Alex Burmester When you need to remember a phone number, a shopping list or a set of instructions, you rely on what psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as working memory. It’s the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind, over brief intervals. It’s for things that are important to you in the present moment, but not 20 years from now. Researchers believe working memory is central to the functioning of the mind. It correlates with many more general abilities and outcomes – things like intelligence and scholastic attainment – and is linked to basic sensory processes. Given its central role in our mental life, and the fact that we are conscious of at least some of its contents, working memory may become important in our quest to understand consciousness itself. Psychologists and neuroscientists focus on different aspects as they investigate working memory: Psychologists try to map out the functions of the system, while neuroscientists focus more on its neural underpinnings. Here’s a snapshot of where the research stands currently. How much working memory do we have? Capacity is limited – we can keep only a certain amount of information “in mind” at any one time. But researchers debate the nature of this limit. Many suggest that working memory can store a limited number of “items” or “chunks” of information. These could be digits, letters, words or other units. Research has shown that the number of bits that can be held in memory can depend on the type of item – flavors of ice cream on offer versus digits of pi. © 2010–2017, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 23711 - Posted: 06.06.2017

By Joshua Rothman In 2004, when she was twenty-three, Sunaura Taylor Googled “arthrogryposis,” the name of a condition she has had since birth. Its Greek roots mean “hooked joints”; the arms and legs of many people who have it are shorter than usual because their joints are permanently flexed. Taylor was curious about whether animals had it, too. In the journal of the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Centre, she found a report called “Congenital Limb Deformity in a Red Fox.” It described a young fox with arthrogryposis. He had “marked flexure of the carpal and tarsal joints of all four limbs”—that is, hooked legs. He walked on the backs of his paws, which were heavily callused. In a surprised tone, the report noted that he was muscular, even a little fat: his stomach contained “the remains of two rodents and bones from a larger mammal mixed with partially digested apple, suggesting that the limb deformity did not preclude successful hunting and foraging.” All this had been discovered after he had been shot by someone walking in the woods, who noticed that he “had an abnormal gait and appeared sick.” Taylor was taken aback by this story. The fox, she thought, had been living a perfectly good life before someone had shot it. Perhaps that someone—the report named only “a resident of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia”—had been afraid of it; maybe he’d seen it as a weird, stumbling creature and imagined the shooting as an act of mercy. Taylor’s hands are small, and she has trouble lifting them; she uses a motorized wheelchair to get around. Once, her libertarian grandmother had told her that, were it not for the help of others, Taylor would “die in the woods.” When she read about the fox, she was coming into political consciousness as a disabled person. She had been learning about what disabilities scholars call the “better-off-dead narrative”—the idea, pervasive in movies and books, that life with a disability is inherently and irredeemably tragic. In the fox, she saw herself. © 2017 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 23710 - Posted: 06.06.2017

By Katie Langin No one likes a con artist. People avoid dealing with characters who have swindled them in the past, and—according to new research—birds avoid those people, too. Ravens, known more for their intelligence, but only slightly less for their love of cheese, were trained by researchers to trade a crust of bread for a morsel of cheese with human partners. When the birds then tried to broker a trade with “fair” and “unfair” partners—some completed the trade as expected, but others took the raven’s bread and kept (and ate) the cheese—the ravens avoided the tricksters in separate trials a month later. This suggests that ravens can not only differentiate between “fair” and “unfair” individuals, but they retain that ability for at least a month, the researchers write this month in Animal Behavior. Ravens have a complex social life involving friendships and rivalries. Their ability to recognize and punish dishonest individuals, even after a single encounter, may help explain how cooperation evolved in this group of birds. For people, though, the moral of the story is simple: Be nice to ravens. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 23709 - Posted: 06.06.2017

By EMILIE LE BEAU LUCCHESI Benjamin Stepp, an Iraq war veteran, sat in his graduate school course trying to focus on the lecture. Neither his classmates nor his professor knew he was silently seething. But his service dog, Arleigh, did. She sensed his agitation and “put herself in my lap,” said Mr. Stepp, 37, of Holly Springs, Miss. “I realized I needed to get out of class. We went outside, I calmed down. We breathed.” During his two deployments to Iraq, Mr. Stepp endured a traumatic brain injury and multiple surgeries on his ankle, and most days he suffers excruciating pain in his legs and lower back. He says he also returned from the war with a lot of anger, which wells up at unexpected times. “Anger kept us alive overseas,” Mr. Stepp said. “You learn that anger keeps you alive.” Now that he is back, though, that anger no longer serves a useful purpose. And Arleigh, a lab and retriever mix who came to Mr. Stepp from K9s For Warriors, a nonprofit organization that trains service dogs, has been helping him to manage it. The dog senses when his agitation and anxiety begin rising, and sends him signals to begin the controlled breathing and other exercises that help to calm him down. Pet owners and trainers have long been aware of a dog’s ability to sense a human’s emotions. In the last 10 years, researchers, too, have begun to explore more deeply the web of emotions, both positive and negative, that can spread between people and animals, said Natalia Albuquerque, an ethologist who studies animal cognition at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and the University of Lincoln in England. The spread of emotions between animals and people, or between animals — what researchers refer to as emotional contagion — is an emerging field of science. But “there are still many unanswered questions we need to address,” Ms. Albuquerque said. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 23708 - Posted: 06.05.2017

Judith Ohikuare In 2005, James Fallon's life started to resemble the plot of a well-honed joke or big-screen thriller: A neuroscientist is working in his laboratory one day when he thinks he has stumbled upon a big mistake. He is researching Alzheimer's and using his healthy family members' brain scans as a control, while simultaneously reviewing the fMRIs of murderous psychopaths for a side project. It appears, though, that one of the killers' scans has been shuffled into the wrong batch. The scans are anonymously labeled, so the researcher has a technician break the code to identify the individual in his family, and place his or her scan in its proper place. When he sees the results, however, Fallon immediately orders the technician to double check the code. But no mistake has been made: The brain scan that mirrors those of the psychopaths is his own. After discovering that he had the brain of a psychopath, Fallon delved into his family tree and spoke with experts, colleagues, relatives, and friends to see if his behavior matched up with the imaging in front of him. He not only learned that few people were surprised at the outcome, but that the boundary separating him from dangerous criminals was less determinate than he presumed. Fallon wrote about his research and findings in the book The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain, and we spoke about the idea of nature versus nurture, and what—if anything—can be done for people whose biology might betray their behavior. © 2017 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 23707 - Posted: 06.05.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Harding Senior High, a public school in St. Paul, Minn., has long been known as a 90-90-90 school: 90 percent of students are minorities, nearly 90 percent come from poor or struggling families and, until recently, 90 percent graduate (now about 80 percent) to go on to college or a career. Impressive statistics, to be sure. But perhaps most amazing about this school is that it recognizes and acts on the critical contribution that adequate food and good nutrition make to academic success. Accordingly, it provides three balanced meals a day to all its students, some of whom might otherwise have little else to eat on school days. For those who can’t get to school in time for early breakfast, a substitute meal is offered after first period, to be eaten during the second period. Every student can pick up dinner at the end of the school day, and those who play sports after school can take the dinner with them to practices and games. To Jennifer Funkhauser, a French teacher at Harding and hands-on participant in the meal program, making sure the students are well fed is paramount to their ability to succeed academically. Ms. Funkhauser and the staff at Harding are well aware of the many studies showing that children who are hungry or malnourished have a hard time learning. After she noticed that some youngsters were uncomfortable eating with hundreds of others in a large, noisy lunchroom, Ms. Funkhauser created a more private, quieter “lunch bunch” option for them. The attitude and atmosphere at Harding are in stark contrast to the humiliating lunchroom experiences suffered by students at some schools, where youngsters are sometimes shamed in front of their classmates and their meals confiscated and dumped in the garbage when parents have an unpaid lunch bill. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23706 - Posted: 06.05.2017

By Helen Thomson Life is full of decisions, and sometimes it’s difficult to know if you’re making the right one. But a drug that blocks the rush of noradrenaline through your body can boost your confidence, and may also lead to new treatments for schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder. How much we trust our decisions is governed by the process we use to assess our own behaviour and abilities, known as metacognition. Our judgements shape how we’ll behave in future. For example, if you play Frisbee and you think you played badly, you might be less likely to do it again, says Tobias Hauser at University College London. Having low confidence in our actions can play a part in mental health conditions. “We see many symptoms associated with poor metacognitive judgement in schizophrenia and OCD,” says Hauser. “In OCD, for instance, people may constantly go and check whether they’ve closed a door. They are poor at judging whether they have done something correctly or not.” Little is known about the neural underpinnings of metacognition, but it is likely to involve the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, two brain areas modulated by the chemicals dopamine and noradrenaline. To investigate, Hauser and his colleagues asked 40 people to take a drug that blocks dopamine or noradrenaline either before or after a placebo. Another 20 people received two doses of the placebo drug. Eighty minutes after receiving the second drug, the subjects performed a task in which they had to decide whether the overall motion of a burst of randomly moving dots was directed to the left or right. © Copyright New Scientist Ltd.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 23705 - Posted: 06.03.2017

In a pair of studies, scientists at the National Institutes of Health explored how the human brain stores and retrieves memories. One study suggests that the brain etches each memory into unique firing patterns of individual neurons. Meanwhile, the second study suggests that the brain replays memories faster than they are stored. The studies were led by Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Persons with drug resistant epilepsy in protocols studying surgical resection of their seizure focus at the NIH’s Clinical Center enrolled in this study. To help locate the source of the seizures, Dr. Zaghloul’s team surgically implanted a grid of electrodes into the patients’ brains and monitored electrical activity for several days. “The primary goal of these recordings is to understand how to stop the seizures. However, it’s also a powerful opportunity to learn how the brain works,” said Dr. Zaghloul. For both studies, the researchers monitored brain electrical activity while testing the patients’ memories. The patients were shown hundreds of pairs of words, like “pencil and bishop” or “orange and navy,” and later were shown one of the words and asked to remember its pair. In one study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the patients correctly remembered 38 percent of the word pairs they were shown. Electrical recordings showed that the brain waves the patients experienced when they correctly stored and remembered a word pair often occurred in the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex regions. Nevertheless, the researchers showed that the waves that appeared when recalling the words happened faster than the waves that were present when they initially stored them as memories.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Epilepsy
Link ID: 23704 - Posted: 06.03.2017

Rebecca Hersher Emotions, the classic thinking goes, are innate, basic parts of our humanity. We are born with them, and when things happen to us, our emotions wash over us. "They happen to us, almost," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She's also the author of a book called How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. In it, she argues for a new theory of emotions which is featured in the latest episode of NPR's program and podcast Invisibilia. The "classical view" of emotions as innate and limited in variety, she says, "matches the way that many of us experience emotion, as if something's happening outside of our control," she tells Shots. "But the problem with this set of ideas is that the data don't support them. There's a lot of evidence which challenges this view from every domain of science that's ever studied it." Lisa Feldman Barrett spoke to Shots about her alternative theory of emotions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. On the "classical" theory of emotions The classical view of emotion is the idea that somewhere lurking deep inside you are the animalistic engine parts of your brain. There are circuits — one each for anger, sadness, fear, disgust and so on. And that when something happens in the world to trigger one of those circuits — say, for fear — you will have a very specific facial expression, a very specific bodily response, and that these expressions and responses have universal meaning. Everyone in the world makes them and recognizes them without learning or any experience at all. © 2017 npr

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 23703 - Posted: 06.03.2017

by Laura Sanders Lots of newborn decorations come in black and white, so that young babies can better see the shapes. But just because it’s easier for babies to see bold blacks and whites doesn’t mean they can’t see color. Very few studies of color vision in newborns exist, says Anna Franklin, a color researcher at the University of Sussex in England. “But those that have been conducted suggest that newborns can see some color, even if their color vision is limited,” she says. Newborns may not be great at distinguishing maroon from scarlet, but they can certainly see a vivid red. But as babies get a little older, they get remarkably adept at discerning the world’s palette, new research shows. Babies ages 4 months to 6 months old are able to sort colors into five categories, researchers report in the May 23 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These preverbal color capabilities offer insight into something scientists have long wondered: Without words for individual colors, how do babies divvy up the hues across the color wheel, telling when blue turns to green, for instance? Along with Franklin and colleagues, psychologist Alice Skelton, also of the University of Sussex, bravely approached this question. The team coaxed 179 4- to 6-month-old babies to calmly and repeatedly look at two squares, each 1 of 14 various colors. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 23702 - Posted: 06.03.2017

Laurel Hamers A monkey’s brain builds a picture of a human face somewhat like a Mr. Potato Head — piecing it together bit by bit. The code that a monkey’s brain uses to represent faces relies not on groups of nerve cells tuned to specific faces — as has been previously proposed — but on a population of about 200 cells that code for different sets of facial characteristics. Added together, the information contributed by each nerve cell lets the brain efficiently capture any face, researchers report June 1 in Cell. “It’s a turning point in neuroscience — a major breakthrough,” says Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a neuroscientist at the University of Leicester in England who wasn’t part of the work. “It’s a very simple mechanism to explain something as complex as recognizing faces.” Until now, Quiroga says, the leading explanation for the way the primate brain recognizes faces proposed that individual nerve cells, or neurons, respond to certain types of faces (SN: 6/25/05, p. 406). A system like that might work for the few dozen people with whom you regularly interact. But accounting for all of the peripheral people encountered in a lifetime would require a lot of neurons. It now seems that the brain might have a more efficient strategy, says Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at Caltech. Tsao and coauthor Le Chang used statistical analyses to identify 50 variables that accounted for the greatest differences between 200 face photos. Those variables represented somewhat complex changes in the face — for instance, the hairline rising while the face becomes wider and the eyes becomes further-set. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 23701 - Posted: 06.02.2017

Mo Costandi Since 1997, more than 100,000 Parkinson’s Disease patients have been treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS), a surgical technique that involves the implantation of ultra-thin wire electrodes. The implanted device, sometimes referred to as a ‘brain pacemaker’, delivers electrical pulses to a structure called the subthalamic nucleus, located near the centre of the brain, and effectively alleviates many of the physical symptoms of the disease, such as tremor, muscle rigidity, and slowed movements. DBS is generally safe but, like any surgical procedure, comes with some risks. First and foremost, it is highly invasive, requiring small holes to be drilled in the patient’s skull, through which the electrodes are inserted. Potential complications of this include infection, stroke, and bleeding on the brain. The electrodes, which are implanted for long periods of time, sometimes move out of place; they can also cause swelling at the implantation site; and the wire connecting them to the battery, typically placed under the skin of the chest, can erode, all of which require additional surgical procedures. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a developed a new method that can stimulate cells deep inside the brain non-invasively, using multiple electric fields applied from outside the organ. In a study published today in the journal Neuron, they show that the method can selectively stimulate deep brain structures in live mice, without affecting the activity of cells in the overlying regions, and also that it can be easily adjusted to evoke movements by stimulation of the motor cortex. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited o

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 23700 - Posted: 06.02.2017

By Gary Stix In April, DARPA announced contracts for a program to develop practical methods to help someone learn more quickly. In the ensuing press coverage, the endeavor drew immediate comparisons to the The Matrix—in which Neo, the Keanu Reeves character, has his brain reprogrammed so that he instantly masters Kung Fu. DARPA is known for setting ambitious goals for its technology development programs. But it is not requiring contractors for the $50 million, four-year effort to find a way to let a special forces soldier upload neural codes to instantaneously execute a flawless Wushu butterfly kick. The agency did award contracts, though, to find some means of zapping nerves in the peripheral nervous system outside the brain to speed the rate at which a foreign language can be learned by as much as 30 percent, a still not-too-shabby goal. Sending an electrical current into the vagus nerve in the neck from a surgically implanted device is already approved for treating epilepsy and depression. The DARPA program, in tacit acknowledgement that mandatory surgery might be unacceptable for students contemplating an accelerated Mandarin class, wants to develop a non-invasive device to stimulate a peripheral nerve, perhaps in the ear. The goal is to hasten, not just the learning of foreign languages, but also to facilitate pattern recognition tasks such as combing through surveillance imagery. © 2017 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 23699 - Posted: 06.02.2017

Baby teeth from children with autism contain more toxic lead and less of the essential nutrients zinc and manganese, compared to teeth from children without autism, according to an innovative study funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The researchers studied twins to control genetic influences and focus on possible environmental contributors to the disease. The findings, published June 1 in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that differences in early-life exposure to metals, or more importantly how a child’s body processes them, may affect the risk of autism. The differences in metal uptake between children with and without autism were especially notable during the months just before and after the children were born. The scientists determined this by using lasers to map the growth rings in baby teeth generated during different developmental periods. The researchers observed higher levels of lead in children with autism throughout development, with the greatest disparity observed during the period following birth. They also observed lower uptake of manganese in children with autism, both before and after birth. The pattern was more complex for zinc. Children with autism had lower zinc levels earlier in the womb, but these levels then increased after birth, compared to children without autism. The researchers note that replication in larger studies is needed to confirm the connection between metal uptake and autism.

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 23698 - Posted: 06.02.2017

Sarah Marsh When depression takes hold of Helen it feels like she is drowning in a pool of water, unable to swim up to the world above. The 36-year-old former nurse has had mental health problems most of her life. No drugs, hospital stays or therapies have been able to help. Then one day, during yet another spell in hospital, her consultant told her about a psychiatrist treating patients with ketamine. The psychiatrist in question visited her to discuss using the drug. He warned there were no guarantees, but it had helped some patients. Since then Helen’s life has transformed. Sitting on a bench in the grounds of the hospital where her treatment began a year and a half ago, she lists everything she can do now that she could not before: take her kids to school, give them hugs, go on coffee dates. “I am managing my thoughts and that is what ketamine helps to do. It slows down my thought process so instead of being completely overwhelmed by all these immense negative thoughts and feelings … I can think, stop and breathe,” she says, nervously pulling her sleeves over her hands as she talks. She adds: “It’s still really hard but now there is a tiny fraction of a second where my thoughts are slow enough to think: ‘I can deal with this. I cannot give up.’”

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 23697 - Posted: 06.02.2017

By Ashley Yeager A database of electron microscopy images reveals the connections of the entire female fruit fly brain. In this image, types of Kenyon cells (KC) in the mushroom body main calyx are labeled by color: αβc-KCs are green, αβs-KCs are yellowish brown, and gamma-KCs are blue. The white arrows point to visible presynaptic release sites.ZHENG ET AL. 2017A 21-million-image dataset of the female fruit fly brain is offering an unprecedented view of the cells and their connections that underlie the animal’s behavior. The full-brain survey, taken by electron microscopy, allowed researchers to describe all of the neural inputs into a region of the fly’s brain linked to learning, examine how tightly neurons are clustered in the area, and identify a new cell type. “This is the biggest whole brain imaged at high resolution,” Davi Bock of the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, VA, tells The Scientist. He and his colleagues published a preprint of their results on bioRxiv this month (May 22). Past studies have produced electron microscopy images with resolution high enough to reveal the wiring of the entire brain of smaller organisms, such as a nematode or a fruit fly larva, or sections from larger animals, including parts of the fly brain or a cat’s thalamus. Imaging the complete fruit fly brain “is nearly two orders of magnitude larger than the next-largest complete brain imaged at sufficient resolution to trace synaptic connectivity,” Bock and colleagues wrote in their report. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 23696 - Posted: 06.02.2017

By Amina Zafar, CBC News When men postpone meal times, it delays one of the body's clocks, British researchers say, a finding that sheds light on a potential way to overcome jet lag and health harms for shift workers. Our bodies run a roughly 24-hour cycle called the circadian or sleep/wake rhythm. It is controlled by a master "clock" in the brain that responds to light signals from the retina, synchronizing other clocks throughout the body. Now investigators have discovered that a five-hour delay in meal time causes a five-hour delay in blood glucose rhythms. "We think this is due to changes in clocks in our metabolic tissues but not the 'master' clock in the brain," said Jonathan Johnston of the University of Surrey, one of the authors of the study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Current Biology. "This work is important because it demonstrates for the first time that a relatively subtle change of standard human feeding pattern re-synchronizes key metabolic rhythms in the body." Currently, people disoriented by the sluggish time warp of jet lag may take melatonin supplements and time their light exposure to help synchronize their clocks. While the study introduces the idea of adding meal timing to the clock reset toolkit, the practical details of how to do so still need to be worked out. In the experiment, 10 healthy young men came to a specialized sleep lab for 13 days. At first, breakfast was set for 30 minutes after waking. Then, after the men got used ©2017 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 23695 - Posted: 06.02.2017

By Matthew Hutson The life of a sheep is not as cushy as it looks. They suffer injury and infection, and can’t tell their human handlers when they’re in pain. Recently, veterinarians have developed a protocol for estimating the pain a sheep is in from its facial expressions, but humans apply it inconsistently, and manual ratings are time-consuming. Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom have stepped in to automate the task. They started by listing several “facial action units” (AUs) associated with different levels of pain, drawing on the Sheep Pain Facial Expression Scale. They manually labeled these AUs—nostril deformation, rotation of each ear, and narrowing of each eye—in 480 photos of sheep. Then they trained a machine-learning algorithm by feeding it 90% of the photos and their labels, and tested the algorithm on the remaining 10%. The program’s average accuracy at identifying the AUs was 67%, about as accurate as the average human, the researchers will report today at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, D.C. Ears were the most telling cue. Refining the training procedure further boosted accuracy. Given additional labeled images, the scientists expect their method would also work with other animals. Better diagnosis of pain could lead to quicker treatment. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science. A

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 23694 - Posted: 06.02.2017

By Bob Grant Prosthetic limbs are rejected by amputees’ bodies at a rate of about 20 percent. Researchers at MIT are seeking to reduce that number, using an amputation procedure that encourages increased feedback between muscles, tendons, and the nervous system so that an artificial limb might stimulate them in a more natural way—giving patients a better sense of proprioception, or where their limb is in space. The key to the surgical technique, demonstrated in rats so far, is to emulate the normal agonist-antagonist pairing of muscles (think biceps and triceps) at the amputation site so that the muscles and nerves surrounding a prosthetic can sense and transmit proprioceptive information about the artificial limb and how much force is being applied to it. The researchers published their work today (May 31) in Science Robotics. “We’re talking about a dramatic improvement in patient care,” Hugh Herr, an MIT professor of media arts and sciences and a coauthor of the study, said in a statement. “Right now there’s no robust neural method for a person with limb amputation to feel proprioceptive positions and forces applied to the prosthesis. Imagine how that would completely hinder one’s ability to move, to successfully balance, or to manipulate objects.” Herr, himself a double-amputee, and his team operated on seven rats, cutting through muscles and nerves in their hind legs. The researchers then grafted on paired muscles, wiring them up to severed nerves. After healing for four months, the rats’ new muscles were contracting and relaxing in tandem, as in naturally paired muscles, and sending electrical signals that reflected the amplitude of the artificial stimulation Herr and his colleagues applied. © 1986-2017 The Scientist

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 23693 - Posted: 06.02.2017

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,” Shakespeare wrote. Now scientists have pinpointed the specific patterns of brain activity that accompany romance, offering a new explanation for why love sends our judgement haywire. As a relationship takes root, the study found, the brain’s reward circuit goes into overdrive, rapidly increasing the value placed on spending time with one’s love interest. This, at least, was the case in the prairie vole, scientists’ animal model of choice for studying the neuroscience of love. Elizabeth Amadei, who co-led the work at Emory University in Atlanta, said: “As humans, we know the feelings we get when we view images of our romantic partners, but, until now, we haven’t known how the brain’s reward system works to lead to those feelings.” In order to get more direct access to what is happening in the brain, Amadei and colleagues turned to the North American voles, which as a species have almost perfected monogamy. They mate for life, share nest-building duties and have an equal role in raising their young – although, like humans, voles have the occasional “extramarital” fling. Using electrical probes, the scientists recorded directly from the brains of female voles as they encountered a potential partner, mated for the first time and began to show signs of having formed a lifelong bond, indicated by “huddling” behaviour.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 23692 - Posted: 06.01.2017