by Tania Lombrozo St. Patrick's Day is my excuse to present you with the following illusion in green, courtesy of , a psychology professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. In this perceptual illusion, the two spirals appear to be different shades of green. In fact, they are the same. In this perceptual illusion, the two spirals appear to be different shades of green. In fact, they are the same. This image includes two spirals in different shades of green, one a yellowish light green and the other a darker turquoise green. Right? Wrong. At least, that's not what the pixel color values on your monitor will tell you, or what you'd find if you used a photometer to measure the distribution of lightwaves bouncing back from the green-looking regions of either spiral. In fact, the two spirals are the very same shade of green. If you don't believe me, here's a trick to make the illusion go away: replace the yellow and blue surrounding the green segments with a uniform background. Here I've replaced the blue with black: And here the yellow is gone, too: Tada! The very same green. The fact that the illusion disappears when the surrounding colors are replaced with a uniform background illustrates an important feature of color perception. Our experience of color for a given region of space isn't just a consequence of the wavelengths of light reaching our retinas from that region. Instead, the context matters a lot! ©2014 NPR

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 19375 - Posted: 03.18.2014

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature The whales are known for their tusks which can reach 2.6m (9ft) in length, earning them comparisons with mythological unicorns. The tusk is an exaggerated front tooth and scientists have discovered that it helps the animals sense changes in their environment. Dr Martin Nweeia from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, US, undertook the study alongside an international team of colleagues. Through the years, many theories have tried to explain the function of the narwhal's impressive tusk. "People have said it's everything from an ice pick to an acoustic probe, but this is the first time that someone has discovered sensory function and has the science to show it," said Dr Nweeia. More recently, experts have agreed that the tusk is a sexual characteristic because it is more often exhibited by males and they appear to use them during fights to assert their social hierarchy. But because the animals are rarely seen, the exact function of the tusk has remained a mystery. Previous studies have revealed that the animals have no enamel on their tusk - the external layer of the tooth that provides a barrier in most mammal teeth. Dr Nweeia and the team's analysis revealed that the outer cementum layer of the tusk is porous and the inner dentin layer has microscopic tubes that channel in towards the centre. In the middle of the tusk lies the pulp, where nerve endings which connect to the narwhal's brain are found. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19374 - Posted: 03.18.2014

By FLORENCE WILLIAMS So there’s this baby who has swallowed a .22-caliber bullet. The mother rushes into a drugstore, crying, “What shall I do?” “Give him a bottle of castor oil,” replies the druggist, “but don’t point him at anybody.” Whether you find this joke amusing depends on many more variables than you probably ever realized. It depends on a common cultural understanding of the technical properties of castor oil. It depends, as many funny jokes do and as any fourth grader can attest, on our own squeamishness about bodily functions. Getting less obvious, your sense of humor can also depend on your age, your gender, your I.Q., your political inclinations, how extroverted you are and the health of your dopamine reward circuit. If you think all this analysis sounds a bit, well, unfunny, E. B. White would back you up. He once wrote that picking apart jokes is like dissecting frogs: Few people are interested, and the subject always dies in the end. Fortunately, the cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems isn’t afraid of being unfunny. Humor is worthy of serious academic study, he argues in his book, “Ha! The Science of When We Laugh and Why,” (Read an excerpt.) because it yields insights into how our brains process a complex world and how that, in turn, makes us who we are. Though animals laugh, humans spend more time laughing than exhibiting any other emotion. But what gives some people a better sense of humor than others? Not surprisingly, extroverts tend to laugh more and produce more jokes; yet in tests measuring the ability to write cartoon captions, people who were more neurotic, assertive, manipulative and dogmatic were actually funnier. As the old saw holds, many of the best comics really are miserable. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19373 - Posted: 03.18.2014

by Colin Barras Amyloid plaques, a hallmark of diseases like Alzheimer's, are bad news for humans – but they could have been drivers of the earliest life on Earth. A new study shows that these amyloid clusters can behave as catalysts, backing a theory that they helped trigger the reactions that sustain life, long before modern enzymes appeared. Without enzymes, life's metabolic reactions simply wouldn't occur. But making enzymes from scratch isn't easy. They are normally large, complicated proteins folded into a specific three-dimensional shape. It's difficult to see how these large proteins could have popped out of the primordial soup fully formed. Even if they did, nature faced another problem. There are 20 naturally occurring amino acids, which are the building blocks for all proteins, and each enzyme is made up of a unique sequence of at least 100 amino acids. This means there is a mind-bogglingly vast number – 20100 – of possible enzymes, each with a different amino acid sequence and a slightly different 3D structure. But very few of these 3D structures will work effectively as enzymes because they have to be an exact fit for the substrate they react with – in the same way that a lock can only be opened by one particular key. Even with millions of years to work at the problem, says Ivan Korendovych at Syracuse University in New York, nature would have struggled to build and test all possible enzyme molecules to identify the relatively few that catalyse today's metabolic reactions. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19372 - Posted: 03.17.2014

By Gary Marcus and Christof Koch What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, wired directly into your brain's hippocampus, that gave you perfect recall of everything you read? Or for an implanted interface with the Internet that automatically translated a clearly articulated silent thought ("the French sun king") into an online search that digested the relevant Wikipedia page and projected a summary directly into your brain? Science fiction? Perhaps not for very much longer. Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago. They are not risk-free and make sense only for a narrowly defined set of patients—but they are a sign of things to come. Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns or implantable insulin pumps, neuroprosthetics—devices that restore or supplement the mind's capacities with electronics inserted directly into the nervous system—change how we perceive the world and move through it. For better or worse, these devices become part of who we are. Neuroprosthetics aren't new. They have been around commercially for three decades, in the form of the cochlear implants used in the ears (the outer reaches of the nervous system) of more than 300,000 hearing-impaired people around the world. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first retinal implant, made by the company Second Sight. ©2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 19371 - Posted: 03.17.2014

By Neuroskeptic A neuroscience paper published before Christmas drew my eye with the expansive title: “How Thoughts Give Rise to Action“ Subtitled “Conscious Motor Intention Increases the Excitability of Target-Specific Motor Circuits”, the article’s abstract was no less bold, concluding that: These results indicate that conscious intentions govern motor function… until today, it was unclear whether conscious motor intention exists prior to movement, or whether the brain constructs such an intention after movement initiation. The authors, Zschorlich and Köhling of the University of Rostock, Germany, are weighing into a long-standing debate in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, concerning the role of consciousness in controlling our actions. To simplify, one school of thought holds that (at least some of the time), our intentions or plans control our actions. Many people would say that this is what common sense teaches us as well. But there’s an alternative view, in which our consciously-experienced intentions are not causes of our actions but are actually products of them, being generated after the action has already begun. This view is certainly counterintuitive, and many find it disturbing as it seems to undermine ‘free will’. That’s the background. Zschorlich and Köhling say that they’ve demonstrated that conscious intentions do exist, prior to motor actions, and that these intentions are accompanied by particular changes in brain activity. They claim to have done this using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a way of causing a localized modulation of brain electrical activity.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19370 - Posted: 03.17.2014

By Christina Ianzito, We get it: Sleep is good for us. The National Sleep Foundation regularly campaigns “to celebrate the health benefits of sleep,” and experts have been boosting sleep’s values as no less important than proper diet and exercise. Insufficient sleep has been linked to stroke, obesity and heart disease. But sleeping too much may also be risky: It, too, is associated with a higher risk of heart disease and obesity, not to mention diabetes and depression. So, how much is too much? And if you’re sleep-deprived during the week, does sleeping 10 or 11 hours on Saturday and Sunday to catch up put you in any jeopardy? Most experts say that a healthy amount of sleep for an adult is a regular seven to nine hours a night. And the operative term here is “regular,” meaning the issue isn’t the college kid who power-sleeps 15 hours on vacation to catch up from too much studying (or partying). When scientists refer to “long sleepers,” they’re referring to people who consistently sleep nine or more hours a night, says Kristen Knutson, a biomedical anthropologist who focuses on sleep research at the University of Chicago’s Department of Medicine. “If you’ve been pulling all-nighters, by all means extend your sleep on the weekend if you can; try to catch up,” Knutson says, “but if you’re sleeping nine or 10 hours night after night after night for months on end . . . then we’ve got to understand why are you sleeping so much.” You might be getting poor-quality sleep, she adds, or are “already on the pathway to illness and your body is reacting by wanting you to sleep more.” © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19369 - Posted: 03.17.2014

Linda Carroll TODAY contributor The stimulants used to treat ADHD might be making kids fat, a new study suggests. A study of more than 160,000 youngsters found that kids with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder who received stimulants were at increased risk of becoming obese as they hit their teens. In contrast, kids with ADHD who took non-stimulant medications or got no therapy were very comparable, in terms of weight gain, to kids who didn’t have the disorder. “Our data suggest that stimulant use during childhood might have lifelong effects,” said Dr. Brian Schwartz, the study’s lead author and a professor of environmental health sciences, epidemiology, and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior investigator at the Geisinger Center for Health Research. “They might reset all sorts of physical properties and appetite parameters.” The new research may have uncovered a growing public health issue, Schwartz said. “Our data would seem to offer a lot of cause for concern with respect to prescribing stimulants,” he explained. Schwartz and his colleagues started the study because they were perplexed by the apparent paradox of hyperactive kids being prone to obesity. They scrutinized 12 years-worth of medical information from 163,820 Pennsylvania children, 13,427 of whom received an ADHD diagnosis.

Keyword: ADHD; Obesity
Link ID: 19368 - Posted: 03.17.2014

Sara Reardon Thomas Insel, the director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), has had enough of shooting in the dark. He thinks that if a clinical trial of a psychiatric therapy fails, scientists should at least learn something about the brain along the way. Now Insel is translating that belief into action: the NIMH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has decided to stop funding clinical trials that aim merely to ease patients’ symptoms. “Future trials will follow an experimental medicine approach in which interventions serve not only as potential treatments, but as probes to generate information about the mechanisms underlying a disorder”, he wrote in a 27 February blog post announcing the move. This funding switch, which will affect grants due to be made in a few months’ time, intensifies the NIMH’s apparent shift in emphasis from abstract psychiatry to the neurobiological roots of disease. “It’s a totally new departure for us,” says Bruce Cuthbert, a clinical psychologist and director of the institute’s adult translational-research division. Insel notes that the NIMH spent about US$100 million on clinical trials in 2013, and says that more than half of recipient projects received funding without any requirement to examine the biological processes involved in a disease. In many cases, “if you get a negative result you have no idea why, and you have to try something else at random”, Cuthbert says. “It’s an incredible waste of money.” The new rules, which will apply to the grant cycle that begins in June, also seek to increase transparency by requiring faster online registration of trials and stricter guidelines for reporting results. Insel acknowledges that researchers may have to rework their studies to satisfy the new guidelines. “I think this will be really unpopular,” he says. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 19367 - Posted: 03.15.2014

By JAN HOFFMAN COLUMBIA, Mo. – Jilly Dos Santos really did try to get to school on time. She set three successive alarms on her phone. Skipped breakfast. Hastily applied makeup while her fuming father drove. But last year she rarely made it into the frantic scrum at the doors of Rock Bridge High School here by the first bell, at 7:50 a.m. Then she heard that the school board was about to make the day start even earlier, at 7:20 a.m. “I thought, if that happens, I will die,” recalled Jilly, 17. “I will drop out of school!” That was when the sleep-deprived teenager turned into a sleep activist. She was determined to convince the board of a truth she knew in the core of her tired, lanky body: Teenagers are developmentally driven to be late to bed, late to rise. Could the board realign the first bell with that biological reality? The sputtering, nearly 20-year movement to start high schools later has recently gained momentum in communities like this one, as hundreds of schools in dozens of districts across the country have bowed to the accumulating research on the adolescent body clock. In just the last two years, high schools in Long Beach, Calif.; Stillwater, Okla.; Decatur, Ga.;, and Glens Falls, N.Y., have pushed back their first bells, joining early adopters in Connecticut, North Carolina, Kentucky and Minnesota. The Seattle school board will vote this month on whether to pursue the issue. The superintendent of Montgomery County, Md., supports the shift, and the school board for Fairfax County, Va., is working with consultants to develop options for starts after 8 a.m. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19366 - Posted: 03.15.2014

|By Meredith Knight Add another credential to oxytocin's impressive resume: the hormone crucial for bonding also reduces the calories people consume when they are snacking for pleasure, making it a possible therapeutic target for obesity. German researchers gave a group of men a dose of oxytocin thought to be roughly the amount released by the brain after breast-feeding or sex, according to lead author Manfred Hallschmid of the University of Tübingen. These men and another group who took a placebo then had a chance to eat as much as they wanted at a breakfast buffet, and later the same day they were offered snacks. Those who took oxytocin ate fewer snack calories, but the hormone did not change how much the men ate during the main meal, suggesting that oxytocin affected pleasure eating without suppressing normal appetite mechanisms. The researchers hypothesize that the hormone diminished reward-seeking behavior initiated in the ventral tegmental area of the brain, a region found to be highly sensitive to oxytocin in rodent studies. The effect may also be stress-related: subjects who took oxytocin saw a drop in their levels of the stress hormone cortisol, according to the paper published in 2013 in the journal Diabetes. More work is needed to understand whether oxytocin could be used to treat obesity, but until then the finding at least hints that it may be possible to curb your cravings by having more sex. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 19365 - Posted: 03.15.2014

By Pippa Stephens Health reporter, BBC News People are less likely to yawn when others do as they get older, a study has found. Contagious yawning is linked more closely to a person's age than their ability to empathise, as previously thought, US-based scientists said. It also showed a stronger link to age than tiredness or energy levels. Researchers are now looking at whether the ability to catch yawns from other people is inherited, with the hope of helping treat mental health disorders. Autism and schizophrenia sufferers are reportedly less able to catch yawns, researchers said, so understanding the genes that might code for contagious yawning could illuminate new pathways for treatment. In the study, published in the journal Plos One, 328 participants were shown a three-minute video showing other people yawning. Each subject had to click a button every time they yawned. Levels of tiredness Overall, 68% of the participants yawned. Of those, 82% of people aged under 25 yawned, compared with 60% of people aged between 25 and 49, and 41% of people aged over 50. Dr Elizabeth Cirulli, assistant professor of medicine at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, led the study. She said: "This is the first study to look at a whole bunch of factors. It is the largest study, in terms of the number of people involved, to date." Dr Cirulli said she did not know why contagious yawning decreased with age. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Emotions; Sleep
Link ID: 19364 - Posted: 03.15.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Angry enough to have a heart attack? It might actually happen. A new analysis has found that outbursts of anger can significantly increase the risk for irregular heart rhythms, angina, strokes and heart attacks. Researchers combined data from nine studies of anger outbursts among patients who had had heart attacks, strokes and related problems. Most of the studies used a widely accepted anger assessment scale; one depended on a questionnaire administered to patients. They found that in the two hours after an outburst of anger, the relative risk of angina and heart attack increased by nearly five times, while the risk of ischemic stroke and cardiac arrhythmia increased by more than three times. The findings appeared in The European Heart Journal. The researchers stressed that the actual likelihood of having an anger-induced heart attack remains small. Still, for people with other risks for heart disease, any increase in risk is potentially dangerous. The senior author, Dr. Murray A. Mittleman, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said that little is known about ways to prevent anger from causing heart problems. “Are there specific behavioral interventions that would be effective? Medicines?” he asked. “There have been proposals for both,” he added, “but we need more and better research.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19363 - Posted: 03.15.2014

Brian Owens Scientists studying what they thought was a ‘fat gene’ seem to have been looking in the wrong place, according to research published today in Nature1. It suggests instead that the real culprit is another gene that the suspected obesity gene interacts with. In 2007, several genome studies identified mutations in a gene called FTO that were strongly associated with an increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes in humans. Subsequent studies in mice showed a link between the gene and body mass. So researchers, including Marcelo Nóbrega, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, thought that they had found a promising candidate for a gene that helped cause obesity. The mutations were located in non-coding portions of FTO involved in regulating gene expression. But when Nóbrega looked closer, he found that something was amiss. These regulatory regions contained some elements that are specific for the lungs, one of the few tissues in which FTO is not expressed. “This made us pause,” he says. “Why are there regulatory elements that presumably regulate FTO in the tissue where it isn’t expressed?” This was not the first red flag. Previous attempts to find a link between the presence of the obesity-associated mutations and the expression levels of FTO had been a “miserable failure”, he says. When Nóbrega presented his new results at meetings, he adds that many people came to him to say ‘I just knew there was something wrong here’. So Nóbrega’s team cast the net wider, looking for genes in the broader neighbourhood of FTO whose expression matched that of the mutations, and found IRX3, a gene about half a million base pairs away. IRX3 encodes a transcription factor — a type of protein involved in regulating the expression of other genes — and is highly expressed in the brain, consistent with a role in regulating energy metabolism and eating behaviour. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19362 - Posted: 03.13.2014

by Bethany Brookshire Spring will be here soon. And with daffodils, crocuses and other signs of spring comes a burst of birdsong as males duke it out to get female attention. While the males trill loud songs, the females sit quietly, choosing who will be the lucky male. Vocal male and quiet female songbirds are common in temperate zones, and have given rise to a common assumption. The best male songs get picked for reproduction, and this sexual selection results in complex song; females just listen and choose, so female song should be rare. After all, females don’t need to sing to attract mates. But it turns out this commonly held assumption is not true. A new study shows that the majority of females of songbird species do sing, and it’s likely that the ancestor of modern songbirds was also a vocal diva. The results challenge the old wisdom about female songbirds, and suggest that when it comes to female song, it’s not all about sex. Karan Odom, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has always been interested in birdsong. “As I began to study it in depth,” she says, “I realized there was a lot that’s unknown, and one area was the extent to which females were singing and the role that song plays in males and females.” Odom and her colleagues did a survey of 44 songbird families, going through bird handbooks and other sources to find records of whether males, females or both were singers. In results published March 4 in Nature Communications, they showed that female melodies are not rare at all. In fact, 71 percent of the species surveyed have singing ladies. So much for that quiet, retiring female bird. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 19361 - Posted: 03.13.2014

by Simon Makin It brings new meaning to having an ear for music. Musical aptitude may be partly down to genes that determine the architecture of the inner ear. We perceive sound after vibrations in the inner ear are detected by "hair cells" and transmitted to the brain as electrical signals. There, the inferior colliculus integrates the signals with other sensory information before passing it on to other parts of the brain for processing. To identify gene variants associated with musical aptitude, Irma Järvelä at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and her colleagues analysed the genomes of 767 people assessed for their ability to detect small differences between the pitch and duration of a sound, and musical pattern. The team compared the combined test scores with the prevalence of common variations in the participants' DNA. Genetic variations most strongly associated with high scores were found near the GATA2 gene – involved in the development of the inner ear and the inferior colliculus. Another gene, PCDH15, plays a role in the hair cells' ability to convert sound into brain signals. Jan Schnupp, an auditory neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, cautions that these findings should not be taken as evidence that genes determine musical ability. He points to the case of the profoundly deaf girl featured in the film "Lost and Sound". She became a superb pianist despite only hearing the world through cochlea implants, after meningitis damaged her inner ear. "Her case clearly demonstrates that even severe biological disadvantages can often be overcome," he says. "She would do extremely poorly at the pitch discrimination task used in this study." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19360 - Posted: 03.13.2014

|By Allie Wilkinson Vivaldi versus the Beatles. Both great. But your brain may be processing the musical information differently for each. That’s according to research in the journal NeuroImage. [Vinoo Alluri et al, From Vivaldi to Beatles and back: Predicting lateralized brain responses to music] For the study, volunteers had their brains scanned by functional MRI as they listened to two musical medleys containing songs from different genres. The scans identified brain regions that became active during listening. One medley included four instrumental pieces and the other consisted of songs from the B side of Abbey Road. Computer algorithms were used to identify specific aspects of the music, which the researchers were able to match with specific, activated brain areas. The researchers found that vocal and instrumental music get treated differently. While both hemispheres of the brain deal with musical features, the presence of lyrics shifts the processing of musical features to the left auditory cortex. These results suggest that the brain’s hemispheres are specialized for different kinds of sound processing. A finding revealed but what you might call instrumental analysis. © 2014 Scientific American,

Keyword: Hearing; Emotions
Link ID: 19359 - Posted: 03.13.2014

Imagine you’re calling a stranger—a possible employer, or someone you’ve admired from a distance—on the telephone for the first time. You want to make a good impression, and you’ve rehearsed your opening lines. What you probably don’t realize is that the person you’re calling is going to size you up the moment you utter “hello.” Psychologists have discovered that the simple, two-syllable sound carries enough information for listeners to draw conclusions about the speaker’s personality, such as how trustworthy he or she is. The discovery may help improve computer-generated and voice-activated technologies, experts say. “They’ve confirmed that people do make snap judgments when they hear someone’s voice,” says Drew Rendall, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. “And the judgments are made on very slim evidence.” Psychologists have shown that we can determine a great deal about someone’s personality by listening to them. But these researchers looked at what others hear in someone’s voice when listening to a lengthy speech, says Phil McAleer, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom and the lead author of the new study. No one had looked at how short a sentence we need to hear before making an assessment, although other studies had shown that we make quick judgments about people’s personalities from a first glance at their faces. “You can pick up clues about how dominant and trustworthy someone is within the first few minutes of meeting a stranger, based on visual cues,” McAleer says. To find out if there is similar information in a person’s voice, he and his colleagues decided to test “one of the quickest and shortest of sociable words, ‘Hello.’ ” © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Emotions
Link ID: 19358 - Posted: 03.13.2014

A hormone released during childbirth and sex could be used as a treatment for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, scientists suggest. Small studies by UK and Korean scientists indicated patients were less likely to fixate on food and body image after a dose of oxytocin. About one in every 150 teenage girls in the UK are affected by the condition. The eating disorders charity Beat said the finding was a long way from becoming a useable treatment. Oxytocin is a hormone released naturally during bonding, including sex, childbirth and breastfeeding. It has already been suggested as a treatment for a range of psychiatric disorders, and has been shown to help lower social anxiety in people with autism. And one four-week study in Australia found people given doses of oxytocin had reduced weight and shape concerns. In the first of the most recent studies, published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 31 patients with anorexia and 33 people who did not have the condition were given either a dose of oxytocin, delivered via nasal spray, or a placebo, or dummy, treatment. They then looked at a series of images to do with a range high and low calorie foods and people of different body shapes and weight. People with anorexia have previously been found to focus for longer on images of overweight people and what they perceive as undesirable body shapes. However after taking oxytocin, patients with anorexia were less likely to focus on such "negative" images of food and fat body parts. The second study, published in PLOS ONE, involved the same people and looked at their reactions to facial expressions, such as anger, disgust or happiness. It has been suggested that anorexia can be linked to a heightened perception of threat, and animal research has shown oxytocin treatment lessened the amount of attention paid to threatening facial expressions. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 19357 - Posted: 03.13.2014

by Clare Wilson ARE people with obsessive compulsive disorder addicted to their repetitive behaviours? In a test designed to measure decision-making, individuals with OCD performed much like gambling addicts, suggesting their underlying brain problems may be similar. OCD makes people worry obsessively, compelling them to carry out rituals like repeated hand washing. It affects about one in 50 people and can take over their lives. Because sufferers get anxious if they can't complete their rituals, OCD is usually treated as an anxiety disorder with talking therapies to relieve distress or anti-anxiety drugs. These approaches reduce symptoms but only a minority of people are cured. In the new study, 80 people – half of whom had OCD – had to choose cards from four decks, winning or losing money in the process. Two decks were rigged to produce big wins but even bigger losses. The people without OCD learned to choose from the two safer decks but those with the disorder were consistently less likely to make good judgements and finished with a significantly lower final score. Drug and gambling addicts also perform poorly on the test. That doesn't prove OCD is an addiction but a growing body of work, including brain scans and other cognitive tests, suggest it should be recast in this way, says Naomi Fineberg of the University of Hertfordshire in Welwyn Garden City. Both addiction and OCD "share a lack of control of behaviour", she says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19356 - Posted: 03.13.2014