Charles F. Zorumski It is indeed possible for a person to get intoxicated and not remember what she or he did. This state is called a “blackout” or, more precisely, a “memory blackout.” During a blackout a person is intoxicated but awake and interacting with the environment in seemingly meaningful ways, such as holding a conversation or driving a car. After the period of intoxication, usually the next day, the person has no or, at best, vague recall for events that occurred while inebriated. At times, being in this state can have disastrous consequences, such as waking up in an unknown or unsafe place, losing personal possessions or participating in risky behaviors. On the neural level, a blackout is a period of anterograde amnesia. That is, a person's ability to form new memories becomes impaired. Although a person does not lose previously learned information, he or she may also find it more difficult to recall certain facts while intoxicated. Yet once a person sobers up, his or her memory and ability to learn new information are not permanently affected. How alcohol, or ethanol, produces a memory blackout is not completely understood. It is clear, however, that alcohol can impair a process in brain cells called long-term potentiation (LTP), a cellular mechanism thought to underlie memory formation, particularly in the hippocampus. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 20603 - Posted: 02.24.2015

A dozen university students have been treated at Connecticut hospitals after overdosing on "Molly" or MDMA, a popular synthetic party drug. Police are investigating after the overdoses were reported late Sunday on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. By Monday, eight remained in hospital and two were in critical condition. It was unclear whether the students had been together or where the drugs had come from. Middletown Police Chief William McKenna said that their "first and foremost goal is to obtain information on the batch of Molly that was distributed to the students on the campus," adding, "this information is critical in ensuring the recovery of those students affected." A pure and more powerful form of MDMA often sold as "Molly" can cause liver, kidney, cardiovascular failure, or death. In a campus-wide statement, Wesleyan president Michael S Roth urged students to "please, please stay away from illegal substances, the use of which can put you in extreme danger. One mistake can change your life forever". Dean Michael Whaley, vice president of student affairs at Wesleyan University, sent a letter to the school body on Sunday recommending students to check on their friends. Ten of the 12 people were Wesleyan students. In 2013, Molly-related deaths and illnesses forced the Electric Zoo Festival in New York to shut down early after two young people died and four were confined to hospital.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 20602 - Posted: 02.24.2015

|By Roni Jacobson Several pharmaceutical drugs promise to help addicts quit, and many people embrace the ease of popping a pill. Yet research continues to show that although medication can help, support networks and therapy targeting the underlying behaviors are still the best available ways to kick addiction over the long term. In addition, some of these medications come with scary side effects—hundreds of people have reportedly committed suicide while on the smoking-cessation drug Chantix, for example. Read on for short profiles of the addiction drugs currently on the market, as well as a few compounds that may hit shelves soon. © 2015 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 20601 - Posted: 02.24.2015

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. On an early summer night in 1944, on the wooded shoulder of a rural Massachusetts highway, a man in a rumpled brown suit wandered in the shadows. Whenever a car passed, he dropped to the ground and lay flat. His hair was matted, his face smeared with mud. He was a respectable Boston doctor on the lam, hungry, lost and ill. He was Mimi Baird’s father, Dr. Perry Baird, a Texas-born, Harvard-trained physician whose severe bipolar disease ultimately destroyed his life and scarred his family with the usual wide-ranging cruelties of mental illness. Dr. Baird vanished from Ms. Baird’s life when she was a little girl. She saw him once, briefly, when she was a teenager, then never again. He died in his mid-50s, in 1959. More than 30 years later, when Ms. Baird herself was in her 50s, a large package arrived on her doorstep and her father re-entered her world. The box contained a manuscript long forgotten in a relative’s garage, written in smudged pencil on onionskin paper, a memoir her father had composed of five terrible months in his life. The story began the very day Dr. Baird said goodbye to 5-year-old Mimi and her sister, and permanently left the household. Stunned and bereft all over again, Ms. Baird then spent two decades chasing down the rest of the story, talking to neighbors, colleagues and relatives about long-ago events and obtaining her father’s medical records. Now in her late 70s, a retired medical administrator, she has, with the help of a co-author, woven all this material into “He Wanted the Moon,” an extraordinary Möbius strip of a book. (Read an excerpt.) Its core is the full text of her father’s manuscript, deftly annotated and explained. Around it she layers the voices of caretakers, friends, relatives and medical authorities. Events are revisited and reframed, turned inside out, then right side up again. The book is autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 20600 - Posted: 02.24.2015

By Nathan Seppa Ask anybody — stress is bad news. The negative view of stress has been expressed so consistently that the concept is now built into our vernacular, which is spiced with advice on avoiding it: Take it easy. Calm down. Chill. Of course, a good case of stress comes in handy during an encounter with a grizzly bear on a hiking trail. In that situation, a stress reaction delivers a burst of hormones that revs up the heart and sharpens attention. This automatic response has served humans well throughout evolution, improving our odds of seeing another day. Problems arise, however, when stress becomes a feature of daily life. Chronic stress is the kind that comes from recurring pain, post-traumatic memories, unemployment, family tension, poverty, childhood abuse, caring for a sick spouse or just living in a sketchy neighborhood. Nonstop, low-grade stress contributes directly to physical deterioration, adding to the risk of heart attack, stroke, infection and asthma. Even recovery from cancer becomes harder. Scientists have now identified many of the biological factors linking stress to these medical problems. The evidence centers on nagging inflammation and genetic twists that steer cells off a healthy course, resulting in immune changes that allow ailments to take hold or worsen. Despite the bad rap stress has acquired throughout history, researchers have only recently been able to convince others that it’s dangerous. “It’s taken much more seriously now,” says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, a clinical psychologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “In the 1980s, we were still in the dark ages on this stuff.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Stress; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 20599 - Posted: 02.21.2015

By Elizabeth Pennisi Researchers have increased the size of mouse brains by giving the rodents a piece of human DNA that controls gene activity. The work provides some of the strongest genetic evidence yet for how the human intellect surpassed those of all other apes. "[The DNA] could easily be a huge component in how the human brain expanded," says Mary Ann Raghanti, a biological anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, who was not involved with the work. "It opens up a whole world of possibilities about brain evolution." For centuries, biologists have wondered what made humans human. Once the human and chimp genomes were deciphered about a decade ago, they realized they could now begin to pinpoint the molecular underpinnings of our big brain, bipedalism, varied diet, and other traits that have made our species so successful. By 2008, almost two dozen computerized comparisons of human and ape genomes had come up with hundreds of pieces of DNA that might be important. But rarely have researchers taken the next steps to try to prove that a piece of DNA really made a difference in human evolution. "You could imagine [their roles], but they were just sort of 'just so' stories,” says Greg Wray, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Wray is particularly interested in DNA segments called enhancers, which control the activity of genes nearby. He and Duke graduate student Lomax Boyd scanned the genomic databases and combed the scientific literature for enhancers that were different between humans and chimps and that were near genes that play a role in the brain. Out of more than 100 candidates, they and Duke developmental neurobiologist Debra Silver tested a half-dozen. They first inserted each enhancer into embryonic mice to learn whether it really did turn genes on. Then for HARE5, the most active enhancer in an area of the brain called the cortex, they made minigenes containing either the chimp or human version of the enhancer linked to a “reporter” gene that caused the developing mouse embryo to turn blue wherever the enhancer turned the gene on. Embryos’ developing brains turned blue sooner and over a broader expanse if they carried the human version of the enhancer, Silver, Wray, and their colleagues report online today in Current Biology. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 20598 - Posted: 02.21.2015

by Sarah Zielinski No one would be shocked to find play behavior in a mammal species. Humans love to play — as do our cats and dogs. It’s not such a leap to believe that, say, a red kangaroo would engage in mock fights. But somehow that behavior seems unlikely in animals other than mammals. It shouldn’t, though. Researchers have documented play behavior in an astonishing range of animals, from insects to birds to mammals. The purpose of such activities isn’t always clear — and not all scientists are convinced that play even exists — but play may help creatures establish social bonds or learn new skills. Here are five non-mammals you may be surprised to find hard at play: Crocodilians Alligators and crocodiles might seem more interested in lurking near the water and chomping on their latest meal, but these frightening reptiles engage in play, Vladimir Dinets of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville reports in the February Animal Behavior and Cognition. Dinets combined 3,000 hours of observations of wild and captive crocodilians with published reports and information gathered from other people who work with the animals. He found examples of all three types of play: Locomotor play: This is movement without any apparent reason or stimulus. Young, captive American alligators, for instance, have been spotted sliding down slopes of water over and over. And a 2.5-meter-long crocodile was seen surfing the waves near a beach in Australia. Object play: Animals like toys, too. A Cuban crocodile at a Miami zoo picked up and pushed around flowers floating in its pool for several days of observation. And like a cat playing with a mouse, a Nile crocodile was photographed as it repeatedly threw a dead hippo into the air. Object play is recognized as so important to crocodilian life “that many zoo caretakers now provide various objects as toys for crocodilians as part of habitat enrichment programs,” Dinets notes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 20597 - Posted: 02.21.2015

Maanvi Singh Your tongue doubtless knows the difference between a high-fat food and the low-fat alternative. Full-fat ice cream and cream cheese feel silkier and more sumptuous. Burgers made with fatty meat are typically juicer than burgers made with lean meat. OK, so, we've long known fat gives food a desirable texture. But some scientists are now making the case that we should also think of fat as the sixth primary taste, along with sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. Early in February, researchers from Deakin University in Australia published a paper in the journal Flavour arguing that "the next 5 to 10 years should reveal, conclusively, whether fat can be classified as the sixth taste." So what would it take for fat to become an official taste? "Strictly speaking, taste is a chemical function," Russell Keast, a sensory scientist at Deakin and lead author of the paper, tells The Salt. He says that when a chemical substance – a salt or sugar crystal, for example — comes into contact with sensory cells in our mouths, it triggers a series of reactions. The cells in our mouths tell other nerve cells that they're perceiving something sweet or salty and those nerve cells eventually pass this information on to the brain. According to the paper, there are five criteria that need to be met to call something a primary taste. It starts with a chemical stimuli (like sugar or salt), which then trigger specific receptors on our taste buds. Then, there has to be a viable a pathway between these receptors and our brains, and we've got to be able to perceive and process the taste in the brain. And finally, this whole process has to trigger downstream effects in the body. © 2015 NPR

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 20596 - Posted: 02.21.2015

By Christie Aschwanden Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise. (The Offits have such studies at the ready — Paul is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and author of “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”) Indeed, famous anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy has said her son’s autism and seizures are linked to “so many shots” because vaccinations preceded his symptoms. But, as Offit’s story suggests, the fact that a child became sick after a vaccine is not strong evidence that the immunization was to blame. Psychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the “illusion of causality.” A study recently published in the British Journal of Psychology investigates how this illusion influences the way we process new information. Its finding: Causal illusions don’t just cement erroneous ideas in the mind; they can also prevent new information from correcting them. Helena Matute, a psychologist at Deusto University in Bilbao, Spain, and her colleagues enlisted 147 college students to take part in a computer-based task in which they each played a doctor who specializes in a fictitious rare disease and assessed whether new medications could cure it. ©2015 ESPN Internet Ventures.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 20595 - Posted: 02.19.2015

Tom Stafford Trusting your instincts may help you to make better decisions than thinking hard, a study suggests. It is a common misconception that we know our own minds. As I move around the world, walking and talking, I experience myself thinking thoughts. "What shall I have for lunch?", I ask myself. Or I think, "I wonder why she did that?" and try and figure it out. It is natural to assume that this experience of myself is a complete report of my mind. It is natural, but wrong. There's an under-mind, all psychologists agree – an unconscious which does a lot of the heavy lifting in the process of thinking. If I ask myself what is the capital of France the answer just comes to mind – Paris! If I decide to wiggle my fingers, they move back and forth in a complex pattern that I didn't consciously prepare, but which was delivered for my use by the unconscious. The big debate in psychology is exactly what is done by the unconscious, and what requires conscious thought. Or to use the title of a notable paper on the topic, 'Is the unconscious smart or dumb?' One popular view is that the unconscious can prepare simple stimulus-response actions, deliver basic facts, recognise objects and carry out practised movements. Complex cognition involving planning, logical reasoning and combining ideas, on the other hand, requires conscious thought. A recent experiment by a team from Israel scores points against this position. Ran Hassin and colleagues used a neat visual trick called Continuous Flash Suppression to put information into participants’ minds without them becoming consciously aware of it.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 20594 - Posted: 02.19.2015

by Catherine Lawson Over the last six years Adam Gazzaley's research has undergone a transformation. He's moved from studying how the brain works, to studying the brain as it ages, then into the domain of applying methodology he's developed to improve the brain's functions. At WIRED Health 2015 he'll outline his vision of the future, one where "we're thinking about software and hardware as medicine". In particular, Gazzaley plans to talk to the WIRED Health audience about video games "that are custom-designed to challenge the brain in a very particular way". Gazzaley's team at University of California, San Francisco previously demonstrated that a custom-designed video game can be highly effective in treating a specific cognitive deficit. They developed NeuroRacer, a driving game aimed at improving multi-tasking skills in older people. The success of NeuroRacer propelled Gazzaley into new partnerships, giving him access to resources that further advance his games development program into areas like motion capture and virtual reality. He's excited about coupling his games with mobile devices that will allow them to function outside the lab. Gazzaley will talk about four new games he's working on, in particular a meditation-inspired one. Meditrain is the product of his collaboration with Buddhist author and teacher Jack Kornfield. Developed for the iPad, he hopes to demonstrate part of it at WIRED Health.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 20593 - Posted: 02.19.2015

Boer Deng Smoking marijuana may stoke a yearning for crisps, but understanding how it affects hunger is relevant not just to those who indulge in it. The drug has yielded a ripe target for scientists who seek to stimulate or suppress appetite: the receptor CB1, found in cells throughout the body. When activated by the anti-nausea drug dronabinol — which is also a component of marijuana (Cannabis sativa) — CB1 prompts the release of hunger-promoting hormones1. And suppressing its activity is thought to aid in weight loss2. But the mechanism by which the receptor kills or kindles appetite is not entirely understood. Now neuroscientist Tamas Horvath, of Yale University in New Haven, and colleagues report in Nature that nerve cells called pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons play a key role in this process3. POMC had generally been thought to promote satiation, but Horvath's team found that POMC neurons in the brain release not just a hunger-suppressing hormone, but also one that promotes appetite. Which hormone is secreted is regulated by a protein in the cells' mitochondria, structures that regulate energy levels. When the CB1 receptor is activated, this mitochondrial protein induces POMC to switch from secreting the substance that suppresses gorging to one that encourages it. The finding is intriguing, says Uberto Pagotto, a neuroscientist at the University of Bologna who has studied cannabinoids for many years. “It gives us a different starting point to look at CB1 receptors and the mitochondria,” he says. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 20592 - Posted: 02.18.2015

Catherine Brahic THE nature versus nurture debate is getting a facelift this week, with the publication of a genetic map that promises to tell us which bits of us are set in stone by our DNA, and which bits we can affect by how we live our lives. The new "epigenomic" map doesn't just look at genes, but also the instructions that govern them. Compiled by a consortium of biologists and computer scientists, this information will allow doctors to pinpoint precisely which cells in the body are responsible for various diseases. It might also reveal how to adjust your lifestyle to counter a genetic predisposition to a particular disease. "The epigenome is the additional information our cells have on top of genetic information," says lead researcher Manolis Kellis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is made of chemical tags that are attached to DNA and its packaging. These tags act like genetic controllers, influencing whether a gene is switched on or off, and play an instrumental role in shaping our bodies and disease. Researchers are still figuring out exactly how and when epigenetic tags are added to our DNA, but the process appears to depend on environmental cues. We inherit some tags from our parents, but what a mother eats during pregnancy, for instance, might also change her baby's epigenome. Others tags relate to the environment we are exposed to as children and adults. "The epigenome sits in a very special place between nature and nurture," says Kellis. Each cell type in our body has a different epigenome – in fact, the DNA tags are the reason why our cells come in such different shapes and sizes despite having exactly the same DNA. So for its map, the Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium collected thousands of cells from different adult and embryonic tissues, and meticulously analysed all the tags. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Epigenetics; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 20591 - Posted: 02.18.2015

By Abigail Zuger, M.D. I had intended to discuss President Obama’s plans for personalized precision medicine with my patient Barbara last week, but she missed her appointment. Or, more accurately, she arrived two hours late, made the usual giant fuss at the reception desk and had to be rescheduled. I was disappointed. Barbara has some insight into the vortex of her own complications, and I thought she might help organize my thoughts. Mr. Obama announced last month that his new budget included $215 million toward the creation of a national databank of medical information, intended to associate specific gene patterns with various diseases and to predict what genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors correlate with successful treatment. Once all those relationships are clarified, the path will open to drugs or other interventions that firm up the good links and interrupt the bad ones. This step up the scientific ladder of medicine has many advocates. Researchers who sequence the genome are enthusiastic, as are those with a financial interest in the technology. Also celebrating are doctors and patients in the cancer community, where genetic data already informs some treatment choices and where the initial thrust of the initiative and much of its funding will be directed. Skeptics point out that genetic medicine, for all its promise, has delivered relatively few clinical benefits. And straightforward analyses of lifestyle and environment effects on health may occasionally lead to clear-cut advice (don’t smoke), but more often sow confusion, as anyone curious about the best way to lose weight or the optimal quantity of dietary salt knows. Without Barbara’s presence, I was left to ponder her medical record, a 20-year saga that might be titled “Genes, Lifestyle and Environment.” and published as a cautionary tale. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 20590 - Posted: 02.18.2015

Claire Ainsworth As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex. A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male1. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James. Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 20589 - Posted: 02.18.2015

By Kate Baggaley A buildup of rare versions of genes that control the activity of nerve cells in the brain increases a person’s risk for bipolar disorder, researchers suggest in a paper posted online the week of February 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “There are many different variants in many different genes that contribute to the genetic risk,” says coauthor Jared Roach, a geneticist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. “We think that most people with bipolar disorder will have inherited several of these…risk variants.” The bulk of a person’s risk for bipolar disorder comes from genetics, but only a quarter of that risk can be explained by common variations in genes. Roach’s team sequenced the genomes of 200 people from 41 families with a history of bipolar disorder. They then identified 164 rare forms of genes that show up more often in people with the condition. People with bipolar disorder had, on average, six of these rare forms, compared with just one, on average, found in their healthy relatives and the general population. The identified genes control the ability of ions, or charged particles, to enter or leave nerve cells, or neurons. This affects neurons’ ability to pass information through the brain. Some of the gene variants probably increase how much neurons fire while others decrease it, the researchers say. Future research will need to explain what role these brain changes play in bipolar disorder. Citations S.A. Ament et al. Rare variants in neuronal excitability genes influence risk for bipolar disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online the week of February 16, 2015. doi:10.1073/pnas.1424958112. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 20588 - Posted: 02.18.2015

By Warren Cornwall The green wings of the luna moth, with their elegant, long tails, aren’t just about style. New research finds they also help save the insect from becoming a snack for a bat. The fluttering tails appear to create an acoustic signal that is attractive to echolocating bats, causing the predators to zero in on the wings rather than more vital body parts. Scientists pinned down the tails’ lifesaving role by taking 162 moths and plucking the tails off 75 of them. They used fishing line to tether two moths—one with tails, the other without—to the ceiling of a darkened room. Then, they let loose a big brown bat. The bats caught 81% of the tailless moths, but just 35% of those with fully intact wings, they report in a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. High-speed cameras helped show why. In 55% of attacks on moths with tails, the bats went after the tails, often missing the body. It’s the first well-documented example of an organism using body shape to confuse predators that use echolocation, the researchers say—the equivalent of fish and insects that display giant eyespots for visual trickery. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 20587 - Posted: 02.18.2015

Berit Brogaard On popular websites, we read headlines such as “Scientists are finding that love really is a chemical addiction between people.” Love, of course, is not literally a chemical addiction. It’s a drive perhaps, or a feeling or an emotion, but not a chemical addiction or even a chemical state. Nonetheless, romantic love, no doubt, often has a distinct physiological, bodily, and chemical profile. When you fall in love, your body chemicals go haywire. The exciting, scary, almost paranormal and unpredictable elements of love stem, in part, from hyper-stimulation of the limbic brain’s fear center known as the amygdala. It’s a tiny, almond-shaped brain region in the temporal lobe on the side of your head. In terms of evolutionary history, this brain region is old. It developed millions of years before the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for logical thought and reasoning. While it has numerous biological functions, the prime role of the amagdala is to process negative emotional stimuli. Significant changes to normal amygdala activation are associated with serious psychological disorders. For example, human schizophrenics have significantly less activation in the amygdala and the memory system (the hippocampus), which is due to a substantial reduction in the size of these areas. People with depression, anxiety, and attachment insecurity, on the other hand, have significantly increased blood flow in the amygdala and memory system. Neuroscientist Justin Feinstein and his colleagues (2010) studied a woman whose amygdala was destroyed after a rare brain condition. They exposed her to pictures of spiders and snakes, took her on a tour of the world’s scariest haunted house, and had her take notes about her emotional state when she heard a beep from a random beeper that had been attached to her. After three months of investigation, the researchers concluded that the woman could not experience fear. This is very good evidence for the idea that the amygdala is the main center for fear processing. (The chief competing hypothesis is that fear is processed in a brain region that receives its main information from the amygdala.) © 2015 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 20586 - Posted: 02.16.2015

By Emily Underwood SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—If you've ever had a migraine, you know it's no ordinary headache: In addition to throbbing waves of excruciating pain, symptoms often include nausea, visual disturbances, and acute sensitivity to sounds, smells, and light. Although there's no cure for the debilitating headaches, which affect roughly 10% of people worldwide, researchers are starting to untangle their cause and find more effective treatments. Here today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science), Science sat down with Teshamae Monteith, a clinical neurologist at the University of Miami Health System in Florida, today to discuss the latest advances in the field. Q: How is our understanding of migraine evolving? A: It's more complicated than we thought. In the past, researchers thought of migraine as a blood vessel disorder, in part because some patients can feel a temple pulsation during a migraine attack. Now, migraine is considered a sensory perceptual disorder, because so many of the sensory systems—light, sound, smell, hearing—are altered. During an attack, patients have concentration impairments, appetite changes, mood changes, and sleeping is off. What fascinates me is that patients are often bothered by manifestations of migraine, such as increased sensitivity to light, in between attacks, suggesting that they may be wired differently, or their neurobiology may be altered. About two-thirds of patients with acute migraine attacks have allodynia, a condition that makes people so sensitive to certain stimuli that even steam from a shower can be incredibly painful. One way to view it is that migraineurs at baseline are at a different threshold for sensory stimuli. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 20585 - Posted: 02.16.2015

|By Gary Stix Implantation of electrodes deep within the brain is now commonly performed for treatment of the neurological disorders Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. But the use of deep-brain stimulation, as it is known, is expanding. It is now being assessed in as many as 200 patients for major depression—and is being considered for other disorders such as anorexia. Helen Mayberg, a neurologist from Emory University, has pioneered the use of imaging techniques to understand the functioning of different brain circuits to determine how to tailor various treatments for depression, including deep-brain stimulation, to a patient’s needs. Learn about her work below in “Deep-Brain Stimulation: A Decade of Progress with Helen Mayberg,” a Webinar put on by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. © 2015 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 20584 - Posted: 02.16.2015