert put it, “really revolutionized my world” when, at age 11, she became the first preteen to get a cochlear implant at New York University Medical Center. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25541 - Posted: 10.08.2018

Rhitu Chatterjee Paige Thesing has struggled with insomnia since high school. "It takes me a really long time to fall asleep — about four hours," she says. For years, her mornings were groggy and involved a "lot of coffee." After a year of trying sleep medication prescribed by her doctor, she turned to the internet for alternate solutions. About four months ago, she settled on a mobile phone meditation app called INSCAPE. "It's about a 30-minute soundtrack, and it starts with a woman kind of telling you to relax and instructing your breathing," explains Thesing. "Then it goes into sounds — relaxing noises. There's wind chimes, some atmospheric music playing..." She uses the app every night and falls asleep within 15 or 20 minutes. "So, definitely a big improvement from four hours," she says. Thesing is not alone. Chronic insomnia affects an estimated 10-15 percent of adults, and another 25-35 percent struggle with sleep issues occasionally. And like Thesing, a growing number of insomniacs are turning to mobile phone apps to lull them to sleep. On Twitter and Facebook, NPR asked its audience if they have used a mobile phone app to help manage insomnia. Nearly 100 people wrote back suggesting a range of apps, including podcasts created to put a listener to sleep. "These are usually relaxation strategies, white noise, meditation," Jason Ong, an associate professor of neurology specializing in sleep at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. He studies non-pharmacological treatments for various sleep disorders and treats patients at the university's Sleep Medicine clinic. "It's not that there's something wrong with those apps. It's a reasonable first thing to try." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25540 - Posted: 10.08.2018

Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent Chinese tech giant Tencent and London medical firm Medopad have teamed up to use artificial intelligence in the diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease. A camera captures the way patients move their hands to determine the severity of their symptoms. The research team has trained the system with existing videos of patients who have been assessed by doctors, working with King's College Hospital in London. "We use the AI to measure the deterioration of Parkinson's disease patients without the patient wearing any sensors or devices," explains Dr Wei Fan, head of the Tencent Medical AI lab. The aim is to speed up a motor function assessment process, which usually takes more than half an hour. Using smartphone technology developed by Medopad, the hope is that patients could be assessed within three minutes - and might not even have to attend a hospital. Medopad is a London-based firm that has been developing apps and wearable devices to monitor patients with various medical conditions. It has been growing fast - but is a minnow compared with Tencent, which is spearheading China's huge investment in AI. Medopad's chief executive Dan Vahdat sais that there was no British company that could match what Tencent offered as a partner. "Our ambition is to impact a billion patients around the world - and to be able to get to that kind of scale we need to work with partners that have international reach," he told me. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 25539 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Neal Pollack AUSTIN, Tex. — My name is Neal, and I’m a marijuana addict. A year ago I wouldn’t have said that, because it would have meant giving up marijuana. I would rather have given up breathing. When I had my first cup of coffee in the morning, I pressed the little button on my vape pen, waited for the blue glow, took a huge inhale and then blew it into the mug so that I could suck in the THC and caffeine at the same time. Then I took another hit, and another. In the afternoons, I’d smoke a bowl, or pop a gummy bear, or both. At night, I got high before eating dinner or watching the ballgame. Maybe I’d stop getting stoned a little bit before bed, but what was the point? If I went to bed high, I could wake up high, too. What a time for people to get stoned! Marijuana has left the counterculture, exploded into the mainstream and transformed into a multibillion-dollar industry. Cannabis is now an essential part of any hip wellness and beauty regimen. Netflix offers a marijuana-themed cooking show. Cannabis should be legal. It has medical uses. Millions of people, most of them black and Latino men, have unjustly gone to jail for selling what should have been easily available in stores. States with the political courage to legalize it have seen their tax rolls bloom and have created thousands of jobs. Also, it’s delicious. But I’m not a child with intractable epilepsy, or a veteran with PTSD, or a person who just wants to chill a little, or Willie Nelson. Unless you count writing articles about marijuana, I’m not profiting from the industry. I’m just a middle-aged house dad with a substance-abuse problem. Like most pot addicts in denial, I spent years telling myself that marijuana isn’t addictive, and so I didn’t have a problem. But clearly I did. And I’m not the only one who suffers this way. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25538 - Posted: 10.08.2018

By Erin Blakemore Are you depressed? If you’re not sure, it’s no surprise. Perpetual sadness isn’t the only symptom. Anger, back pain, sleep disturbances and even indecisiveness could all be signs of depression. One in six adults will experience depression in their life, but you can’t get help if you’re not sure you need it. Your doctor can screen for depression, so it’s worth asking on your next visit. Isolation and social withdrawal are common among people with depression. But it’s still possible to seek help during these periods. If you can’t face the thought of visiting your doctor, you can find information and assistance on your computer or smartphone. Screening for Mental Health’s online screening program gives a brief survey. It then tells you whether your answers are consistent with depression and provides materials to bring to your next doctor’s visit and a list of resources. Although it’s not a formal diagnosis, it’s a place to start to seek help. Crisis Text Line can connect you with a trained crisis counselor who can take you from crisis to cool down, all via text. The service is free and confidential. It’s available to people experiencing any kind of crisis. Text HOME to 741741 to get started. The National Alliance on Mental Illness can also connect you to mental-health resources, including help for depression. Visit nami.org/Find-Support or call the NAMI Helpline, 800-950-NAMI, between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25537 - Posted: 10.08.2018

Selene Meza-Perez, Troy D. Randall Fat is a loaded tissue. Not only is it considered unsightly, the excess flab that plagues more than two-thirds of adults in America is associated with many well-documented health problems. In fact, obesity (defined as having a body mass index of 30 or more) is a comorbidity for almost every other type of disease. But, demonized as all body fat is, deep belly fat known as visceral adipose tissue (VAT) also has a good side: it’s a critical component of the body’s immune system. VAT is home to many cells of both the innate and adaptive immune systems. These cells influence adipocyte biology and metabolism, and in turn, adipocytes regulate the functions of the immune cells and provide energy for their activities. Moreover, the adipocytes themselves produce antimicrobial peptides, proinflammatory cytokines, and adipokines that together act to combat infection, modify the function of immune cells, and maintain metabolic homeostasis. Unfortunately, obesity disrupts both the endocrine and immune functions of VAT, thereby promoting inflammation and tissue damage that can lead to diabetes or inflammatory bowel disease. As researchers continue to piece together the complex connections between immunity, gut microbes, and adipose tissues, including the large deposit of fat in the abdomen known as the omentum, they hope not only to gain an understanding of how fat and immunity are linked, but to also develop fat-targeted therapeutics that can moderate the consequences of infectious and inflammatory diseases. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Obesity; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25536 - Posted: 10.06.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi The melodious call of many birds comes from a mysterious organ buried deep within their chests: a one-of-a-kind voice box called a syrinx. Now, scientists have concluded that this voice box evolved only once, and that it represents a rare example of a true evolutionary novelty. “It’s something that comes out of nothing,” says Denis Dubuole, a geneticist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who was not involved with the work. “There is nothing that looks like a syrinx in any related animal groups in vertebrates. This is very bizarre.” Reptiles, amphibians, and mammals all have a larynx, a voice box at the top of the throat that protects the airways. Folds of tissue there—the vocal cords—can also vibrate to enable humans to talk, pigs to grunt, and lions to roar. Birds have larynxes, too. But the organ they use to sing their tunes is lower down—where the windpipe splits to go into the two lungs. The syrinx, named in 1872 after a Greek nymph who was transformed into panpipes, has a similar structure: Both are tubes supported by cartilage with folds of tissue. The oldest known syrinx belongs to a bird fossil some 67 million years old; that’s about the same time all modern bird groups became established. To figure out where the bizarre organ came from, Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas in Austin, who made the syrinx discovery in 2013, assembled a team of developmental biologists, evolutionary biologists, and other researchers. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 25535 - Posted: 10.06.2018

By Jim Hopper On Monday October 1, Republican senators released “Analysis of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s Allegations,” a memo written by Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor they hired to question Christine Blasey Ford and review other evidence. Ms. Mitchell’s “analysis” includes descriptions of Ford’s memories as not “consistent,” lacking “key details,” and uncorroborated by people she said were at the “party.” In the final two weeks of September, many Americans learned from the media (e.g., USA Today, Rolling Stone, Vox, NBC News, NPR) the distinction that memory researchers make between “central” and “peripheral” details, terms that reflect the commonsense understanding that we remember things that had significance to us and got our attention. Many people have also learned that stress and trauma greatly enhance the differential storage of central over peripheral details, and that the central details of traumatic experiences can get burned into our brains for the rest of our lives. But most people already knew that too, even if they hadn’t stopped to think about it. Advertisement These past few weeks, I’ve tried to help with that learning, by talking with reporters and sharing the expert testimony on trauma and memory that I could have provided to senators and the country, which was published by Scientific American and on my blog with Psychology Today, Sexual Assault and the Brain. There I explain central versus peripheral details, that stress amplifies their differential encoding and storage, and how sexual assault survivors—like traumatized soldiers and police—may protect themselves by clinging for years to superficial descriptions of events, which keep the most disturbing details out of their minds. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 25534 - Posted: 10.06.2018

By Carl Zimmer People of Asian and European descent — almost anyone with origins outside of Africa — have inherited a sliver of DNA from some unusual ancestors: the Neanderthals. These genes are the result of repeated interbreeding long ago between Neanderthals and modern humans. But why are those genes still there 40,000 years after Neanderthals became extinct? As it turns out, some of them may protect humans against infections. In a study published on Thursday, scientists reported new evidence that modern humans encountered new viruses — including some related to influenza, herpes and H.I.V. — as they expanded out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago. Some of those infections may have been picked up directly from Neanderthals. Without immunity to pathogens they had never encountered, modern humans were particularly vulnerable. “We were actually able to not only say, ‘Yes, modern humans and Neanderthals exchanged viruses,’” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new paper, published in the journal Cell. “We are able to start saying something about which types of viruses were involved.” But if Neanderthals made us sick, they also helped keep us well. Some of the genes inherited from them through interbreeding also protected our ancestors from these infections, just as they protected the Neanderthals. Lluis Quintana-Murci, a geneticist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was not involved in the new research, said that until now, scientists had not dreamed of getting such a glimpse at the distant medical history of our species. “Five years ago, we would never have imagined that,” he said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25533 - Posted: 10.05.2018

Doris Tsao is a neuroscientist who uses brain imaging technology, electrical recording techniques, and mathematical modeling. Though Tsao has explored several aspects of visual processing, such as the perception of depth and color, her most notable line of research has focused on uncovering the fundamental neural principles that underlie one of the brain’s most highly specialized and socially important tasks: recognizing a face. Prior neuroscientific research has identified regions in the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys that are particularly responsive to faces. These earlier studies, however, shed little light on how face-responsive cells within these regions might be organized and integrated into a system. Early in her career, Tsao confirmed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that the visual cortex of the macaque monkey shows face-selective activation in six small “patches” in each hemisphere of the brain. She then used data from fMRI brain scans as a map to guide the placement of single-neuron, electrical recording probes, which demonstrated that certain neurons display highly attuned sensitivity to faces, but not to other categories of objects, and that different patches across the brain’s cortex are integrated in a network dedicated to the visual processing of faces. Through other elegantly designed experiments, Tsao showed that the sensitivity of specific neurons can be further analyzed by measuring their responses to cartoon representations of faces with subtle variations in features and that certain features, such as facial shape and inter-eye distance, elicit particularly frequent and robust responses. © 2018 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 25532 - Posted: 10.05.2018

By Benedict Carey Dr. Bernard J. Carroll, whose studies of severe depression gave psychiatry the closest thing it has to a “blood test” for a mental disorder, and who later became one of the field’s most relentless critics, helping to expose pervasive corruption in academic research, died on Sept. 10 at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 77. His wife, Sylvia Carroll, said the cause was lung cancer. Dr. Carroll was all of 28 when he published a paper that seemed to herald a new age of psychiatry, one rooted in biology rather than Freudian theory. Trained both in endocrinology and psychiatry, he applied a test from that first specialty — the dexamethasone suppression test, or DST — to people with mood problems. The test measures the body’s ability to suppress its own surges of cortisol, a stress hormone. In a 1968 article in The British Medical Journal, Dr. Carroll announced that when the test was administered to people with the severest species of depression — a paralyzing gloom then called melancholia, or endogenous depression — their bodies were shown to have trouble suppressing the hormone. People with other kinds of mood disorders had normal scores. The test did not mean that failure to suppress cortisol caused depression, just that it was associated with it. “I thought of it as a confirmatory test, to support a diagnosis, not to make one,” Dr. Carroll, known as Barney, said, in a recent interview in his home, “and possibly as a way to monitor progress in treatment.” It didn’t happen. In 1980, experts revising psychiatry’s influential diagnostic manual eliminated distinctions in kinds of depression. Melancholia was lumped with many other mild and moderate conditions under the classification “major depressive disorder.” Soon after, modern antidepressants hit the market, and pharmaceutical companies paid top academics around the world to help interpret studies, massage data and promote their products. The field chased the drugs, and the money, and learned nothing about the biology of mental disorders. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25531 - Posted: 10.05.2018

By Laura M. Holson Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have recommended that psilocybin, the active compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, be reclassified for medical use, potentially paving the way for the psychedelic drug to one day treat depression and anxiety and help people stop smoking. The suggestion to reclassify psilocybin from a Schedule I drug, with no known medical benefit, to a Schedule IV drug, which is akin to prescription sleeping pills, was part of a review to assess the safety and abuse of medically administered psilocybin. Before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify the drug, though, it has to clear extensive study and trials, which can take more than five years, the researchers wrote. The analysis was published in the October print issue of Neuropharmacology, a medical journal focused on neuroscience. The study comes as many Americans shift their attitudes toward the use of some illegal drugs. The widespread legalization of marijuana has helped demystify drug use, with many people now recognizing the medicinal benefits for those with anxiety, arthritis and other physical ailments. Psychedelics, like LSD and psilocybin, are illegal and not approved for medical or recreational use. But in recent years scientists and consumers have begun rethinking their use to combat depression and anxiety. “We are seeing a demographic shift, particularly among women,” said Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins and one of the study’s authors. Among the research he has conducted, he said, “we’ve had more females in our studies.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25530 - Posted: 10.04.2018