by Laura Sanders Last Sunday, the Giants battled the Redskins in our living room, and there was no bigger fan than 9-month-old Baby V. Unlike her father, she was not interested in RG3’s shortcomings. The tiny, colorful guys running around on a bright green field, the psychedelic special effects and the bursts of noise drew her in like a moth to a 42-inch high-definition flame. My friends with kids have noticed the same screen fascination in their little ones. Like adults, kids love colorful, shiny, moving screens. The problem, of course, is that watching TV probably isn’t the best way for little kids to spend their time. Long bouts in front of the tube have been linked to obesity, weaker attention spans and aggression in kids. Now, a new study of Japanese children has linked TV time with changes in the growing brains, effects that have been harder to spot. And the more television a kid watches, the more profound the brain differences, scientists report November 20 in Cerebral Cortex. Researchers studied kids between age 5 and 18 who watched between zero and four hours of television a day. On average, the kids watched TV for about two hours a day. Brain scans revealed that the more television a kid watched, the larger certain parts of the brain were. Gray matter volume was higher in regions toward the front and side of the head in kids who watched a lot of TV. Say that again? Watching television boosts brain volume? Before you rejoice and fire up Season 1 of Breaking Bad, keep in mind: Bigger isn’t always better. In this case, higher brain volume in these kids was associated with a lower verbal IQ. Study coauthor Hikaru Takeuchi Tohoku University in Japan says that these brain areas need to be pruned during childhood to operate efficiently. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 18995 - Posted: 12.03.2013

by Bob Holmes Dying cells may play only a small role in the brain decline that accompanies ageing. That is the suggestion from the first computer simulation of brain function that can solve intelligence tests almost as well as university undergraduates. The model promises to reveal how our brains and behaviour are affected by age, and might even offer a way of testing drugs that compensate for cognitive decline. Psychologists have known for many years that our ability to think through novel problems – our "fluid intelligence" – gradually declines with age. However, the reasons for this decline aren't clear, because many features of the brain change as we age: neurons die; connections become sparser between regions of the brain and between individual brain cells; and our mental representation of different concepts becomes less distinct, among other changes. So far, psychologists have been unable to tease apart these possible explanations for cognitive decline. Enter Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and his student Daniel Rasmussen. The pair used a computer to simulate the behaviour of about 35,000 individual brain cells wired together in a biologically realistic way. Just like a real brain, their model encoded information as a pattern of electrical activity in particular sets of cells. The researchers set up the system to solve a widely used intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, which involves predicting what abstract symbol comes next in a sequence. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 18994 - Posted: 12.03.2013

This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York Supreme Court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week. They target two research chimps at Stony Brook University and two chimps on private property, and are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant “legal personhood” to a variety of animals across the United States. If NhRP is successful in New York, it could be a significant step toward upending millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a “chain reaction” that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a proponent of focusing on animal welfare rather than animal rights. “But if they lose it could be a significant step backward for the movement. They’re playing with fire.” The litigation has been in the works since 2007, when animal rights attorney Steven Wise founded NhRP, an association of about 60 lawyers, scientists, and policy experts. The group argues that cognitively advanced animals like chimpanzees and dolphins are so self-aware that keeping them in captivity—whether a zoo or research laboratory—is tantamount to slavery. “It’s a terrible torture we inflict on them, and it has to stop,” Wise says. “And all of human law says the way things stop is when courts and legislatures recognize that the being imprisoned is a legal person.” NhRP spent 5 years researching the best legal strategy—and best jurisdiction—for its first cases. The upshot: a total of three lawsuits to be filed in three New York trial courts this week on behalf of four resident chimpanzees. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18993 - Posted: 12.03.2013

To expedite research on brain disorders, the National Institutes of Health is shifting from a limited funding role to coordinating a Web-based resource for sharing post-mortem brain tissue. Under a NIH NeuroBioBank initiative, five brain banks will begin collaborating in a tissue sharing network for the neuroscience community. “Instead of having to seek out brain tissue needed for a study from scattered repositories, researchers will have one-stop access to the specimens they need,” explained Thomas Insel, M.D., director of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), one of three NIH institutes underwriting the project. “Such efficiency has become even more important with recent breakthrough technologies, such as CLARITY and resources such as BrainSpan that involve the use of human tissue.” Historically, NIH institutes have awarded investigator-initiated grants to support disease-specific brain bank activities. The NIH NeuroBioBank instead employs contracts, which affords the agency a more interactive role. Contracts totaling about $4.7 million for the 2013 fiscal year were awarded to brain banks at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City; Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., the University of Miami; Sepulveda Research Corporation, Los Angeles; and the University of Pittsburgh. These brain and tissue repositories seek out and accept brain donations, store the tissue, and distribute it to qualified researchers seeking to understand the causes of – and identify treatments and cures for – brain disorders, such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, depression, epilepsy, Down syndrome and autism.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18992 - Posted: 12.03.2013

By KRISTIN WARTMAN THE solution to one of America’s most vexing problems — our soaring rates of obesity and diet-related diseases — may have its roots in early childhood, and even in utero. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research organization in Philadelphia, have found that babies born to mothers who eat a diverse and varied diet while pregnant and breast-feeding are more open to a wide range of flavors. They’ve also found that babies who follow that diet after weaning carry those preferences into childhood and adulthood. Researchers believe that the taste preferences that develop at crucial periods in infancy have lasting effects for life. In fact, changing food preferences beyond toddlerhood appears to be extremely difficult. “What’s really interesting about children is, the preferences they form during the first years of life actually predict what they’ll eat later,” said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and researcher at the Monell Center. “Dietary patterns track from early to later childhood but once they are formed, once they get older, it’s really difficult to change — witness how hard it is to change the adult. You can, but it’s just harder. Where you start, is where you end up.” This may have profound implications for the future health of Americans. With some 70 percent of the United States population now overweight or obese and chronic diseases skyrocketing, many parents who are eating a diet high in processed, refined foods are feeding their babies as they feed themselves, and could be setting their children up for a lifetime of preferences for a narrow range of flavors. The Monell researchers have identified several sensitive periods for taste preference development. One is before three and a half months of age, which makes what the mother eats while pregnant and breast-feeding so important. “It’s our fundamental belief that during evolution, we as humans are exposed to flavors both in utero and via mother’s milk that are signals of things that will be in our diets as we grow up and learn about what flavors are acceptable based on those experiences,” said Gary Beauchamp, the director of the Monell Center. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18991 - Posted: 12.02.2013

Ewen Callaway Certain fears can be inherited through the generations, a provocative study of mice reports1. The authors suggest that a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in humans. But some researchers are sceptical of the findings because a biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has not been identified. According to convention, the genetic sequences contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information across generations. Random DNA mutations, when beneficial, enable organisms to adapt to changing conditions, but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations. Yet some studies have hinted that environmental factors can influence biology more rapidly through 'epigenetic' modifications, which alter the expression of genes, but not their actual nucleotide sequence. For instance, children who were conceived during a harsh wartime famine in the Netherlands in the 1940s are at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and other conditions — possibly because of epigenetic alterations to genes involved in these diseases2. Yet although epigenetic modifications are known to be important for processes such as development and the inactivation of one copy of the X-chromsome in females, their role in the inheritance of behaviour is still controversial. Kerry Ressler, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and a co-author of the latest study, became interested in epigenetic inheritance after working with poor people living in inner cities, where cycles of drug addiction, neuropsychiatric illness and other problems often seem to recur in parents and their children. “There are a lot of anecdotes to suggest that there’s intergenerational transfer of risk, and that it’s hard to break that cycle,” he says. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Epigenetics; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18990 - Posted: 12.02.2013

By PAUL BLOOM In 1780, Immanuel Kant wrote that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite.” And after that appetite is sated? The loved one, Kant explained, “is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.” Many contemporary feminists agree that sexual desire, particularly when elicited by pornographic images, can lead to “objectification.” The objectifier (typically a man) thinks of the target of his desire (typically a woman) as a mere thing, lacking autonomy, individuality and subjective experience. This idea has some laboratory support. Studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge those people as less intelligent, less ambitious, less competent and less likable. One neuroimaging experiment found that, for men, viewing pictures of sexualized women induced lowered activity in brain regions associated with thinking about other people’s minds. The objectification thesis also sits well with another idea that many psychologists, including myself, have defended, which is that we are all common-sense dualists. Even if you are a staunch science-minded atheist, in everyday life you still think of people as immaterial conscious beings — we inhabit fleshy bodies, but we are not ourselves physical. To see someone as a body is in opposition to thinking of her as a mind, then, and hence a heightened focus on someone’s body tends to strip away her personhood. But this analysis is too simple. It’s not literally true that women in pornography are thought of as inanimate and unfeeling objects; if they were, then they would just as effectively be depicted as unconscious or unresponsive, as opposed to (as is more often the case) aroused and compliant. Also, as the philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Leslie Green have pointed out, being treated as an object isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine that you are sitting outside on a sunny day, and you move behind someone so that she blocks the sun from your eyes. You have used her as an object, but it’s hard to see that you’ve done something wrong. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 18989 - Posted: 12.02.2013

Jo Marchant When Steve Cole was a postdoc, he had an unusual hobby: matching art buyers with artists that they might like. The task made looking at art, something he had always loved, even more enjoyable. “There was an extra layer of purpose. I loved the ability to help artists I thought were great to find an appreciative audience,” he says. At the time, it was nothing more than a quirky sideline. But his latest findings have caused Cole — now a professor at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California, Los Angeles — to wonder whether the exhilaration and sense of purpose that he felt during that period might have done more than help him to find homes for unloved pieces of art. It might have benefited his immune system too. At one time, most self-respecting molecular biologists would have scoffed at the idea. Today, evidence from many studies suggests that mental states such as stress can influence health. Still, it has proved difficult to explain how this happens at the molecular level — how subjective moods connect with the vastly complex physiology of the nervous and immune systems. The field that searches for these explanations, known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), is often criticized as lacking rigour. Cole's stated aim is to fix that, and his tool of choice is genome-wide transcriptional analysis: looking at broad patterns of gene expression in cells. “My job is to be a hard-core tracker,” he says. “How do these mental states get out into the rest of the body?” With his colleagues, Cole has published a string of studies suggesting that negative mental states such as stress and loneliness guide immune responses by driving broad programs of gene expression, shaping our ability to fight disease. If he is right, the way people see the world could affect everything from their risk of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease to the progression of conditions such as HIV and cancer. Now Cole has switched tack, moving from negative moods into the even more murky territory of happiness. It is a risky strategy; his work has already been criticized as wishful thinking and moralizing. But the pay-off is nothing less than finding a healthier way to live. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18988 - Posted: 11.30.2013

by Jessica Griggs HAVING type 2 diabetes may mean you are already on the path to Alzheimer's. This startling claim comes from a study linking the two diseases more intimately than ever before. There is some good news: the same research also offers a way to reverse memory problems associated with diabetes – albeit in rats – which may hint at a new treatment for Alzheimer's. "Perhaps you should use Alzheimer's drugs at the diabetes stage to prevent cognitive impairment in the first place," says Ewan McNay from the University at Albany in New York. Alzheimer's cost the US $130 billion in 2011 alone. One of the biggest risk factors is having type 2 diabetes. This kind of diabetes occurs when liver, muscle and fat cells stop responding efficiently to insulin, the hormone that tells them to absorb glucose from the blood. The illness is usually triggered by eating too many sugary and high-fat foods that cause insulin to spike, desensitising cells to its presence. As well as causing obesity, insulin resistance can also lead to cognitive problems such as memory loss and confusion. In 2005, a study by Susanne de la Monte's group at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, identified a reason why people with type 2 diabetes had a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. In this kind of dementia, the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory, seemed to be insensitive to insulin. Not only could your liver, muscle and fat cells be "diabetic" but so it seemed, could your brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Obesity
Link ID: 18987 - Posted: 11.30.2013

In the 1970s pop hit “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” famed rocker Meat Loaf wails to his tired old lover: “[I]f I gotta spend another minute with you I don't think that I can really survive.” Turns out that interactions with the opposite sex really do control life span, at least if you’re an insect or a worm. Sexually frustrated fruit flies perish prematurely, a study has just found. And another experiment reveals that in nematodes—nearly microscopic roundworms—males kill members of the opposite sex by spurring what resembles premature aging. An animal’s environment shapes its longevity, sometimes in surprising ways. For example, placing lab animals on a meager diet that replicates food scarcity in the wild extends survival in many species. And, oddly enough, dulling nematodes’ and flies’ sense of smell or taste stretches their life span. An animal’s environment also includes the other members of its species that it interacts with, such as potential mates and rivals. Researchers have identified some impacts of these interactions on life span. For example, because a male fruit fly’s seminal fluid contains toxins, mating can be fatal for females. Now, Scott Pletcher, a geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues have shown that sexually unsatisfied fruit flies give up the ghost faster that usual. The researchers played a dirty trick on some male fruit flies, housing them with other males that had been genetically altered to exude female pheromones, or scent molecules. Normal males woo these she-males but can’t mate with them. Pletcher and colleagues report online today in Science that the sexually thwarted males pined away. Their stored fat dwindled, their ability to endure stress declined, and their life span shrank by more than 10%. The researchers also measured a reduction in female flies’ longevity if they hobnobbed with macho females that released male pheromones. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18986 - Posted: 11.30.2013

Regina Nuzzo The gut may know better than the head whether a marriage will be smooth sailing or will hit the rocks after the honeymoon fades, according to research published today in Science1. Researchers have long known that new love can be blind, and that those in the midst of it can harbour positive illusions about their sweetheart and their future. Studies show that new couples rate their partner particularly generously, forgetting his or her bad qualities, and generally view their relationship as more likely to succeed than average2. But newlyweds are also under a lot of conscious pressure to be happy — or, at least, to think they are. Now a four-year study of 135 young couples has found that split-second, 'visceral' reactions about their partner are important, too. The results show that these automatic attitudes, which aren’t nearly as rosy as the more deliberate ones, can predict eventual changes in people’s marital happiness, perhaps even more so than the details that people consciously admit. The researchers, led by psychologist James McNulty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, tapped into these implicit attitudes by seeing how fast newlyweds could correctly classify positively and negatively themed words after being primed by a photo of their spouse for a fraction of a second. If seeing a blink-of-the-eye flash of a partner’s face conjures up immediate, positive gut-level associations, for example, the participant will be quicker to report that 'awesome' is a positive word and slower to report that 'awful' is a negative one. Researchers used the difference between these two reaction times as a measurement of a participant’s automatic reaction. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18985 - Posted: 11.30.2013

by Laura Sanders If you own a television, a computer or a smartphone, you may have seen ads for Lumosity, the brain-training regimen that promises to sharpen your wits and improve your life. Take the bait, and you’ll first create a profile that includes your age, how much sleep you get, the time of day you’re most productive and other minutiae about your life and habits. After this digital debriefing, you can settle in and start playing games designed to train simple cognitive skills like arithmetic, concentration and short-term recall. The 50 million people signed up for Lumosity presumably have done so because they want to improve their brains, and these games promise an easy, fun way to do that. The program also offers metrics, allowing users to chart their progress over weeks, months and years. Written in these personal digital ledgers are clues that might help people optimize their performance. With careful recordkeeping, for example, you might discover that you hit peak brainpower after precisely one-and-a-half cups of medium roast coffee at 10:34 a.m. on Tuesdays. But you’re not the only one who has access to this information. With each click, your performance data will fly by Internet into the eager hands of scientists at Lumos Labs, the San Francisco company that created Lumosity. Giant datasets like this one, created as a by-product of people paying money to learn about and improve themselves, will revolutionize research in human health and behavior, some scientists believe. Lumos Labs researchers hope that their brain-training data in particular could reveal deep truths about how the human mind works. They believe that they have a nimble, customizable and cheap way to discover things about the brain that would otherwise take huge amounts of money and many years to unearth with standard lab-based studies. Other researchers have also taken note, and some have gotten permission to use Lumosity data in their own research. Some of these researchers are hunting for subtle signatures of Alzheimer’s in the data. Others are investigating more fundamental mysteries with cross-cultural studies of how the brain builds emotions and how memory works. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sleep
Link ID: 18984 - Posted: 11.30.2013

By David Nutt Imagine being an astronomer in a world where the telescope was banned. This effectively happened in the 1600s when, for over 100 years, the Catholic Church prohibited access to knowledge of the heavens in a vain attempt to stop scientists proving that the earth was not the center of the universe. ‘Surely similar censorship could never happen today,’ I hear you say—but it does in relation to the use of drugs to study the brain. Scientists and doctors are banned from studying many hundreds of drugs because of outdated United Nations charters dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the banned drugs include cannabis, psychedelics and MDMA (now widely known as ecstasy). The most remarkable example is that of the psychedelic LSD, a drug accidentally discovered by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann while he was working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz to find new treatments for migraine. Once the ability of LSD to alter brain function became apparent, Hofmann and others realized it had enormous potential as a tool to explore and treat the brain. The immediate effects of LSD to alter brain states offered unique insight into states such as consciousness and psychosis; the long-lasting changes in self-awareness it brought on were seen as potentially useful for conditions such as addiction. Pharmaceutical company Sandoz saw LSD as so important that they chose to make it widely available to researchers in the 1950s. Researchers conducted over 1,000 studies at that time, most of which yielded significant results. However, once young Americans started using the drug recreationally—partly in protest against the Vietnam War—it was banned, both there and all over the world. Since then, research into the science behind the drug and its effects on the brain has come to a halt. Yet, we have begun to rectify the situation using the shorter-acting psychedelic psilocybin (also known as magic mushrooms). In just a couple of experiments, scientists have discovered remarkable and unexpected effects on the brain, leading them to start a clinical trial in depression. Other therapeutic targets for psychedelics are cluster headaches, OCD and addiction. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 18983 - Posted: 11.30.2013

At the Society for Neuroscience meeting earlier this month in San Diego, California, Science sat down with Geoffrey Ling, deputy director of the Defense Sciences Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to discuss the agency’s plans for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, a neuroscience research effort put forth by President Barack Obama earlier this year. So far, DARPA has released two calls for grant applications, with at least one more likely: The first, called SUBNETS (Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies), asks researchers to develop novel, wireless devices, such as deep brain stimulators, that can cure neurological disorders such as posttraumatic stress (PTS), major depression, and chronic pain. The second, RAM (Restoring Active Memory), calls for a separate wireless device that repairs brain damage and restores memory loss. Below is an extended version of a Q&A that appears in the 29 November issue of Science. Q: Why did DARPA get involved in the BRAIN project? G.L.: It’s really focused on our injured warfighters, but it has a use for civilians who have stress disorders and civilians who also have memory disorders from dementia and the like. But at the end of the day, it is still meeting [President Obama’s] directive. Of all the things he could have chosen—global warming, alternative fuels—he chose this, so in my mind the neuroscience community should be as excited as all get-up. Q: Why does SUBNETS focus on deep brain stimulation (DBS)? G.L.: We’ve opened the possibility of using DBS but we haven’t exclusively said that. We’re challenging people to go after neuropsychiatric disorders like PTS [and] depression. We’re challenging the community to come up with something in 5 years that’s clinically feasible. DBS is an area that has really been traditionally underfunded, so we thought what the heck, let’s give it a go—in this new BRAIN Initiative the whole idea is to go after the things that there aren’t 400 R01 grants for—and let’s be bold, and boy, if it works, fabulous. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 18982 - Posted: 11.30.2013

By Tanya Lewis 20 hours ago To understand the human brain, scientists must start small, and what better place than the mind of a worm? The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is one of biology's most widely studied organisms, and it's the first to have the complete wiring diagram, or connectome, of its nervous system mapped out. Knowing the structure of the animal's connectome will help explain its behavior, and could lead to insights about the brains of other organisms, scientists say. "You can't understand the brain without understanding the connectome," Scott Emmons, a molecular geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, said in a talk earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego. In 1963, South African biologist Sydney Brenner of the University of Cambridge decided to use C. elegans as a model organism for developmental biology. He chose the roundworm because it has a simple nervous system, it's easy to grow in a lab and its genetics are relatively straightforward. C. elegans was the first multicellular organism to have its genome sequenced, in 1998. Brenner knew that to understand how genes affect behavior, "you would have to know the structure of the nervous system," Emmons told LiveScience.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18981 - Posted: 11.30.2013

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. His Twitter handle is @brainyacts. Jorge Cham draws the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper at www.phdcomics.com. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18980 - Posted: 11.30.2013

by Bethany Brookshire Most people take it as a given that distraction is bad for — oh, hey, a squirrel! Where was I? … Right. Most people take it as a given that distraction is bad for memory. And most of the time, it is. But under certain conditions, the right kind of distraction might actually help you remember. Nathan Cashdollar of University College London and colleagues were looking at the effects of distraction on memory in memory-impaired patients. They were specifically looking at distractions that were totally off-topic from a particular task, and how those distractions affected memory performance. Their results were published November 27 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The researchers worked with a small group of people with severe epilepsy who had lesions in the hippocampus, and therefore had memory problems. They compared them to groups of people with epilepsy without lesions, young healthy people, and older healthy people that were matched to the epilepsy group. Each of the participants went through a memory task called “delayed match-to-sample.” For this task, participants are given a set of samples or pictures, usually things like nature scenes. Then there’s a delay, from one second at the beginning of the test on up to nearly a minute. Then participants are shown another nature scene. Is it one they have seen before? Yes or no? The task starts out simply, with only one nature scene to match, but soon becomes harder, with up to five pictures to remember, and a five-second delay. People with memory impairments did a lot worse when they had more items to remember (called high cognitive load), falling off very steeply in their performance. Normal controls did better, still remaining fairly accurate, but making mistakes once in a while. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18979 - Posted: 11.27.2013

By Emilie Reas Did you make it to work on time this morning? Go ahead and thank the traffic gods, but also take a moment to thank your brain. The brain’s impressively accurate internal clock allows us to detect the passage of time, a skill essential for many critical daily functions. Without the ability to track elapsed time, our morning shower could continue indefinitely. Without that nagging feeling to remind us we’ve been driving too long, we might easily miss our exit. But how does the brain generate this finely tuned mental clock? Neuroscientists believe that we have distinct neural systems for processing different types of time, for example, to maintain a circadian rhythm, to control the timing of fine body movements, and for conscious awareness of time passage. Until recently, most neuroscientists believed that this latter type of temporal processing – the kind that alerts you when you’ve lingered over breakfast for too long – is supported by a single brain system. However, emerging research indicates that the model of a single neural clock might be too simplistic. A new study, recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience by neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine, reveals that the brain may in fact have a second method for sensing elapsed time. What’s more, the authors propose that this second internal clock not only works in parallel with our primary neural clock, but may even compete with it. Past research suggested that a brain region called the striatum lies at the heart of our central inner clock, working with the brain’s surrounding cortex to integrate temporal information. For example, the striatum becomes active when people pay attention to how much time has passed, and individuals with Parkinson’s Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that disrupts input to the striatum, have trouble telling time. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18978 - Posted: 11.27.2013

By Neuroskeptic Claims that children with autism have abnormal brain white matter connections may just reflect the fact that they move about more during their MRI scans. So say a team of Harvard and MIT neuroscientists, including Nancy “Voodoo Correlations” Kanwisher, in a new paper: Spurious group differences due to head motion in a diffusion MRI study. Essentially, the authors show how head movement during a diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scan causes apparant differences in the integrity of white matter tracts, like these ones: In comparisons of two randomized groups of healthy children – in whom no white matter differences ought to appear – spurious effects were seen whenever one group moved more than the other: As for autism, the authors found that kids with autism moved more, on average, than controls, and that matching the two groups by motion reduced the magnitude of the group differences in white matter (though many remained significant). Technically, the motion-related differences manifested as increases in RD and reductions in FA; these were localized: The pathways that exhibited the most substantial motion-induced group differences in our data were the corpus callosum and the cingulum bundle. Perhaps this is related to their proximity to non-brain voxels (such as the ventricles) … deeper brain areas appear to be more affected than more superficial ones, thus distance from the head coils may also be a factor. The good news is that there’s a simple fix: entering the motion parameters, extracted from the DTI data itself, as a covariate in the analysis. The authors show that this is extremely effective. The bad news is that most researchers don’t do this.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Autism
Link ID: 18977 - Posted: 11.27.2013

Peter Hildebrand Neuroscience is a rapidly growing field, but one that is usually thought to be too complex and expensive for average Americans to participate in directly. Now, an explosion of cheap scientific devices and online tutorials are on the verge of changing that. This change could have exciting implications for our future understanding of the brain. From 1995 to 2005, the amount of money spent on neuroscience research doubled. A lot of that research used medical devices, like MRI and CT Scan machines, and drugs that everyday citizens don’t have access to. Even in colleges, experience with powerful research equipment is reserved for upperclassmen and graduate students. The lowlier castes can work with models or dissect animal brains, but as scientist and engineer Greg Gage points out in this TED video, the brain isn’t like the heart or the lungs. You can’t tell how it works just by looking at it. Gage is calling for “neuro-revolution,” in which scientists and inventors come together to put the tools for learning neuroscience into the hands of the public. He may be onto something too, because those tools are looking more accessible than ever before. One of the most well publicized examples of this punk rock revolution has been Gage’s own “SpikerBox,” which he co-developed with Tim Marzullo. Roughly the size of your fist, the SpikerBox is a small collection of electronic components bolted between two squares of orange plastic. Coming out of one end are two pins that you can use to record the electrical activity of nerve cells in, say, a recently severed cockroach leg. There’s also a port that allows you to attach the box to a smartphone or tablet, and watch the spikes of activity as the neurons are stimulated. © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18976 - Posted: 11.26.2013