Ever wonder why things that normally feel gentle, like putting on soft shirts, are painful after a sunburn? In a study of four patients with a rare genetic disorder, NIH researchers found that PIEZO2, a gene previously shown to control our sense of our bodies in space and gentle touch, may also be responsible for tactile allodynia: the skin’s reaction to injury that makes normally gentle touches feel painful. This and a second NIH-funded study, both published in Science Translational Medicine, used mice to show how the gene may play an essential role in the nervous system’s reaction to injury and inflammation, making PIEZO2 a target for developing precise treatments for relieving the pain caused by cuts, burns, and other skin injuries. “For years scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of how gentle touch becomes painful. These results suggest PIEZO2 is the gene for tactile allodynia. We hope that these results will help researchers develop better treatments for managing this form of pain,” said Alexander T. Chesler, Ph.D., a Stadtman Investigator at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) and a senior author of one of the studies. The PIEZO2 gene encodes what scientists call a mechanosensitive protein which produces electrical nerve signals in response to changes in cell shape, such as when skin cells and neurons of the hand are pressed against a table. Since its discovery in mice by a team led by Ardem Patapoutian, Ph.D., Scripps Research, La Jolla, CA, the lead author of the second paper, scientists have proposed that PIEZO2 plays an important role in touch and pain in humans.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25563 - Posted: 10.11.2018

By Christine Hauser Health authorities in the United States said this week that they were investigating an unusual spike in cases of a rare condition that causes limb paralysis and severe muscle weakness in children. Since mid-September, six cases of the condition, acute flaccid myelitis, in children under 10 years old have been reported to the Minnesota Department of Health, the agency said. Another two possible cases are pending confirmation, officials said. The number of cases of the illness, also known as A.F.M., is the highest in the state since 2014, when there were three reported cases, the health authorities said. Minnesota typically records one case of A.F.M. each year, and some years it does not have any at all, the department said. Officials have not found a specific cause for the illness. On Tuesday, the health authorities said three children suspected to have A.F.M. were being treated at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Officials in Colorado said this week that they were investigating a viral infection outbreak among children that included 14 cases of A.F.M. this year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it has seen an increasing number of people across the United States with the serious condition in the past four years. A.F.M. affects the nervous system and causes, mostly in children, paralysis similar to polio. The signs include sudden muscle weakness in the arms or legs; neck weakness or stiffness; a drooping face or eyelids; difficulty swallowing; and slurred speech, health officials say. Parents usually notice the child’s loss of the use of an arm or a leg. That was the case with Orville Young, a 4-year-old boy in Minnesota who lost mobility in his right arm and had difficulty sitting up and moving his legs. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25562 - Posted: 10.11.2018

Anna Azvolinsky When you move only your right arm, there’s neural activity in both the left and right sides of the brain, researchers report today (October 8) in The Journal of Neuroscience. Recent animal and human studies have hinted that moving muscle on only one side of the body resulted in neural activity from the same side—or ipsilateral—part of the brain. But the data haven’t been convincing enough to completely erase the idea that only the left side of the brain is responsible for movement on the right side of the body or vice versa. The new study shows the ipsilateral brain activity encodes detailed arm movement information including position, speed, and velocity. The results could one day be used to help improve recovery therapies for patients with brain injuries. “This is an important contribution to our understanding of how the brain controls arm movement because it reveals a greater role of ipsilateral brain activity than previously recognized,” writes Nathan Crone, a professor of neurology who runs a cognitive neurophysiology lab at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and was not involved in the research, in an email to The Scientist. In the study, Eric Leuthardt, professor of neurosurgery, engineering, and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues enlisted four patients with epilepsy who were to undergo surgery and who had electrodes implanted for a week under the skull. The electrodes were placed directly onto the cortex of the patients’ brain cortex regions, including the primary motor cortex—responsible for coordinating voluntary muscle movements. The patients volunteered to perform three-dimensional, individual arm motions while the researchers recorded neural activity from the implanted electrodes. The team then used machine learning to derive speed, velocity, and position information on each movement—gathering data on fine motor movements that cannot be easily captured using noninvasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25561 - Posted: 10.11.2018

By Mitch Leslie Our immune cells normally pounce on intruding bacteria and viruses. But in multiple sclerosis (MS), immune cells target the nervous system instead. Now, researchers may have pinpointed a long-sought molecule called a self-antigen that provokes these attacks, pointing a way toward potential new treatments. “The work is monumental, and it’s tantalizing,” says neuroimmunologist Hartmut Wekerle of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, Germany, who wasn’t connected to the research. Researchers have long suspected that a self-antigen—a normal molecule in the body that the immune system mistakenly treats as a threat—can trigger MS. The prime suspects have been proteins in myelin, the nerve insulation that erodes in patients with the disease. But after years of searching, scientists haven’t been able to pinpoint the molecule. To uncover other candidates, immunologists Roland Martin and Mireia Sospedra of University Hospital of Zurich in Switzerland and their colleagues analyzed immune cells known as T cells that came from a patient who died from MS. T cells normally switch on when they encounter protein fragments containing just a few amino acids that belong to an invading microbe, but they also turn on in people who have MS. The researchers wanted to determine which protein shards stimulated the patients’ T cells, so they tested 200 fragment mixtures, each containing 300 billion varieties. The two fragments with the strongest effect turned out to be part of a human enzyme called guanosine diphosphate-L-fucose synthase, which helps cells remodel sugars that are involved in everything from laying down memories to determining our blood type. T cells from 12 of 31 patients who had who either had been diagnosed with MS or had shown early symptoms of the disease also reacted to the enzyme, the researchers report online today in Science Translational Medicine. What’s more, T cells from four of the eight patients tested responded to a bacterial version of the enzyme—lending credence to the recently proposed idea that intestinal bacteria may help spark the disease. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25560 - Posted: 10.11.2018

Richard Harris If you are one of the 5.7 million Americans who ends up in the intensive care unit each year, you are at high risk of developing long-term mental effects like dementia and confusion. These mental problems can be as pronounced as those experienced by people with Alzheimer's disease or a traumatic brain injury and many patients never fully recover. But research shows you are less likely to suffer those effects if the doctors and nurses follow a procedure that's gaining ground in ICUs nationwide. The steps are part of a bundle of actions aimed at reducing delirium in ICU patients. Doctors define delirium as a usually temporary state of mental confusion characterized by a lack of focus, difficulty in understanding what's going on around you and, sometimes, hallucinations. Following this checklist of actions can reduce the risk of mental impairment following an ICU stay by 25 to 30 percent, says Dr. E. Wesley "Wes" Ely at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. (This post-ICU condition is separate from memory problems that can arise after heart surgery and general anesthesia in the elderly). It isn't simply detailed medical care — it's a philosophy. "I think the most modifiable piece of this is what we do to the patient," Ely says. "And what we do to the patient [that] is dangerous is immobilize them chemically [with drugs] and physically, and then not allow the family there, and allow them to subsist in delirium." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 25559 - Posted: 10.11.2018

Jef Akst Facial expressions of pain and orgasm are different, according to a study published this week (October 8) in PNAS. Forty Western and 40 East Asian participants viewed computerized images of a human face and categorized the expressions as indicative of pain, orgasm, or other. For pain and orgasm, participants also rated the intensities of the expressions they viewed. In contrast to previous research that suggested expressions of pain and orgasm are “virtually indistinguishable,” according to the PNAS paper, the new study found that there were distinctions between the two—namely, expressions of pain involve pulling the face inward (lowering the eyebrows and wrinkling the nose, for example) and expressions of pleasure involve movements that expanded the face, such as raising the eye brows. Moreover, while Western and East Asian observers viewed expressions of pain similarly, there were culture-specific elements of orgasmic expressions. For example, Westerners’ o-face involved wide-open eyes and a dropped jaw, while East Asians’ expression involved smiling. Dynamic mental representations of the facial expressions of pain or orgasm PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1807862115, 2018 © 1986 - 2018 The Scientis

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 25558 - Posted: 10.11.2018

By Melissa Bailey, Kaiser Health News Some patients refuse to answer. Many doctors don’t ask. Family members worry about offending a suffering loved one. As the number of Americans with dementia rises, health professionals are grappling with when and how to pose the question: “Do you have guns at home?” While gun violence data is scarce, a Kaiser Health News investigation with PBS NewsHour published in June uncovered over 100 cases across the United States since 2012 in which people with dementia used guns to kill themselves or others. The shooters often acted during bouts of confusion, paranoia, delusion or aggression — common symptoms of dementia. Tragically they shot spouses, children and caregivers. Yet health care providers across the country say they have not received enough guidance on whether, when and how to counsel families on gun safety. Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been practicing medicine for five years, said that she recently realized that talking to patients with cognitive decline about guns in the home was a “blind spot” in her clinical practice. She looked up the American Academy of Neurology’s advice on treating dementia patients. Its guidelines suggest doctors consider asking about “access to firearms or other weapons” during a safety screen — but they don’t say what to do if a patient does have guns. With a dearth of national gun safety data, there are no scientific standards for when a health care provider should discuss gun access for people with cognitive impairment or at what point in dementia’s progression a person becomes unfit to handle a gun. Most doctors don’t ask about firearms, research has found. In a 2014 study, 58 percent of internists surveyed reported never asking whether patients have guns at home. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 25557 - Posted: 10.10.2018

By Daniel Ackerman Repeatedly heading a soccer ball exacts a toll on an athlete’s brain. But this cost—measured by the volume of brain cells damaged—is five times greater for women than for men, new research suggests. The study provides a biological explanation for why women report more severe symptoms and longer recovery times than men following brain injuries in sports. Previously some researchers had dismissed female players’ complaints because there was little physiological evidence for the disparity, says Michael Lipton, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a co-author of the paper. Lipton’s team used magnetic resonance imaging to peer into the skulls of 98 adult amateur soccer players—half of them female and half male—who headed the ball with varying frequency during the prior year. For women, eight of the brain’s signal-carrying white matter regions showed structural deterioration, compared with just three such regions in men (damage increased with the number of reported headers). Furthermore, female athletes in the study suffered damage to an average of about 2,100 cubic millimeters of brain tissue, compared with an average of just 400 cubic millimeters in the male athletes. Lipton does not yet know the cause of these sex differences, but he notes two possibilities. Women may suffer stronger whiplash from a cranial blow because they generally have less muscle mass than men to stabilize the neck and skull. Alternatively, a dip in progesterone, a hormone that protects against swelling in the brain, could heighten women’s vulnerability to brain injury during certain phases of their menstrual cycle. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25556 - Posted: 10.10.2018

Researchers say they have discovered a gene mutation that slows the metabolism of sugar in the gut, giving people who have the mutation a distinct advantage over those who do not. Those with the mutation have a lower risk of diabetes, obesity, heart failure, and even death. The researchers say their finding could provide the basis for drug therapies that could mimic the workings of this gene mutation, offering a potential benefit for the millions of people who suffer with diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. The study, which is largely supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (link is external). “We’re excited about this study because it helps clarify the link between what we eat, what we absorb, and our risk for disease. Knowing this opens the door to improved therapies for cardiometabolic disease,” said Scott D. Solomon, M.D., a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the research. He explained that the study is the first to fully evaluate the link between mutations in the gene mainly responsible for absorbing glucose in the gut — SGLT-1, or sodium glucose co-transporter-1 — and cardiometabolic disease. People who have the natural gene mutation appear to have an advantage when it comes to diet, Solomon noted. Those who eat a high-carbohydrate diet and have this mutation will absorb less glucose than those without the mutation. A high-carbohydrate diet includes such foods as pasta, breads, cookies, and sugar-sweetened beverages.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25555 - Posted: 10.10.2018

By Alex Therrien Health reporter, BBC News Doctors have been given permission to give a British man with CJD a pioneering treatment, in a world first. There is currently no treatment for the rare but lethal brain disease, known as the human version of "mad cow disease". Doctors in London were given permission for the trial use on a human for the first time by the Court of Protection. Scientists say lab testing of the man-made antibody has been encouraging, but they admit they do not know how their patient will respond. The patient in this case, who has not been named, has sporadic CJD, the most common form of the disease in humans. This is different from variant CJD, the version linked to eating beef infected by bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. Sporadic CJD happens when healthy proteins in the human body - prions - become spontaneously misshapen and build up in the brain. The man-made antibody treatment, called PRN100, aims to prevent abnormal prions from being able to attach themselves to healthy proteins, meaning that they cannot grow and cause devastation throughout the brain. University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) is set to use it in a patient for the first time after a judge from the Court of Protection confirmed on Monday that it was lawful and in the patient's best interests to receive it. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 25554 - Posted: 10.10.2018

Richard Harris Doctors have gradually come to realize that people who survive a serious brush with death in the intensive care unit are likely to develop potentially serious problems with their memory and thinking processes. This dementia, a side-effect of intensive medical care, can be permanent. And it affects as many as half of all people who are rushed to the ICU after a medical emergency. Considering that 5.7 million Americans end up in intensive care every year, this is a major problem which, until recently, has been poorly appreciated by medical caregivers. Take, for example, the story of Richard Langford, a 63-year-old retired minister who lives with his mother in East Nashville. He went into the hospital for knee surgery 10 years ago, "because I was playing tennis with an 85-year-old and he beat my butt," Langford says with a chuckle. "So I wanted fresh knees to help me play better." But after that routine knee surgery, Langford developed a serious lung infection, which sent him to the intensive care unit. He had developed sepsis, a life-threatening condition sometimes called blood poisoning. With sepsis, the body overreacts to an infection and that can lead to crashing blood pressure, multiple organ failure and often death. During his four-week stay in the hospital and the rehab that followed, Langford suffered from long spells of delirium. That's a state of muddled thought, confusion and even at times hallucinations in some patients. All Langford remembers is the sensation of a near-death experience. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 25553 - Posted: 10.10.2018

By Frankie Schembri Think of all the faces you know. As you flick through your mental Rolodex, your friends, family, and co-workers probably come first—along with celebrities—followed by the faces of the nameless strangers you encounter during your daily routine. But how many faces can the human Rolodex store? To ballpark the size of the average person’s “facial vocabulary,” researchers gave 25 people 1 hour to list as many faces from their personal lives as possible, and then another hour to do the same with famous faces, like those of actors, politicians, and musicians. If the participants couldn’t remember a person’s name, but could imagine their face, they used a descriptive phrase like “the high school janitor,” or “the actress from Friends with the haircut.” People came up with lots of faces during the first minutes of the test, but the rate of remembrance dropped over the course of the hour. By graphing this relationship and extrapolating it to when most people would run out of faces, the researchers estimated the number of faces an average person can recall from memory. To figure out how many additional faces people recognized but were unable to recall without prompting, researchers showed the participants photographs of 3441 celebrities, including Barack Obama and Tom Cruise. To qualify as “knowing” a face, the participants had to recognize two different photos of each person. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 25552 - Posted: 10.10.2018

by Hannah Devlin, Science correspondent “The only known function of sleep is to cure sleepiness,” the Harvard sleep scientist Dr J Allan Hobson once joked. This isn’t quite true, but the questions of why we spend about a third of our lives asleep and what goes on in our head during this time are far from being solved. One big mystery is why sleep emerged as an evolutionary strategy. It must confer powerful benefits to balance out the substantial risks, such as being eaten or missing out on food while lying dormant. The emerging picture from research is that sleep is not a luxury but essential to both physical and mental health. But the complex and diverse functions of sleep are only just starting to be uncovered. What’s going on in our brains while we sleep? The brain doesn’t just switch off. It generates two main types of sleep: slow-wave sleep (deep sleep) – SWS – and rapid eye movement (dreaming), or REM. About 80% of our sleeping is of the SWS variety, which is characterised by slow brain waves, relaxed muscles and slow, deep breathing. There is strong evidence that deep sleep is important for the consolidation of memories, with recent experiences being transferred to long-term storage. This doesn’t happen indiscriminately though – a clearout of the less relevant experiences of the preceding day also appears to take place. A study published last year revealed that the connections between neurons, known as synapses, shrink during sleep, resulting in the weakest connections being pruned away and those experiences forgotten. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25551 - Posted: 10.09.2018

Jake Harper Months in prison didn't rid Daryl of his addiction to opioids. "Before I left the parking lot of the prison, I was shooting up, getting high," he says. Daryl has used heroin and prescription painkillers for more than a decade. Almost four years ago he became one of more than 200 people who tested positive for HIV in a historic outbreak in Scott County, Ind. After that diagnosis, he says, he went on a bender. But about a year ago, Daryl had an experience that made him realize he might be able to stay away from heroin and opioids. For several days, he says, he couldn't find drugs. He spent that time in withdrawal. "It hurts all over. You puke, you get diarrhea," Daryl says. His friend offered him part of a strip of Suboxone, a brand-name version of the addiction medication buprenorphine that is combined with naloxone. Buprenorphine is a long-acting opioid that is generally used to treat opioid addiction. It reduces cravings for the stronger opioids he had been taking, prevents physical withdrawal from those drugs and comes with a significantly lower risk of fatal overdose. Daryl injected the buprenorphine, and his opioid withdrawal symptoms disappeared. (Daryl is his middle name, which NPR is using to protect his identity because it is illegal to use buprenorphine without a prescription.) "At first it felt like I was high," Daryl says. "But I think that's what normal feels like now. I have not been normal in a long time." © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25550 - Posted: 10.09.2018

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