John Consentino After multiple doctors had conflicted about ADHD, I decided to move away from psychiatry and seek a neuropsychologist. I thought that autism made sense, but what ultimately led me to seek help was my focus problem. When I was 8 years old, it would take me HOURS to do homework. On Wednesdays, we got out of school at noon, and I wouldn't finish homework until about 8 p.m. No one understood why this was happening, and with all of the screaming and punishments I withstood, nothing improved. I still had GPAs near the high 90s, so all was OK, supposedly. I struggled with eye contact during that time, and this is very much apparent now. I struggled speaking to waiters/waitresses, to teachers, to family members. Speaking to members of the opposite sex was a near-impossible task. I never understood social groups. I went through all of high school in the same fashion. However, my family felt that everything was OK. I still had a mid-90 GPA, and I had made numerous friends. Unfortunately, my GPA had dropped by about 15-plus points by my senior year. I struggled badly during my first two years of college. I was constantly unhappy, and I made little to no friends. My GPA was horrid, and my time at the university was dwindling. I dropped out of school twice, and my future felt bleak. After transferring schools, I did great. So, everything was OK yet again. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 22036 - Posted: 03.28.2016

By ALAN SCHWARZ, WALT BOGDANICH and JACQUELINE WILLIAMS With several of its marquee players retiring early after a cascade of frightening concussions, the league formed a committee in 1994 that would ultimately issue a succession of research papers playing down the danger of head injuries. Amid criticism of the committee’s work, physicians brought in later to continue the research said the papers had relied on faulty analysis. Now, an investigation by The New York Times has found that the N.F.L.’s concussion research was far more flawed than previously known. For the last 13 years, the N.F.L. has stood by the research, which, the papers stated, was based on a full accounting of all concussions diagnosed by team physicians from 1996 through 2001. But confidential data obtained by The Times shows that more than 100 diagnosed concussions were omitted from the studies — including some severe injuries to stars like quarterbacks Steve Young and Troy Aikman. The committee then calculated the rates of concussions using the incomplete data, making them appear less frequent than they actually were. After The Times asked the league about the missing diagnosed cases — more than 10 percent of the total — officials acknowledged that “the clubs were not required to submit their data and not every club did.” That should have been made clearer, the league said in a statement, adding that the missing cases were not part of an attempt “to alter or suppress the rate of concussions.” One member of the concussion committee, Dr. Joseph Waeckerle, said he was unaware of the omissions. But he added: “If somebody made a human error or somebody assumed the data was absolutely correct and didn’t question it, well, we screwed up. If we found it wasn’t accurate and still used it, that’s not a screw-up; that’s a lie.” These discoveries raise new questions about the validity of the committee’s findings, published in 13 peer-reviewed articles and held up by the league as scientific evidence that brain injuries did not cause long-term harm to its players. It is also unclear why the omissions went unchallenged by league officials, by the epidemiologist whose job it was to ensure accurate data collection and by the editor of the medical journal that published the studies. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 22035 - Posted: 03.26.2016

Mo Costandi Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance. Understanding how the brain generates behaviour is one of the ultimate goals of neuroscience – and one of its most difficult questions. In recent years, researchers have developed a number of methods that enable them to remotely control specified groups of neurons and to probe the workings of neuronal circuits. The most powerful of these is a method called optogenetics, which enables researchers to switch populations of related neurons on or off on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale with pulses of laser light. Another recently developed method, called chemogenetics, uses engineered proteins that are activated by designer drugs and can be targeted to specific cell types. Although powerful, both of these methods have drawbacks. Optogenetics is invasive, requiring insertion of optical fibres that deliver the light pulses into the brain and, furthermore, the extent to which the light penetrates the dense brain tissue is severely limited. Chemogenetic approaches overcome both of these limitations, but typically induce biochemical reactions that take several seconds to activate nerve cells. The new technique, developed in Ali Güler’s lab at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and described in an advance online publication in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is not only non-invasive, but can also activate neurons rapidly and reversibly. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 22034 - Posted: 03.26.2016

Kristin Gourlay Swaddled in soft hospital blankets, Lexi is 2 weeks old and weighs 6 pounds. She's been at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, R.I., since she was born, and is experiencing symptoms of opioid withdrawal. Her mother took methadone to wean herself from heroin when she got pregnant, just as doctors advised. But now the hospital team has to wean newborn Lexi from the methadone. As rates of opioid addiction have continued to climb in the U.S., the number of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome has gone up, too — by five-fold from 2000 to 2012, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse. It can be a painful way to enter the world, abruptly cut off from the powerful drug in the mother's system. The baby is usually born with some level of circulating opioids. As drug levels decline in the first 72 hours, various withdrawal symptoms may appear — such as trembling, vomiting, diarrhea or seizures. At some point, if symptoms mount in number or severity, doctors will begin giving medication to help ease them. The idea is to give the baby just enough opioid to reduce those symptoms, and then slowly, over days or weeks, decrease that dose to zero. A doctor comes to check on Lexi and her mother, Carrie. To protect her family's privacy, Carrie asked us not to use the family name. "So, hi, Peanut!" the doctor says to the baby. "Any concerns?" she asks Carrie. "Coming down has been catching up with her," says Carrie. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22033 - Posted: 03.26.2016

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE LAWRENCE, Mass. — When Eddie Frasca was shooting up heroin, he occasionally sought out its more potent, lethal cousin, fentanyl. “It was like playing Russian roulette, but I didn’t care,” said Mr. Frasca, 30, a carpenter and barber who said he had been clean for four months. When he heard that someone had overdosed or even died from fentanyl, he would hunt down that batch. “I’d say to myself, ‘I’m going to spend the least amount of money and get the best kind of high I can,’ ” he said. Fentanyl, which looks like heroin, is a powerful synthetic painkiller that has been laced into heroin but is increasingly being sold by itself — often without the user’s knowledge. It is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and up to 100 times more potent than morphine. A tiny bit can be fatal. In some areas in New England, fentanyl is now killing more people than heroin. In New Hampshire, fentanyl alone killed 158 people last year; heroin killed 32. (Fentanyl was a factor in an additional 120 deaths; heroin contributed to an additional 56.) “It sort of snuck up on us,” said Detective Capt. Robert P. Pistone of the Haverhill Police Department in Massachusetts. He said that a jump in deaths in 2014 appeared to be caused by heroin, but that lab tests showed the culprit was fentanyl. Fentanyl represents the latest wave of a rolling drug epidemic that has been fueled by prescription painkillers, as addicts continue to seek higher highs and cheaper fixes. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22032 - Posted: 03.26.2016

By Catherine Matacic Twenty-three years ago, a bonobo named Kanzi (above) aced a test in understanding human language. But a new study reveals he may not be as brainy as scientists thought—at least when it comes to grammar. The original test consisted of 660 verbal commands, in English, that asked Kanzi to do things like "show me the hot water" and "pour cold water in the potty." Overall, the ape did well, responding correctly 71.5% of the time (compared with 66.6% for an infant human). But when the researchers asked him to perform an action on more than one item, his performance plummeted to just 22.2%, according to the new analysis. When he was asked to "give the lighter and the shoe to Rose," for example, he gave Rose the lighter, but no shoe. When asked to "give the water and the doggie to Rose," he gave her the toy dog, but no water. The cause? Animals like bonobos may have a harder time than humans in processing complex noun phrases like “water and doggie,” linguist Robert Truswell of the University of Edinburgh reported in New Orleans, Louisiana, this week at the Evolution of Language conference. This feature of grammar—which effectively “nests” one unit within the bigger construct of a sentence—is easily picked up by humans, allowing us to communicate—and understand—more complex ideas. But Truswell cautions that humans probably aren’t born with the ability to interpret this kind of nesting structure. Instead, we must be taught how to use it. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 22031 - Posted: 03.26.2016

Laura Sanders The 22 men took the same pill for four weeks. When interviewed, they said they felt less daily stress and their memories were sharper. The brain benefits were subtle, but the results, reported at last year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, got attention. That’s because the pills were not a precise chemical formula synthesized by the pharmaceutical industry. The capsules were brimming with bacteria. In the ultimate PR turnaround, once-dreaded bacteria are being welcomed as health heroes. People gobble them up in probiotic yogurts, swallow pills packed with billions of bugs and recoil from hand sanitizers. Helping us nurture the microbial gardens in and on our bodies has become big business, judging by grocery store shelves. These bacteria are possibly working at more than just keeping our bodies healthy: They may be changing our minds. Recent studies have begun turning up tantalizing hints about how the bacteria living in the gut can alter the way the brain works. These findings raise a question with profound implications for mental health: Can we soothe our brains by cultivating our bacteria? By tinkering with the gut’s bacterial residents, scientists have changed the behavior of lab animals and small numbers of people. Microbial meddling has turned anxious mice bold and shy mice social. Rats inoculated with bacteria from depressed people develop signs of depression themselves. And small studies of people suggest that eating specific kinds of bacteria may change brain activity and ease anxiety. Because gut bacteria can make the very chemicals that brain cells use to communicate, the idea makes a certain amount of sense. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 22029 - Posted: 03.24.2016

Nicola Davis If you get hot under the collar behind the wheel, it could be down to a brain parasite. According to new research, adults who have intermittent explosive disorder (IED) - a psychiatric condition in which violent outbursts of anger and cursing erupt in response to apparently trivial irritations - are more likely to have been infected with toxoplasma gondii. “The kind of triggers are usually social provocations,” said Dr Royce Lee, an author of the study from the University of Chicago. “In the workplace it could be some kind of interpersonal frustration, on the road it could be getting cut up.” A common parasite, toxoplasma gondii reproduces within cats and is spread in their faeces. It can enter humans through the food chain in raw or undercooked meat, contaminated water or unwashed vegetables that have come into contact with the parasite. It is thought that up to a third of the British population have been infected with toxoplasma gondii - a parasite that lurks in the tissues of the brain. While generally considered to be harmless, toxoplasmosis in pregnant women has been linked miscarriages, stillbirths and congenital defects in babies, and can cause serious problems in those with weakened immune systems. While infection with the parasite in humans is often symptomless, its effects have attracted much attention - studies in humans have suggested that infection could be linked to schizophrenia and even increase the likelihood of road traffic accidents, while research in rats has found that infection with the parasite can remove their fear of cats. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22026 - Posted: 03.24.2016

By PAM BELLUCK When people make risky decisions, like doubling down in blackjack or investing in volatile stocks, what happens in the brain? Scientists have long tried to understand what makes some people risk-averse and others risk-taking. Answers could have implications for how to treat, curb or prevent destructively risky behavior, like pathological gambling or drug addiction. Now, a study by Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a prominent Stanford neuroscientist and psychiatrist, and his colleagues gives some clues. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reports that a specific type of neuron or nerve cell, in a certain brain region helps galvanize whether or not a risky choice is made. The study was conducted in rats, but experts said it built on research suggesting the findings could be similar in humans. If so, they said, it could inform approaches to addiction, which involves some of the same neurons and brain areas, as well as treatments for Parkinson’s disease because one class of Parkinson’s medications turns some patients into problem gamblers. In a series of experiments led by Kelly Zalocusky, a doctoral student, researchers found that a risk-averse rat made decisions based on whether its previous choice involved a loss (in this case, of food). Rats whose previous decision netted them less food were prompted to behave conservatively next time by signals from certain receptors in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, the scientists discovered. These receptors, which are proteins attached to neurons, are part of the dopamine system, a neurochemical important to emotion, movement and thinking. In risk-taking rats, however, those receptors sent a much fainter signal, so the rats kept making high-stakes choices even if they lost out. But by employing optogenetics, a technique that uses light to manipulate neurons, the scientists stimulated brain cells with those receptors, heightening the “loss” signal and turning risky rats into safer rats. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 22025 - Posted: 03.24.2016

By Daniel Barron It’s unnerving when someone with no criminal record commits a disturbingly violent crime. Perhaps he stabs his girlfriend 40 times and dumps her body in the desert. Perhaps he climbs to the top of a clock tower and guns down innocent passers-by. Or perhaps he climbs out of a car at a stoplight and nearly decapitates an unsuspecting police officer with 26 rounds from an assault rifle. Perhaps he even drowns his own children. Or shoots the President of the United States. The shock is palpable (NB: those are all actual cases). The very notion that someone—our neighbor, the guy ahead of us in the check-out line, we (!)—could do something so terrible rubs at our minds. We wonder, “What happened? What in this guy snapped?” After all, for the last 20 years, the accused went home to his family after work—why did he go rob that liquor store? What made him pull that trigger? The subject hit home for me this week when I was called to jury duty. As I made my way to the county courthouse, I wondered whether I would be asked to decide a capital murder case like the ones above. As a young neuroscientist, the prospect made me uneasy. At the trial, the accused’s lawyers would probably argue that, at the time of the crime, he had diminished capacity to make decisions, that somehow he wasn’t entirely free to choose whether or not to commit the crime. They might cite some form of neuroscientific evidence to argue that, at the time of the crime, his brain wasn’t functioning normally. And the jury and judge have to decide what to make of it. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 22024 - Posted: 03.24.2016

By Jordana Cepelewicz Last week a senior National Football League official acknowledged for the first time the link between head injuries in professional football and a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The admission—which has been compared with Big Tobacco’s 1997 disclosure that smoking causes cancer—comes at a time when the dangers of less severe traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), including concussions, have also been making headlines. Scientists do not yet understand the biological mechanisms underlying the detrimental effects of TBI—and as a result, effective treatments remain elusive. In fact, how to deal with even a mild concussion is the subject of debate: Some doctors prescribe rest for several weeks whereas others claim this may have negative consequences and urge patients to stay active. Now it turns out that the type of rest patients get may be key. In a study on rats published this week in The Journal of Neuroscience a team of researchers at University Hospital Zurich (UHZ) found that enhancing the slow-wave cycle of sleep after a traumatic head injury preserves brain function and minimizes damage to axons, the long projections from neurons that send signals to other cells in the brain. Previous research has shown that TBIs cause axonal damage as well as the buildup of neurotoxic molecular waste products that result from injury. In the new study the researchers examined two different methods of inducing a slow-wave sleep state—the deepest sleep stage characterized by low-frequency, high-amplitude waves. During this stage, the brain clears out protein buildup, leading the researchers to question whether it could help treat rats that had suffered a brain injury. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Sleep
Link ID: 22023 - Posted: 03.24.2016

Healthy body, healthy mind. Elderly people who are physically active seem to be able to stave off memory loss – but only if they start exercising before symptoms appear. At the end of a five-year period, the brains of non-exercisers look 10 years older than those who did moderate exercise. That’s what Clinton Wright at the University of Miami in Florida and his colleagues found when they followed 876 people, starting at an average age of 71, for five years. At the start of the study, each participant underwent a number of memory and cognition tests, and had the health of their brain assessed during an MRI scan. Each person was also asked how much exercise they had done in recent weeks, ranging from “no/light”, such as walking or gardening, to “moderate/heavy”, which included running and swimming. Five years later, the volunteers were called back to repeat all the tests. The participants generally performed less well than they had five years earlier. But their scores were linked to their level of exercise – those who reported no or low levels of exercise scored lower in all tests, the team found. The 10 per cent of people who said they had been engaged in moderate-to-heavy exercise not only started with higher scores in the first round of tests, but showed less of a decline five years later . Those who did little or no exercise also seemed to have worse vascular health – they had higher blood pressure, and their MRI scans showed evidence of undetected strokes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 22022 - Posted: 03.24.2016

Laura Sanders In a pair of twin sisters, a rare disease had damaged the brain’s structures believed necessary to feel fear. But an injection of a drug could nevertheless make them anxious. The results of that experiment, described in the March 23 Journal of Neuroscience, add to evidence that the amygdalae, small, almond-shaped brain structures tucked deep in the brain, aren’t the only bits of the brain that make a person feel afraid. “Overall, this suggests multiple different routes in the brain to a common endpoint of the experience of fear,” says cognitive neuroscientist Stephan Hamann of Emory University in Atlanta. The twins, called B.G. and A.M., have Urbach-Wiethe disease, a genetic disorder that destroyed most of their amygdalae in late childhood. Despite this, the twins showed fear after inhaling air laden with extra carbon dioxide (an experience that can create the sensation of suffocating), an earlier study showed (SN: 3/23/13, p. 12). Because carbon dioxide affects a wide swath of the body and brain, scientists turned to a more specific cause of fear that stems from inside the body: a drug called isoproterenol, which can set the heart racing and make breathing hard. Sensing these bodily changes provoked by the drug can cause anxiety. “If you know what adrenaline feels like, you know what isoproterenol feels like,” says study coauthor Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22021 - Posted: 03.23.2016

By Roni Caryn Rabin Sixty-five million Americans suffer from chronic lower back pain, and many feel they have tried it all: physical therapy, painkillers, shots. Now a new study reports many people may find relief with a form of meditation that harnesses the power of the mind to manage pain. The technique, called mindfulness-based stress reduction, involves a combination of meditation, body awareness and yoga, and focuses on increasing awareness and acceptance of one’s experiences, whether they involve physical discomfort or emotional pain. People with lower back pain who learned the meditation technique showed greater improvements in function compared to those who had cognitive behavioral therapy, which has been shown to help ease pain, or standard back care. Participants assigned to meditation or cognitive behavior therapy received eight weekly two-hour sessions of group training in the techniques. After six months, those learning meditation had an easier time doing things like getting up out of a chair, going up the stairs and putting on their socks, and were less irritable and less likely to stay at home or in bed because of pain. They were still doing better a year later. The findings come amid growing concerns about opioid painkillers and a surge of overdose deaths involving the drugs. At the beginning of the trial, 11 percent of the participants said they had used an opioid within the last week to treat their pain, and they were allowed to continue with their usual care throughout the trial. “This new study is exciting, because here’s a technique that doesn’t involve taking any pharmaceutical agents, and doesn’t involve the side effects of pharmaceutical agents,” said Dr. Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the paper. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stress
Link ID: 22020 - Posted: 03.23.2016

Angus Chen You've probably heard that a little booze a day is good for you. I've even said it at parties. "Look at the French," I've said gleefully over my own cup. "Wine all the time and they still live to be not a day younger than 82." I'm sorry to say we're probably wrong. The evidence that alcohol has any benefit on longevity or heart health is thin, says Dr. Timothy Naimi, a physician and epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center. He and his colleagues published an analysis 87 of the best research studies on alcohol's effect on death from any cause in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs on Tuesday. "[Our] findings here cast a great deal of skepticism on this long, cherished belief that moderate drinking has a survival advantage," he says. In these studies, the participants get sorted into categories based on how much alcohol they think they drink. Researchers typically size up occasional, moderate and heavy drinkers against non-drinkers. When you do this, the moderates, one to three drinks a day, usually come out on top. They're less likely to die early from health problems like heart disease or cancer and injury. But then it gets very tricky, "because moderate drinkers tend to be very socially advantaged," Naimi says. Moderate drinkers tend to be healthier on average because they're well-educated and more affluent, not because they're drinking a bottle of wine a week on average. "[Their] alcohol consumption ends up looking good from a health perspective because they're already healthy to begin with." © 2016 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 22019 - Posted: 03.23.2016

By Maryse Zeidler, CBC News Effective immediately, the overdose-reversing drug naloxone is available without a prescription in Canada. Health groups and advocates across the country have been clamouring for naloxone to be widely available in order to prevent deaths, following a flood of fatalities linked to street drugs containing the powerful opiate fentanyl. Health Canada issued a statement about the change on Tuesday following a brief consultation period that began in mid-January. The ministry said all 130 responses it received on the subject were in favour of the change. It said doctors, pharmacists and patient organizations were some of the groups included in the consultation. The most common comment, said Health Canada, was "the need for a more user-friendly dosage form." Currently the drug is administered through injection — it said a nasal-spray form isn't yet available in Canada. Other concerns included the need to train those administering the drug and the acknowledgement that making naloxone more widely available "is not the cure to the opioid abuse problem and we must not lose sight of the underlying causes of drug addiction."

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22018 - Posted: 03.23.2016

By Anahad O'Connor What does it take to live a good life? Surveys show that most young adults believe that obtaining wealth and fame are keys to a happy life. But a long-running study out of Harvard suggests that one of the most important predictors of whether you age well and live a long and happy life is not the amount of money you amass or notoriety you receive. A much more important barometer of long term health and well-being is the strength of your relationships with family, friends and spouses. These are some of the findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a research project that since 1938 has closely tracked and examined the lives of more than 700 men and in some cases their spouses. The study has revealed some surprising – and some not so surprising – factors that determine whether people are likely to age happily and healthily, or descend into loneliness, sickness and mental decline. The study’s current director, , outlined some of the more striking findings from the long-running project in a recent TED Talk that has garnered more than seven million views. “We publish our findings in academic journals that most people don’t read,” Dr. Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said in a recent interview. “And so we really wanted people to know that this study exists and that it has for 75 years. We’ve been funded by the government for so many years, and it’s important that more people know about this besides academics.” The study began in Boston in the 1930s with two very different groups of young men. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 22017 - Posted: 03.23.2016

By NATALIE ANGIER Juan F. Masello never intended to study wild parrots. Twenty years ago, as a graduate student visiting the northernmost province of Patagonia in Argentina, he planned to write his dissertation on colony formation among seabirds. But when he asked around for flocks of, say, cormorants or storm petrels, a park warden told him he was out of luck. “He said, ‘This is the only part of Patagonia with no seabird colonies,’” recalled Dr. Masello, a principal investigator in animal ecology and systematics at Justus Liebig University in Germany. Might the young scientist be interested in seeing a large colony of parrots instead? The sight that greeted Dr. Masello was “amazing” and “incredible,” he said. “It was almost beyond words.” On a 160-foot-high sandstone cliff that stretched some seven miles along the Atlantic coast, tens of thousands of pairs of burrowing parrots had used their powerful bills to dig holes — their nests — deep into the rock face. And when breeding season began not long afterward, the sky around the cliffs erupted into a raucous carnival of parrot: 150,000 crow-size, polychromed aeronauts with olive backsides, turquoise wings, white epaulets and bright red belly patches ringed in gold. Dr. Masello was hooked. Today, Dr. Masello’s hands are covered with bite scars. He has had four operations to repair a broken knee, a broken nose — “the little accidents you get from working with parrots,” he said. Still, he has no regrets. “Their astonishing beauty and intelligence,” Dr. Masello said, “are inspirational.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 22016 - Posted: 03.22.2016

Giant manta rays have been filmed checking out their reflections in a way that suggests they are self-aware. Only a small number of animals, mostly primates, have passed the mirror test, widely used as a tentative test of self-awareness. “This new discovery is incredibly important,” says Marc Bekoff, of the University of Colorado in Boulder. “It shows that we really need to expand the range of animals we study.” But not everyone is convinced that the new study proves conclusively that manta rays, which have the largest brains of any fish, can do this – or indeed, that the mirror test itself is an appropriate measure of self-awareness. Csilla Ari, of the University of South Florida in Tampa, filmed two giant manta rays in a tank, with and without a mirror inside.The fish changed their behaviour in a way that suggested that they recognised the reflections as themselves as opposed to another manta ray. They did not show signs of social interaction with the image, which is what you would expect if they perceived it to be another individual. Instead, the rays repeatedly moved their fins and circled in front of the mirror (click on image below to see one in action). This suggests they could see whether their reflection moved when they moved. The frequency of these movements was much higher when the mirror was in the tank than when it was not. manta © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 22015 - Posted: 03.22.2016

Nicola Davis The same genes involved in predisposing people to autism appear to influence social skills in the wider population, suggesting that the autism spectrum has no clear cut-off point, scientists have discovered. Researchers have previously shown that autism is linked not just to one or two powerful genes, but to the combined effect of many small genetic changes. The latest findings, published in Nature Genetics, suggest that social charm, empathy and the ability to make friends is about more than just practice and upbringing, but is also affected by how many of these autism risk gene variants we possess. Dr Elise Robinson, from Harvard University and a lead author on the paper, said: “This is the first study that specifically shows that ... factors that we have unambiguously associated with autism are also very clearly associated with social communication differences in the general population.” Rather than viewing a person as either having or not having such a disorder, Robinson believes our social skills are better viewed as sitting on a sliding scale across the whole population. “The primary implication is that the line at which we say people are affected or unaffected is arbitrary,” said Robinson. “There is no clear objective point either in terms of genetic risk or in terms of behavioural traits, where you can say quite simply or categorically that you’re affected or unaffected. It’s like trying to pick a point where you say someone is tall or not.” © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 22014 - Posted: 03.22.2016