BCIs have deep roots. In the 18th century Luigi Galvani discovered the role of electricity in nerve activity when he found that applying voltage could cause a dead frog’s legs to twitch. In the 1920s Hans Berger used electroencephalography to record human brain waves. In the 1960s José Delgado theatrically used a brain implant to stop a charging bull in its tracks. One of the field’s father figures is still hard at work in the lab. Eberhard Fetz was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle when he decided to test whether a monkey could control the needle of a meter using only its mind. A paper based on that research, published in 1969, showed that it could. Dr Fetz tracked down the movement of the needle to the firing rate of a single neuron in the monkey’s brain. The animal learned to control the activity of that single cell within two minutes, and was also able to switch to control a different neuron. Dr Fetz disclaims any great insights in setting up the experiment. “I was just curious, and did not make the association with potential uses of robotic arms or the like,” he says. But the effect of his paper was profound. It showed both that volitional control of a BCI was possible, and that the brain was capable of learning how to operate one without any help. Some 48 years later, Dr Fetz is still at the University of Washington, still fizzing with energy and still enthralled by the brain’s plasticity. He is particularly interested in the possibility of artificially strengthening connections between cells, and perhaps forging entirely new ones.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 24839 - Posted: 04.09.2018

By Jeff Sebo You might be aware that chimpanzees can recognize themselves in a mirror, communicate through sign language, pursue goals creatively and form long-lasting friendships. You might also think that these are the kinds of things that a person can do. However, you might not think of chimpanzees as persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project does. Since 2013, the group has been working on behalf of two chimpanzees, Kiko and Tommy, currently being held in cages by their “owners” without the company of other chimpanzees. It is asking the courts to rule that Kiko and Tommy have the right to bodily liberty and to order their immediate release into a sanctuary where they can live out the rest of their lives with other chimpanzees. The problem is that under current United States law, one is either a “person” or a “thing.” There is no third option. If you are a person, you have the capacity for rights, including the right to habeas corpus relief, which protects you from unlawful confinement. If you are a thing, you do not have the capacity for rights. And unfortunately, even though they are sensitive, intelligent, social beings, Kiko and Tommy are considered things under the law. In response, the Nonhuman Rights Project is taking a bold position: It is arguing that if every being must be either a person or a thing, then Kiko and Tommy are persons, not things. I agree, and many other philosophers do, too. In February, a group of philosophers, including me, submitted an amicus curiae brief to the New York Court of Appeals in support of legal personhood for Kiko and Tommy. (Members of the group contributed to this article as well.) The court is considering whether to allow the case to proceed. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 24838 - Posted: 04.09.2018

By Julie Hecht I’m right handed. Utensils, pens, pencils, and of course my toothbrush are all operated by my right hand. Like roughly 90% of people, my left hand simply isn’t cut out for much on its own. Dogs, outfitted with paws not hands, also appear to prefer one paw over the other. In dogs, paw laterality — or paw preference — is explored not with forks or pencils, but with more dog-appropriate motor tasks. Studies have asked which paw dogs use to reach toward food or which paw they use to remove something from their body, like a blanket. Researchers have even checked which paw dogs first lift to walk down a step and which paw they “give” when asked to “give” paw. To date, it has been assumed that, like us, dogs have a “hand” preference. But Deborah Wells, a longtime laterality researcher, wondered if something was missing. Studies of paw preference typically use only one test to investigate paw preference. As a result, it is unclear whether “dogs harbour consistent paw preferences” or, on the other hand (ha!), whether paw preference instead might be task-specific. Maybe a dog consistently reaches for food with the right paw, but is more likely to lift the left front paw to walk down a step. Wells and colleagues at the Animal Behaviour Center, Queen’s University, Belfast, took the natural next step (ha again!). They tested 32 pet dogs on four different paw preference tests to see whether dog paw preference was consistent across tests. To check preferences over time, a subset was tested 6 months later. This research was recently published in Behavioural Processes. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 24837 - Posted: 04.09.2018

Aimee Cunningham A deep conviction that one’s skin is contaminated with insects or other objects despite a lack of medical evidence. She was certain her skin was infested: Insects were jumping off; fibers were poking out. Fearful her condition could spread to others, the 50-year-old patient told doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., that she was avoiding contact with her children and friends. The patient had delusional infestation, explains Mayo Clinic dermatologist Mark Davis. Sufferers have an unshaking belief that pathogens or inanimate objects pollute their skin despite no medical evidence. Davis and colleagues report online April 4 in JAMA Dermatology that the disorder is not as rare as previously assumed. In the first population-based study of the disorder’s prevalence, the researchers identified 35 cases from 1976 to 2010 reported in Minnesota’s Olmsted County. Based on the findings, the authors estimate 27 out of every 100,000 people in the United States have delusional infestation. Due to the county’s lack of diversity — the population of about 150,000 is predominantly white — the researchers used only the nationwide white population to estimate prevalence, so the result may not be representative of other populations. Delusional infestation has been recognized for decades, albeit under different names. Patients insist they’ve been overtaken with creatures, such as insects, worms or parasites, or inanimate materials like fibers — or both. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 24836 - Posted: 04.09.2018

By Melissa Healy Despite years of effort, researchers have so far failed to find a pill you could take or a food you could eat to harden your brain against the injury that could be caused by a stroke. But new research offers the prospect of limiting a stroke's long-term damage in a different way: with a drug that enhances the brain's ability to rewire itself and promote recovery in the weeks and months after injury. In experiments, both mice and macaque monkeys that suffered strokes regained more movement and dexterity when their rehabilitative regimen included an experimental medication called edonerpic maleate. The drug, which has already run a gauntlet of safety trials as a possible medication for Alzheimer's disease, appears to have enhanced the effectiveness of rehab by strengthening the connections between brain cells and nourishing the chemical soup in which those cells forge those new connections. A report on the experiments appears in Friday's edition of the journal Science. The work was conducted by researchers at Yokohama City University School of Medicine and employees of Toyama Chemical Co., Ltd., a Japanese pharmaceutical firm that owns intellectual property rights to edonerpic maleate. Toyama provided funding for Yokohama City University to study the drug in macaque monkeys. The findings from the mice shed important light on how edonerpic maleate may work in an injured brain.

Keyword: Stroke; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24835 - Posted: 04.07.2018

By RONI CARYN RABIN By the time Thomas Hodorowski made the connection between his marijuana habit and the bouts of pain and vomiting that left him incapacitated every few weeks, he had been to the emergency room dozens of times, tried anti-nausea drugs, anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants, endured an upper endoscopy procedure and two colonoscopies, seen a psychiatrist and had his appendix and gallbladder removed. The only way to get relief for the nausea and pain was to take a hot shower. He often stayed in the shower for hours at a time and could be in and out of the shower for days. When the hot water ran out, “the pain was unbearable, like somebody was wringing my stomach out like a washcloth,” said the 28-year-old, who works as a production and shipping assistant and lives outside Chicago. It was nearly 10 years until a doctor finally convinced him the diagnosis was cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes cyclic vomiting in heavy marijuana users and can be cured by quitting marijuana. Until recently the syndrome was thought to be uncommon or even rare. But as marijuana use has increased, emergency room physicians say they have been seeing a steady flow of patients with the telltale symptoms, especially in states where marijuana has been decriminalized and patients are more likely to divulge their drug use to physicians. “After marijuana was legalized in Colorado, we had a doubling in the number of cases of cyclic vomiting syndrome we saw,” many of which were probably related to marijuana use, said Dr. Cecilia J. Sorensen, an emergency room doctor at University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz medical campus in Aurora who has studied the syndrome. “C.H.S. went from being something we didn’t know about and never talked about to a very common problem over the last five years,” said Dr. Eric Lavonas, director of emergency medicine at Denver Health and a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24834 - Posted: 04.07.2018

by Meeri Kim On a beautiful autumn afternoon in New York’s Central Park, Carol Berman had the horrifying realization that her husband of 40 years no longer recognized her as his wife. In his eyes, she wasn’t the real Carol but rather some strange woman pretending to be Carol — effectively, an impostor. They were out for a stroll when he started yelling at a woman with a similar hairdo farther up the street: “Carol! Carol, come here!” Shocked, his wife faced him head-on, looked deep into his eyes and reassured him that she was right here. But he refused to acknowledge her as the real Carol. Marty Berman had been a warmhearted, highly intelligent and hard-working patent lawyer for much of his life. But at 74, he began to show signs of dementia. Once proficient in math and engineering, he could no longer subtract simple numbers correctly. A man who had walked the whole of Manhattan couldn’t go a few blocks by himself anymore without getting lost. Perhaps the most painful part for Carol was when her husband’s delusion developed a year or two after his initial symptoms arose. Capgras syndrome is a psychological condition that prompts a person to believe that loved ones have been replaced by identical duplicates of themselves. As a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York University, Carol had treated several Capgras patients. But witnessing the delusion in the person she loved the most, whom she was already losing to dementia, was agonizing. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 24833 - Posted: 04.07.2018

By Knvul Sheikh In the bare winter woods across North America, you can hear the clear whistles of Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees as they forage for food. The insects they normally love to eat are gone, so the birds must find seeds and stash them among the trees for later. The Black-capped Chickadee and its southern lookalike, the Carolina Chickadee, are like squirrels in this sense: well-known for their food-caching behavior. They’ve evolved sharp brains, with some parts that grow bigger in the winter, specifically so they can remember the location of hundreds to thousands of seeds. But in the narrow strip of land from Kansas to New Jersey where the two species overlap and mate, their offspring have a weaker memory, according to a new study published in Evolution last week. In a set of experiments, only 62.5 percent of hybrid chickadees were able to solve a puzzle to uncover their food, as opposed to 95 percent of normal chickadees. More importantly, the hybrids’ poor recall could hurt their ability to survive harsh winters. “These birds don’t migrate; they stay in their regions throughout the year, so winter survival is pretty important,” says Michael McQuillan, a biologist at Lehigh University who was the lead author of the research. “If the hybrids are less able to do this, or if they have worse memories, that could be really bad for them.” The trend could also explain why the blended birds haven’t evolved into a distinct species over time. Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees hybridize extensively—often to the chagrin of birders, who already have a hard time telling them apart. In general, hybridization is common: It occurs in about 10 percent of animal and 25 percent of plant species, McQuillan says. Many hybrids thrive, and in rare cases like the Golden-crowned Manakin and the Galapagos “Bird Bird” finch, they can form stable new lineages.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 24832 - Posted: 04.07.2018

Maria Temming PHOENIX — High-tech attire that would give users the sensation of being pushed, pinched or poked could someday make virtual realities feel as real as they look. Today’s VR systems rely heavily on goggle-generated visual displays to transport users to simulated worlds. But superthin, shape-shifting sheets worn as sleeves or built into other garments could provide gamers with tactile feedback that makes virtual realities more immersive. The new device, described April 5 at the Materials Research Society spring meeting, contains a grid of tiny, inflatable bubbles, sandwiched between two soft, stretchy silicone films. When one of these bubble wrap–like sheets is placed against a user’s skin, inflating different air pockets by different amounts at different speeds can make a gamer feel like she’s been grabbed around the wrist or patted on the back. Some previously developed hand- or finger-worn devices have allowed wearers to feel or manipulate virtual objects. But clothing embedded with smart silicone skins could make VR gaming more of a full-body experience. Each air pocket on the sheet is coated with a liquid metal sensor that tracks how much that bubble is distended, which helps regulate the device’s shape-shifting. Those sensors also detect indentations in the bubbles, so these sleeves could work as touch pad game controllers, too, says study coauthor Matthew Robertson, a roboticist at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 24831 - Posted: 04.07.2018

Laurel Hamers Your brain might make new nerve cells well into old age. Healthy people in their 70s have just as many young nerve cells, or neurons, in a memory-related part of the brain as do teenagers and young adults, researchers report in the April 5 Cell Stem Cell. The discovery suggests that the hippocampus keeps generating new neurons throughout a person’s life. The finding contradicts a study published in March, which suggested that neurogenesis in the hippocampus stops in childhood (SN Online: 3/8/18). But the new research fits with a larger pile of evidence showing that adult human brains can, to some extent, make new neurons. While those studies indicate that the process tapers off over time, the new study proposes almost no decline at all. Understanding how healthy brains change over time is important for researchers untangling the ways that conditions like depression, stress and memory loss affect older brains. When it comes to studying neurogenesis in humans, “the devil is in the details,” says Jonas Frisén, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was not involved in the new research. Small differences in methodology — such as the way brains are preserved or how neurons are counted — can have a big impact on the results, which could explain the conflicting findings. The new paper “is the most rigorous study yet,” he says. Researchers studied hippocampi from the autopsied brains of 17 men and 11 women ranging in age from 14 to 79. In contrast to past studies that have often relied on donations from patients without a detailed medical history, the researchers knew that none of the donors had a history of psychiatric illness or chronic illness. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24830 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Nicky Phillips Before playing a guitar, musicians tune the strings to particular frequencies to get the pitch they want. Starting this week, a team of neuroscientists in Australia will apply a similar tuning process to human brains as part of a study to recalibrate abnormal neural patterns to a healthy state. The group, at Monash University in Melbourne, is conducting one of the first trials to use electrodes on people’s scalps, both to monitor their brain activity and to provide customized electrical stimulation. By tuning groups of neurons to specific frequencies, the team will attempt to alleviate people’s depression and other mood disorders. The Monash team is one of several around the world experimenting with such ‘closed loop’ systems — where stimulation is directed by the patient’s brain activity, which is in turn altered by the stimulation. “They’re doing something right at the cutting edge,” says Charlotte Stagg, a neurophysiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. “It’ll be pretty cool if they can get it to work.” Researchers hope such techniques will offer a better way than current stimulation techniques to correct abnormal brain patterns. Although at an early stage, the approach is a fundamental shift in the field and seeks to offer more personalization than is possible with brain-stimulation treatments routinely used in the clinic. Other teams, in the United States and Europe, have trialled closed-loop brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease and for cognitive training, but the Melbourne team is among the first to use this approach for mood disorders. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 24829 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Joan McFadden When Les Milne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease aged just 45, his wife Joy was, understandably, devastated. But her sadness wasn’t just down to the fact her husband was in the grip of such a terrible illness but that, when she’d noticed a change in his smell 12 years earlier, she hadn’t realised the two things might be connected. Upon first noticing a “sort of woody, musky odour” Joy “started suggesting tactfully to him that he wasn’t showering enough or cleaning his teeth,” she recalls. “He clearly didn’t smell it and was quite adamant that he was washing properly.” Joy, a former nurse, let the issue lie, occupied with the far more pressing issue of her husband’s rapidly changing character. “He wasn’t the man I’d known since I was 16. About eight years before he was diagnosed he started suffering from mood swings, with bursts of anger which left me dreading what might come next.” When Les was eventually referred for a brain scan, he was told that his symptoms indicated a diagnosis of either a brain tumour or Parkinson’s, which affects one in 500 people in the UK. As medical professionals - Les worked as an anaesthetist - both knew just how serious the diagnosis was, though Joy admits that it was a relief to have one at all. Forced to retire five years later, the pair moved back to Perth from Cheshire, with his growing inability to sleep and diminishing motor skills seeing Les, a former water polo player for Scotland, give up the swimming he loved to do every day. “He was just a completely different person. It was devastating to watch" Joy, now 67, says. © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2018

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Parkinsons
Link ID: 24828 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Rachel Aviv Before having her tonsils removed, Jahi McMath, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl from Oakland, California, asked her doctor, Frederick Rosen, about his credentials. “How many times have you done this surgery?” Hundreds of times, Rosen said. “Did you get enough sleep last night?” He’d slept fine, he responded. Jahi’s mother, Nailah Winkfield, encouraged Jahi to keep asking questions. “It’s your body,” she said. “Feel free to ask that man whatever you want.” Jahi had begged not to get the surgery, but her mother promised that it would give her a better life. Jahi had sleep apnea, which left her increasingly fatigued and unable to focus at school. She snored so loudly that she was too embarrassed to go to slumber parties. Nailah had brought up four children on her own, and Jahi, her second, was her most cautious. When she saw news on television about wars in other countries, she would quietly ask, “Is it going to come here?” Her classmates made fun of her for being “chunky,” and she absorbed the insults without protest. A few times, Nailah went to the school and asked the teachers to control the other students. The operation, at Oakland’s Children’s Hospital, took four hours. When Jahi awoke, at around 7 p.m. on December 9, 2013, the nurses gave her a grape Popsicle to soothe her throat. About an hour later, Jahi began spitting up blood. The nurses told her not to worry and gave her a plastic basin to catch it in. A nurse wrote in her medical records that she encouraged Jahi to “relax and not cough if possible.” By nine that night, the bandages packing Jahi’s nose had become bloody, too. Nailah’s husband, Marvin, a truck driver, repeatedly demanded that a doctor help them. A nurse told him that only one family member was allowed in the room at a time. He agreed to leave. © 2018 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24827 - Posted: 04.06.2018

David Cyranoski Beijing has announced plans to build a brain-science centre that will rival in size some of the world’s largest neuroscience organizations. It will also serve as a core facility for the country’s long-awaited brain project — China’s version of the high-profile brain-science initiatives under way elsewhere in the world. The Chinese Institute for Brain Research was officially established in Beijing on 22 March, with an agreement signed by representatives of the Beijing municipality and seven research organizations based in the capital. The agreement named two neuroscientists — Peking University’s Rao Yi and Luo Minmin of the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing — as co-directors. The new Beijing facility will be one of the first concrete developments in the national China brain-research project, which has been under discussion for five years but has yet to be formally announced. The United States and Europe each launched billion-dollar brain initiatives in 2013, and Japan followed with a smaller project the following year. South Korea answered with its own initiative in 2016. The Chinese project is expected to complement these projects with its rapidly growing cadre of top neuroscientists, abundant supplies of research monkeys, the country’s heavy burden of people with neurological diseases and its big investments in brain-imaging facilities. “The brain is such a complex system that significant efforts are needed to tame this complexity at an international level,” says Katrin Amunts, scientific research director of Europe’s Human Brain Project. China has the potential to provide important insights that relate to the work of other projects, she says. © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24826 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Dina Fine Maron A new report raises questions about whether contracting Zika virus in the months after birth may damage an infected newborn’s brain. Researchers at Emory University injected a small number of infant rhesus macaques with the virus five weeks after birth—an age which roughly correlates with Zika exposure in three-month-old human babies—and found that although the monkeys cleared the infection from their blood as expected, the animals developed brain damage and behavioral problems. “This is the first time [infant infection] has been studied in a controlled fashion. And while it is with a small group of animals, it does make us more concerned about what the long-term behavioral or cognitive issues may be in human infants that might have been similarly exposed,” says Ann Chahroudi, senior author on the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine. Advertisement The good news is infected monkeys did not develop the most severe problems seen in humans exposed to Zika prenatally, which include limb deformities, hearing and vision loss, and a small-headed condition that can form in the womb called microcephaly. Yet certain brain areas typically responsible for vision as well as emotional and behavioral responses did not develop normally in infant macaques exposed to Zika, and the animals acted strangely in behavioral tests compared with control animals not exposed to the pathogen. Connections between the amygdala and hippocampus were also weak in the infected macaques, which suggests signals sent between those two areas—ones that would help the infants recognize and respond to stressful situations—would be slow or spotty. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24825 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Dr Sarah Bailey If you have ever taken a medicine, you have benefited from the humane use of animals in medical research. My research at the University of Bath focuses on understanding how the brain responds to stress and how we can use that knowledge to develop new and better antidepressants. We use mice to study how their behaviour changes in response to stress, or potential new drug treatments, and then we analyse their brains to identify affected brain circuits and the molecules involved in those behaviours. Over four million UK adults experience depression at any one time, and only around half of those will respond to the existing medications. There is a vital need to understand more about the brain mechanisms that cause depression in order to develop new and better antidepressants. Animal research plays a key role in this. In the UK the Home Office regulates animal research under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act. At the heart of the legislation is the humane treatment of animals. This is enshrined in “the 3Rs” that regulate all research conducted with animals in the UK – replacement, reduction and refinement. Replacement: the act does not allow animal research to be done where alternatives exist. ● Reduction: the minimum number of animals is used to obtain valid results for any experiment. ● Refinement: all techniques, from picking up an animal to a simple injection, must be done in a way that minimises animal suffering and emphasises the welfare of the animal. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 24824 - Posted: 04.06.2018

By Danna Staaf "You're doing your surgery, but you don't know if the animal still feels it and you've just stolen its ability to respond," says biologist Robyn Crook of San Francisco State University (SFSU) in California. Until recently, researchers working with octopuses, squids, and other cephalopods routinely faced this dilemma, an ethical and, in some cases, legal challenge to studying these intelligent creatures in the laboratory. But Crook has now shown that both ordinary alcohol and magnesium chloride are effective anesthetics—crucial information for scientists pursuing cephalopod research. Cephalopods might not seem to be ideal laboratory animals. They're exclusively marine, so a complex seawater system is needed to keep them alive, and they're disinclined to stay put—octopuses can escape through minuscule holes, while squids may jet right out of their tanks. But their unique biology and behavior have made them indispensable to researchers in many fields. Studies of the squid's giant axon helped spawn modern neuroscience decades ago, and the light organ of the bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) powered a revolution in the study of symbiotic host-microbe interactions. Today, some researchers are studying how the animals accomplish their striking feats of regeneration, while others use them in ecotoxicology studies; cephalopods even guide research into the origins of consciousness. Because of their complex brains, cephalopods became the first invertebrates to be protected by laboratory animal laws. In 1991, the Canadian Council on Animal Care decided to extend the standards for vertebrate care to cephalopods, meaning, among other things, that researchers have to get ethical approval for their studies and must use anesthesia, when possible, for procedures that could cause pain. Since then, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and some Australian states have passed similar regulations. The biggest expansion of cephalopod rights came in 2013, when an EU-wide directive gave them the same protections as vertebrates in scientific studies in 28 countries. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A

Keyword: Animal Rights; Sleep
Link ID: 24823 - Posted: 04.06.2018

Laura Y. Cabrera Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to specific targets in the brain to alter neural activity. While brain implants aim to treat neural dysfunction, cases like these demonstrate that they may influence an individual’s perception of the world and behavior in undesired ways. Mr. B received DBS as treatment for his severe obsessive compulsive disorder. He’d never been a music lover until, under DBS, he developed a distinct and entirely new music preference for Johnny Cash. When the device was turned off, the preference disappeared. Mr. X, an epilepsy patient, received DBS as part of an investigation to locate the origin of his seizures. During DBS, he hallucinated that doctors became chefs with aprons before the stimulation ended and the scene faded. In both of these real-world cases, DBS clearly triggered the changed perception. And that introduces a host of thorny questions. As neurotechnologies like this become more common, the behaviors of people with DBS and other kinds of brain implants might challenge current societal views on responsibility. Lawyers, philosophers and ethicists have labored to define the conditions under which individuals are to be judged legally and morally responsible for their actions. The brain is generally regarded as the center of control, rational thinking and emotion – it orchestrates people’s actions and behaviors. As such, the brain is key to agency, autonomy and responsibility. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24822 - Posted: 04.04.2018

James Gorman The snow monkeys of Japan are famous, as monkeys go. This troop of Japanese macaques lives in the north, near Nagano, the mountainous, snowy site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. Others of their species live even farther north, farther than any other nonhuman primate, so they are able to adapt to winter weather. But the source of this troop’s fame is an adaptation that only they exhibit: soaking in hot spring bathing pools. Their habitat is full of natural hot springs that tend to be over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that is apparently uncomfortable for the monkeys. It wasn’t until 1963 that a young female macaque was first observed bathing in a pool built by a hotel, with the water cooled to a temperature comfortable enough for humans and monkeys. At first, one or two monkeys joining human visitors were a curiosity , but eventually they became a nuisance and health hazard, and a park was built with hot spring pools at a comfortable 104 degrees Fahrenheit, for monkeys only. The monkeys have been a long time tourist attraction and favorite of photographers, and it looked like they were trying to stay warm. Only recently have scientists investigated this behavior by measuring levels of stress hormones and observing the effects of social structure. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Evolution
Link ID: 24821 - Posted: 04.04.2018

Kas Roussy · You think you have a dysfunctional clan? Check out the family feud involving Humphrey, Charlie and Hugh. In the early '70s, the trio was part of a tight-knit community of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania. These are some of the same chimps that British primatologist Jane Goodall was studying at the time, looking at social and family dynamics. "Jane and other researchers who came to Gombe initially had this idea that chimpanzees were these idyllic forest-dwelling species that could provide this model for what humanity could be like," says Duke University researcher Joseph Feldblum. "They thought they were peaceful and egalitarian." They were about to get a reality check of the wild kingdom variety. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans — like power, ambition, and jealousy — can also tear apart chimpanzees. You'll recall from all those wildlife documentaries that chimps are our closest animal relatives. In Gombe, Goodall and her colleagues watched a once-unified group of chimps disintegrate into two rival factions. "There's still a bit of uncertainty, even with people who were there at the time, about exactly what happened," Feldblum tells CBC News. But thanks to new digitized data taken from Goodall's own field notes from that period, Feldblum and a team of scientists were able to get a clearer, more detailed picture of what they call "the seeds of the conflict." "We were able to examine the course of the split in more detail and pinpoint when it became obvious more precisely," says co-author and Duke anthropologist Anne Pusey. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 24820 - Posted: 04.04.2018