by Helen Thomson For the first time, doctors have opened and closed the brain's protector – the blood-brain barrier – on demand. The breakthrough will allow drugs to reach diseased areas of the brain that are otherwise out of bounds. Ultimately, it could make it easier to treat conditions such as Alzheimer's and brain cancer. The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a sheath of cells that wraps around blood vessels (in black) throughout the brain. It protects precious brain tissue from toxins in the bloodstream, but it is a major obstacle for treating brain disorders because it also blocks the passage of drugs. Several teams have opened the barrier in animals to sneak drugs through. Now Michael Canney at Paris-based medical start-up CarThera, and his colleagues have managed it in people using an ultrasound brain implant and an injection of microbubbles. When ultrasound waves meet microbubbles in the blood, they make the bubbles vibrate. This pushes apart the cells of the BBB. With surgeon Alexandre Carpentier at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Canney tested the approach in people with a recurrence of glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumour. People with this cancer have surgery to remove the tumours and then chemotherapy drugs, such as Carboplatin, are used to try to kill any remaining tumour cells. Tumours make the BBB leaky, allowing in a tiny amount of chemo drugs: if more could get through, their impact would be greater, says Canney. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 20235 - Posted: 10.23.2014

James Hamblin People whose faces are perceived to look more "competent" are more likely to be CEOs of large, successful companies. Having a face that people deem "dominant" is a predictor of rank advancement in the military. People are more likely to invest money with people who look "trustworthy." These sorts of findings go on and on in recent studies that claim people can accurately guess a variety of personality traits and behavioral tendencies from portraits alone. The findings seem to elucidate either canny human intuition or absurd, misguided bias. There has been a recent boom in research on how people attribute social characteristics to others based on the appearance of faces—independent of cues about age, gender, race, or ethnicity. (At least, as independent as possible.) The results seem to offer some intriguing insight, claiming that people are generally pretty good at predicting who is, for example, trustworthy, competent, introverted or extroverted, based entirely on facial structure. There is strong agreement across studies as to what facial attributes mean what to people, as illustrated in renderings throughout this article. But it's, predictably, not at all so simple. Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, makes the case against face-ism today, in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. In light of many recent articles touting people's judgmental abilities, Olivola and Princeton University's Friederike Funk and Alexander Todorov say that a careful look at the data really doesn't support these claims. And "instead of applauding our ability to make inferences about social characteristics from facial appearances," Olivola said, "the focus should be on the dangers."

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 20234 - Posted: 10.23.2014

By PAUL VITELLO Most adults do not remember anything before the age of 3 or 4, a gap that researchers had chalked up to the vagaries of the still-developing infant brain. By some accounts, the infant brain was just not equipped to remember much. Textbooks referred to the deficiency as infant amnesia. Carolyn Rovee-Collier, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers University who died on Oct. 2 at 72, challenged the theory, showing in a series of papers in the early 1980s that babies remember plenty. A 3-month-old can recall what he or she learned yesterday, she found, and a 9-month-old can remember a game for as long as a month and a half. She cited experiments suggesting that memory processes in adults and infants are virtually the same, and argued that infant memories were never lost. They just become increasingly harder to retrieve as the child grows, learns language and loses touch with the visual triggers that had kept those memories sharp — a view from between the bars of a crib, say, or the view of the floor as a crawler, not a toddler, sees it. Not all of Dr. Rovee-Collier’s theories won over the psychology establishment, which still uses the infant amnesia concept to explain why people do not remember life as a baby. But her insights about an infant’s short-term memory and ability to learn have been widely accepted, and have helped recast scientific thinking about the infant mind over the past 30 years. Since the first of her 200 papers was published, infant cognitive studies has undergone a boom in university programs around the country. It was a field that had been largely unexplored in any systematic way by the giants of psychological theory. Freud and Jean Piaget never directly addressed the subject of infant memory. William James, considered the father of American psychology, once hazarded a guess that the human baby’s mind was a place of “blooming, buzzing confusion.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 20233 - Posted: 10.23.2014

David DiSalvo @neuronarrative One of the lively debates spawned from the neuroscience revolution has to do with whether humans possess free will, or merely feel as if we do. If we truly possess free will, then we each consciously control our decisions and actions. If we feel as if we possess free will, then our sense of control is a useful illusion—one that neuroscience will increasingly dispel as it gets better at predicting how brain processes yield decisions. For those in the free-will-as-illusion camp, the subjective experience of decision ownership is not unimportant, but it is predicated on neural dynamics that are scientifically knowable, traceable and—in time—predictable. One piece of evidence supporting this position has come from neuroscience research showing that brain activity underlying a given decision occurs before a person consciously apprehends the decision. In other words, thought patterns leading to conscious awareness of what we’re going to do are already in motion before we know we’ll do it. Without conscious knowledge of why we’re choosing as we’re choosing, the argument follows, we cannot claim to be exercising “free” will. Those supporting a purer view of free will argue that whether or not neuroscience can trace brain activity underlying decisions, making the decision still resides within the domain of an individual’s mind. In this view, parsing unconscious and conscious awareness is less important than the ultimate outcome – a decision, and subsequent action, emerging from a single mind. If free will is drained of its power by scientific determinism, free-will supporters argue, then we’re moving down a dangerous path where people can’t be held accountable for their decisions, since those decisions are triggered by neural activity occurring outside of conscious awareness. Consider how this might play out in a courtroom in which neuroscience evidence is marshalled to defend a murderer on grounds that he couldn’t know why he acted as he did.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 20232 - Posted: 10.23.2014

Carl Zimmer Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia. And the genome, extracted from a fossil thighbone found in Siberia, added strong support to a provocative hypothesis: Early humans interbred with Neanderthals. “It’s irreplaceable evidence of what once existed that we can’t reconstruct from what people are now,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. “It speaks to us with information about a time that’s lost to us.” The discoveries were made by a team of scientists led by Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Over the past three decades, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues have developed tools for plucking out fragments of DNA from fossils and reading their sequences. Early on, the scientists were able only to retrieve tiny snippets of ancient genes. But gradually, they have invented better methods for joining the overlapping fragments together, assembling larger pieces of ancient genomes that have helped shed light on the evolution of humans and their relatives. In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 20231 - Posted: 10.23.2014

By BENEDICT CAREY A Polish man who was paralyzed from the chest down after a knife attack several years ago is now able to get around using a walker and has recovered some sensation in his legs after receiving a novel nerve-regeneration treatment, according to a new report that has generated both hope and controversy. The case, first reported widely by the BBC and other British news outlets, has stirred as much excitement on the Internet as it has extreme caution among many experts. “It is premature at best, and at worst inappropriate, to draw any conclusions from a single patient,” said Dr. Mark H. Tuszynski, director of the translational neuroscience unit at the medical school of the University of California, San Diego. That patient — identified as Darek Fidyka, 40 — is the first to recover feeling and mobility after getting the novel therapy, which involves injections of cultured cells at the site of the injury and tissue grafts, the report said. The techniques have shown some promise in animal studies. But the medical team, led by Polish and English doctors, also emphasized that the results would “have to be confirmed in a larger group of patients sustaining similar types of spinal injury” before the treatment could be considered truly effective. The case report was published in the journal Cell Transplantation. The history of spinal injury treatment is studded with false hope and miracle recoveries that could never be replicated, experts said. In previous studies, scientists experimented with some of the same methods used on Mr. Fidyka, with disappointing results. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 20230 - Posted: 10.22.2014

By Fergus Walsh Medical correspondent A paralysed man has been able to walk again after a pioneering therapy that involved transplanting cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord. Darek Fidyka, who was paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack in 2010, can now walk using a frame. The treatment, a world first, was carried out by surgeons in Poland in collaboration with scientists in London. Prof Wagih El Masri Consultant spinal injuries surgeon Details of the research are published in the journal Cell Transplantation. BBC One's Panorama programme had unique access to the project and spent a year charting the patient's rehabilitation. Darek Fidyka, 40, from Poland, was paralysed after being stabbed repeatedly in the back in the 2010 attack. He said walking again - with the support of a frame - was "an incredible feeling", adding: "When you can't feel almost half your body, you are helpless, but when it starts coming back it's like you were born again." He said what had been achieved was "more impressive than man walking on the moon". UK research team leader Prof Geoff Raisman: Paralysis treatment "has vast potential" The treatment used olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) - specialist cells that form part of the sense of smell. OECs act as pathway cells that enable nerve fibres in the olfactory system to be continually renewed. In the first of two operations, surgeons removed one of the patient's olfactory bulbs and grew the cells in culture. Two weeks later they transplanted the OECs into the spinal cord, which had been cut through in the knife attack apart from a thin strip of scar tissue on the right. They had just a drop of material to work with - about 500,000 cells. About 100 micro-injections of OECs were made above and below the injury. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 20229 - Posted: 10.22.2014

By Scott Barry Kaufman “Just because a diagnosis [of ADHD] can be made does not take away from the great traits we love about Calvin and his imaginary tiger friend, Hobbes. In fact, we actually love Calvin BECAUSE of his ADHD traits. Calvin’s imagination, creativity, energy, lack of attention, and view of the world are the gifts that Mr. Watterson gave to this character.” — The Dragonfly Forest In his 2004 book “Creativity is Forever“, Gary Davis reviewed the creativity literature from 1961 to 2003 and identified 22 reoccurring personality traits of creative people. This included 16 “positive” traits (e.g., independent, risk-taking, high energy, curiosity, humor, artistic, emotional) and 6 “negative” traits (e.g., impulsive, hyperactive, argumentative). In her own review of the creativity literature, Bonnie Cramond found that many of these same traits overlap to a substantial degree with behavioral descriptions of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)– including higher levels of spontaneous idea generation, mind wandering, daydreaming, sensation seeking, energy, and impulsivity. Research since then has supported the notion that people with ADHD are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement than those without ADHD (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). What’s more, recent research by Darya Zabelina and colleagues have found that real-life creative achievement is associated with the ability to broaden attention and have a “leaky” mental filter– something in which people with ADHD excel. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience also suggests a connection between ADHD and creativity (see here and here). Both creative thinkers and people with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity coming from the “Imagination Network“: © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 20228 - Posted: 10.22.2014

By Paula Span Maybe it’s something else. That’s what you tell yourself, isn’t it, when an older person begins to lose her memory, repeat herself, see things that aren’t there, lose her way on streets she’s traveled for decades? Maybe it’s not dementia. And sometimes, thankfully, it is indeed some other problem, something that mimics the cognitive destruction of Alzheimer’s disease or another dementia — but, unlike them, is fixable. “It probably happens more often than people realize,” said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University Medical Center. But, he added, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as family members hope. Several confounding cases have appeared at Duke: A woman who appeared to have Alzheimer’s actually was suffering the effects of alcoholism. Another patient’s symptoms resulted not from dementia but from chronic depression. Dr. Doraiswamy estimates that when doctors suspect Alzheimer’s, they’re right 50 to 60 percent of the time. (The accuracy of Alzheimer’s diagnoses, even in specialized medical centers, is more haphazard than you would hope.) Perhaps another 25 percent of patients actually have other types of dementia, like Lewy body or frontotemporal — scarcely happy news, but because these diseases have different trajectories and can be exacerbated by the wrong drugs, the distinction matters. The remaining 15 to 25 percent “usually have conditions that can be reversed or at least improved,” Dr. Doraiswamy said. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 20227 - Posted: 10.22.2014

BY Tina Hesman Saey SAN DIEGO — A Golden retriever that inherited a genetic defect that causes muscular dystrophy doesn’t have the disease, giving scientists clues to new therapies for treating muscle-wasting diseases. The dog, Ringo, was bred to have a mutation that causes Duchenne muscular dystrophy in both animals and people. His weak littermates that inherited the same mutation could barely suckle at birth. But Ringo was healthy, with muscles that function normally. One of Ringo’s sons also has the mutation but doesn’t have the disease, said geneticist Natassia Vieira of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University October 19 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. The dogs without the disease had a second genetic variant that caused their muscles to make more of a protein called Jagged 1, Vieira and her colleagues discovered. That protein allows muscles to repair themselves. Making more of Jagged 1 appears to compensate for the wasting effect of the muscular dystrophy mutation, although the researchers don’t yet know the exact mechanism. The finding suggests that researchers may one day be able to devise treatments for people with muscular dystrophies by boosting production of Jagged 1 or other muscle repair proteins. N. M. Vieira. The muscular dystrophies: Revealing the genetic and phenotypic variability. American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting, San Diego, October 19, 2014. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Muscles; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 20226 - Posted: 10.22.2014

Scientists say they have identified the underlying reason why some people are prone to the winter blues, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD). People with Sad have an unhelpful way of controlling the "happy" brain signalling compound serotonin during winter months, brain scans reveal. As the nights draw in, production of a transporter protein ramps up in Sad, lowering available serotonin. The work will be presented this week at a neuropsychopharmacology conference. The University of Copenhagen researchers who carried out the trial say their findings confirm what others have suspected - although they only studied 11 people with Sad and 23 healthy volunteers for comparison. Using positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans, they were able to show significant summer-to-winter differences in the levels of the serotonin transporter (SERT) protein in Sad patients. The Sad volunteers had higher levels of SERT in the winter months, corresponding to a greater removal of serotonin in winter, while the healthy volunteers did not. Winter depression Lead researcher, Dr Brenda Mc Mahon, said: "We believe that we have found the dial the brain turns when it has to adjust serotonin to the changing seasons. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 20225 - Posted: 10.21.2014

By Jane E. Brody Within a week of my grandsons’ first year in high school, getting enough sleep had already become an issue. Their concerned mother questioned whether lights out at midnight or 1 a.m. and awakening at 7 or 7:30 a.m. to get to school on time provided enough sleep for 14-year-olds to navigate a demanding school day. The boys, of course, said “yes,” especially since they could “catch up” by sleeping late on weekends. But the professional literature on the sleep needs of adolescents says otherwise. Few Americans these days get the hours of sleep optimal for their age, but experts agree that teenagers are more likely to fall short than anyone else. Researchers report that the average adolescent needs eight and a half to nine and a half hours of sleep each night. But in a poll taken in 2006 by the National Sleep Foundation, less than 20 percent reported getting that much rest on school nights. With the profusion of personal electronics, the current percentage is believed to be even worse. A study in Fairfax, Va., found that only 6 percent of children in the 10th grade and only 3 percent in the 12th grade get the recommended amount of sleep. Two in three teens were found to be severely sleep-deprived, losing two or more hours of sleep every night. The causes can be biological, behavioral or environmental. And the effect on the well-being of adolescents — on their health and academic potential — can be profound, according to a policy statement issued in August by the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Sleep is not optional. It’s a health imperative, like eating, breathing and physical activity,” Dr. Judith A. Owens, the statement’s lead author, said in an interview. “This is a huge issue for adolescents.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 20224 - Posted: 10.21.2014

by Amy Standen The important thing is that Meghan knew something was wrong. When I met her, she was 23, a smart, wry young woman living with her mother and stepdad in Simi Valley, about an hour north of Los Angeles. Meghan had just started a training program to become a respiratory therapist. Concerned about future job prospects, she asked NPR not to use her full name. Five years ago, Meghan's prospects weren't nearly so bright. At 19, she had been severely depressed, on and off, for years. During the bad times, she'd hide out in her room making thin, neat cuts with a razor on her upper arm. "I didn't do much of anything," Meghan recalls. "It required too much brain power." "Her depression just sucked the life out of you," Kathy, Meghan's mother, recalls. "I had no idea what to do or where to go with it." One night in 2010, Meghan's mental state took an ominous turn. Driving home from her job at McDonald's, she found herself fascinated by the headlights of an oncoming car. "I had the weird thought of, you know, I've never noticed this, but their headlights really look like eyes." To Meghan, the car seemed malicious. It wanted to hurt her. Kathy tried to reason with her. "Honey, you know it's a car, right? You know those are headlights," she recalls pressing her daughter. "You understand that this makes no sense, right?" © 2014 NPR

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 20223 - Posted: 10.21.2014

By Catherine Saint Louis KATY, Tex. — Like many parents of children with autism, Nicole Brown feared she might never find a dentist willing and able to care for her daughter, Camryn Cunningham, now a lanky 13-year-old who uses words sparingly. Finishing a basic cleaning was a colossal challenge, because Camryn was bewildered by the lights in her face and the odd noises from instruments like the saliva suctioner — not to mention how utterly unfamiliar everything was to a girl accustomed to routine. Sometimes she’d panic and bolt from the office. Then in May, Ms. Brown, 45, a juvenile supervision officer, found Dr. Amy Luedemann-Lazar, a pediatric dentist in this suburb of Houston. Unlike previous dentists, Dr. Luedemann-Lazar didn’t suggest that Camryn would need to be sedated or immobilized. Instead, she suggested weekly visits to help her learn to be cooperative, step by step, with lots of breaks so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. Bribery helped. If she sat calmly for 10 seconds, her reward was listening to a snippet of a Beyoncé song on her sister’s iPod. This month, Camryn sat still in the chair, hands crossed on her lap, for no less than 25 minutes through an entire cleaning — her second ever — even as purple-gloved hands hovered near her face, holding a noisy tooth polisher. At the end, Dr. Luedemann-Lazar examined Camryn’s teeth and declared her cavity-free and ready to see an orthodontist. “It was like a breakthrough,” Ms. Brown said, adding, “Dr. Amy didn’t just turn her away.” Parents of children with special needs have long struggled to find dentists who will treat them. In a 2005 study, nearly three-fifths of 208 randomly chosen general dentists in Michigan said they would not provide care for children on the autism spectrum; two-thirds said the same for adults. But as more and more children receive diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder, more dentists and dental hygienists are recognizing that with accommodations, many of them can become cooperative patients. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 20222 - Posted: 10.21.2014

By David Bornstein Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Andrea became severely depressed. She was 17 at the time and she didn’t fully understand what she was going through; she just felt like a failure. “I felt like I didn’t want to be alive,” she recalls. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to be alive. I felt like a bad person and a bad mother, and I was never going to get any better.” When her baby persisted in crying, she felt her frustration mount quickly. “I was hitting a boiling point,” she says. “I was at a point where I didn’t want to deal with anything. Sometimes I would just let her cry — but then I would feel very bad afterwards.” Depression is the most common health problem women face. In the United States, outside of obstetrics, it is the leading cause of hospitalizations among women ages 15 to 44. It’s estimated that 20 percent to 25 percent of women will experience depression during their lifetimes, and about one in seven will experience postpartum depression. For low-income women, the rates are about twice as high. As my colleague Tina Rosenberg has reported, the World Health Organization ranks depression as the most burdensome of all health conditions affecting women (as measured by lost years of productive life). Postpartum depressions are often assumed to be associated with hormonal changes in women. In fact, only a small fraction of them are hormonally based, said Cindy-Lee Dennis, a professor at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at Women’s College Research Institute, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Perinatal Community Health. The misconception is itself a major obstacle, she adds. Postpartum depression is often not an isolated form of depression; nor is it typical. “We now consider depression to be a chronic condition,” Dennis says. “It reoccurs in approximately 30 to 50 percent of individuals. And a significant proportion of postpartum depression starts during the pregnancy but is not detected or treated to remission. We need to identify symptoms as early as possible, ideally long before birth.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 20221 - Posted: 10.20.2014

Daniel Cressey The history of sex may have to be rewritten thanks to a group of unsightly, long-extinct fish called placoderms. A careful study1 of fossils of these armour-plated creatures, which gave rise to all current vertebrates with jaws, suggests that their descendants — our ancient ancestors — switched their sexual practices from internal to external fertilization, an event previously thought to be evolutionarily improbable. “This was totally unexpected,” says John Long, a palaeontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and lead author of the study, published in Nature1. “Biologists thought that there could not be a reversion back from internal fertilization to external fertilization, but we have shown it must have happened this way.” Go back far enough in your family tree — before placoderms — and your ancestors were rather ugly jawless fish who reproduced through external fertilization, in which sperm and eggs are expelled into the water to unite. Some of these distant relatives later gave rise to the jawless fish called lampreys that lurk in seas today and still use this method of reproduction. Bony organ Long's team studied placoderms, one of the earliest groups of jawed animals, and found structures in fossils that they interpret as bony ‘claspers’ — male organs that penetrate the female and deliver sperm. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 20220 - Posted: 10.20.2014

By KONIKA BANERJEE and PAUL BLOOM ON April 15, 2013, James Costello was cheering on a friend near the finish line at the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded, severely burning his arms and legs and sending shrapnel into his flesh. During the months of surgery and rehabilitation that followed, Mr. Costello developed a relationship with one of his nurses, Krista D’Agostino, and they soon became engaged. Mr. Costello posted a picture of the ring on Facebook. “I now realize why I was involved in the tragedy,” he wrote. “It was to meet my best friend, and the love of my life.” Mr. Costello is not alone in finding meaning in life events. People regularly do so for both terrible incidents, such as being injured in an explosion, and positive ones, like being cured of a serious disease. As the phrase goes, everything happens for a reason. Where does this belief come from? One theory is that it reflects religious teachings — we think that events have meaning because we believe in a God that plans for us, sends us messages, rewards the good and punishes the bad. But research from the Yale Mind and Development Lab, where we work, suggests that this can’t be the whole story. In one series of studies, recently published in the journal Cognition, we asked people to reflect on significant events from their own lives, such as graduations, the births of children, falling in love, the deaths of loved ones and serious illnesses. Unsurprisingly, a majority of religious believers said they thought that these events happened for a reason and that they had been purposefully designed (presumably by God). But many atheists did so as well, and a majority of atheists in a related study also said that they believed in fate — defined as the view that life events happen for a reason and that there is an underlying order to life that determines how events turn out. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 20219 - Posted: 10.20.2014

A drug being studied as a fast-acting mood-lifter restored pleasure-seeking behavior independent of — and ahead of — its other antidepressant effects, in a National Institutes of Health trial. Within 40 minutes after a single infusion of ketamine, treatment-resistant depressed bipolar disorder patients experienced a reversal of a key symptom — loss of interest in pleasurable activities — which lasted up to 14 days. Brain scans traced the agent’s action to boosted activity in areas at the front and deep in the right hemisphere of the brain. “Our findings help to deconstruct what has traditionally been lumped together as depression,” explained Carlos Zarate, M.D., of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. “We break out a component that responds uniquely to a treatment that works through different brain systems than conventional antidepressants — and link that response to different circuitry than other depression symptoms.” This approach is consistent with the NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria project, which calls for the study of functions – such as the ability to seek out and experience rewards – and their related brain systems that may identify subgroups of patients in one or multiple disorder categories. Zarate and colleagues reported on their findings Oct. 14, 2014 in the journal Translational Psychiatry. Although it’s considered one of two cardinal symptoms of both depression and bipolar disorder, effective treatments have been lacking for loss of the ability to look forward to pleasurable activities, or anhedonia. Long used as an anesthetic and sometimes club drug, ketamine and its mechanism-of-action have lately been the focus of research into a potential new class of rapid-acting antidepressants that can lift mood within hours instead of weeks.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 20218 - Posted: 10.18.2014

By Smitha Mundasad Health reporter, BBC News Scientists have uncovered hidden signatures in the brains of people in vegetative states that suggest they may have a glimmer of consciousness. Doctors normally consider these patients - who have severe brain injuries - to be unaware of the world around them although they appear awake. Researchers hope their work will help identify those who are actually conscious, but unable to communicate. Their report appears in PLoS Computational Biology. After catastrophic brain injuries, for example due to car crashes or major heart attacks, some people can appear to wake up yet do not respond to events around them. Doctors describe these patients as being in a vegetative state. Patients typically open their eyes and look around, but cannot react to commands or make any purposeful movements. Some people remain in this state for many years. But a handful of recent studies have questioned this diagnosis - suggesting some patients may actually be aware of what is going on around them, but unable to communicate. A team of scientists at Cambridge University studied 13 patients in vegetative states, mapping the electrical activity of their nerves using a mesh of electrodes applied to their scalps. The electrical patterns and connections they recorded were then compared with healthy volunteers. The study reveals four of the 13 patients had an electrical signature that was very similar to those seen in the volunteers. Dr Srivas Chennu, who led the research, said: "This suggests some of the brain networks that support consciousness in healthy adults may be well-preserved in a number of people in persistent vegetative state too." BBC © 2014

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 20217 - Posted: 10.18.2014

By Benedict Carey Sleep. Parents crave it, but children and especially teenagers, need it. When educators and policymakers debate the relationship between sleep schedules and school performance and — given the constraints of buses, sports and everything else that seem so much more important — what they should do about it, they miss an intimate biological fact: Sleep is learning, of a very specific kind. Scientists now argue that a primary purpose of sleep is learning consolidation, separating the signal from the noise and flagging what is most valuable. School schedules change slowly, if at all, and the burden of helping teenagers get the sleep they need is squarely on parents. Can we help our children learn to exploit sleep as a learning tool (while getting enough of it)? Absolutely. There is research suggesting that different kinds of sleep can aid different kinds of learning, and by teaching “sleep study skills,” we can let our teenagers enjoy the sense that they’re gaming the system. Start with the basics. Sleep isn’t merely rest or downtime; the brain comes out to play when head meets pillow. A full night’s sleep includes a large dose of several distinct brain states, including REM sleep – when the brain flares with activity and dreams – and the netherworld of deep sleep, when it whispers to itself in a language that is barely audible. Each of these states developed to handle one kind of job, so getting sleep isn’t just something you “should do” or need. It’s far more: It’s your best friend when you want to get really good at something you’ve been working on. So you want to remember your Spanish vocabulary (or “How I Met Your Mother” trivia or Red Sox batting averages)? © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 20216 - Posted: 10.18.2014