By MARK OPPENHEIMER When our young daughters first decided to play on top of our Honda minivan, parked in our driveway, my wife was worried. But to me, it seemed no less safe than chasing a ball that frequently ended up in the street. And they loved the height, the novelty, the danger. So I let them stay. They never fell. And with the summer weather here, playing on the car is once again keeping them occupied for hours. Now that I have read Paul Raeburn’s “Do Fathers Matter?,” I know that my comfort with more dangerous play — my willingness to let my daughters stand on top of a minivan — is a typically paternal trait. Dads roughhouse with children more, too. They also gain weight when their wives are pregnant and have an outsize effect on their children’s vocabulary. The presence of dads can delay daughters’ puberty. But older dads have more children with dwarfism and with Marfan syndrome. In Mr. Raeburn’s book, there is plenty of good news for dads, and plenty of bad. A zippy tour through the latest research on fathers’ distinctive, or predominant, contributions to their children’s lives, “Do Fathers Matter?” is filled with provocative studies of human dads — not to mention a lot of curious animal experiments. (You’ll learn about blackbirds’ vasectomies.) But above all, Mr. Raeburn shows how little we know about the role of fathers, and how preliminary his book is. Its end is really a beginning, a prospectus for further research. Mr. Raeburn writes that “as recently as a generation ago, in the 1970s, most psychologists” believed that “with regard to infants, especially, fathers were thought to have little or no role to play.” When it came to toddlers and older children, too, the great parenting theories of the 20th century placed fathers in the background. Freud famously exalted, or damned, the mother for her influence. John Bowlby’s attachment theory, which he developed beginning in the 1940s, focused on the mother or “mother-figure.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19686 - Posted: 06.03.2014

|By Christie Nicholson Conventional wisdom once had it that each brain region is responsible for a specific task. And so we have the motor cortex for handling movements, and the visual cortex, for processing sight. And scientists thought that such regions remained fixed for those tasks beyond the age of three. But within the past decade researchers have realized that some brain regions can pinch hit for other regions, for example, after a damaging stroke. And now new research finds that the visual cortex is constantly doing double duty—it has a role in processing not just sight, but sound. When we hear [siren sound], we see a siren. In the study, scientists scanned the brains of blindfolded participants as the subjects listened to three sounds: [audio of birds, audio of traffic, audio of a talking crowd.] And the scientists could tell what specific sounds the subjects were hearing just by analyzing the brain activity in the visual cortex. [Petra Vetter, Fraser W. Smith and Lars Muckli, Decoding Sound and Imagery Content in Early Visual Cortex, in Current Biology] The next step is to determine why the visual cortex is horning in on the audio action. The researchers think the additional role conferred an evolutionary advantage: having a visual system primed by sound to see the source of that sound could have given humans an extra step in the race for survival. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 19685 - Posted: 06.03.2014

Jessica Morrison Bees, like birds and butterflies, use the Sun as a compass for navigation, whereas mammals typically find their way by remembering familiar landmarks on a continuous mental map. However, the latest research suggests that bees also use this type of map, despite their much smaller brain size. The work adds a new dimension to complex bee-navigation abilities that have long captivated researchers. “The surprise comes for many people that such a tiny little brain is able to form such a rich memory described as a cognitive map,” says co-author Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin. The research by Menzel and his team, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, demonstrates that bees can find their way back to their hives without relying solely on the Sun. Instead, they seem to use a 'cognitive map' that is made up of memorized landscape snapshots that direct them home. The cognitive map used by mammals is thought to originate in the brain’s hippocampus. Humans employ such maps on a daily basis; for example, even in a windowless office, many people can point towards their home, orienting themselves in space based on knowledge of their location relative to the outside world. “They can point to their home generally even though they can’t see it, even along a path through a wall that they haven’t travelled,” explains Fred Dyer, a behavioural biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, who was not involved in the research. The study authors argue that bees can do something similar, albeit on a much more rudimentary level. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 19684 - Posted: 06.03.2014

By Lara Salahi A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have embarked on a new project to create an implantable device in the brain that would read and alter the emotions of someone with a mental illness. The team is working in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, on a new program funded by the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The researchers are working to create an implantable device that can sense abnormal activity in the brain using algorithms, and then deliver electrical impulses to certain parts of the brain that would suppress the abnormal signals. “Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” Jose Carmena, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who is involved in the project, told MIT Technology Review. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.” Mental illness and suicide rates among the US military have spiked over the past decade, the National Institute of Mental Healthreports. The current research is part of DARPA’s emerging neurotechnology therapy program which investigates new approaches to treat neuropsychological illnesses among military servicemembers and veterans. Their goal is to treat at least seven psychiatric conditions, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and fibromyalgia.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 19683 - Posted: 06.03.2014

Damage to certain parts of the brain can lead to a bizarre syndrome called hemispatial neglect, in which one loses awareness of one side of their body and the space around it. In extreme cases, a patient with hemispatial neglect might eat food from only one side of their plate, dress on only one side of their body, or shave or apply make-up to half of their face, apparently because they cannot pay attention to anything on that the other side. Research published last week now suggests that something like this happens to all of us when we drift off to sleep each night. The work could help researchers to understand the causes of hemispatial neglect, and why it affects one side far more often than the other. It also begins to reveal the profound changes in conscious experience that take place while we fall asleep, and the brain changes that accompany them. Hemispatial neglect is a debilitating condition that occurs often in people who suffer a stroke, where damage to the left hemisphere of the brain results in neglect of the right half of space, and vice versa. It can occur as a result of damage to certain parts of the frontal lobes, which are involved in alertness and attention, and the parietal lobes, which process information about the body and its surrounding space. In clinical tests, patients with hemispatial neglect are typically unaware of all kinds of stimuli in one half of space – they fail to acknowledge objects placed in the affected half of their visual field, for example and cannot state the location of touch sensations on the affected side of their body. Some may stop using the limbs on the affected side, or even deny that the limbs belong to them. Patients with neglect can usually see perfectly well, but information from the affected side just does not reach their conscious awareness. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Laterality
Link ID: 19682 - Posted: 06.03.2014

By DAAN HEERMA VAN VOSS I was 25 when I lost my memory. It happened on Jan. 16, 2012. I woke up, not knowing where I was. I was lying in bed, sure, but whose bed was it? There was no one in the room, no sound that I recognized: I was alone with my body. Of course, my relationship to my body was radically different than before. My body parts seemed to belong to someone else or, rather, to something else. The vague sense of identity that I possessed was confined to the knowledge of my name, but even that felt arbitrary — a collection of random letters, crumbling. No words can accurately describe the feeling of losing your memory, your life. Sammy Harkham Underlying the loss of facts is a deeper problem: the loss of logic and causality. A person can function, ask questions, only when he recognizes a fundamental link between circumstances and time, past and present. The links between something happening to you, leading you to do or say something, which leads to someone else responding. No act is without an act leading up to it, no word is without a word that came before. Without the sense of causality provided by memory, there is chaos. When I woke up, I had no grip on logic, and logic none on me. It was a profound not-knowing, and it was terrifying. I started hyperventilating. What struck me has a name: Transient Global Amnesia. T.G.A., as it’s referred to, is a neurological disorder. The name sounds definitive, but in fact, it’s just a fancy way of saying: We don’t know the cause, we know only what the symptoms are. Its most defining symptom is a near total disruption of short-term memory. In many cases, there is a temporary loss of long-term memory as well. But there is a bright side. T.G.A. lasts for approximately two to 20 hours, so it’s a one-day thing. At the time, though, I didn’t know this. Two names popped into my mind: Daniel and Sophie. I didn’t know where the names came from, or to whom they belonged. I stumbled across the room, opened a door, and discovered that I was alone in the apartment. (It was, in fact, my apartment.) I found an iPhone and, quite magically, I thought, knew how to work it. As it turns out, there was nothing magical about this: A characteristic of T.G.A. is that those afflicted with it can perform familiar tasks, even ones as difficult as driving a car. (But I wouldn’t recommend that.) Occurrence of T.G.A. is rare, with at most 10 cases per 100,000 people. It is most likely to happen when you’re between 40 and 80; the average age of a T.G.A. patient is 62 years old. But I have always been in the fast lane. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19681 - Posted: 06.02.2014

By SANFORD E. DeVOE IN recent years we have seen plenty of studies of the impact of fast food on our bodies. But what about our psychological health? It stands to reason that fast food would have an effect on our mental state. From its production to its consumption, fast food both embodies and symbolizes speed and instant gratification. Moreover, through extensive franchising and large advertising budgets, fast-food companies shape many of the cues in our everyday environment. While the ubiquity of fast food is undoubtedly driven by consumer demand for instant gratification, it may also play a role in exacerbating that very impatience — and not just for food, but in many facets of our lives. In a series of recent papers, I joined two of my colleagues at the University of Toronto, Julian House and Chen-Bo Zhong, in examining this question. We began our experiments by prompting participants with reminders of fast food, like pictures of fast-food logos or having them recall recent experiences of eating fast food. We then gave them a number of tasks to complete. Across several studies, we found that thoughts of fast food spurred participants to hurry through reading a paragraph describing their city; express a greater desire for timesaving products; report less happiness from savoring a beautiful opera duet; and save less for tomorrow. These findings — that our associations with fast food can induce greater impatience — are interesting in their own right, but they are especially important because of the pervasiveness of fast food in our modern environment. We also took our investigation a step further, to consider whether the prevalence of fast-food restaurants in our neighborhoods might undercut our well-being. There is a lengthy epidemiology literature demonstrating a link between the number of fast-food restaurants and obesity. While the consequences of fast food for our health seem quite obvious, we wondered what these same methods might reveal regarding impatience. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19680 - Posted: 06.02.2014

Learning a second language can have a positive effect on the brain, even if it is taken up in adulthood, a University of Edinburgh study suggests. Researchers found that reading, verbal fluency and intelligence were improved in a study of 262 people tested either aged 11 or in their seventies. A previous study suggested that being bilingual could delay the onset of dementia by several years. The study is published in Annals of Neurology. The big question in this study was whether learning a new language improved cognitive functions or whether individuals with better cognitive abilities were more likely to become bilingual. Dr Thomas Bak, from the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said he believed he had found the answer. Using data from intelligence tests on 262 Edinburgh-born individuals at the age of 11, the study looked at how their cognitive abilities had changed when they were tested again in their seventies. The research was conducted between 2008 and 2010. All participants said they were able to communicate in at least one language other than English. Of that group, 195 learned the second language before the age of 18, and 65 learned it after that time. The findings indicate that those who spoke two or more languages had significantly better cognitive abilities compared to what would have been expected from their baseline test. The strongest effects were seen in general intelligence and reading. The effects were present in those who learned their second language early, as well as later in life. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Language; Alzheimers
Link ID: 19679 - Posted: 06.02.2014

Sarah C. P. Williams This, in all its molecular complexity, is what the bulging end of a single neuron looks like. A whopping 300,000 proteins come together to form the structure, which is less than a micrometer wide, hundreds of times smaller than a grain of sand. This particular synapse is from a rat brain. It’s where chemical signals called neurotransmitters are released into the space between neurons to pass messages from cell to cell. To create a 3D molecular model of the structure, researchers first isolated the synapses of rat neurons and turned to classic biochemistry to identify and quantify the molecules present at every stage of the neurotransmitter release cycle. Then, they used microscopy to pinpoint the location of each protein. Some proteins—like the red patches of SNAP25 visible in the video at 0:14—aid in the release of vesicles, tiny spheres full of neurotransmitters. Others—like the green, purple, and red rods at 0:45—help the synapse maintain its overall structure. Different proteins surround vesicles when they’re inside the synapse—the circles scattered throughout the structure at 0:56—than when the vesicles are forming at the edge of the synapse—as shown at 2:08. Researchers can use the model, described online today in Science, to better understand how neurons function and what goes wrong in brain disorders. (Video credit: Wilhelm et al. 2014, Science) © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19678 - Posted: 05.31.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Several observational studies have suggested that drinking diet soda may encourage weight gain, but a new randomized trial finds that it is not so. The study, published in the June issue of Obesity and paid for by the American Beverage Association, suggests that diet drinks may be better for weight loss than plain water. The study tested 303 men and women who followed the same diet for 12 weeks. But half were randomly assigned to drink at least 24 ounces of water daily, and the rest the same amount of artificially sweetened drinks. After controlling for age, sex, ethnicity and initial weight and blood pressure, researchers found that those who drank diet drinks lost an average of 14.2 pounds, compared with a 10-pound loss for the water drinkers. The mechanism, the authors write, is unclear, but the group on diet drinks reported slightly lower scores on a questionnaire measuring the degree of feelings of hunger. “There’s no magic in diet soda,” said the lead author, James O. Hill, a professor of health and wellness at the University of Colorado. But the less intense feelings of hunger among the drinkers, he said, may have made it easier for them to adhere to the diet. “From everything we know about diet soda,” he continued, “this result was totally expected. There’s not a single randomized controlled trial that shows the opposite.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19677 - Posted: 05.31.2014

by Laura Sanders Some people think marijuana is nature’s gift to humankind: a nonaddictive drug, safe at any dose, that opens the mind, lifts the spirit and transports the user to a more profound reality. “The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world,” a user named Mr. X wrote in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. Close to 30 years later, Mr. X was revealed to be the legendary science communicator and astronomer Carl Sagan. His message still reverberates with many Americans, whose support for legalizing marijuana has tripled since 1989 — from 16 percent to 54 percent today. In Colorado and Washington state, voters legalized recreational marijuana use in November 2012. That formal embrace of marijuana may signal a growing shift in acceptance. Today, 21 states and the District of Columbia sanction medical use (up from 16 in 2010) and 17 have curbed punishments for possession of small amounts of recreational cannabis. Marijuana as medicine is gaining support in studies, both to tamp down nausea and pain and to directly counter insidious diseases such as epilepsy, cancer and multiple sclerosis (SN: 6/19/10, p. 16). But what about for healthy people? Is marijuana really a safe way to rise above the tumult and distress of daily life? Michele Leonhart, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, says no. In congressional testimony in 2012, she portrayed marijuana as a dangerous addictive drug on par with methamphetamines or heroin. Like other drugs cordoned off by her agency to a list called Schedule I, she said, marijuana has no medical use and a high potential for abuse. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19676 - Posted: 05.31.2014

Elizabeth Norton It's a sad fact that children born in poverty start out at a disadvantage and continue to fall further behind kids who are more privileged as they grow up. In developing countries, chiefly in Africa and Asia, some 200 million children under age 5 won't reach the same milestones—for physical growth, school performance, and earnings later on—as children who are less deprived. But a new analysis of a long-term study in Jamaica shows that surprisingly simple ways of stimulating children’s mental development can have dramatic benefits later in life. The children were participants in the Jamaican Study, a project geared toward improving cognitive development begun in the mid-1980s by child health specialists Sally Grantham-McGregor of University College London and Susan Walker of the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Jamaica. They focused on children between the ages of 9 and 24 months whose growth was stunted, placing them in the bottom 5% of height for their age and sex (an easy-to-quantify gauge of extreme poverty). Children of normal height in the same neighborhoods were also studied for comparison. For 2 years, community health workers visited the families weekly. One group was given nutritional assistance only (a formula containing 66% of daily recommended calories, along with vitamins and minerals). One group received a mental and social stimulation program only, and one group got stimulation and nutritional assistance. A final group had no intervention and served as a control. The mental stimulation program involved giving parents simple picture books and handmade toys, and encouraging them to read and sing to their children and point out names of objects, shapes, and colors. They were also taught better ways to converse and respond to their toddlers. These everyday interactions aren't always part of the culture in low-income countries, explains Paul Gertler, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Parents might have five or six kids and few toys. They might be working really hard and have a lot of competing demands. They might not have been taught how to talk to their children, or how important and effective it is," he says. Past research attests to the importance of everyday conversation for children’s mental development: A recent study suggests that children of affluent parents do better in life in large part because their parents talk to them more. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19675 - Posted: 05.31.2014

Jyoti Madhusoodanan Most people handle stress well, but some find it difficult to cope and as a result develop depression and other mood disorders. Researchers have previously been able to identify the part of the brain that controls this response, but not exactly how it does so. Now, a study in mice identifies a small group of neurons that could be responsible. The research might also help elucidate the mechanism of deep brain stimulation, a therapy that uses electrical impulses to treat depression and other neurological disorders. How an animal deals with stress is controlled by a part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, and the neurons in this part of the brain are known to change in structure and function in response to stressful situations1. To look at the cellular basis of the responses, neuroscientist Bo Li of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues subjected mice to small electric shocks at random intervals to produce stress. Most of the mice tried to avoid the shocks, but just over one-fifth did not. They also started to avoid other animals or failed to choose tasty foods over plain ones — typical signs of depressive behaviour. The researchers then looked at the animals' brains and found that a specific set of neurons in the prefrontal cortex were easily excitable in depressed mice, but much harder to excite in those resilient to the stress. Furthermore, artificially increasing the activity of these neurons caused mice that were once resilient to become susceptible to depressive behaviours. “We were surprised that we were able to see a difference between depressed and resilient animals at the level of synaptic transmission,” says Li. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 19674 - Posted: 05.31.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The hormone estrogen is the recommended treatment for menopausal night sweats and hot flashes, but some women are unable or unwilling to use it. Now a clinical trial suggests that the antidepressant venlafaxine, often used as an alternative, is equally effective. In an eight-week placebo-controlled double-blind study, researchers randomly assigned 339 perimenopausal and postmenopausal women to one of three treatments: 0.5 milligrams a day of estrogen (in the form of estradiol), 75 milligrams a day of the antidepressant venlafaxine (a generic form of Effexor), or a placebo. Before the start of the study, all the women had had symptoms at least 14 times a week. Compared to the rate before the study — an average of 8.1 episodes a day — the frequency of hot flashes and night sweats declined by 52.9 percent in the estradiol group, 47.6 percent in the Effexor group, and 28.6 percent among those who took a placebo. Both Effexor and estradiol were effective treatments, but the study, published online in JAMA Internal Medicine, was not large enough to show that one was significantly better than the other. “Women have important choices of different medications to discuss with their doctors,” said the lead author, Dr. Hadine Joffe, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard. “They should know, as they think about these options, that both are effective.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 19673 - Posted: 05.31.2014

By Denali Tietjen If you watch porn, you probably have a small brain, a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) shows. The study, conducted by the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin, found a significant negative correlation between frequent pornography consumption and grey matter in the brain (that’s the stuff that tells your brain how to react to sensory information.) The keyword here is correlation. While the study’s findings are significant, the researchers don’t know if it’s the porn that causes the low grey-matter volume in porn-watchers, or if it’s the other way around. It could be a neurological pre-condition that makes watching porn particularly satisfying. However, researchers have reason to believe that porn does negatively impact the brain. Previous research proves that frequent porn consumption can cause negative social behavior. Porn consumption can cause viewers to be less satisfied during sex and viewers often want to adopt acts they’ve seen in illegal pornography, according to the report. If porn can affect social behavior, it can probably affect cognitive behavior, too. The study examined the cognitive structure of 64 males ages 21 to 45 years old that consumed porn at varying levels of frequency. While few people openly admit to watching porn, 66 percent of all men and 41 percent of American women view pornography at least once a month, and an estimated 50 percent of internet traffic is sex-related, according to the journal.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 19672 - Posted: 05.31.2014

By Matthew R. Francis Possibly no subject in science has inspired more nonsense than quantum mechanics. Sure, it’s a complicated field of study, with a few truly mysterious facets that are not settled to everyone’s satisfaction after nearly a century of work. At the same time, though, using quantum to mean “we just don’t know” is ridiculous—and simply wrong. Quantum mechanics is the basis for pretty much all our modern technology, from smartphones to fluorescent lights, digital cameras to fiber-optic communications. If I had to pick a runner-up in the nonsense sweepstakes, it would be human consciousness, another subject with a lot of mysterious aspects. We are made of ordinary matter yet are self-aware, capable of abstractly thinking about ourselves and of recognizing others (including nonhumans) as separate entities with their own needs. As a physicist, I’m fascinated by the notion that our consciousness can imagine realities other than our own: The universe is one way, but we are perfectly happy to think of how it might be otherwise. I hold degrees in physics and have spent a lot of time learning and teaching quantum mechanics. Nonphysicists seem to have the impression that quantum physics is really esoteric, with those who study it spending their time debating the nature of reality. In truth, most of a quantum mechanics class is lots and lots of math, in the service of using a particle’s quantum state—the bundle of physical properties such as position, energy, spin, and the like—to describe the outcomes of experiments. Sure, there’s some weird stuff and it’s fun to talk about, but quantum mechanics is aimed at being practical (ideally, at least). © 2014 The Slate Group LLC.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19671 - Posted: 05.31.2014

Carl Zimmer All animals do the same thing to the food they eat — they break it down to extract fuel and building blocks for growing new tissue. But the metabolism of one species may be profoundly different from another’s. A sloth will generate just enough energy to hang from a tree, for example, while some birds can convert their food into a flight from Alaska to New Zealand. For decades, scientists have wondered how our metabolism compares to that of other species. It’s been a hard question to tackle, because metabolism is complicated — something that anyone who’s stared at a textbook diagram knows all too well. As we break down our food, we produce thousands of small molecules, some of which we flush out of our bodies and some of which we depend on for our survival. An international team of researchers has now carried out a detailed comparison of metabolism in humans and other mammals. As they report in the journal PLOS Biology, both our brains and our muscles turn out to be unusual, metabolically speaking. And it’s possible that their odd metabolism was part of what made us uniquely human. When scientists first began to study metabolism, they could measure it only in simple ways. They might estimate how many calories an animal burned in a day, for example. If they were feeling particularly ambitious, they might try to estimate how many calories each organ in the animal’s body burned. Those tactics were enough to reveal some striking things about metabolism. Compared with other animals, we humans have ravenous brains. Twenty percent of the calories we take in each day are consumed by our neurons as they send signals to one another. Ten years ago, Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and his colleagues began to study human metabolism in a more detailed way. They started making a catalog of the many molecules produced as we break down food. “We wanted to get as much data as possible, just to see what happened,” said Dr. Khaitovich. To do so, the scientists obtained brain, muscle and kidney tissues from organ donors. They then extracted metabolic compounds like glucose from the samples and measured their concentrations. All told, they measured the levels of over 10,000 different molecules. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 19670 - Posted: 05.28.2014

Elizabeth Norton Cultures around the world have long assumed that women are hardwired to be mothers. But a new study suggests that caring for children awakens a parenting network in the brain—even turning on some of the same circuits in men as it does in women. The research implies that the neural underpinnings of the so-called maternal instinct aren't unique to women, or activated solely by hormones, but can be developed by anyone who chooses to be a parent. "This is the first study to look at the way dads' brains change with child care experience," says Kevin Pelphrey, a neuroscientist at Yale University who was not involved with the study. "What we thought of as a purely maternal circuit can also be turned on just by being a parent—which is neat, given the way our culture is changing with respect to shared responsibility and marriage equality." The findings come from an investigation of two types of households in Israel: traditional families consisting of a biological mother and father, in which the mother assumed most of the caregiving duties, though the fathers were very involved; and homosexual male couples, one of whom was the biological father, who'd had the child with the help of surrogate mothers. The two-father couples had taken the babies home shortly after birth and shared caregiving responsibilities equally. All participants in the study were first-time parents. Researchers led by Ruth Feldman, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, visited with the families in their homes, videotaping each parent with the child and then the parents and children alone. The team, which included collaborators at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, also took saliva samples from all parents before and after the videotaped sessions to measure oxytocin—a hormone that's released at times of intimacy and affection and is widely considered the "trust hormone.” Within a week of the home visit, the participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning to determine how their brains reacted to the videotapes of themselves with their infants. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 19669 - Posted: 05.28.2014

by Clare Wilson There is a new way to hack the brain. A technique that involves genetically engineering brain cells so that they fire in the presence of certain drugs has been used to treat an epilepsy-like condition in rats, and it could soon be trialled in humans. Chemogenetics builds on optogenetics, which involves engineering brain cells so they "fire" when lights are turned on. Selected neurons can then be activated with the flick of a switch. But this requires fibre optic cables to be implanted in the brain, which is impractical for treating human brain disorders. In chemogenetics, however, no cables are needed because neurons are altered to fire in the presence of a certain chemical rather than light. "It's got more potential in that you can give drugs to people more easily than you can get light into their brains," says Dimitri Kullmann of University College London. Stop the neurons Kullmann's team tested the approach by using a harmless virus to deliver a gene into the brains of rats. The gene encoded a protein that stops neurons from firing – but only in the presence of a chemical called clozapine N-oxide (CNO). Several weeks later, they injected the rats with chemicals that trigger brain seizures, to mimic epilepsy. If the rats were then given CNO, the severity of their seizures dropped within 10 minutes. This is the first time the technique has been used to treat a brain disorder, Kullmann says. "The system is neat," says Arnd Pralle of the University of Buffalo in New York state. But he points out that optogenetics allows faster control than this, because light can be turned on and off instantly. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 19668 - Posted: 05.28.2014

|By Bret Stetka Skepticism around fibromyalgia stemmed in part from an elusive organic explanation. Symptoms appeared to arise out of nowhere, which didn't make any sense to empirically minded physicians. “I, too, have been assigned months of futility, long and weary nights of misery. When I go to bed, I think,`When will it be morning?' But the night drags on, and I toss till dawn...Depression haunts my days. My weary nights are filled with pain as though something were relentlessly gnawing at my bones.” Job suffered badly. And his Old Testament woes are considered by many to be one of the earliest descriptions of fibromyalgia, a painful, puzzling disorder that still has experts bickering and patients frustrated, bereft of relief. The Bible isn't exactly a paragon of medical accuracy, but Job’s ailment does sound an awful lot like the modern interpretation of fibromyalgia. The classic diffuse pain, aches and discomfort aren’t the half of it; depression, fatigue, stiffness, sleep loss and generally just feeling really bad are common too. Fibromyalgia patients — 2 percent to 8 percent of the population — have also endured decades of dismissals that it's all in their head — a psychosomatic conjuring, a failure of constitution. Skepticism around fibromyalgia stemmed in part from an elusive organic explanation. Symptoms appeared to arise out of nowhere, which didn't make any sense to empirically minded physicians. But over the past two decades, research has brought clinicians closer to deciphering this mysterious pain state, once thought muscular in nature, now known to be neurologic. Based on this recent work a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association by chronic pain expert Dr. Daniel Clauw brings us up to speed on the understanding, diagnosis and management of fibromyalgia circa 2014. And the outlook for patients is rosier than you might expect given the condition’s perplexing reputation. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 19667 - Posted: 05.28.2014