By Dan Stark I used to tell people considering deep brain stimulation — which involves the surgical implantation of electrodes into the brain — that it gave the typical Parkinson’s sufferer perhaps 10 years of relief, during which the symptoms would be relatively minor. The bet — this is, after all, brain surgery that carries some risk of serious adverse results — would be that sometime during that decade, researchers would come up with a real solution. In other words, DBS was a way to buy time. Still, 10 years is no small period, particularly for those who have no other hope. My experience is typical. I had DBS just under 12 years ago. Things went so well that I became a huge fan of the procedure. But DBS works on only some Parkinson’s symptoms. (Drooling, for example, is not affected.) For slightly more than a decade, DBS performed wonders on me, eliminating the shakes that had accompanied my attempts to beat back Parkinson’s symptoms with medicine alone. But because DBS masks the symptoms while not affecting the underlying disease, in the end it will fail the Parkinson’s patient. For me, the failure was in the form of a one-two punch. The first blow was self-inflicted. In April, one of the batteries powering my neural implants died. That was my fault; one should monitor the batteries and replace them in advance. Because I hadn’t, I got a taste of what life would be like without the stimulators. © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 24132 - Posted: 10.02.2017

By John Horgan “The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips,” published in Scientific American in October 2005, has provoked as much interest as anything I’ve ever written. It focuses on Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, a pioneer in brain-stimulation research. I keep hearing from journalists and others wanting more information on Delgado, whom I interviewed in 2005 and who died in 2011. Delgado fascinates conspiracy theorists, too. An article on Infowars.com describes him as a “madman” who believed that “no human being has an inherent right to his own personality.” Given widespread interest in and misinformation about Delgado, whose work prefigures current research on brain implants (see “Further Reading”), I’m posting an edited version of my 2005 article. --John Horgan Once among the world’s most acclaimed scientists, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado has become an urban legend, whose career is shrouded in misinformation. Delgado pioneered that most unnerving of technologies, the brain chip, which manipulates the mind by electrically stimulating neural tissue with implanted electrodes. Long a McGuffin of science fictions, from The Terminal Man to The Matrix, brain chips are now being tested as treatments for epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, paralysis, depression, and other disorders. In part because it was relatively unencumbered by ethical regulations, Delgado’s research rivaled and even surpassed much of what is being done today. In 1965, The New York Times reported on its front page that he had stopped a charging bull in its tracks by sending a radio signal to a device implanted in its brain. He also implanted radio-equipped electrode arrays, which he called “stimoceivers,” in dogs, cats, monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons, and humans. With the push of a button, he could evoke smiles, snarls, bliss, terror, hunger, garrulousness, lust, and other responses. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 24131 - Posted: 10.02.2017

By Matthew Hutson Studying the human mind is tough. You can ask people how they think, but they often don’t know. You can scan their brains, but the tools are blunt. You can damage their brains and watch what happens, but they don’t take kindly to that. So even a task as supposedly simple as the first step in reading—recognizing letters on a page—keeps scientists guessing. Now, psychologists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to probe how our minds actually work. Marco Zorzi, a psychologist at the University of Padua in Italy, used artificial neural networks to show how the brain might “hijack” existing connections in the visual cortex to recognize the letters of the alphabet, he and colleagues reported last month in Nature Human Behaviour. Zorzi spoke with Science about the study and about his other work. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Q: What did you learn in your study of letter perception? A: We first trained the model on patches of natural images, of trees and mountains, and then this knowledge becomes a vocabulary of basic visual features the network uses to learn about letter shapes. This idea of “neural recycling” has been around for some time, but as far as I know this is the first demonstration where you actually gained in performance: We saw better letter recognition in a model that trained on natural images than one that didn’t. Recycling makes learning letters much faster compared to the same network without recycling. It gives the network a head start. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Robotics
Link ID: 24130 - Posted: 09.30.2017

By Christina Leuker, Wouter van den Bos, Jon M. Jachimowicz It is often easier to access someone else’s heart than their mind. We can nearly effortlessly pick up on our partner’s mood or sense that a friend dismisses our plans, without them even speaking a word. But how do we know what is going on in their heads? How do we get this special access to the most private of domains—the human mind? A growing body of research reveals that looking at their eyes may be a neglected and powerful way to do so. The phrases “the eyes are the window to the soul” and “I can see it in your eyes” certainly sound poetic. Many singers, songwriters and writers have capitalized on it. But it turns out that the eyes really might be the windows to the soul. And here’s the great thing about eyes: even if people don’t want you to know how they feel, they can’t change how their eyes behave. So how does this work? The first thing to look for is changes in pupil size. A famous study published in 1960 suggests that how wide or narrow pupils are reflects how information is processed, and how relevant it is. In their experiment, the two experimental psychologists Hess and Polt of the University of Chicago asked male and female participants to look at semi-nude pictures of both sexes. Female participants’ pupil sizes increased in response to viewing men, and male participants’ pupils increased in response to viewing women. In subsequent studies, Hess and Polt find that homosexual participants looking at semi-nude pictures of men (but not women) also had larger pupils. This should come to no surprise: after all, pupils can also reflect how aroused we are. But women’s pupils also responded to pictures of mothers holding babies. Hence, changes in pupil size don’t only reflect how aroused we are, but also how relevant and interesting what we see is. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 24129 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Josh Dehaas: Earlier this month, Stanford University researchers released a study that showed artificial intelligence can be used to predict whether a person is gay. Given a single image, computers used an algorithm to correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81 per cent of cases, and in 71 per cent of cases for women. Humans could also pick out gay people more often then not: 61 per cent for men, and 54 per cent for women. The researchers said their results offer support for the theory that prenatal hormones, which influence how we look, also influence sexual orientation. For gay people like me, the study simply seemed to confirm what we already know: sexual orientation is fixed at birth. You might think that LGBT activists would embrace this new study as yet more evidence that could be used to persuade religious conservatives or other skeptics that being gay isn’t a moral failing. Their response was, in fact, the opposite. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a huge lobby group in the U.S., called the study “junk science.” The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) chided the few media outlets who dared to write about it, criticizing the methodology, including the researchers’ decision to use all Caucasian photos (which they presumably did to ensure the computers were detecting facial differences related to sexuality rather than race), and their exclusion of transgender and bisexual people (a flaw, but not a huge one). A couple of professors joined the pile on, suggesting that it is unethical to so much as study whether machines can predict a person’s sexuality, because it could be used by anti-gay governments to further target and oppress people. That is a frightening concern in a world where being gay is illegal in more than 70 countries, but it ignores the possibility that this kind of research might actually change how oppressive regimes think about these issues in the long term. As University of Lethbridge sexuality researcher Paul Vasey points out, “the more people think homosexuality is biological the more tolerant they are.” And intolerance persists, even here in North America. Roy Moore, the man who just won a primary runoff to become the Republican nominee for senator in Alabama, wrote in 2002 (when he was the chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court) that “homosexual behavior is a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.” In 2005, he said that “homosexuality should be © 2017 National Post,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24128 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Alva Noë Philosophers have long worried whether it is ever really possible to know how things are, internally, with another. After all, we are confined to the external — to mere behavior, or perhaps to behavior plus measurements of brain activity. But the thoughts, feelings, images, sensations of another person, these are always hidden from our direct inspection. The situation of doctors facing unresponsive victims of brain injury is a terrifying real-world example of the fact that we our locked out of the minds of another. Consider the remarkable report, published Monday in Current Biology and discussed here, that a team in France has enabled a patient who has languished for 15 years in a vegetative state, to show, as they claim, a marked improvement in his levels of consciousness. They achieved this by means of the direct and sustained stimulation of the vagus nerve. As Dr. Angela Sirigu, one of the team leaders, explains by email, the results are dramatic: "After VNS [vagus nerve stimulation] the patient could respond to simple orders that were impossible before (to follow an object with his gaze, to turn the head on the other side of the bed on verbal request). His ability to sustain attention, like staying awake when listening to his therapist reading a book, greatly improved as reported by the mother. After stimulation, we found also responses to 'threat' that were absent before implantation. For instance, when the examiner's head suddenly approached to the patient's face, he reacted with surprise by opening the eyes wide, a reaction which indicates that he was fully aware that the examiner was too close to him." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24127 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Juli Fraga Becoming a mother is often portrayed as a magical and glorious life event. But many women don't feel joyful after giving birth. In fact, according to the American Psychological Association, almost 15 percent of moms suffer from a postpartum mood disorder like anxiety or depression, making maternal mental health concerns the most common complication of childbirth in the U.S. And even though these mental illnesses affect millions of women each year, new research shows 20 percent of mothers don't disclose their symptoms to healthcare providers. "Many women feel hesitant discussing their emotional difficulties, especially when they're experiencing symptoms of postpartum depression and anxiety," says Sarah Checcone, founder and director of The Postpartum Society of Florida. The Sarasota-based non-profit organization is testing out a new way to support struggling mothers and their families by offering a mother-to-mother mentorship program known as SISTER (Self-Image Support Team and Emotional Resource). Volunteers are mothers who've recovered from a maternal mental illness, as well as those impacted by a friend or family member's postpartum challenges. Sister moms seek to build community, creating a safe space. And that just might help women to open up about their difficulties. "Many women falsely believe that admitting they're anxious or depressed is the same as admitting weakness. They may even fear that speaking about their feelings may make them more real. We need to do a better job explaining to patients that anxiety and depression have nothing to do with being a 'bad mom,' " says Dr. Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist in New York City, specializing in maternal mental health and reproductive psychiatry. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24126 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Medical professionals and body artists say the practice of tattooing the eyeball, which recently left an Ottawa woman facing the prospect of vision loss, is on the rise despite its many risks. Ophthalmologists and tattoo studios decry the practice, saying it's very difficult to engage in it safely. Nonetheless, they say they hear of increasing demand for the extreme form of body modification which involves injecting ink into the whites of the eyes. A 24-year-old woman says she has learned the hard way about the risks of the procedure. Catt Gallinger says she recently allowed someone to dye the white of her right eye purple, but has since developed major complications. Gallinger does alternative modelling, a branch of modelling that features models who do not conform to mainstream beauty ideals and who often have body modifications. She has currently lost part of the vision in her swollen, misshapen eye and is facing the prospect of living with irreversible damage. "This is a very big toll on the mental health," she said in a telephone interview. "At this point, every day is different. Some days I feel a bit better, other days I kind of want to give up." ​Gallinger said she has long had an interest in body modification, and especially in tattooing the white of her eye, technically known as the sclera. But she said she took the plunge without doing adequate research on the procedure. Had she done so, medical and tattoo professionals say she could have found a plethora of evidence discouraging the practice, which has gained traction among body modification enthusiasts in recent years. ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24125 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Christie Wilcox Many tadpoles ward off predators with potent poisons — but those toxins also seem to help win battles with their own kind, a new study finds. Tadpoles of common toads (Bufo bufo) are more poisonous when raised in crowded conditions, which may give them a competitive edge, according to the work published on 23 September in Functional Ecology1. Many noxious plant species are known to modulate their defences to fend off different threats2, but it is less clear whether animals possess similar toxin-tuning abilities. Although predation pressure is known to induce tadpole chemical defences3, the new findings are the first unequivocal evidence of toxin synthesis spurred by competition in vertebrate animals. Being poisonous can make a species essentially inedible to predators, but making potent toxins comes at a metabolic cost — so it’s best to make that investment count. “It would be very profitable for such animals to kill two birds with one stone by using their anti-predatory toxins as chemical weapons against their competitors, too,” says the study’s lead author, Veronika Bókony, an ecologist with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Common toads are equipped with bufadienolides, potent toxins that cause harm by accelerating and disrupting the heart’s rhythms4. Field studies have found that common toad toxicity varies geographically, with the intensity of competition being the most reliable predictor5. But it has been unclear whether such patterns occur because populations are genetically isolated from one another in different ponds, or whether they reflect defences induced by environmental factors. © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Evolution
Link ID: 24124 - Posted: 09.30.2017

Barbara J. King In 1981, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man hit the presses. A take-down of studies purporting to demonstrate that the intelligence of humans is genetically determined — and that some human groups (read "white Western Europeans") are innately superior — the book exposed interpretive bias and scientific racism in the measurement of human intelligence. Different environmental histories across human groups, in fact, affect testing outcomes in significant ways: There is no innate superiority due to genes. The Mismeasure of Man ignited ferocious discussion (and the occasional subsequent correction) that has continued even in recent years across biology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy: Its argument mattered not only for how we do science, but how science entangles with issues of social justice. Now, psychologists David A. Leavens of the University of Sussex, Kim A. Bard of the University of Portsmouth, and William D. Hopkins of Georgia State University have framed their new Animal Cognition article, "The mismeasure of ape social cognition," around Gould's book. Ape (especially chimpanzee) social intelligence, the authors say, has been routinely mismeasured because apes are tested in comprehensively different circumstances from the children with whom they are compared — and against whose performance theirs is found to be lacking. Leavens et al. write: "All direct ape-human comparisons that have reported human superiority in cognitive function have universally failed to match the groups on testing environment, test preparation, sampling protocols, and test procedures." © 2017 npr

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 24123 - Posted: 09.29.2017

By GINA KOLATA Otto F. Warmbier, the college student imprisoned in North Korea and returned to the United States in a vegetative state, suffered extensive brain damage following interrupted blood flow and a lack of oxygen, according to the coroner who examined his body. But an external examination and “virtual autopsy” conducted by the coroner’s office in Hamilton County, Ohio, could not determine how his circulation had been cut off. “All we can do is theorize, and we hate to theorize without science backing us up,” Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, the county coroner, said in an interview Thursday. Mr. Warmbier, 22, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was convicted in March 2016 of trying to steal a propaganda poster while on a trip to North Korea and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He was flown back to the United States in June in a vegetative state. North Korean officials said Mr. Warmbier’s condition was caused by sleeping pills and botulism, a diagnosis that medical experts doubted. He died six days later at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. His parents requested that a full autopsy not be performed. On Tuesday, during an appearance on the television show “Fox & Friends,” Fred Warmbier said that his son had been “tortured” and described North Korean officials as “terrorists.” After the interview, President Trump said in a tweet that Mr. Warmbier “was tortured beyond belief by North Korea.” On Thursday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement denying again that Mr. Warmbier had been tortured and accusing the United States of “employing even a dead person” in a “conspiracy campaign” against North Korea. Dr. Sammarco’s examination, which was concluded earlier this month, did not find signs of torture but could not rule out the possibility. “There are a lot of horrible things you can do to a human body that don’t leave external signs behind,” Dr. Sammarco said. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24122 - Posted: 09.29.2017

A tiny change—just one mutation—appears to have boosted the modern Zika virus’s ability to attack fetal brain cells, fueling the wave of birth defects involving microcephaly (small head size) that recently swept across the Americas. The findings are reported Thursday in Science. Researchers in China found that a single swap of amino acids—from serine to asparagine—on a structural protein of the Zika virus occurred a few months before the pathogen first took off in French Polynesia in 2013. The team’s results may begin to answer an outstanding question from the Zika epidemic: Why have Zika-related microcephaly and other brain abnormalities been seen in areas hard-hit by outbreaks in the past few years but not in the decades following the virus’s discovery in 1947? One theory is that the Zika–microcephaly connection previously flew under the radar because there were too few cases to see the link. Another leading theory is that something about the modern virus has changed, allowing it to infect brain cells more efficiently than its ancestors could. The new work suggests the latter is true. “This is a very good study and it gives a plausible explanation that is scientifically based,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He adds that the results will be further strengthened if other groups replicate them. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24121 - Posted: 09.29.2017

By Amanda Onion Belly fat can be deadly, and is linked to a host of chronic diseases, including heart disease and type 2 diabetes. But as many of us probably know, it can be hard to lose weight in this area. Now it seems that inflammation of immune cells may be to blame, and we may be able to use drugs to help us burn off our belly flab. Christina Cammel, of the Yale School of Medicine, and her colleagues have been investigating macrophages – immune cells that normally track down and gobble up pathogens in the body. But as we age, there’s evidence that the macrophages in belly fat become inflamed. To see what effect this might have, Cammel’s team isolated macrophages from the fat tissue of young and old mice, and sequenced the DNA from these cells. They found that the genomes of the aged macrophages expressed more genes that hinder a group of molecules that spread signals between nerve cells, called catecholamines. The genes do this by activating an enzyme that suppresses these neurotransmitters. The boosted activity of this enzyme in aged immune cells in the belly fat of older mice effectively block signals telling the body that there is fat there that is available to burn for energy. “We found [that] macrophages in belly fat interfere with signals in a way that’s new to us,” says Cammel. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Depression
Link ID: 24120 - Posted: 09.28.2017

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS For most of us, temptations are everywhere, from the dessert buffet to the online shoe boutique. But a new study suggests that exercise might be a simple if unexpected way to increase our willpower and perhaps help us to avoid making impulsive choices that we will later regret. Self-control is one of those concepts that we all recognize and applaud but do not necessarily practice. It requires forgoing things that entice us, which, let’s face it, is not fun. On the other hand, lack of self-control can be consequential for health and well-being, often contributing to problems like weight gain, depression or money woes. Given these impacts, scientists and therapists have been interested in finding ways to increase people’s self-restraint. Various types of behavioral therapies and counseling have shown promise. But such techniques typically require professional assistance and have for the most part been used to treat people with abnormally high levels of impulsiveness. There have been few scientifically validated options available to help those of us who might want to be just a little better at resisting our more devilish urges. So for the new study, which was published recently in Behavior Modification, a group of researchers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence began wondering about exercise. Exercise is known to have considerable psychological effects. It can raise moods, for example, and expand people’s sense of what they are capable of doing. So perhaps, the researchers speculated, exercise might alter how well people can control their impulses. To find out, the scientists decided first to mount a tiny pilot study, involving only four men and women. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 24119 - Posted: 09.28.2017

By Avi Selk Five minutes in the life of a guppy in the terrible spring of 2015: You’re swimming around with your friends in a tank. You’ve been here for days. Food falls from the sky. Everything is fine. Then suddenly, you’re netted up and dropped into an alien world, all alone, just you and the glass. You panic at first, but in time your courage returns and you investigate. Glass wall; glass wall; glass wall; glass wall. A scrap of plastic on the aquarium floor provides the only scant shelter. Hmm … Splash! A huge beak crashes into the water. If you knew what the University of Exeter is, you might wonder how a heron even got inside. Instead, you just cower under the plastic and wait for death. But the beak does not return, and you peek out after a minute or so, and soon the net delivers you back to familiar surroundings. Food and friends again. The terrible memory fades, and life returns to normal. For three days. Then the net again, and the same strange tank of terror. Again and again and again — for you are a guppy in Tom Houslay’s lab, and he wants to understand the very core of your being. The fish could have been any one of the 105 Trinidadian guppies that Houslay’s team at Exeter’s Penryn campus subjected to regular doses of fear two years ago, in an effort to determine whether they have personalities. It turns out they do, of a sort. According to the team’s study, published Monday in the journal Functional Ecology, each fish demonstrated a unique response to stress — which they endured every three days in the form of a pulley-rigged lawn-ornament heron named “Grim,” or a predatory cichlid suddenly revealed on the other side of the glass. “Some of them go straight to the shelter,” said Houslay, an evolutionary biologist and the study’s lead author. “Some just stop moving, maybe hoping they won’t be seen. Some rush to the side and just swim up and down trying to escape.” © 1996-2017 The Washington Post

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 24118 - Posted: 09.28.2017

Greta Jochem Concussions have gotten a lot of attention in recent years, especially as professional football players' brains have shown signs of degenerative brain disease linked with repeated blows to the head. Now, a new analysis confirms what many doctors fear — that concussions start showing up at a high rate in teens who are active in contact sports. About 20 percent of teens said they have been diagnosed with at least one concussion. And nearly 6 percent said they've been diagnosed with more than one, according to a research letter published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says concussions can result in headaches, nausea and irritability. While most people do not suffer from long-term impacts from a concussion, between 10 percent and 20 percent may experience symptoms like depression, headaches or difficulty concentrating. Some people experience sleep problems, and multiple concussions are one way to cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease notably found in some NFL players. The letter's authors looked at 13,000 questionnaire responses from the 2016 version of Monitoring the Future. Each year since 1975, the study, run by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center, has surveyed high school students all over the country about their behaviors and attitudes. According to Philip Veliz, an author of the JAMA letter and an assistant research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Women & Gender, in 2016, the survey added a question asking whether students had ever had a concussion. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24117 - Posted: 09.28.2017

Hannah Devlin A 35-year-old man who had been in a persistant vegetative state (PVS) for 15 years has shown signs of consciousness after receiving a pioneering therapy involving nerve stimulation. The treatment challenges a widely-accepted view that there is no prospect of a patient recovering consciousness if they have been in PVS for longer than 12 months. Since sustaining severe brain injuries in a car accident, the man had been completely unaware of the world around him. But when fitted with an implant to stimulate the vagus nerve, which travels into the brain stem, the man appeared to flicker back into a state of consciousness. He started to track objects with his eyes, began to stay awake while being read a story and his eyes opened wide in surprise when the examiner suddenly moved her face close to the patient’s. He could even respond to some simple requests, such as turning his head when asked – although this took about a minute. Angela Sirigu, who led the work at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, France, said: “He is still paralysed, he cannot talk, but he can respond. Now he is more aware.” Niels Birbaumer, of the University of Tübingen and a pioneer of brain-computer interfaces to help patients with neurological disorders communicate, said the findings, published in the journal Current Biology, raised pressing ethical issues. “Many of these patients may and will have been neglected, and passive euthanasia may happen often in a vegetative state,” he said. “This paper is a warning to all those believing that this state is hopeless after a year.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24116 - Posted: 09.26.2017

By Anil Ananthaswamy “We were very happy when we saw him reacting,” says Angela Sirigu of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Bron, leader of the team that has “woken” a man from a vegetative state. “This patient is like our baby. We are very attached to him. He’ll always remain in our hearts, because he’s our first patient.” Sirigu and her colleagues chose the 35-year-old man to be the first to trial vagus nerve stimulation because his condition had not improved for 15 years. They reasoned that any improvements in his behaviour would be down to the stimulation and not simply chance fluctuations. Before the stimulation started, the man was unresponsive, and his eyes were shut for most of the day. If open, they would stare into empty space, says Sirigu. “You had the feeling he was not looking at you.” That changed once her team began stimulating his vagus nerve. Almost immediately, he began opening his eyes more often. About a month after stimulation began, his behavioural improvements started stabilising. “His eyes were moving around as if he wanted to follow me,” says Sirigu. He then began to respond to instructions to turn his gaze from one side of the bed to another. When a clinician asked him to smile, he’d react by raising his left cheek. When the team played some of his favourite music by French singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, the man had tears in his eyes. Sirigu says vagus nerve stimulation activates the neuroendocrinal system, which can explain the tears. But it happened at the same time as he listened to his preferred music, says Sirigu. “What can we say? We can conclude that there was an emotional reaction.” © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 24115 - Posted: 09.26.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Now and then I hear someone (myself included) proclaim “my brain is on overload.” This is not surprising given the myriad complex tasks the brain performs, among them enabling you to learn, plan, remember, communicate, see, hear and smell. Perhaps also not surprising, a growing number of studies have linked compromised sensory functions like poor vision and hearing to a decline in cognitive abilities. The brain, it seems, can do only so much, and when it must struggle to make sense of the world – from reading the words on a page to understanding the spoken word – it may be less able to perform other important tasks. While a cause-and-effect relationship has yet to be established, evidence is gradually increasing to suggest that uncorrected deficits in vision and hearing can accelerate cognitive decline. National statistics demonstrate the importance of this relationship. The number of Americans with poor vision, often undetected among older adults, is expected to double by 2050; hearing loss – mostly untreated or undertreated – afflicts nearly two-thirds of adults over 70; both vision and hearing impairment occur in one person in nine age 80 and older (fewer than one in five have neither), and the prevalence of dementia is now doubling every 20 years. The latest study, published in August in JAMA Ophthalmology, found that among a representative sample of nearly 3,000 older Americans and a second sample of 30,000 Medicare beneficiaries, poor vision was associated with poor cognition. The two data sets used different measurements of cognitive abilities like memory, orientation and planning, and the consistency of their findings suggests that the association between vision impairment and compromised brain function is real, the researchers concluded. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 24114 - Posted: 09.26.2017

By ERICA CROMPTON I’ve been fired more times than I care to admit. I have even more resignation letters to my name. Work and paranoid schizophrenia aren’t exactly a recipe for success. At one job I had, on the ground floor of a city office, there were bars on the windows. The bars were no doubt put in for security reasons, like all the other shops and offices on the street. But I grew increasingly convinced that they were placed there just for me as part of a grand conspiracy. I have always felt that people are setting me up for heinous crimes or that I’ve committed one that I can’t remember and that the police are spying on me to gather evidence. With the windows I felt they’d been fitted by a stranger who knew of me, sometime before I started work, to send me the message that I would soon “be behind bars.” Seeing a policeman on the street outside the office or hearing a helicopter fly by would set my heart racing. I was convinced they’d finally come for me. I didn’t last long in that office. The sedative effects of my medications also mean I often oversleep and get into the office late. Really late. Sometimes 90 minutes late. The head of my department at another job I had didn’t seem to mind, as I always made the time up in the evening. But colleagues did mind, others in the office told me, including the girl who sat next to me. Back then, I wasn’t open about having schizophrenia. I didn’t want to stigmatize myself by giving reasons for my tardiness. So I assume people just thought I was lazy. Far too often, I would regard an off-the-cuff remark by a work colleague, a roll of the eyes when I offered an idea at a meeting, or a sigh when I arrived late, as aggressive and threatening, an insult directed toward me. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 24113 - Posted: 09.26.2017