By Nicholas Bakalar In a randomized clinical trial, researchers assigned 120 men and women with chronic back or neck pain to one of two treatments. The first group received the commonly recommended program of physical therapy and general exercises. The second received a program of “pain neuroscience education,” in which they learned about the function of neurons and synapses, the ways in which pain is transmitted along nerve fibers via the spinal cord to the brain, and how pain itself can modify central nervous system functions, producing pain with even the mildest stimulation. They also performed exercises, closely integrated with the education program, that gradually introduced increasingly difficult movements, concentrating on functionality rather than pain relief, and trying to continue exercising despite the pain. Treatment in both groups lasted three months, and researchers re-examined the participants at six and 12 months afterward. Compared to the controls, the neuroscience education group had higher pain thresholds, a significant reduction in disability, and improved self-reported physical and mental health. The study is in JAMA Neurology. “The main message is: Don’t be afraid of the pain,” said the lead author, Anneleen Malfliet, a doctoral candidate at the Free University of Brussels. “We know that worrying and giving attention to pain ultimately increases it. Staying active and moving is better than rest when it comes to chronic back and neck pain.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25199 - Posted: 07.13.2018

Alison Abbott On a sun-parched patch of land in Rehovot, Israel, two neuroscientists peer into the darkness of a 200-metre-long tunnel of their own design. The fabric panels of the snaking structure shimmer in the heat, while, inside, a study subject is navigating its dim length. Finally, out of the blackness bursts a bat, which executes a mid-air backflip to land upside down, hanging at the tunnel’s entrance. The vast majority of experiments probing navigation in the brain have been done in the confines of labs, using earthbound rats and mice. Ulanovsky broke with the convention. He constructed the flight tunnel on a disused plot on the grounds of the Weizmann Institute of Science — the first of several planned arenas — because he wanted to find out how a mammalian brain navigates a more natural environment. In particular, he wanted to know how brains deal with a third dimension. The tunnel, which Ulanovsky built in 2016, has already proved its scientific value. So have the bats. They have helped Ulanovsky to discover new aspects of the complex encoding of navigation — a fundamental brain function essential for survival. He has found a new cell type responsible for the bats’ 3D compass, and other cells that keep track of where other bats are in the environment. It is a hot area of study — navigation researchers won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and the field is an increasingly prominent fixture at every big neuroscience conference. “Nachum’s boldness is impressive,” says Edvard Moser of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway, one of the 2014 Nobel laureates. “And it’s paid off — his approach is allowing important new questions to be addressed.” . © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 25198 - Posted: 07.12.2018

by Bethany Brookshire An astonishing number of things that scientists know about brains and behavior are based on small groups of highly educated, mostly white people between the ages of 18 and 21. In other words, those conclusions are based on college students. College students make a convenient study population when you’re a researcher at a university. It makes for a biased sample, but one that’s still useful for some types of studies. It would be easy to think that for studies of, say, how the typical brain develops, a brain is just a brain, no matter who’s skull its resting in. A biased sample shouldn’t really matter, right? Wrong. Studies heavy in rich, well-educated brains may provide a picture of brain development that’s inaccurate for the American population at large, a recent study found. The results provide a strong argument for scientists to pay more attention to who, exactly, they’re studying in their brain imaging experiments. It’s “a solid piece of evidence showing that those of us in neuroimaging need to do a better job thinking about our sample, where it’s coming from and who we can generalize our findings to,” says Christopher Monk, who studies psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The new study is an example of what happens when epidemiology experiments — studies of patterns in health and disease — crash into studies of brain imaging. “In epidemiology we think about sample composition a lot,” notes Kaja LeWinn, an epidemiologist at the University of California in San Francisco. Who is in the study, where they live and what they do is crucial to finding out how disease patterns spread and what contributes to good health. But in conversations with her colleagues in psychiatry about brain imaging, LeWinn realized they weren’t thinking very much about whose brains they were looking at. Particularly when studying healthy populations, she says, there was an idea that “a brain is a brain is a brain.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25197 - Posted: 07.12.2018

By Karen Weintraub No one can talk to a horse, of course. But a new study set out to find whether horses are trying to tell us something when they snort. In the study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers in France determined that the snorting exhale that horses often make may be a sign of a positive emotion. Mathilde Stomp, a doctoral student at the University of Rennes who led the research, said she set out to understand whether the snort could be used as an measure of the horse’s mood. She and her collaborators recorded 560 snorts among 48 privately owned and riding school horses. All the horses snorted — as little as once or as often as 13 times an hour. The horses mainly snorted during calm and relaxing activities, and those that spent more time out of doors snorted the most, the study found. When a horse was snorting, the researchers also recorded the animal’s ear position; forward-pointing ears are a known signal of a positive internal state, Ms. Stomp said. Researchers also developed a composite score of each animal’s stress level when snorting, with measurements including how much time a horse spent facing the wall in its stall, as well as its level of interaction with or aggressive behavior toward the researcher. Ms. Stomp said her work was motivated by the desire to help people better understand and meet the needs of their animals. “We think that with this acoustic indicator, maybe they will be able to test when their horses are in good conditions or not,” she said. Not all horses may be snorting in contentment, however, but rather in discomfort or simply acting on a physical need, akin to humans blowing their noses. Sue McDonnell, a specialist in equine physiology and behavior at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, said not enough is known to draw conclusions about a horse’s emotional state from its snorts. “I think it’s a huge overreach, an over-interpretation of their data,” she said. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 25196 - Posted: 07.12.2018

Yao-Hua Law It’s easy to tell a male from a female shark. Flip it over. If it has a pair of claspers — finger-like extensions jutting from the end of the pelvic fins — it is male; no claspers means female. Like a penis, claspers deliver sperm inside the female. That was marine biologist Alissa Barnes’ understanding until she dissected seven bigeye houndsharks (Iago omanesis) with claspers and found a complete female reproductive system in each. None of the seven sharks had any internal male sex organs. Six were pregnant. Barnes, of the Dakshin Foundation, shared her findings June 25 at the 5th International Marine Conservation Congress in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Barnes stumbled upon these hermaphrodite sharks at a port in Odhisa in eastern India in 2017. She was surveying local fishers to see if changes in their practices might explain a decline in hauls of sharks and rays. When she checked what the fishing vessels brought in, Barnes noticed two oddities. Male bigeye houndsharks greatly outnumbered females. And though males of this deepwater species are smaller than females, she saw immature males as large as female adults. Sensing something amiss, she took some sharks back to her lab for dissection. “I was amazed,” says Barnes, who admits she squealed during the dissections. Even before opening the fish, she had pressed on the bellies of the "male" sharks and felt the pups inside. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25195 - Posted: 07.12.2018

Amy Maxmen Legal hurdles to exploring marijuana’s medicinal properties might soon fall in the wake of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) first approval of a cannabis-derived drug. On 25 June, the FDA announced its approval of Epidiolex — a treatment for epileptic seizures that is based on a cannabis compound called cannabidiol (CBD). The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has until 24 September to re-classify Epidiolex so that it’s legal for doctors across the country to prescribe it. Many researchers hope that the agency will re-classify CBD itself, instead of just Epidiolex, so that they can more easily study this non-psychedelic component of marijuana. Now that the FDA has approved Epidiolex, “we have a clear recognition that this plant has more potential than people credited it for, and that has reverberations that are scientific as well as legal”, says Daniele Piomelli, director of a new centre for cannabis research at the University of California, Irvine. At the very least, he says, the DEA ought to grant researchers an exemption permitting them to study CBD — especially now that people consume it and other cannabis compounds, known as cannabinoids, in states where marijuana is legal. At this point, the limits on research seem irrational, he adds. Lessening restrictions on the study of CBD would also be good news for biotech startups that have been producing cannabinoids through genetic engineering. These products could be purer and more affordable than those obtained through older methods of extraction from marijuana plants or chemical synthesis. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Epilepsy
Link ID: 25194 - Posted: 07.11.2018

By Robert Martone We normally think that every cell in our body contains the same genome, the complete set of genetic information that makes up the biological core of our individuality. However, there are exceptions where the body contains cells that are genetically different. This happens in cancers, of course, which arise when mutations create genetically distinct cells. What most people do not realize, however, is that the brain has remarkable genetic diversity, with some studies suggesting there may be hundreds of mutations in each nerve cell. In the developing brain, mutations and other genetic changes that occur while brain cells divide are passed down to a cluster of daughter cells. As a result, the adult brain is composed of a mosaic of genetically distinct cell clusters. We know that the activity and organization of the brain changes in response to experience. Memories and learning are reflected in the number and strength of connections between nerve cells. We also know that the brain is genetically mosaic, but a new study makes a remarkable connection between experience and the genetic diversity of the brain. It suggests that experience can change the DNA sequence of the genome contained in brain cells. This is a fundamentally new and unexplored way in which experience can alter the brain. It is of great scientific interest because it reveals the brain to be pliable, to its genetic core, in response to the world. © 2018 Scientific America

Keyword: Epigenetics; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25193 - Posted: 07.11.2018

The number of people admitted to hospital in Scotland with alcohol-related brain damage has reached a 10-year high. A total of 661 people required treatment for brain injury after alcohol misuse between 2016-17, the equivalent of nearly two people a day. Alcohol-related brain damage can lead to problems with memory and learning. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde had the most admissions at 230, followed by 99 in NHS Lothian. The figures were released in response to a parliamentary question by the Scottish Conservative health spokesman Miles Briggs. He said it was worrying that the statistics were continuing to rise despite efforts to combat alcohol misuse. He said: "Scotland already has one of the worst records in Europe for alcohol consumption and, despite increased awareness, the problem only seems to be getting worse." He added: "The decision by SNP ministers to cut funding for alcohol and drug partnerships was wrong, and has clearly impacted on the delivery of services to support people addicted to alcohol." © 2018 BBC. T

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25192 - Posted: 07.11.2018

by Jennifer MacCormack Many people feel more irritable, annoyed or negative when hungry — an experience colloquially called being “hangry.” The idea that hunger affects our feelings and behaviors is widespread. But surprisingly little research investigates how feeling hungry transforms into feeling hangry. Psychologists have traditionally thought of hunger and emotions as separate, with hunger and other physical states as basic drives with different physiological and neural underpinnings from emotions. But growing scientific evidence suggests that your physical states can shape your emotions and cognition in surprising ways. Prior studies show that hunger itself can influence mood, probably because it activates many of the same bodily systems — such as the autonomic nervous system and hormones — that are involved in emotion. For example, when you’re hungry, your body releases a host of hormones including cortisol and adrenaline, often associated with stress. The result is that hunger, especially at greater intensity, can make you feel more tense, unpleasant and primed for action. But is feeling hangry just these hunger-induced feelings, or is there more to it? This question inspired the studies that psychologist Kristen Lindquist and I conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We wanted to know whether ­hunger-induced feelings can transform how people experience their emotions and the world around them. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Emotions; Obesity
Link ID: 25191 - Posted: 07.11.2018

By Rachel Zamzow, The brains of children with autism fold differently than those of their typical peers, two new studies suggest. But whether they are unusually smooth or convoluted depends on location and age. Certain regions of the brain’s outer layer, the cerebral cortex, are more intricately folded in school-age children and adolescents with autism than they are in controls, according to one of the studies. In young people, this folding difference may be the most obvious structural feature of the autism brain, says Ralph-Axel Müller, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who led the study. Their brains don’t tend to show overall differences in brain volume or surface area, for example. “It seems like [brain folding] is actually a rather sensitive anatomical metric,” he says. By contrast, preschoolers with autism do not show exaggerated folding unless they have enlarged brains, according to a second study. And one brain region is atypically smooth in preschoolers with autism. Together, the studies add to evidence that folding follows a different developmental path in autism brains than in controls. “That is fascinating,” says Greg Wallace, assistant professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in either study. “Having autism is going to affect developmental trajectories of all kinds of things, including cortical structure,” he says. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25190 - Posted: 07.10.2018

Laura Sanders I’m making my way through my third round of breastfeeding a newborn and taking stock of how things are going. Some aspects are definitely easier: My milk came in really quickly (a perk of being a repeat lactator), the fancy breastfeeding baby holds are no longer mysterious to me and I already own all of the weird pillows I need to prop up my tiny baby. But one thing isn’t easier this time around: the bone-crushing, mind-numbing exhaustion. Just like my other two, this sweet baby seems to eat all the time. All day. All night. Sometimes multiple times an hour, especially in the witching hours of the evening. This frequency got me curious about the biology of newborns’ stomachs. Just how small are they? Are they so microscopic that one can hold only enough sustenance to keep my newborn satisfied for a thousandth of a second? Birth educators and medical professionals often use a marble to illustrate the size of a newborn’s stomach, a tiny orb that holds about 5 to 7 milliliters of liquid. But that small estimate has come into question. A 2008 review published in the Journal of Human Lactation points out that there aren’t many solid studies on the size of the infant stomach, and some of the ones that do exist come to different conclusions. Another review of existing studies concluded that the average newborn stomach is slightly smaller than a Ping-Pong ball and can hold about 20 milliliters, or about two-thirds of an ounce. © Society for Science and the Public

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25189 - Posted: 07.10.2018

Layal Liverpool Working night shifts can mess up the body’s natural rhythms so much that the brain and digestive system end up completely out of kilter with one another, scientists say. Three night shifts in a row had little impact on the body’s master clock in the brain, researchers found, but it played havoc with gut function, throwing the natural cycle out by a full 12 hours. The finding highlights the dramatic impact that night shifts can have on the different clocks that govern the natural rhythms of organs and systems throughout the human body. Internal disagreements over night and day may explain why people on night shifts, and those with jet lag, can suffer stomach pains and other gut problems, which clear up once their body has had time to adjust. “One of the first symptoms people experience when traveling across time zones is gastrointestinal discomfort and that’s because you knock their gut out of sync from their central biological clock,” said Hans Van Dongen, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University. For the study, Van Dongen invited 14 healthy volunteers aged 22 to 34 into his sleep lab and split them into two groups. The first spent three days on a simulated day shift and could sleep from 10pm to 6am each night. Those in the second group stayed awake for three nights in a row and were only allowed to sleep from 10am to 6pm. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 25188 - Posted: 07.10.2018

Laura Sanders Mouse mothers can transmit stress signals to offspring, changing the way the pups’ bodies and brains develop. Some of these stress messages get delivered during birth, scientists suggest July 9 in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers suspected that vaginal microbes from stressed-out moms could affect male pups in ways that leave them vulnerable to stress later in life (SN: 12/14/2013, p. 13). But earlier studies hadn’t demonstrated whether those microbes, picked up during birth, actually caused some of the changes seen in offspring, or if other aspects of life in utero were to blame. Tracy Bale of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and colleagues subjected pregnant mice to stressful trials that included smelling the scent of a fox for an hour, listening to unusual sounds overnight and being restrained in a tube for 15 minutes. Other pregnant mice didn’t experience these stressors. Then, researchers delivered pups by cesarean section, so that the pups weren’t exposed to their mothers’ community of vaginal microorganisms, or microbiome. After delivery, researchers dosed the pups with vaginal fluid taken from stressed or unstressed mothers. For male pups not exposed to stress in the womb, vaginal microbes from a stressed mother changed the amount of certain kinds of gut bacteria. (Just as in earlier studies, female pups didn’t show effects of their mothers’ stress.) When those male pups were older, being restrained led them to release more of the stress hormone corticosteroid than mice dosed with microbiota from unstressed moms. And in the brains of adult mice that had experienced chronic stress, genes involved in metabolism and the development of nerve cells behaved differently depending on whether early microbes came from stressed or unstressed mothers. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25187 - Posted: 07.10.2018

by Lynn Peterson Mobley We started our ascent of Italy’s Stromboli volcano at dusk, as the Tyrrhenian Sea darkened behind us. It was a long, steady trek upward, but not an exhausting one. At the crater’s rim, with fountains and bombs of glowing lava exploding into the night sky, we soon forgot the effort it had taken to get there. Going down, however, was unforgettably harder. The trail through the deep black sand blanketing the massive cone was impossible to follow by the paltry light of our helmet lamps. I had never witnessed my athletic husband struggle before. He stumbled down the mountain for two hours with borrowed walking sticks, falling more than once. We had been hiking along the Volcano Route: Vesuvius, Amalfi’s Trail of the Gods, Vulcano, Etna. Robert was a fit 70-year-old then, never sick in his life. But after Stromboli, things weren’t quite the same. Back in Rome for a few days before our flight home, he was aware of weakness in his feet and lower legs. His shoes slapped the sidewalks as if they were too big. It took forever to get back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing. He was tired, yes, but this was different. Later that year, in 2010, he was diagnosed with a disease that we had never heard of, and that he shared with millions of other Americans: peripheral neuropathy, or PN. As we were to learn, the nervous system is composed of two parts. The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system, while the nerves running from them form the peripheral nervous system. PN encompasses damage to the nerves that deliver messages to or from the brain. Damage to the sensory nerves can mean tingling or numbness in the hands, feet and legs; damage to motor nerves that control the muscles causes loss of strength and balance; damage to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates automatic functions, affects things such as heart rate, blood pressure, bladder control and digestion, along with a host of other involuntary responses. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 25186 - Posted: 07.09.2018

By Jane E. Brody I wonder how we all survived — and even thrived — in our younger years without the plethora of water bottles that nearly everyone seems to carry around these days. In reading about the risks and consequences of dehydration, especially for the elderly and anyone who exercises vigorously in hot weather, it’s nothing short of a miracle that more of us hadn’t succumbed years ago to the damaging physical, cognitive and health effects of inadequate hydration. Even with the current ubiquity of portable water containers, far too many people still fail to consume enough liquid to compensate for losses suffered especially, though not exclusively, during the dehydrating months of summer. For those of you who know or suspect that you don’t drink enough to compensate for daily water losses, the good news is you don’t have to rely entirely on your liquid intake to remain well-hydrated. Studies in societies with limited supplies of drinking water suggest you can help to counter dehydration and, at the same time, enhance the healthfulness of your diet by consuming nutritious foods that are laden with a hidden water source. Plant foods like fruits, vegetables and seeds are a source of so-called gel water — pure, safe, hydrating water that is slowly absorbed into the body when the foods are consumed. That’s the message in a newly published book, “Quench,” by Dr. Dana Cohen, an integrative medicine specialist in New York, and Gina Bria, an anthropologist whose studies of the water challenges faced by desert dwellers led to the establishment of the Hydration Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes understanding and consumption of nonliquid sources of water. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 25185 - Posted: 07.09.2018

By John Horgan Last spring, I descended into the basement of a suburban home with two-dozen people and swilled fluid from a plastic cup. It was ayahuasca, a tea brewed from two South American plants, which contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, DMT. Ayahuasca has the viscosity of spit, it tastes like beer dregs into which someone has dropped a cigar, and it is nauseating, literally. Our guides gave each of us a plastic pail in case we vomited (which I did). The brew induces visions that can be blissful, excruciating, terrifying, sometimes all at once. As our guides played music and sang, we groaned, retched, cried, laughed, stared open-mouthed into space, retched again. A young man beside me oscillated between giggles and sobs. We each paid $200 for this experience, which lasted about five hours. Why, you might ask, would anyone in his right mind want to do this? I raised this question 15 years ago in Rational Mysticism, my investigation of psychedelics, meditation and other mystical technologies (and I’ll tell you my answer below). That same year, 2003, I proposed in Slate that psychedelics be dispensed by “licensed therapists, who can screen clients for mental instability and advise them on how to make their experiences as rewarding as possible.” © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25184 - Posted: 07.09.2018

Will Stone It started with a rolled ankle during a routine training exercise. Shannon Hubbard never imagined it was the prologue to one of the most debilitating pain conditions known to exist, called ­­­­­­­complex regional pain syndrome. It's a condition that causes the nervous system to go haywire, creating pain disproportionate to the actual injury. It can also affect how the body regulates temperature and blood flow. For Hubbard, it manifested several years ago following surgery on her foot. That's a common way for it to take hold. "My leg feels like it's on fire pretty much all the time. It spreads to different parts of your body," the 47-year-old Army veteran says. Hubbard props up her leg, careful not to graze it against the kitchen table in her home east of Phoenix. It's red and swollen, still scarred from an ulcer that landed her in the hospital a few months ago. "That started as a little blister and four days later it was like the size of a baseball," she says. "They had to cut it open and then it got infected and because I have blood flow issues, it doesn't heal." She knows that soon it will happen again. "Over the past three years, I've been prescribed over sixty different medications and combinations, none have even touched the pain," she says. She holds up a plastic bag filled with discarded pill bottles — evidence of her elusive search for a solution to the pain. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25183 - Posted: 07.09.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra Like humans, mice experience a period of amnesia when they lose their memories of experiences from infancy. Now, researchers report that these memories are not entirely forgotten by mice but simply difficult to recollect—and can be brought out of storage. These findings were published today (July 5) in Current Biology. According to this study, early life experiences “leave very long-lasting traces even if the memories are not expressed,” writes Cristina Alberini, who studies memory at New York University’s Center for Neural Science and was not involved in the study, in an email to The Scientist. Having encountered patients who couldn’t remember their early years, Sigmund Freud first coined the term infantile amnesia in the late 19th century. Since then, scientists have tried to understand why humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents alike experience this phenomenon. Whether these lost memories were due to improper storage or inefficient recollection was unknown. In this latest study, Paul Frankland, a psychologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and his colleagues sought to establish which of these possibilities was operating in mice. To first induce memory formation in the animals, the scientists placed the mice in a box and gave them a mild foot shock. While young adult mice retained this memory and froze when put in the box a second time, infant mice forgot this fear-related memory after a day and behaved normally when they encountered the box again. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 25182 - Posted: 07.07.2018

Arran Frood The use of drugs by people hoping to boost mental performance is rising worldwide, finds the largest ever study of the trend. In a survey of tens of thousands of people, 14% reported using stimulants at least once in the preceding 12 months in 2017, up from 5% in 2015. The non-medical use of substances — often dubbed smart drugs — to increase memory or concentration is known as pharmacological cognitive enhancement (PCE), and it rose in all 15 nations included in the survey. The study looked at prescription medications such as Adderall and Ritalin — prescribed medically to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — as well as the sleep-disorder medication modafinil and illegal stimulants such as cocaine. The work, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy1 in June, is based on the Global Drug Survey — an annual, anonymous online questionnaire about drug use worldwide. The survey had 79,640 respondents in 2015 and 29,758 in 2017. US respondents reported the highest rate of use: in 2017, nearly 30% said they had used drugs for PCE at least once in the preceding 12 months, up from 20% in 2015. But the largest increases were in Europe: use in France rose from 3% in 2015 to 16% in 2017; and from 5% to 23% in the United Kingdom (see ‘Quest for cognitive enhancement’). An informal reader survey by Nature in 2008 found that one in five respondents had used drugs to boost concentration or memory. The latest analysis is impressive in its size, says Barbara Sahakian, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the work. There is an increasing ‘lifestyle use’ of cognitive-enhancing drugs by healthy people, which raises ethical concerns, she says. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 25181 - Posted: 07.07.2018

by Erin Blakemore What if you wanted to speak but couldn’t string together recognizable words? What if someone spoke to you but you couldn’t understand what they were saying? These situations aren’t hypothetical for the more than 1 million Americans with aphasia, which affects the ability to understand and speak with others. Aphasia occurs in people who have had strokes, traumatic brain injuries or other brain damage. Some victims have a scrambled vocabulary or are unable to express themselves; others find it hard to make sense of the words they read or hear. The disorder doesn’t reduce intelligence, only a person’s ability to communicate. And although there is no definitive cure, it can be treated. Many people make significant recoveries from aphasia after a stroke, for example. July is Aphasia Awareness Month, a fine time to learn more about the disorder. The TED-Ed series offers a lesson on aphasia, complete with an engaging video that describes the condition, its causes and its treatment, along with a quiz, discussion questions and other resources. Created by Susan Wortman-Jutt, a speech-language pathologist who treats aphasia, it’s a good introduction to the disorder and how damage to the brain’s language centers can hamper an individual’s ability to communicate. Another resource is the National Aphasia Association. Its website, aphasia.­org, contains information about the disorder and links to support and treatment options. Aphasia can have lasting effects, but there is hope for people whose brains are injured. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Stroke
Link ID: 25180 - Posted: 07.07.2018