By Jessica Hamzelou A rare sighting of a chimpanzee giving birth in the wild came to a grisly conclusion. Within seconds of the birth, the baby was snatched away and eaten by a male of the same group. The observation explains why female chimpanzees tend to go into hiding for weeks or months when they have their babies. Little is known about how chimpanzees give birth in the wild because only five births have ever been observed, says Hitonaru Nishie of Kyoto University in Japan. Nishie and his colleagues have been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Mahale mountains for the last few years. One of the reasons so few have been witnessed is that the soon-to-be mothers often leave the group when the baby is due, and don’t return until the infant is weeks or months old. This absence has been described as a chimpanzee’s “maternity leave”. So Nishie and his colleague Michio Nakamura were surprised when, at around 11 am one December day, a female member of the chimpanzee group they were observing began to give birth in front of the 20 other members. As soon as the baby was out – and before the mother had even had a chance to touch it – the baby was snatched away by a male member of the group, who then disappeared into the bush. The researchers found him around 1½ hours later, sitting up a tree and eating the infant from the lower half of its body. He ate the entire body within an hour. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 24193 - Posted: 10.14.2017

Heidi Ledford The US government is considering whether to approve a gene therapy to prevent the degradation of cells in the retina (shown here in an image from a scanning electron microscope). Advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have paved the way for the agency’s first approval of a gene therapy to treat a disease caused by a genetic mutation. On 12 October, a panel of external experts unanimously voted that the benefits of the therapy, which treats a form of hereditary blindness, outweigh its risks. The FDA is not required to follow the guidance of its advisers, but it often does. A final decision on the treatment, called voretigene neparvovec (Luxturna), is expected by 12 January. An approval in the lucrative US drug market would be a validation that gene-therapy researchers have awaited for decades. “It’s the first of its kind,” says geneticist Mark Kay of Stanford University in California, of the treatment. “Things are beginning to look more promising for gene therapy.” Luxturna is made by Spark Therapeutics of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is designed to treat individuals who have two mutated copies of a gene called RPE65. The mutations impair the eye’s ability to respond to light, and ultimately lead to the destruction of photoreceptors in the retina. The treatment consists of a virus loaded with a normal copy of the RPE65 gene. The virus is injected into the eye, where the gene is expressed and supplies a normal copy of the RPE65 protein. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24192 - Posted: 10.14.2017

By Virginia Morell Dog owners often wonder what—if anything—is going on when their pooches are sleeping. It turns out they may be learning, according to a new study. Researchers in Hungary trained 15 pet dogs to sit and lie down using English phrases instead of the Hungarian they already knew. Afterward, the scientists attached small electrodes to the dogs’ heads to record their brain activity while they slept. Electroencephalograms (EEGs) showed that during 3-hour naps, the dogs’ brains experienced brief, repeated moments of “slow-wave” brain activity, lasting 0.5 to 5 seconds. These bursts—called sleep spindles because they look like a train of fast, rhythmic waves on EEG recordings—occur during non-REM sleep and are known to support memory, learning, general intelligence, and healthy aging in humans and rats. But this is the first time they’ve been studied in detail in dogs. Like those of humans and rats, the dogs’ sleep spindles occur in short cycles in the 9-hertz to 16-hertz range; in humans and rats, these cycles are associated with memory consolidation. The scientists also discovered that the number of spindle sessions per minute correlated with how well the dogs learned their new, foreign vocabulary, the researchers report this week in Scientific Reports. And—just like in humans—females had more spindle sessions per minute than males and performed better during testing. About 30% of the females learned the new words, compared to about 10% of the males. That suggests, the researchers say, that dogs can serve as models to better understand the function of our own sleep spindles. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24191 - Posted: 10.14.2017

by Robby Berman Our problem with opioids has been in the news a lot lately, and for good reason: It’s arguably the worst drug problem the U.S. has ever faced. The leading cause of death for people under 50? Opioids. According to the CDC, between 1999 and 2015, over 183,000 Americans have died of overdoses from prescription opioids alone. The agency estimates that more than 1,000 people receive emergency treatment for prescription overdoses every day. While those numbers are leveling off a bit now — perhaps as doctors become more careful about prescribing them — the number of deaths from non-prescription opioids is rising fast. Overdoses are easy to count, but nearly as disturbing, if less visible, is how many people are dependent on these drugs. The CDC estimates that in 2014 that number was two million Americans. The top three prescription opioids causing overdoses, says the CDC, are methadone, oxycodone (including OxyContin®), and hydrocodone (including Vicodin®). The two leading non-prescription killers on the rise are heroin and fentanyl, the drug that killed musician Prince. Experts believe that prescription opioids serve as gateways for illegal ones, so getting prescription use under control may be the key first step. Meanwhile, watch this. If you’ve ever thought that those who become dependent on opioids are weak or have defective personalities — and that these drugs might be safe for others, even you — this video from Lily Fang about how they work in the human brain reveals why these pain-killers are so incredibly dangerous. The video was created for a HarvardX class. © Copyright 2007-2017 & BIG THINK,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24190 - Posted: 10.13.2017

Haroon Siddique Magic mushrooms may effectively “reset” the activity of key brain circuits known to play a role in depression, the latest study to highlight the therapeutic benefits of psychadelics suggests. Psychadelics have shown promising results in the treatment of depression and addictions in a number of clinical trials over the last decade. Imperial College London researchers used psilocybin – the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in magic mushrooms – to treat a small number of patients with depression, monitoring their brain function, before and after. Images of patients’ brains revealed changes in brain activity that were associated with marked and lasting reductions in depressive symptoms and participants in the trial reported benefits lasting up to five weeks after treatment. Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, who led the study, said: “We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments. “Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted’. “Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24189 - Posted: 10.13.2017

Jo Marchant Male scientists are more likely to share their published work than are women — but only with other men, a study of hundreds of researchers has found. Humans are generally considered to be a highly cooperative species, says Jorg Massen, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. But most of the evidence for that assumption comes from artificial situations such as computerized cooperation tasks. “I wanted to test human prosociality in an everyday situation,” he says. So he chose one of the most competitive situations he could think of: his own field of research psychology. To investigate cooperation among psychologists, Massen turned his fellow researchers into guinea pigs. He and his colleagues e-mailed nearly 300 researchers and asked them to share either a PDF of one of their latest papers, or some raw data (pretending that they wanted to include it in a meta-analysis). The results were published in Scientific Reports on 10 October1. In general, the scientists contacted were highly cooperative, with almost 80% willing to share a PDF and almost 60% willing to send raw data. “I was surprised,” says Massen. “Humans are prosocial even in this competitive field.” Even more unexpected, however, was a strong gender difference in how the scientists responded to the request for help. Massen and his colleagues had wondered whether men might respond more favourably to women, or vice versa. In fact, men were more likely to share, but only with other men. A male–male request was 15% more likely to be granted than any other gender combination. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 24188 - Posted: 10.13.2017

By Helen Thomson The most detailed study yet of orgasm brain activity has discovered why climaxing makes women feel less pain and shown that ‘switching off’ isn’t necessary. It’s not easy to study the brain during orgasm. “A brain scanner like fMRI is the least sexy place in the world,” says Nan Wise at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. “It’s noisy, claustrophobic and cold.” There is also the problem of keeping your head still – movement of little more than the width of a pound coin can render data useless. Despite these hurdles, Wise and her colleagues recruited 10 heterosexual women to lay in a fMRI scanner and stimulate themselves to orgasm. They then repeated the experiment but had their partners stimulate them. Wise’s custom-fitted head stabiliser allowed the team to follow brain activity in 20 second intervals to see what happens just before, during, and after an orgasm. Pain relief Back in 1985, Wise’s colleagues Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk, both at Rutgers, discovered that, during self-stimulation and orgasm, women are less likely to notice painful squeezing of a finger, and can tolerate more of this pain. They found that women’s ability to withstand pain increased by 75 per cent during stimulation, while the level of squeezing at which women noticed the pain more than doubled. Now Wise’s team has explained why. At the point of orgasm, the dorsal raphe nucleus area of the brain becomes more active. This region plays a role in controlling the release of the brain chemical serotonin, which can act as an analgesic, dampening the sensation of pain. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 24187 - Posted: 10.13.2017

Laura Sanders The brain’s mapmakers don’t get a break, even for sleep. Grid cells, specialized nerve cells that help keep people and other animals oriented, stay on the clock 24/7, two preliminary studies on rats suggest. Results from the studies, both posted October 5 at bioRxiv.org, highlight the stability of the brain’s ‘inner GPS’ system. Nestled in a part of the brain called the medial entorhinal cortex, grid cells fire off regularly spaced signals as a rat moves through the world, marking a rat’s various locations. Individual grid cells work together to create a mental map of the environment. But scientists didn’t know what happens to this map when an animal no longer needs it, such as during sleep. Grid cells, it turns out, maintain their mapmaking relationships even in sleeping rats, report two teams of researchers, one from the University of Texas at Austin and one from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. (The Norway group includes the researchers who won a Nobel Prize in 2014 for discovering grid cells (SN Online: 10/6/14).) By eavesdropping on pairs of grid cells, researchers found that the cells maintain similar relationships to each other during sleep as they do during active exploration. For instance, two grid cells that fired off signals nearly in tandem while the rat was awake kept that same pattern during sleep, a sign that the map is intact. The results provide insights into how grid cells work together to create durable mental maps. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24186 - Posted: 10.13.2017

Dean Burnett Another day, another powerful man embroiled in a sinister sexual scandal decades in the making. This time it’s powerful Hollywood figure Harvey Weinstein. The moral, ethical and political aspects of this whole mess have been covered extensively elsewhere, and will no doubt continue to be so over the coming days and weeks. However, recent reports suggest that Weinstein has checked himself into a European rehab clinic for sex addiction. This has been met with some not-inconsiderable cynicism, but, even if it is true, wondering whether Weinstein is a sex addict overlooks a more fundamental question: is anyone a sex addict? Because that diagnosis, as commonplace as it may seem, is far from established psychiatric fact. Many people do believe sex addiction is real and serious problem, while others dismiss it outright. Despite it being a widely-used term, it doesn’t feature in either the DSM-V or ICD-10, the two main sources for officially-recognised psychiatric disorders the world over (although that’s not a guarantee of consensus either). How can something that seems, to many, to be so straightforward be the subject of so wide a debate? We all know what sex is, we all know what addiction is, what’s the issue? First, sex is a fundamental drive inherent in practically every human. A large percentage of our brain’s systems are responsible for or at least involved in it. An underlying need to seek out sex and an ability to engage in it as and when we like is a remarkably human trait (well, maybe bonobos too). This has many significant consequences for how our societies and cultures work, but one relevant problem is, at what point do you want sex too much? Because that’s not an easy thing to pin down. Those who don’t support the idea of sex addiction often argue that it’s another attempt to pin a clinical diagnosis on “normal” human behaviour (like the dispute around grief in the DSM-V). Some even compare it to gay conversion therapy, in how it medicalises and tries to undo what is an expression of human sexuality. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24185 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By Sara Van Note On a recent Saturday morning, two-year-old Ryleigh and five-year-old Colton Arnett play with brightly colored play dough in the family room of their Albuquerque home. Colton narrates his creations with a gap-toothed smile. “I’m going to use a mold. I’m going to make a boat.” Ryleigh echoes him enthusiastically, “Mold! Boat!” An estimated 30,000 New Mexicans carry the mutation, and the numbers are increasing. Their mother, Lori Dunworth, remarks that Colton and his sister don’t usually play so well together. “Usually she’s a bit of a bully when it comes to toys.” Both Ryleigh and Colton receive speech therapy because of something that happened to Colton several years ago, when Dunworth and her husband, Toby Arnett, first noticed that Colton, who was two at the time, was making repeating clicking sounds while his face twitched on one side. After one episode lasted over 20 minutes, they called their doctor, who told them to take him to the hospital immediately. Colton had suffered a seizure, and scans would later reveal masses in his brain — lesions, it turned out, caused by abnormal blood vessels. “The original impact was devastating,” Arnett says. Colton was ultimately diagnosed with Cerebral Cavernous Malformations (CCM), a rare disease that can cause seizure, stroke, and death. He also tested positive for a genetic mutation that causes the disease, known as the Common Hispanic Mutation. Colton’s sister and his mom also have the mutation. Dunworth had no idea she was the carrier. “I’ve never had any symptoms, no seizures, no paralysis, no nothing,” she says. Copyright 2017 Undark

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24184 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By Emily Underwood If you’ve ever found yourself in an MRI machine, you know keeping still isn’t easy. For newborns, it’s nearly impossible. Now, a portable, ultrasonic brain probe about the size of a domino could do similar work, detecting seizures and other abnormal brain activity in real time, according to a new study. It could also monitor growing babies for brain damage that can lead to diseases like cerebral palsy. “This is a window of time we haven’t had access to, and techniques like this are really going to open that up,” says Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Researchers have long been able to take still pictures of the newborn brain and study brain tissue after death. But brain function during the first few weeks of life, which is “utterly essential to future human health,” has always been something of a black box, Thomason says. Two techniques used in adults—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which can measure blood flow; and electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the outer layers of the brain—have their drawbacks. FMRI doesn’t work well with squirmy tots, is expensive, and is too big to haul to a delicate baby’s bedside. EEG—which only requires attaching a few wires to someone’s head—can’t penetrate deeper brain structures or show where a seizure begins, critical information for doctors weighing treatment options, says Olivier Baud, a developmental neuroscientist at the Robert Debré University Hospital in Paris. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24183 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By Bret Stetka The concept of mindfulness involves focusing on your present situation and state of mind. This can mean awareness of your surroundings, emotions and breathing—or, more simply, enjoying each bite of a really good sandwich. Research in recent decades has linked mindfulness practices to a staggering collection of possible health benefits. Tuning into the world around you may provide a sense of well-being, an array of studies claim. Multiple reports link mindfulness with improved cognitive functioning. One study even suggests it may preserve the tips of our chromosomes, which whither away as we age. Yet many psychologists, neuroscientists and meditation experts are afraid that hype is outpacing the science. In an article released this week in Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15 prominent psychologists and cognitive scientists caution that despite its popularity and supposed benefits, scientific data on mindfulness is woefully lacking. Many of the studies on mindfulness and meditation, the authors wrote, are poorly designed—compromised by inconsistent definitions of what mindfulness actually is, and often void of a control group to rule out the placebo effect. The new paper cites a 2015 review published in American Psychologist reporting that only around 9 percent of research into mindfulness-based interventions has been tested in clinical trials that included a control group. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Attention
Link ID: 24182 - Posted: 10.12.2017

Hannah Devlin Forget negotiations over who takes out the bin, new research suggests that the ideal home temperature is the vexed question most likely to split households down gender lines. A study found that one third of couples dispute this issue and that four in 10 women covertly turn up the heating behind their partner’s back. The research, which was sponsored by Corgi Homeplan, a company that installs and maintains boilers and thermostats, probably falls short of the rigours of peer-reviewed science. However, there is strong evidence to back up the idea that women are more sensitive to the cold. A 2015 study by Dutch scientists, for instance, found that women are comfortable at a temperature 2.5C warmer than men, typically between 24-25C. Men and women have roughly the same core body temperature, at over 37C; in fact, some studies have found the female core body temperature is slightly higher. However, our perception of temperature depends more on skin temperature, which, for women, tends to be lower. One study reported that the average temperature of women’s hands exposed to cold was nearly 3C degrees lower than that observed in men. The female hormone oestrogen contributes to this because it slightly thickens the blood, reducing the flow to capillaries that supply the body’s extremities. This means that, in women, blood flow to the tips of fingers and toes tends to shut off more readily when it is cold. Research has shown that women tend to feel colder around ovulation, when estrogen levels are high. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24181 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By Jessica Hamzelou For the first time, researchers have shown that being born by C-section can contribute to obesity in mice. This probably happens because the procedure disrupts a newborn’s microbiome. Until fairly recently, babies were thought to be born with sterile guts free from bacteria. But we now know that babies are born with a gutful of microbes, and that at least some of these come from a mother’s vaginal canal during birth. Babies born by C-section are thought to miss out on these bacteria, which could explain why their microbiomes look different. The ecosystem of microbes that live inside us has been implicated in a range of health issues, so this may explain why babies born by C-section are more likely to grow up overweight, and to develop allergies and asthma in later life. To test if C-sections really do lead to heavier babies, Maria Dominguez-Bello at New York University and her colleagues performed C-sections on 34 pregnant mice, and compared the resulting pups to 35 that were born vaginally. By the time the mice had grown into adults 15 weeks later, there were stark difference in body weight between the two groups. The mice born by C-section were, on average, 33 per cent heavier than those born vaginally. Females seemed particularly affected, says Dominguez-Bello. While the C-section males were around 20 per cent heavier than their vaginally-born counterparts, the females were 70 per cent heavier, she says. “We were very surprised to see this,” she says. “We have no idea why it’s happening.” © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24180 - Posted: 10.12.2017

Rae Ellen Bichell Abstinence may have found its most impressive poster child yet: Diploscapter pachys. The tiny worm is transparent, smaller than a poppy seed and hasn't had sex in 18 million years. It's basically just been cloning itself this whole time. Usually, that's a solid strategy for going extinct, fast. What's its secret? "Scientists have been trying to understand how some animals can survive for millions of years without sex, because such strict, long-term abstinence is very rare in the animal world," says David Fitch, a biologist at New York University. Most plants and animals use sex to reproduce. As he and his colleagues report in the recent issue of Current Biology, this seemingly unimpressive roundworm seems to have developed a different way of copying its genes — one that leads to just enough mutations to give the worms room to adapt, but not enough to cause crippling defects. Sex is pretty great for a lot of reasons (unless, perhaps, you're a duck), but one is that's it's a good way to dodge the effects of bad mutations. "All organisms accumulate mutations," says Kristin Gunsalus, a developmental geneticist at New York University and a co-author of the study. Usually, the machinery that copies DNA makes a few mistakes each time a cell divides. In humans, says Gunsalus, there are about six errors per cell division. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24179 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK Dr. Michel Jouvet, a neurophysiologist who discovered the region of the brain that controls rapid eye movement, and who helped define REM sleep as a unique state of consciousness common to humans and animals alike, was found dead on Oct. 3 in Villeurbanne, France. He was 91. Pierre-Hervé Luppi, a fellow researcher who worked with Dr. Jouvet for many years, said he had died overnight at a hospital. The curious physiological phenomenon known as REM sleep was first reported in the early 1950s by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman, researchers at the University of Chicago. They noticed that people who appeared to be sleeping soundly sometimes moved their fully lidded eyes, and that electroencephalogram recordings showed that brain activity during periods of eye movement was closer to that of someone awake than someone unconscious. They and another colleague, William C. Dement, eventually determined that sleepers had intermittent periods of REM during which they often dreamed. Dr. Jouvet was a researcher at the University of Lyon in France, studying how sleeping cats react to stimuli, before he turned his attention to REM in the late 1950s. In deep, or slow-wave, sleep, both cats and humans show slight muscle tension and low brain activity. But Dr. Jouvet found that during periods of REM sleep the muscles of cats were completely slack, even though their brain waves suggested physical activity. He called the REM state “paradoxical sleep,” since the brain is active even though the body is virtually still. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 24177 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By Esther Landhuis Among hundreds of genes that might nudge your risk of Alzheimer's up or down, Apolipoprotein E (APOE) has the strongest effect. Scientists discovered a quarter century ago that people with the APOE ε4 version of this gene are four to 15 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s, a deadly brain disorder that afflicts more than five million Americans. Yet how APOE actually sets off dementia has been somewhat of a mystery—and efforts to use it as a drug target have floundered. The field’s attention has focused on another “A” word—amyloid beta (Aβ). This protein can unwittingly accrue in the brain for years, disrupting nerve connections essential for thinking and memory. APOE has been thought of as a co-conspirator in this process, but finding ways to undermine its collusion have proved challenging. Anti-amyloid drugs have consumed the labors of pharmaceutical companies. If a drug could break those insidious clumps of protein or keep them from forming, drug developers reasoned, it could in theory halt the progression of the disease. But billions of dollars have poured into large-scale clinical trials of amyloid-lowering therapies that so far have failed. Advertisement APOE has hovered on the periphery as far as drug development, but this could soon change. Connections have emerged between the functioning of APOE and Aβ. In 2012 Boston scientists studying autopsy tissue from Alzheimer’s patients found APOE ε4 individuals had unusually high levels of brain Aβ. And they noticed Aβ clumped more readily in test tubes if mixed with ApoE proteins, especially ApoE4. Mouse data from teams at Washington University in Saint Louis and the University of California, San Francisco—suggested a similar relationship. Each lab worked with existing Alzheimer’s mouse models and further modified their genomes to make different types and amounts of ApoE proteins. In both studies animals with less ApoE had fewer Aβ plaques in their brains. © 2017 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24176 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Women with high blood pressure in their 40s are at increased risk for dementia in later years, researchers report. But the finding does not hold for men. Beginning in 1964, investigators collected health and lifestyle information on 5,646 men and women when they were 30 to 35 years old, and again when they were in their 40s. From 1996 to 2015, 532 of them were found to have Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. The study is in Neurology. Hypertension in women in their 30s was not associated with dementia. But women who were hypertensive at an average age of 44 had a 68 percent higher risk for dementia than those who had normal blood pressure at that age, even after adjusting for B.M.I., smoking and other risk factors. High blood pressure in men in their 30s or 40s was not associated with later dementia, but the study’s senior author, Rachel A. Whitmer, said that studies have tied hypertension in men in their 50s to later dementia. Dr. Whitmer, a senior research scientist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif., added that hypertension is more common in men, and the hypertensive men in the study tended to die at a younger age than the women. “The big picture here is that brain health is a lifelong issue,” she said. “What you do in young adulthood matters for your brain in old age.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 24175 - Posted: 10.12.2017

By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS The disintegration of Jake’s life took him by surprise. It happened early in his junior year of high school, while he was taking three Advanced Placement classes, running on his school’s cross-country team and traveling to Model United Nations conferences. It was a lot to handle, but Jake — the likable, hard-working oldest sibling in a suburban North Carolina family — was the kind of teenager who handled things. Though he was not prone to boastfulness, the fact was he had never really failed at anything. Not coincidentally, failure was one of Jake’s biggest fears. He worried about it privately; maybe he couldn’t keep up with his peers, maybe he wouldn’t succeed in life. The relentless drive to avoid such a fate seemed to come from deep inside him. He considered it a strength. Jake’s parents knew he could be high-strung; in middle school, they sent him to a therapist when he was too scared to sleep in his own room. But nothing prepared them for the day two years ago when Jake, then 17, seemingly “ran 150 miles per hour into a brick wall,” his mother said. He refused to go to school and curled up in the fetal position on the floor. “I just can’t take it!” he screamed. “You just don’t understand!” Jake was right — his parents didn’t understand. Jake didn’t really understand, either. But he also wasn’t good at verbalizing what he thought he knew: that going to school suddenly felt impossible, that people were undoubtedly judging him, that nothing he did felt good enough. “All of a sudden I couldn’t do anything,” he said. “I was so afraid.” His tall, lanky frame succumbed, too. His stomach hurt. He had migraines. “You know how a normal person might have their stomach lurch if they walk into a classroom and there’s a pop quiz?” he told me. “Well, I basically started having that feeling all the time.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Stress
Link ID: 24174 - Posted: 10.11.2017

Nicola Davis When it comes to understanding how another person thinks and feels, it might be best to close your eyes and listen. A study by an American psychologist suggests that people are better able to pick up on the emotions of others when simply focusing on their voice, compared with both watching and listening to them, or just watching them. “Humans are actually remarkably good at using many of their senses for conveying emotions, but emotion research historically is focused almost exclusively on the facial expressions,” said Michael Kraus, a social psychologist at Yale University and author of the study. While combining information from a person’s voice with their facial expressions and other cues might at first seem like a way to boost understanding of their thoughts and feelings, Kraus says pooling the senses divides attention. What’s more, he notes, facial expressions can mask a person’s true feelings – something that he says is harder to do with the voice – while language plays a key role in how people understand and label their emotions. The upshot, he says, is that what people say, and the way they say it, offers the clearest insights into the emotions of others. “Listening matters,” said Kraus. “Actually considering what people are saying and the ways in which they say it can, I believe, lead to improved understanding of others at work or in your personal relationships.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 24173 - Posted: 10.11.2017