By Elizabeth Pennisi TAMPA, FLORIDA—Swimming through the oceans, voraciously consuming plankton and other small creatures—and occasionally startling a swimmer—the beautiful gelatinous masses known as comb jellies won’t be joining Mensa anytime soon. But these fragile creatures have nerve cells—and they offer insights about the evolutionary origins of all nervous systems, including our own. Inspired by studies of a glue-secreting cell unique to these plankton predators, researchers have now proposed that neurons emerged in the last common ancestor of today’s animals—and that their progenitors were secretory cells, whose primary function was to release chemicals into the environment. Joseph Ryan, a computational evolutionary biologist the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, suggested that scenario last year after tracing the development of nerve cells in embryos of comb jellies, among the most ancient animals. Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) here, he marshaled evidence from developmental studies of other animals, all pointing to common origins for some neuron and secretory cells. “What Ryan is proposing is novel and important,” says David Plachetzki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Among other mysteries, it could resolve a long debate about whether the nervous system evolved twice early in animal life. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25857 - Posted: 01.11.2019

Laura Sanders Young nerve cells derived from people with autism are precocious, growing bigger and developing sooner than cells taken from people without autism, a new study shows. The results, described January 7 in Nature Neuroscience, hint that in some cases nerve cells veer off course early in brain development to ultimately cause the disorder. As a proxy of brain growth, researchers led by Simon Schafer of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., transformed skin cells from people with and without autism into stem cells that then developed into nerve cells in the lab. Along the way, the scientists monitored the cells’ growth and the behavior of their genes. Compared with cells derived from five people without autism, cells from eight people with autism grew bigger, with longer and more elaborate branches, the researchers found. Three-dimensional balls called organoids made of the autism-derived cells were bulkier, too. In addition to this physical development, a group of genes important for brain development switched on sooner. Trouble in the autism-derived cells, however, actually began a bit earlier, just as the cells were on the cusp of becoming nerve cells. At the neural stem cell stage, certain spots of these cells’ chromatin — tightly packed genetic material — were more open and accessible than they should have been, an unfolding that can lead to abnormally active genes. The results show that open chromatin “can have major effects on neuronal development,” says neuroscientist David Amaral of the University of California, Davis. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25856 - Posted: 01.11.2019

Bruce Bower An ancient hominid skeleton dubbed Little Foot possessed a brain largely similar to that of modern chimpanzees and an inner ear with a mix of apelike and humanlike features, two studies suggest. These findings, along with other analyses of the adult female’s 3.67-million-year-old skeleton, point to the piecemeal evolution of humanlike traits in close relatives of our species, scientists say. The research is part of the first formal analyses of Little Foot’s skeleton, which was discovered more than 20 years ago in a South African cave but was recently removed from its rocky encasing. Other analyses of trunk and limb bones indicate that Little Foot, who lived perhaps a million years before the emergence of the human genus, Homo, already walked upright about as well as people today do (SN: 1/19/19, p.13). Although Little Foot consists of a nearly complete skeleton, her evolutionary identity is controversial. Paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg — Little Foot’s discoverer and a coauthor of the two new studies — assigns the find to Australopithecus prometheus, an early extinct hominid species that many scientists don’t regard as valid. Other researchers regard Little Foot as an early member of Australopithecus africanus, a species previously known from fossils discovered at several South African sites (SN: 1/19/19, p. 13). |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 25855 - Posted: 01.10.2019

By Perri Klass, M.D. Pain control in infants and children has come a long way over the past few decades. Experts know how to provide appropriate anesthesia when children need surgery and understand the ways that even very young children express distress when they’re hurting afterward. There is a lot of evidence about reducing the pain and anxiety that can accompany immunizations and blood draws, and there is increasing expertise about helping children who struggle with chronic pain. But today’s parents may be shocked to learn that was not always the case. As recently as the early 1980s, the pain of children and infants was thought to be different from that of adults and was sometimes treated differently, or sometimes not treated at all. Change doesn’t always come easily in medicine, so there’s a certain onus on parents to make sure that their children get state-of-the-art pain management around procedures, large and small. That means preparation before any planned surgery, ideally with a child life specialist, and it means careful attention to the child’s pain afterward, with parents well backed up by medical specialists. Let me start in the bad old days: About 30 years ago, when I was doing my residency, my 4-year-old son fractured his femur. After surgery, he found himself on the orthopedic ward of my very own hospital, and in a fair amount of pain (the femur is the biggest bone in the body, and there was a lot of tissue damage). As his busybody on-call pediatric resident mother, I discovered that the pain control ordered by the surgeons was “IM MSO4 PRN.” That meant he could have an intramuscular dose of morphine whenever the pain from the fracture was so bad that it overcame a 4-year-old’s fear of shots. To get pain relief, he would have to request the needle. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25854 - Posted: 01.10.2019

Diana Kwon When Adriano Aguzzi, a neuropathologist at the University of Zurich, learned that the application to renew his lab’s license for mouse experiments was rejected in December, he was stunned. Aguzzi uses rodents to investigate prions—misfolded proteins that cause fatal neurodegenerative disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—and for the last two decades, he has successfully received authorization to conduct studies that involve inoculating animals with prions and monitoring their vital signs as they develop disease. The latest license request was “the same application that has been renewed every three years,” he tells The Scientist. Aguzzi is one of several scientists who say it has become increasingly difficult to get licenses for animal experiments in recent years. Switzerland has some of the strictest animal protection laws in the world, and as a result, the quantity of animals used in research has steadily declined over the years. Between 2008 and 2017, for example, the number dropped by more than 100,000 per year. “What I’ve seen over the past 20 years is that regulations have tightened quite a lot. It requires much more work to write a license application and to get it approved,” says Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroepigeneticist at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. “Most of the additional requirements are good, because they have optimized the research in terms of animal numbers and forced us to better plan and document our experiments—but some changes are not necessary and have complicated our work.” © 1986 - 2019 The Scientist

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25853 - Posted: 01.10.2019

By Elizabeth Pennisi American Kennel Club descriptions of dog breeds can read like online dating profiles: The border collie is a workaholic; the German shepherd will put its life on the line for loved ones. Now, in the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, scientists have shown that such distinct breed traits are actually rooted in a dog’s genes. The findings may shed light on human behaviors as well. “It’s a huge advance,” says Elaine Ostrander, a mammalian geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved with the work. “It’s a finite number of genes, and a lot of them do make sense.” When the dog genome was sequenced in 2005, scientists thought they would quickly be able to pin down the genes that give every breed its hallmark personality. But they found so much variation even within a breed that they could never study enough dogs to get meaningful results. So in the new study, Evan MacLean, a comparative psychologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues began by looking at behavioral data for about 14,000 dogs from 101 breeds. The analyses come from the Canine Behavioral Assessment & Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ), a sort of pet personality quiz developed by James Serpell, an ethologist at the University of Pennsylvania. C-BARQ asks questions like, “What does your dog do when a stranger comes to the door?” to allow owners to objectively characterize 14 aspects of their pet’s personalities, including trainability, attachment, and aggression. Since the survey was developed in 2003, more than 50,000 owners have participated. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 25852 - Posted: 01.09.2019

Elizabeth Preston A little blue-and-black fish swims up to a mirror. It maneuvers its body vertically to reflect its belly, along with a brown mark that researchers have placed on its throat. The fish then pivots and dives to strike its throat against the sandy bottom of its tank with a glancing blow. Then it returns to the mirror. Depending on which scientists you ask, this moment represents either a revolution or a red herring. Alex Jordan, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, thinks this fish — a cleaner wrasse — has just passed a classic test of self-recognition. Scientists have long thought that being able to recognize oneself in a mirror reveals some sort of self-awareness, and perhaps an awareness of others’ perspectives, too. For almost 50 years, they have been using mirrors to test animals for that capacity. After letting an animal get familiar with a mirror, they put a mark someplace on the animal’s body that it can see only in its reflection. If the animal looks in the mirror and then touches or examines the mark on its body, it passes the test. Humans don’t usually reach this milestone until we’re toddlers. Very few other species ever pass the test; those that do are mostly or entirely big-brained mammals such as chimpanzees. And yet as reported in a study that appeared on bioRxiv.org earlier this year and that is due for imminent publication in PLOS Biology, Jordan and his co-authors observed this seemingly self-aware behavior in a tiny fish. Jordan’s findings have consequently inspired strong feelings in the field. “There are researchers who, it seems, do not want fish to be included in this secret club,” he said. “Because then that means that the [primates] are not so special anymore.” All Rights Reserved © 2019

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 25851 - Posted: 01.09.2019

By Karen Weintraub Sometimes a whale just wants to change its tune. That’s one of the things researchers have learned recently by eavesdropping on whales in several parts of the world and listening for changes in their pattern and pitch. Together, the new studies suggest that whales are not just whistling in the water, but constantly evolving a form of communication that we are only beginning to understand. Most whales and dolphins vocalize, but dolphins and toothed whales mostly make clicking and whistling sounds. Humpbacks, and possibly bowheads, sing complex songs with repeated patterns, said Michael Noad, an associate professor in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia. Birds may broadcast their social hierarchy among song-sharing populations by allowing the dominant bird to pick the playlist and patterns. But how and why whales pass song fragments across hundreds of miles, and to thousands of animals, is far more mysterious. The biggest question is why whales sing at all. “The thing that always gets me out of bed in the morning is the function of the song,” Dr. Noad said. “I find humpback song fascinating from the point of view of how it’s evolved.” The leading hypothesis is that male humpbacks — only the males sing — are trying to attract females. But they may also switch tunes when another male is nearby, apparently to assess a rival’s size and fitness, said Dr. Noad, who was the senior author of one of four new papers on whale songs. © 2019 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25850 - Posted: 01.09.2019

By Karen Weintraub Research on Alzheimer’s has mainly focused on Caucasians. New findings, however, suggest the disease process that leads to dementia may differ in African–Americans. According to a study published Monday in JAMA Neurology, the brains of African–Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer’s have less buildup of a protein called tau—one of the two hallmark proteins that characterize the disease. It is not clear why African–Americans would have less tau while still suffering from Alzheimer’s, says neurologist John Morris, who led the research. But the finding is significant because it means the medical community needs to exercise caution when defining Alzheimer’s by measures of tau buildup alone. The study also suggests race might affect other aspects of the disease’s pathology, says Morris, who directs the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center at Washington University in Saint Louis. “The study of Alzheimer’s disease, which really began formally in the United States in the mid-1980s, has largely been of white people,” he notes. “The U.S. in general and the older adult portion of the U.S. population is increasingly diverse, so we really do need to study all populations to try to understand the disease and its forms.” For the moment, the differences detected in the disease’s pathology will not change existing treatment protocols, which do not yet look at certain aberrant proteins to make a diagnosis. Physicians today diagnose Alzheimer’s largely based on a patient’s neuropsychological characteristics. But once researchers have developed a more practical way to measure levels of key proteins involved in the disease, such differences could be crucial for accurate diagnoses, Morris says. Brain scans can detect tau as well as amyloid beta—another protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers—but the scans are expensive and not widely available. © 2019 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25849 - Posted: 01.09.2019

By Malcolm Gladwell A few years ago, the National Academy of Medicine convened a panel of sixteen leading medical experts to analyze the scientific literature on cannabis. The report they prepared, which came out in January of 2017, runs to four hundred and sixty-eight pages. It contains no bombshells or surprises, which perhaps explains why it went largely unnoticed. It simply stated, over and over again, that a drug North Americans have become enthusiastic about remains a mystery. For example, smoking pot is widely supposed to diminish the nausea associated with chemotherapy. But, the panel pointed out, “there are no good-quality randomized trials investigating this option.” We have evidence for marijuana as a treatment for pain, but “very little is known about the efficacy, dose, routes of administration, or side effects of commonly used and commercially available cannabis products in the United States.” The caveats continue. Is it good for epilepsy? “Insufficient evidence.” Tourette’s syndrome? Limited evidence. A.L.S., Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s? Insufficient evidence. Irritable-bowel syndrome? Insufficient evidence. Dementia and glaucoma? Probably not. Anxiety? Maybe. Depression? Probably not. Then come Chapters 5 through 13, the heart of the report, which concern marijuana’s potential risks. The haze of uncertainty continues. Does the use of cannabis increase the likelihood of fatal car accidents? Yes. By how much? Unclear. Does it affect motivation and cognition? Hard to say, but probably. Does it affect employment prospects? Probably. Will it impair academic achievement? Limited evidence. This goes on for pages. © 2019 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25848 - Posted: 01.08.2019

By Kelly Servick In the animal world, monogamy has some clear perks. Living in pairs can give animals some stability and certainty in the constant struggle to reproduce and protect their young—which may be why it has evolved independently in various species. Now, an analysis of gene activity within the brains of frogs, rodents, fish, and birds suggests there may be a pattern common to monogamous creatures. Despite very different brain structures and evolutionary histories, these animals all seem to have developed monogamy by turning on and off some of the same sets of genes. “It is quite surprising,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Hopi Hoekstra, who was not involved in the new work. “It suggests that there’s a sort of genomic strategy to becoming monogamous that evolution has repeatedly tapped into.” Evolutionary biologists have proposed various benefits to so-called social monogamy, where mates pair up for at least a breeding season to care for their young and defend their territory. When potential mates are scarce or widely dispersed, for example, forming a single-pair bond can ensure they get to keep reproducing. Neuroscientist Hans Hofmann and evolutionary biologist Rebecca Young at the University of Texas in Austin wanted to explore how the regulation of genes in the brain might have changed when a nonmonogamous species evolved to become monogamous. For example, the complex set of genes that underlie the ability to tolerate the presence of another member of one’s species presumably exists in nonmonogamous animals, but might be activated in different patterns to allow prolonged partnerships in monogamous ones. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25847 - Posted: 01.08.2019

Jon Hamilton Scientists have found a biological clue that could help explain why African-Americans appear to be more vulnerable than white Americans to Alzheimer's disease. A study of 1,255 people, both black and white, found that cerebrospinal fluid from African-Americans tended to contain lower levels of a substance associated with Alzheimer's, researchers report Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology. Yet these low levels did not seem to protect black participants from the disease. The finding "implies that the biological mechanisms underlying Alzheimer's disease may be very different in [different] racial groups," says Dr. John Morris, an author of the paper and director of the Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. And if Alzheimer's works differently in African-Americans, that difference could make them more vulnerable to the disease, Morris says. The study has limitations, though, says Lisa Barnes, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago, who wrote an accompanying editorial. For example, it could not fully account for the effects of some other known Alzheimer's risk factors — including hypertension, diabetes and obesity — or some suspected risk factors, including stress and poverty. Also, the study included just 173 African-Americans and was able to obtain spinal fluid samples from only half of them. Even so, Barnes says she was excited to see the study "because we have so little data" on African-Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities. © 2019 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25846 - Posted: 01.08.2019

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