A single alcohol binge can cause bacteria to leak from the gut and increase levels of bacterial toxins in the blood, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Increased levels of these bacterial toxins, called endotoxins, were shown to affect the immune system, with the body producing more immune cells involved in fever, inflammation, and tissue destruction. Binge drinking is defined by NIAAA as a pattern of drinking alcohol that brings blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08g/dL or above. For a typical adult, this pattern corresponds to consuming five or more drinks for men, or four or more drinks for women, in about two hours. Some individuals will reach a 0.08g/dL BAC sooner depending on body weight. Binge drinking is known to pose health and safety risks, including car crashes and injuries. Over the long term, binge drinking can damage the liver and other organs. “While the negative health effects of chronic drinking are well-documented, this is a key study to show that a single alcohol binge can cause damaging effects such as bacterial leakage from the gut into the blood stream,” said Dr. George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of NIH. The study was led by Gyongyi Szabo, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Vice Chair of Medicine and Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The article appears online in PLOS ONE In the study, 11 men and 14 women were given enough alcohol to raise their blood alcohol levels to at least .08 g/dL within an hour. Blood samples were taken every 30 minutes for four hours after the binge and again 24 hours later.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19620 - Posted: 05.16.2014

By RONI CARYN RABIN For decades, scientists have embarked on the long journey toward a medical breakthrough by first experimenting on laboratory animals. Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: Researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments. That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women. From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market. Now the National Institutes of Health says that this routine gender bias in basic research must end. In a commentary published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the N.I.H., and Dr. Janine A. Clayton, director of the institutes’ Office of Research on Women’s Health, warned scientists that they must begin testing their theories in female lab animals and in female tissues and cells. The N.I.H. has already taken researchers to task for their failure to include adequate numbers of women in clinical trials. The new announcement is an acknowledgment that this gender disparity begins much earlier in the research process. “Most scientists want to do the most powerful experiment to get the most durable, powerful answers,” Dr. Collins said in an interview. “For most, this has not been on the radar screen as an important issue. What we’re trying to do here is raise consciousness.” Women now make up more than half the participants in clinical research funded by the institutes, but it has taken years to get to this point, and women still are often underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by drug companies and medical device manufacturers. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Depression
Link ID: 19619 - Posted: 05.15.2014

By Matty Litwack One year ago, I thought I was going to die. Specifically, I believed an amoeba was eating my brain. As I’ve done countless times before, I called my mother in a panic: “Mom, I think I’m dying.” As she has done countless times before, she laughed at me. She doesn’t really take me seriously anymore, because I’m a massive hypochondriac. If there exists a disease, I’ve probably convinced myself that I have it. Every time I have a cough, I assume it’s lung cancer. One time I thought I had herpes, but it was just a piece of candy stuck to my face. In the case of the brain amoeba, however, I had a legitimate reason to believe I was dying. Several days prior, I had visited a doctor to treat my nasal congestion. The doctor deemed my sickness not severe enough to warrant antibiotics and instead suggested I try a neti pot to clear up my congestion. A neti pot is a vessel shaped like a genie’s lamp that’s used to irrigate the sinuses with saline solution. My neti pot came with an instruction manual, which I immediately discarded. Why would I need instructions? Nasal irrigation seemed like a simple enough process: water goes up one nostril and flows down the other – that’s just gravity. I dumped a bottle of natural spring water into the neti pot, mixed in some salt, shoved it in my nostril and started pouring. If there was in fact a genie living in the neti pot, I imagine this was very unpleasant for him. The pressure in my sinuses was instantly reduced. It worked so well that over the next couple of days, I was raving about neti pots to anybody who would allow me to annoy them. It was honestly surprising how little people wanted to hear about nasal irrigation. Some nodded politely, others asked me to stop talking about it, but one friend had a uniquely interesting reaction: “Oh, you’re using a neti pot?” he asked. “Watch out for the brain-eating amoeba.” This was hands-down the strangest warning I had ever received. I assumed it was a joke, but I made a mental note to Google brain amoebas as soon as I was done proselytizing the masses on the merits of saltwater nose genies. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 19618 - Posted: 05.15.2014

by Nathan Collins There's a new twist in mental health. People with depression seem three times as likely as those without it to have two brain lobes curled around each other. The brains of people with depression can be physically different from other brains – they are often smaller, for example – but exactly why that is so remains unclear. In humans, some studies point to changes in the size of the hippocampi, structures near the back of the brain thought to support memory formation. "There are so many studies that show a smaller hippocampus in almost every psychiatric disorder," says Jerome Maller, a neuroscientist at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, who led the latest work looking at brain lobes. "But very few can actually show or hypothesize why that is." Maller thinks he has stumbled on an explanation. He had been using a brain stimulation technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation as a therapy for antidepressant-resistant depression. This involved using fMRI scans to create detailed maps of the brain to determine which parts to stimulate. While pouring over hundreds of those maps, Maller noticed that many of them showed signs of occipital bending. This is where occipital lobes – which are important for vision – at the back of the brain's left and right hemispheres twist around each other. So he and his colleagues scanned 51 people with and 48 without major depressive disorder. They found that about 35 per cent of those with depression and 12.5 per cent of the others showed signs of occipital bending. The difference was even greater in women: 46 per cent of women with depression had occipital bending compared with just 6 per cent of those without depression. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Laterality
Link ID: 19617 - Posted: 05.15.2014

By Pippa Stephens Health reporter, BBC News An anti-depressant drug could be used to slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease, say scientists in the US. Research into 23 people, and transgenic mice, found citalopram hampered a protein which helps to build destructive plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Scientists said they hoped the study could help prevent the disease. Experts said the study was "interesting" and that using an approved drug could be beneficial. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, affecting around 496,000 people in the UK. It affects the brain through protein plaques and tangles which lead to the death of brain cells, and a shortage of chemicals important for transmitting messages. Symptoms include loss of memory, mood changes, and problems with communication and reasoning. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University School of Medicine carried out the study between 2012 and 2014. They bred mice with Alzheimer's disease and looked at the levels of the peptide - or protein component - amyloid beta (AB), in the brain. AB clusters in plaques which, alongside the tau protein, are thought to trigger Alzheimer's. After giving the mice citalopram, the level of AB fell by 25%, compared to the control group, with no anti-depressant. And after two months of anti-depressants, the growth of new plaques was reduced, and existing plaques did not grow any further, the study said. But it noted the drug could not cause existing plaques to shrink, or decrease in number. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Alzheimers; Depression
Link ID: 19616 - Posted: 05.15.2014

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR Two medications could help tens of thousands of alcoholics quit drinking, yet the drugs are rarely prescribed to patients, researchers reported on Tuesday. The medications, naltrexone and acamprosate, reduce cravings for alcohol by fine-tuning the brain’s chemical reward system. They have been approved for treating alcoholism for over a decade. But questions about their efficacy and a lack of awareness among doctors have resulted in the drugs’ being underused, the researchers said. Less than a third of all people with alcohol problems receive treatment of any kind, and less than 10 percent are prescribed medications. The Affordable Care Act requires that insurers provide coverage for substance abuse treatments and services, and addiction specialists expect to see increases this year in the number of people seeking help for alcoholism. George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said the new study should reassure doctors that naltrexone and acamprosate, while not silver bullets, can help many patients. “This is an important paper,” said Dr. Koob, who was not involved in the study. “There are effective medications for the treatment of alcoholism, and it would be great if the world would use them.” In the new study, which was published online on Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, a team of researchers based mostly at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill compiled findings from the most rigorous trials of medications for alcoholism in the past few decades. Ultimately, they analyzed data on roughly 23,000 people from 122 randomized trials. The researchers focused on a measure known as the “number needed to treat,” an indicator of how many people need to take a pill for one person to be helped. The study found that to prevent one person from returning to drinking, the number needed to treat for acamprosate was 12; for naltrexone, the number was 20. By comparison, large studies of widely used drugs, like the cholesterol-lowering statins, have found that 25 to more than 100 people need treatment to prevent one cardiovascular event. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19615 - Posted: 05.15.2014

|By Andrea Anderson Our knack for language helps us structure our thinking. Yet the ability to wax poetic about trinkets, tools or traits may not be necessary to think about them abstractly, as was once suspected. A growing body of evidence suggests nonhuman animals can group living and inanimate things based on less than obvious shared traits, raising questions about how creatures accomplish this task. In a study published last fall in the journal PeerJ, for example, Oakland University psychology researcher Jennifer Vonk investigated how well four orangutans and a western lowland gorilla from the Toronto Zoo could pair photographs of animals from the same biological groups. Vonk presented the apes with a touch-screen computer and got them to tap an image of an animal—for instance, a snake—on the screen. Then she showed each ape two side-by-side animal pictures: one from the same category as the animal in the original image and one from another—for example, images of a different reptile and a bird. When they correctly matched animal pairs, they received a treat such as nuts or dried fruit. When they got it wrong, they saw a black screen before beginning the next trial. After hundreds of such trials, Vonk found that all five apes could categorize other animals better than expected by chance (although some individuals were better at it than others). The researchers were impressed that the apes could learn to classify mammals of vastly different visual characteristics together—such as turtles and snakes—suggesting the apes had developed concepts for reptiles and other categories of animals based on something other than shared physical traits. Dogs, too, seem to have better than expected abstract-thinking abilities. They can reliably recognize pictures of other dogs, regardless of breed, as a study in the July 2013 Animal Cognition showed. The results surprised scientists not only because dog breeds vary so widely in appearance but also because it had been unclear whether dogs could routinely identify fellow canines without the advantage of smell and other senses. Other studies have found feats of categorization by chimpanzees, bears and pigeons, adding up to a spate of recent research that suggests the ability to sort things abstractly is far more widespread than previously thought. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 19614 - Posted: 05.15.2014

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues today released its first set of recommendations for integrating ethics into neuroscience research in the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Last July, President Barack Obama charged the commission with identifying key ethical questions that may arise through the BRAIN Initiative and wider neuroscience research. The report is “a dream come true,” says Judy Illes, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was a guest presenter to the commission. Brain research raises unique ethical issues because it “strikes at the very core of who we are,” said political scientist and philosopher Amy Gutmann of the University of Pennsylvania, who chairs the commission, in a call with reporters yesterday. Specific areas of concern identified in the report include questions of brain privacy raised by advances in neuroimaging research; whether research participants and patients with dementia can give informed consent to participate in experimental trials; and research into cognitive enhancement, which raises “issues of distributive justice and fairness,” Gutmann says. Parsing hope from hype is key to ethical neuroscience research and its application, Gutmann notes. Citing the troubled ethical history of psychosurgery in the United States, in which more than 40,000 people were lobotomized based on shaky evidence that the procedure could treat psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression, Gutmann cautions that a similar ethical derailment is possible in contemporary neuroscience research. A misstep with invasive experimental treatments such as deep brain stimulation surgery would not only be tragic for patients, but have “devastating consequences” for scientific progress, she says. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 19613 - Posted: 05.15.2014

By KATIE THOMAS Almost overnight, a powerful new painkiller has become a $100 million business and a hot Wall Street story. But nearly as quickly, questions are emerging about how the drug is being sold, and to whom. The drug, Subsys, is a form of fentanyl, a narcotic that is often used when painkillers like morphine fail to provide relief. The product was approved in 2012 for a relatively small number of people — cancer patients — but has since become an outsize moneymaker for the obscure company that makes it, Insys Therapeutics. In the last year, the company’s sales have soared and its share price has jumped nearly 270 percent. Behind that business success is an unusual marketing machine that may have pushed Subsys far beyond the use envisioned by the Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. approved Subsys only for cancer patients who are already using round-the-clock painkillers, and warned that it should be prescribed only by oncologists and pain specialists. But just 1 percent of prescriptions are written by oncologists, according to data provided by Symphony Health, which analyzes drug trends. About half of the prescriptions were written by pain specialists, and a wide range of doctors prescribed the rest, including general practice physicians, neurologists and even dentists and podiatrists. Interviews with several former Insys sales representatives suggest the company, based in Chandler, Ariz., has aggressively marketed the painkiller, including to physicians who did not treat many cancer patients and by paying its sales force higher commissions for selling higher doses of the drug. Under F.D.A. rules, manufacturers may market prescription drugs only for approved uses. But doctors may prescribe drugs as they see fit. Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies have paid billions of dollars to settle claims that they encouraged doctors to use drugs for nonapproved treatments, or so-called off-label uses, to increase sales and profits. © 2014 The New York Times Compan

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19612 - Posted: 05.15.2014

Ewen Callaway In the silk business, sex is money. Male silkworms weave cocoons with more silk of a higher quality than females do, and the multibillion dollar sericulture industry has long sought an easy way to breed only males. That might now be a realistic goal, as researchers have identified the process that determines sex in the silkworm Bombyx mori1. The sex factor is found to be a small RNA molecule — the first time that anything other than a protein has been implicated in a sex-detemination process. In nearly all Lepidoptera — the order that includes moths and butterflies — sex is determined in silkworms by a WZ chromosome system, in contrast to the XY system used in mammals. Female silkworms carry W and Z sex chromosomes, whereas males boast a pair of Z chromosomes. Last year, researchers showed how to genetically modify silkworms so that the females would express a deadly protein (see 'Genetic kill switch eradicates female silkworms for a better crop'). But efforts to identify the genes on the W chromosome that make silkworms female have come up short: the W does not seem to have any protein-making genes, and is instead almost completely filled with parasitic, mobile genetic elements called transposons. In 2011, a team led by entomologist Susumu Katsuma at the University of Tokyo reported that the W chromosome produces short RNA molecules that keep transposons at bay in newly formed egg cells2. Katsuma and his team report in Nature today1 that one such molecule, which the authors called Fem, is specific to female silkworms, suggesting that it has a role in sex determination. The Fem RNA breaks down a corresponding molecule made by a gene known as Masculinizer, which is found on the Z chromosome. When the researchers silenced Masculinizer, embryos execute a genetic programme that makes female tissue. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19611 - Posted: 05.15.2014

Bullying casts a long shadow. Children who are bullied are more prone to depression and suicidal tendencies even when they grow up; they're also more likely to get sick and have headaches and stomach troubles, researchers have discovered. A new study may have found the underlying cause: A specific indicator of illness, called C-reactive protein (CRP), is higher than normal in bullying victims, even when they get older. In contrast, the bullies, by the same gauge, seem to be healthier. The researchers focused on CRP because it's a common, easily tested marker of inflammation, the runaway immune system activity that's a feature of many chronic illnesses including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain, and depression, explains lead author William Copeland, a psychologist and epidemiologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. To link inflammation to bullying, the researchers asked 1420 youngsters between the ages of 9 and 16 whether, and how often, they had been bullied or had bullied others. Interviewers asked participants whether they felt more teased, bullied, or treated meanly by siblings, friends, and peers than other children—and whether they had upset or hurt other people on purpose, tried to get others in trouble, or forced people to do something by threatening or hurting them. The researchers took finger stick blood tests at each assessment. Interviews took place once a year until the participants turned 16, and again when they were 19 and 21. The children interviewed were participants in the larger Great Smoky Mountains Study, in which some 12,000 children in North Carolina were assessed to track the development of psychiatric conditions. In the short term, the effect of bullying on the victims was immediate. CRP levels increased along with the number of reported bullying instances, and more than doubled in those who said they'd been bullied three times or more in the previous year, compared with kids who had never been bullied. No change was seen in bullies, or in kids who hadn't been involved with bullying one way or the other, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19610 - Posted: 05.13.2014

by Anil Ananthaswamy Children born with split brains – whereby the two hemispheres of their brains are not connected – can develop new brain wiring that helps to connect the two halves, according to brain scans of people with the condition. Such circuitry is not present in normal brains, and explains how some people with split brains can still maintain normal function. It also suggests that the developing brain is even more adaptable than previously thought. Research into people with split brains goes back to the 1960s, when neuroscientists studied people who had undergone brain surgery to treat particularly severe epilepsy. The surgery involved cutting the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neuronal fibres that connects the brain's two halves. This disconnection prevented epileptic seizures spreading from one brain hemisphere to the other. The recipients of such split-brain surgery showed a form of disconnection syndrome whereby the two halves of their brains could not exchange information. For instance, if a patient touched an object with their left hand without seeing the object, they would be unable to name it. That is because sensory-motor signals from the left hand are processed in the right hemisphere. To put a name to the object, the tactile information from the hand has to reach the brain's left hemisphere, the seat of language. With the central connection between hemispheres severed, the object's naming information cannot be retrieved. Conversely, if that person were to touch an object with their right hand without seeing it, the sensory-motor signals from that hand would go to the left hemisphere, which hosts the brain's language centres, making naming the object easy. However, children born without a corpus callosum – and therefore whose two brain hemispheres are separated – can often pass such tactile naming tests when they are old enough to take them. Their brain hemispheres are obviously communicating, but it wasn't clear how. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Laterality; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19609 - Posted: 05.13.2014

By DANIEL GOLEMAN Which will it be — the berries or the chocolate dessert? Homework or the Xbox? Finish that memo, or roam Facebook? Such quotidian decisions test a mental ability called cognitive control, the capacity to maintain focus on an important choice while ignoring other impulses. Poor planning, wandering attention and trouble inhibiting impulses all signify lapses in cognitive control. Now a growing stream of research suggests that strengthening this mental muscle, usually with exercises in so-called mindfulness, may help children and adults cope with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and its adult equivalent, attention deficit disorder. The studies come amid growing disenchantment with the first-line treatment for these conditions: drugs. In 2007, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study finding that the incidence of A.D.H.D. among teenagers in Finland, along with difficulties in cognitive functioning and related emotional disorders like depression, were virtually identical to rates among teenagers in the United States. The real difference? Most adolescents with A.D.H.D. in the United States were taking medication; most in Finland were not. “It raises questions about using medication as a first line of treatment,” said Susan Smalley, a behavior geneticist at U.C.L.A. and the lead author. In a large study published last year in The Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers reported that while most young people with A.D.H.D. benefit from medications in the first year, these effects generally wane by the third year, if not sooner. “There are no long-term, lasting benefits from taking A.D.H.D. medications,” said James M. Swanson, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of the study. “But mindfulness seems to be training the same areas of the brain that have reduced activity in A.D.H.D.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19608 - Posted: 05.13.2014

By Suzanne Allard Levingston, Playing with bubble wrap is a silly activity that delights most preschoolers. But for one 21 / 2-year-old from Silver Spring, loud noises such as the pop of plastic bubbles were so upsetting that he would cover his ears and run away. Some days the sound of a vacuum cleaner would make him scream. The child so persistently avoided activities with too much noise and motion that his preschool’s administrators asked to meet with his family — and soon an assessment led to a diagnosis of sensory processing disorder, or SPD. SPD is a clinical label for people who have abnormal behavioral responses to sensory input such as sound and touch. Some children with SPD seem oversensitive to ordinary stimuli such as a shirt label’s scratching their skin. Others can be underresponsive — seemingly unaffected by the prick of a needle. A third group have motor problems that make holding a pencil or riding a bike seem impossible. Whatever the difficulty, such kids are often described as “out-of-sync,” a term popularized by Carol Stock Kranowitz’s 1998 book “The Out-of-Sync Child,” which has sold nearly 700,000 copies. As many as 16 percent of school-age kids in the United States may face sensory processing challenges. And yet there’s debate over whether these challenges constitute a discrete medical disorder. Some experts contend that SPD may be merely a symptom of some other ailment — autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorder or fragile X syndrome, for example — while others insist it is a separate condition that should be labeled a disorder when it interferes with daily life. The debate over how to classify SPD is not merely matter of semantics. Such discussions can affect research funding and can guide whether insurers will reimburse therapy costs. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Autism; Hearing
Link ID: 19607 - Posted: 05.13.2014

Erin Allday A gene variant that scientists already knew to be associated with longer life also seems to make people smarter, and may help offset the effects of normal cognitive decline in old age, according to a team of San Francisco researchers. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Cell Reports, are encouraging news for the roughly 1 in 5 people who have the genetic trait, which is a variant of the klotho gene. Beyond that, scientists hope the findings will help them develop tools for retaining, or even boosting, intelligence in people who have suffered cognitive losses, either from disease or through the normal course of aging. 'Cognitive enhancer' "What we've discovered is a cognitive enhancer," said Dr. Dena Dubal, an assistant professor of neurology at UCSF and lead author of the study, which was done with researchers from the Gladstone Institutes. "This may represent a new way to treat problems of cognition in the brain." The name of the gene comes from Greek mythology - Klotho is one of the three sisters of fate, and she spins the thread of life. The gene is responsible for secretions of the hormone klotho, which is thought to have effects on a variety of biological systems and has been shown to disrupt some processes associated with aging. © 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19606 - Posted: 05.13.2014

Victoria Colliver If all traditional cigarette smokers switched to electronic cigarettes, lives would be saved and overall public health would improve, scientists and doctors say. But UCSF researchers, in a paper published Monday, say a growing body of research shows that people who take up e-cigarettes aren't necessarily giving up conventional cigarettes, and on top of that, the devices are being heavily marketed to young people, creating a potential new market for the nicotine and tobacco industry. "Our bottom line is, at the moment, it doesn't seem like e-cigarettes are having a big impact on the population in terms of quitting," said UCSF's Dr. Neal Benowitz, a leading nicotine researcher and a co-author of the scientific review published in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association. E-cigarettes, battery-operated devices that vaporize a nicotine solution, have been sold in the U.S. only since the mid-2000s, but their popularity is exploding, particularly among teenagers. The percentage of U.S. middle and high school students who said they've tried e-cigarettes was 3.3 percent in 2011 but rose to 6.8 percent by the following year, according to a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health effects unclear Some manufacturers claim the devices help people stop smoking and some users agree, but researchers in the study say that's unclear. The paper cites studies that show people tend to use e-cigarettes with combustible cigarettes, rather than as an alternative. © 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19605 - Posted: 05.13.2014

By DOLLY CHUGH, KATHERINE L. MILKMAN and MODUPE AKINOLA IN the world of higher education, we professors like to believe that we are free from the racial and gender biases that afflict so many other people in society. But is this self-conception accurate? To find out, we conducted an experiment. A few years ago, we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang, names that earlier research participants consistently perceived as belonging to either a white, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese student. In total, we used 20 different names in 10 different race-gender categories (e.g. white male, Hispanic female). On a Monday morning, the emails went out — one email per professor — and then we waited to see which professors would write back to which students. We understood, of course, that some professors would naturally be unavailable or uninterested in mentoring. But we also knew that the average treatment of any particular type of student should not differ from that of any other — unless professors were deciding (consciously or not) which students to help on the basis of their race and gender. (This “audit” methodology has long been used to study intentional and unintentional bias in real-world decision-making, as it allows researchers to standardize much about the decision environment.) What did we discover? First comes the fairly good news, which we reported in a paper in Psychological Science. Despite not knowing the students, 67 percent of the faculty members responded to the emails, and remarkably, 59 percent of the responders even agreed to meet on the proposed date with a student about whom they knew little and who did not even attend their university. (We immediately wrote back to cancel those meetings.) © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 19604 - Posted: 05.12.2014

by Helen Thomson If you liked Inception, you're going to love this. People have been given the ability to control their dreams after a quick zap to their head while they sleep. Lucid dreaming is an intriguing state of sleep in which a person becomes aware that they are dreaming. As a result, they gain some element of control over what happens in their dream – for example, the dreamer could make a threatening character disappear or decide to fly to an exotic location. Researchers are interested in lucid dreaming because it can help probe what happens when we switch between conscious states, going from little to full awareness. In 2010, Ursula Voss at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and her colleagues trained volunteers to move their eyes in a specific pattern during a lucid dream. By scanning their brains while they slept, Voss was able to show that lucid dreams coincided with elevated gamma brainwaves. This kind of brainwave occurs when groups of neurons synchronise their activity, firing together about 40 times a second. The gamma waves occurred mainly in areas situated towards the front of the brain, called the frontal and temporal lobes. Perchance to dream The team wanted to see whether gamma brainwaves caused the lucid dreams, or whether both were side effects of some other change. So Voss and her colleagues began another study in which they stimulated the brain of 27 sleeping volunteers, using a non-invasive technique called transcranial alternating current. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Consciousness
Link ID: 19603 - Posted: 05.12.2014

By DAVID L. KIRP Whenever President Obama proposes a major federal investment in early education, as he did in his two most recent State of the Union addresses, critics have a two-word riposte: Head Start. Researchers have long cast doubt on that program’s effectiveness. The most damning evidence comes from a 2012 federal evaluation that used gold-standard methodology and concluded that children who participated in Head Start were not more successful in elementary school than others. That finding was catnip to the detractors. “Head Start’s impact is no better than random,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized. Why throw good money after bad? Though the faultfinders have a point, the claim that Head Start has failed overstates the case. For one thing, it has gotten considerably better in the past few years because of tougher quality standards. For another, researchers have identified a “sleeper effect” — many Head Start youngsters begin to flourish as teenagers, maybe because the program emphasizes character and social skills as well as the three R’s. Still, few would give Head Start high marks, and the bleak conclusion of the 2012 evaluation stands in sharp contrast to the impressive results from well-devised studies of state-financed prekindergartens. Head Start, a survivor of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty, enrolls only poor kids. That’s a big part of the problem — as the adage goes, programs for the poor often become poor programs. Whether it’s health care (compare the trajectories of Medicare, for those 65 and older of all incomes, and Medicaid, only for the poor), education or housing, the sorry truth is that “we” don’t like subsidizing “them.” Head Start is no exception. It has been perpetually underfunded, never able to enroll more than half of eligible children or pay its teachers a decent wage. If Head Start is going to realize its potential, it has to break out of the antipoverty mold. One promising but unfortunately rarely used strategy is to encourage all youngsters, not just poor kids, to enroll, with poor families paying nothing and middle-class families contributing on a sliding scale. Another is to merge Head Start with high-quality state prekindergarten. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19602 - Posted: 05.12.2014

Sam Kean For most of recorded history, human beings situated the mind — and by extension the soul — not within the brain but within the heart. When preparing mummies for the afterlife, for instance, ancient Egyptian priests removed the heart in one piece and preserved it in a ceremonial jar; in contrast, they scraped out the brain through the nostrils with iron hooks, tossed it aside for animals, and filled the empty skull with sawdust or resin. (This wasn’t a snarky commentary on their politicians, either—they considered everyone’s brain useless.) Most Greek thinkers also elevated the heart to the body’s summa. Aristotle pointed out that the heart had thick vessels to shunt messages around, whereas the brain had wispy, effete wires. The heart furthermore sat in the body’s center, appropriate for a commander, while the brain sat in exile up top. The heart developed first in embryos, and it responded in sync with our emotions, pounding faster or slower, while the brain just sort of sat there. Ergo, the heart must house our highest faculties. Meanwhile, though, some physicians had always had a different perspective on where the mind came from. They’d simply seen too many patients get beaned in the head and lose some higher faculty to think it all a coincidence. Doctors therefore began to promote a brain-centric view of human nature. And despite some heated debates over the centuries—especially about whether the brain had specialized regions or not—by the 1600s most learned men had enthroned the mind within the brain. A few brave scientists even began to search for that anatomical El Dorado: the exact seat of the soul within the brain. One such explorer was Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the oddest ducks to ever waddle across the stage of history. © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19601 - Posted: 05.12.2014