By Helen Briggs BBC News Our perception of how food tastes is influenced by cutlery, research suggests. Size, weight, shape and colour all have an effect on flavour, says a University of Oxford team. Cheese tastes saltier when eaten from a knife rather than a fork; while white spoons make yoghurt taste better, experiments show. The study in the journal Flavour suggests the brain makes judgements on food even before it goes in the mouth. More than 100 students took part in three experiments looking at the influence of weight, colour and shape of cutlery on taste. The researchers found that when the weight of the cutlery confirms to expectations, this had an impact on how the food tastes. For example, food tasted sweeter on the small spoons that are traditionally used to serve desserts. Colour contrast was also an important factor - white yoghurt eaten from a white spoon was rated sweeter than white yoghurt tasted on a black spoon. Similarly, when testers were offered cheese on a knife, spoon, fork or toothpick, they found that the cheese from a knife tasted saltiest. "How we experience food is a multisensory experience involving taste, feel of the food in our mouths, aroma, and the feasting of our eyes," said Prof Charles Spence and Dr Vanessa Harrar. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 18315 - Posted: 06.26.2013

The prevalence of traumatic brain injuries such as concussions among students points to a silent epidemic that demands a wake-up call from parents, coaches and other adults, Canadian neurosurgeons and psychologists say. One in five students in grades 7 to 12 said they’d had a traumatic brain injury that left them unconscious for at least five minutes or required a hospital stay overnight after symptoms, researchers said in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers from St. Michael's Hospital and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto surveyed 8,915 students across Ontario in 2011 as part of one of the longest ongoing school surveys in the world. "It needs to be a wake-up call to say, look, young people are sustaining brain injuries at a very high rate,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael’s Hospital. "If we want to protect future generations, because our brain really defines how we are … not just as an individual, we need to do something collectively as a society to address this problem." Of the 464 students reporting a traumatic brain injury in the past 12 months, sports injuries accounted for more than half of the cases, 56 per cent, particularly for boys. Concussions that didn't lead to loss of consciousness or a hospital stay weren't included. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18314 - Posted: 06.26.2013

Traci Watson When it comes to friendship it may be quantity, not quality, that matters — at least for Barbary macaques in a crisis. Scientists have long known that sociable humans live longer than their solitary peers, but is the same true for animals? A harsh natural experiment may offer some answers. It also raises intriguing questions about the type of social ties that matter. Endangered Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) in the mountains of Morocco are accustomed to cold, but the 2008–09 winter was devastatingly hard for them. Snow covered the ground for almost four months instead of the usual one, and the monkeys, which eat seeds and grasses on the ground, began to starve. Richard McFarland, a behavioural ecologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his colleagues were studying the animals as part of a wider project on the monkeys' social lives launched in January 2008. When they went looking for the macaques in January 2009, they found corpses, says McFarland. Of the 47 adults in two troops that the team studied, only 17 survived, making for a 64% mortality rate, McFarland and his colleague Bonaventura Majolo of the University of Lincoln, UK, report today in Biology Letters1. Analysis showed that the more friends a monkey had, the more likely it was to have survived. Individuals with whom a monkey had exchanged grooming or had had bodily contact with at least once during observation sessions were deemed as social contacts. Perhaps the animals with more buddies had more partners with whom to huddle against the cold, the researchers suggest. Monkeys with large social networks may also have been able to look for food with fewer interruptions from hostile group members. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 18313 - Posted: 06.26.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News The social brain theory - that animals in large social groups have bigger brains - has now been supported by a computer model. For animals in smaller social groups, the cost of having a large brain outweighs the benefits. Scientists used a simulation modelling technique to confirm that large social groups are only possible through sophisticated communication. The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The human brain is a very costly organ which consumes a lot of energy. Animals that live in small social groups could therefore be at a disadvantage if they had large brains taking up processing power that could better be used elsewhere. A team at Oxford University has now looked at the cognitive demands of making social decisions using a method called agent-based modelling, which models simplified representations of reality. As expected, they found that more complex social decisions take up more 'brain' power. The cognitive complexity of language evolved as social groups became larger and more complex, said lead author of the study Tamas David-Barrett from the University of Oxford. He explained that a group of five is an ideal number to coordinate an event such as a hunt, but as the group size increases, the coordination involved would become increasingly complex. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 18312 - Posted: 06.26.2013

by Mara Hvistendahl and Martin Enserink A mysterious group of viruses known for their circular genome has been detected in patients with severe disease on two continents. In papers published independently this week, researchers report the discovery of agents called cycloviruses in Vietnam and in Malawi. The studies suggest that the viruses—one of which also widely circulates in animals in Vietnam—could be involved in brain inflammation and paraplegia, but further studies are needed to confirm a causative link. The discovery in Vietnam grew out of a frustrating lack of information about the causes of some central nervous system (CNS) infections such as encephalitis and meningitis, which can be fatal or leave lasting damage. "There are a lot of severe cases in the hospitals here, and very often we can't come to a diagnosis," says H. Rogier van Doorn, a clinical virologist with the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Ho Chi Minh City. Extensive diagnostic tests turn up pathogens in only about half of patients with such infections, he says. Van Doorn and colleagues in Vietnam and at the University of Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center hoped that they might uncover new pathogens using a powerful new technique called next-generation sequencing. The group sequenced all the genetic material in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples taken from more than 100 patients with undiagnosed CNS infections. One sample batch returned a promising lead: a viral sequence belonging to the Circoviridae family. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 18311 - Posted: 06.25.2013

A randomized clinical trial of estrogen therapy in younger postmenopausal women, aged 50–55, has found no long-term risk or benefit to cognitive function. The National Institutes of Health-supported study, reported in JAMA Internal Medicine on June 24, 2013, looked at women taking conjugated equine estrogens, the most common type of postmenopausal hormone therapy in the United States. The earlier Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS) linked the same type of hormone therapy to cognitive decline and dementia in older postmenopausal women. The new findings come from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study of Younger Women (WHIMSY) trial and were reported by Mark A. Espeland, Ph.D., Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, N.C., on behalf of the academic research centers involved in the study. The study was funded primarily by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), along with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), both components of the NIH. “The WHIMS study found that estrogen-based postmenopausal hormone therapy produced deficits in cognitive function and increased risk for dementia when prescribed to women 65 and older,” said NIA Director Richard J. Hodes, M.D. “Researchers leading the WHIMSY study wanted to expand on those results by exploring the possibility of a window of opportunity whereby hormone therapy might promote or preserve brain health when given to younger women.” “In contrast to findings in older postmenopausal women, this study tells women that taking these types of estrogen-based hormone therapies for a relatively short period of time in their early postmenopausal years may not put them at increased risk for cognitive decline over the long term,” said Susan Resnick, Ph.D., chief of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience, in NIA’s Intramural Research Program and a co-author of the study. “Further, it is important to note that we did not find any cognitive benefit after long-term follow-up.”

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Alzheimers
Link ID: 18310 - Posted: 06.25.2013

The risk posed by some popular antidepressants in early pregnancy is not worth taking for women with mild to moderate depression, an expert has warned. Professor Stephen Pilling says evidence suggests SSRIs can double the risk of a child being born with a heart defect. The drugs have been used by up to one in six women of child-bearing age. A manufacturer contacted by the BBC denies any link to major foetal malformations. Panorama has spoken to eight mothers who had babies born with serious heart defects after taking a commonly used SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) antidepressant while pregnant. Currently, prescription guidelines for doctors only warn specifically against taking the SSRI, paroxetine, in early pregnancy. But Prof Pilling, expert adviser to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), says that advice is about to be updated. "The available evidence suggests that there is a risk associated with the SSRIs. We make a quite a lot of effort really to discourage women from smoking or drinking even small amounts of alcohol in pregnancy, and yet we're perhaps not yet saying the same about antidepressant medication, which is going to be carrying similar - if not greater - risks," he said. When Anna Wilson, from Ayrshire, had her 20-week scan, doctors realised her son had a serious heart problem and would need immediate heart surgery when he was born. David Wilson David will need further surgery before he starts school Now eight months old, David was hooked up to machines for the first five weeks of his life. He will need more open-heart surgery before he starts school and doctors say he may not live beyond 40. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 18309 - Posted: 06.25.2013

By DAVID DOBBS On average, about 700 Americans kill themselves each week — but in the fine-weather weeks of May and June, the toll rises closer to 800, sometimes higher. Every year, suicide peaks with the tulips and lilacs — increasing roughly 15 percent over the annual average to create one of psychiatry’s most consistent epidemiological patterns. It may seem perverse that the period of spring and early summer, as the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison puts it in her splendid book “Night Falls Fast,” should contain “a capacity for self-murder that winter less often has.” Yet it does. This grim spring growth confounds conventional belief that suicides peak in winter. It also confounds researchers — and fascinates them. As they discover more angles into the biology of mood and behavior, they are finding new clues about why suicides rise with the sun’s arc. They hope solving this puzzle will help us better understand why people commit suicide at all — and perhaps reduce the numbers year-round. This effort takes an extra urgency from what Dr. Adam Kaplin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, calls a “suicide epidemic” — a sharp increase in both absolute and per-capita rates since the recession that began in 2007, particularly among the middle-aged. More than 38,000 people committed suicide in the United States in 2010 — a 16.5 percent jump from the 32,600 suicides five years before, and a new high. The stakes involved in figuring out the dynamics of self-murder seem only to rise with time. The spring surge in suicides is actually the largest of a few oscillations throughout the year. After dropping to an annual low in February (October in the southern hemisphere), rates climb sharply through spring; fall slowly in summer; show a slight rise, according to some studies, in fall; and then begin a steep winter drop. The spring peak generally runs 10 to 25 percent above the yearly average and 20 to 50 percent above the February low. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18308 - Posted: 06.25.2013

By Judith Graham, A year ago, Bernard Belisle was in a bad way. Pain throbbed in his legs all day, every day, and he was angry and irritable much of the time. Then, he enrolled in a novel study on preventing depression in older adults at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Belisle says the move has changed his life. While this 73-year-old still has pain, he’s less oppressed by it after four months of therapy that taught him new ways to adapt to his osteoarthritis. “My pain is still there, but I can manage it better and I have a much more positive attitude,” says Belisle, whose emotional response to his chronic pain had put him at risk of becoming depressed. “If I feel I’m becoming upset these days, I stop and go on to something else,” he said. “I take more breaks, and I don’t take on more than I can handle.” The Pittsburgh investigation is the largest effort to explore whether helping older adults cope with their illnesses can forestall major depression, an underrecognized and undertreated mental health problem that often has a dramatic impact on seniors’ overall health. “It’s a vicious cycle: Pain can make people feel hopeless and helpless, which leads to depression, which can lead to [fitness] deconditioning, fatigue, worse sleep at night, which then amplifies pain and just perpetuates the cycle,” said Jordan Karp, who is heading up part of the study. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Depression
Link ID: 18307 - Posted: 06.25.2013

The paralyzing syndrome Guillain-Barré syndrome isn't linked to receiving common vaccines, according to a U.S. study. Concerns about the association of Guillain-Barré syndrome with vaccines have "flourished" since there was a hint of an increased risk after the 1976 swine flu vaccine campaign. It hasn’t been clearly linked since then. The syndrome is an acute inflammatory disease that results in destruction of a nerve’s myelin sheath and some nerves, which in severe cases can progress to complete paralysis and even death. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, Calif. looked back at cases of GBS over 13 years in the state that were confirmed by a neurologist who reviewed the medical records. In the 13-year study period 415 patients were confirmed with GBS only 25 had received a vaccine within six weeks before onset of the disease. "In summary, this study did not find any association between influenza vaccine or any other vaccine and development of GBS within six weeks following vaccination," Dr. Roger Baxter, co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center and his co-authors concluded in Monday's online issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18306 - Posted: 06.25.2013

By Ben Thomas Your neurons are outnumbered. Many of the cells in your brain – in your whole nervous system, in fact – are not neurons, but glia. These busy little cells shape and insulate neural connections, provide vital nutrients for your neurons, regulate many of the automatic processes that keep you alive, and even enable your brain to learn and form memories. The latest research is revealing that glia are far more active and mysterious than we’d ever suspected. But their journey into the spotlight hasn’t been an easy one. Unlike neurons, which earned their starring roles in neuroscience as soon as researchers demonstrated what they did, neuroglia didn’t get much respect until more than a century after their discovery. The man who first noted the existence of glia – a French physician named Rene Dutrochet – didn’t even bother to give them a name when he noticed them in 1824; he just described them as “globules” that adhered between nerve fibers. In 1856, when the German anatomist Rudolf Virchow examined these “globules” in more detail, he figured they must be some sort of neural adhesive, which he named neuroglia – “nerve glue” in Greek. As publicity campaigns go, it wasn’t the most promising start. Even worse, as other biologists investigated neuroglia over the next few decades, they started jumping to a variety of conclusions – not all of them accurate. For example, since glia appeared not to have axons – the long connective fibers that carry signals from one neuron to the next – most researchers assumed these cells must act as structural support; essentially serving as a stage on which neurons, the real stars of the show, could play their roles. Some even wondered if glia might not be nerve cells at all, but specially adapted skin cells instead. Though a few scientists did argue that glia also seemed to be crucial for neuron nutrition and healing, it was rare for anyone even to speculate that these cells might actually be involved in neural communication. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Glia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18305 - Posted: 06.25.2013

By Tina Hesman Saey Cells that sheathe the brain’s electrical wires in a protective coating called myelin have a brief career, a new study of zebrafish finds. Specialized brain cells known as oligodendrocytes wrap myelin around axons, long fibers that carry electrical messages between nerve cells. After only five hours, the cells bow out of the myelin production business, researchers from the University of Edinburgh report in the June 24 Developmental Cell. Myelination is crucial for brain function, and when it breaks down, so does communication among brain cells. The new results could influence treatment strategies for diseases such as multiple sclerosis, which damages myelin. Instead of coaxing existing cells to replenish myelin, doctors may need to stimulate new oligodendrocyte growth in patients’ nervous systems. In the new study, researchers made time-lapse movies of neural development in zebrafish by tagging electricity-generating neurons and myelin-making oligodendrocytes in the fishes’ spinal cords with different colors. A protein called Fyn kinase stimulates oligodendrocytes to produce more myelin sheaths for the first five hours of the cells’ existence, but the protein can’t persuade the cells to postpone retirement, the researchers discovered. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Glia; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 18304 - Posted: 06.25.2013

Helen Shen Wiping out drinking-associated memories could help those with alcohol problems to stay sober, suggests a study in rats. As with other forms of addiction, environmental cues linked to drinking — such as the smell of beer — can trigger the urge to consume alcohol and increase the risk of a relapse into abuse. Over time, these learned associations can be maddeningly difficult to break. Scientists have now identified a potential molecular target in the brains of rats that could one day lead to treatments to help people stay dry. Dorit Ron, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and her team show that strategically blocking the mTORC1 signalling pathway reduces alcoholic relapse by disrupting memories linked to past drinking. This pathway controls the production of several proteins associated with learning and memory. A memory is thought to become vulnerable when it is retrieved, like a folder checked out from a library archive1. Pages can be shuffled or lost before the folder is returned to long-term storage. A number of studies have suggested that disrupting the mTORC1 pathway during this time window can destabilize the process of memory restoration and can potentially help treat post-traumatic stress disorder as well as drug addiction. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18303 - Posted: 06.24.2013

Melissa Dahl TODAY The video will melt your heart: A deaf little boy is stunned when he hears his father’s voice for the first time after receiving an auditory brainstem implant. “Daddy loves you,” Len Clamp tells his 3-year-old son, Grayson, in a video that was recorded May 21 but is going viral today. (He signs the words, too, to be sure the boy would understand.) Grayson was born without cochlear nerves, the “bridge” that carries auditory information from the inner ear to the brain. He’s now the among the first children in the U.S. to receive an auditory brainstem implant in a surgery done at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C., led by UNC head and neck surgeon Dr. Craig Buchman. The device is already being used in adults, but is now being tested in children at UNC as part of an FDA-approved trial. It’s similar to a cochlear implant, but instead of sending electrical stimulation to the cochlea, the electrodes are placed on the brainstem itself. Brain surgery is required to implant the device. "Our hope is, because we're putting it into a young child, that their brain is plastic enough that they'll be able to take the information and run with it," Buchman told NBCNews.com.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 18302 - Posted: 06.24.2013

Zoe Cormier By trawling through data from 35 million users of online ‘brain-training’ tools, researchers have conducted a survey of what they say is the world’s largest data set of human cognitive performance. Their preliminary results show that drinking moderately correlates with better cognitive performance and that sleeping too little or too much has a negative association. The study, published this week in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience1, analysed user data from Lumosity, a collection of web-based games made by Lumos Labs, based in San Francisco, California. Researchers at Lumos conducted the study in collaboration with scientists at two US universities as part of the Human Cognition Project, which the authors describe as “a collaborative research effort to describe the human mind”. The authors examined results from more than 600 million completed tasks — which measured players’ speed, memory capacity and cognitive flexibility — to get a snapshot of how lifestyle factors can affect cognition and how learning ability changes with age. Users who enjoyed one or two alcoholic drinks a day tended to perform better on cognitive tasks than teetotallers and heavier drinkers, whose scores dropped as the number of daily drinks increased. The optimal sleep time was seven hours, with performance worsening for every hour of sleep lost or added. The study authors also looked at performance over time for users who returned to the same brain-training tasks at least 25 times. Performance decreased with age, but the ability to learn new tasks that relied on ‘crystallized knowledge’ (such as vocabulary) did not decline as quickly as it did for those that measured ‘fluid intelligence’ (such as the ability to memorize new sets of information). © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18301 - Posted: 06.24.2013

Did that prairie dog just call you fat? Quite possibly. On The Current Friday, biologist Con Slobodchikoff described how he learned to understand what prairie dogs are saying to one another and discovered how eloquent they can be. Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at North Arizona University, told Erica Johnson, guest host of The Current, that he started studying prairie dog language 30 years ago after scientists reported that other ground squirrels had different alarm calls to warn each other of flying predators such as hawks and eagles, versus predators on the ground, such as coyotes or badgers. Prairie dogs, he said, were ideal animals to study because they are social animals that live in small co-operative groups within a larger colony, or "town" and they never leave their colony or territory, where they have built an elaborate underground complex of tunnels and burrows. In order to figure out what the prairie dogs were saying, Slobodchikoff and his colleagues trapped them and painted them with fur dye to identify each one. Then they recorded the animals' calls in the presence of different predators. They found that the animals make distinctive calls that can distinguish between a wide variety of animals, including coyotes, domestic dogs and humans. The patterns are so distinct, Slobodchikoff said, that human visitors that he brings to a prairie dog colony can typically learn them within two hours. But then Slobodchikoff noticed that the animals made slightly different calls when different individuals of the same species went by. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18300 - Posted: 06.22.2013

By Caroline Parkinson Health editor, BBC News website Patients given a clot-busting drug within six hours of a stroke are more likely to have a good quality of life 18 months afterwards, an international study suggests. However, the review of more than 3,000 patients found the drug - alteplase - offered no improvement in survival rates. The drug is increasingly being used in specialist stroke units in the UK. The Stroke Association said the Lancet Neurology research was "encouraging". Quality of life The treatment is given to patients who have had an ischaemic stroke, when the brain's blood supply is interrupted by a clot. A stroke can cause permanent damage such as paralysis and speech problems, and can be fatal. Without treatment, a third of people who suffer a stroke die, with another third left permanently dependent and disabled. This international trial, led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, followed patients from 12 different countries - half had the alteplase treatment, which is given intravenously, and half did not. It was funded by the UK and Australian governments, the UK Stroke Association, the Medical Research Council and Health Foundation UK, with no funding from the pharmaceutical company that makes the drug. The researchers suggest that for every 1,000 patients given the drug within six hours of stroke, by 18 months, 36 more will be able to manage independently and will have less pain and discomfort than if they had not had it. However that is the average - and more of those given alteplase within the first hour or two after a stroke will see such benefits. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 18299 - Posted: 06.22.2013

by Anil Ananthaswamy Name: Sandra Condition: Ecstatic epilepsy "It's like when you have an orgasm. You don't get to the orgasm in one step. You go progressively. [My seizure] was the same kind of thing." Sandra thinks she had her earliest epileptic seizures when she was just 4 years old. But they were no ordinary seizures. Hers gave her an intense feeling of bliss. Blissful is not how most of us think of epilepsy. Fabienne Picard at the University Hospital Geneva, in Switzerland, says Sandra experienced a form of partial seizure – one localised to a specific region of the brain – known as an ecstatic seizure. These were immortalised in literature by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who also had them. Dostoevsky described his seizures in a letter to a friend: "I feel entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world, and this feeling is so strong and so delightful that for a few seconds of such bliss one would gladly give up 10 years of one's life, if not one's whole life." To explain how she felt during her seizures, Sandra makes an analogy with a highly pleasurable event. "It's like when you have an orgasm," she says. "You don't get to the orgasm in one step. You go progressively. [The seizure] was the same kind of thing." However, "it was not a sexual feeling", she says. "It was more psychological." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 18298 - Posted: 06.22.2013

Meghan Holohan NBC News Most of us can't actually be as attractive as professional good-looking people like Kate Upton. But new research shows that an electrical shock to the brain can make people perceive other people to be more attractive. The research may one day point toward new treatments for neurological disorders like depression or Parkinson's. Another workday with your drab, dull-looking coworkers. If only your world was filled with the beautiful people - more Kate Uptons than Katie from accounting, more Jon Hamms than John from HR. Actually, technology exists that could almost make that possible -- provided you're OK with an electric shock to your brain. But the brain zap isn't some party game. Findings from a new California Institute of Technology study could one day help lead to new, noninvasive ways to study and treat mental disorders. The Caltech researchers found that people who receive a mild electrical shock deep within the brain ranked people as more attractive than they did before the jolt. It might sound like a silly thing to study, but Vikram Chib, lead author of the paper, explains that rating the attractiveness of faces is one of the hallmark tasks used to diagnose neurological problems like depression, schizophrenia or Parkinson's. Chib, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, wanted to know how an area nestled deep with the brain called the midbrain influenced mood and behavior, and if there were a way to manipulate it noninvasively. The midbrain is believed to be the source of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and Parkinson’s disease. While drugs do treat these disorders, Chib and his colleague, Shinsuke Shimojo, hoped that noninvasive deep brain stimulation could change only the midbrain, without influencing the entire body.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18297 - Posted: 06.22.2013

Helen Shen An international group of neuroscientists has sliced, imaged and analysed the brain of a 65-year-old woman to create the most detailed map yet of a human brain in its entirety (see video at bottom). The atlas, called ‘BigBrain’, shows the organization of neurons with microscopic precision, which could help to clarify or even redefine the structure of brain regions obtained from decades-old anatomical studies. “The quality of those maps is analogous to what cartographers of the Earth offered as their best versions back in the seventeenth century,” says David Van Essen, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, who was not involved in the study. He says that the new and improved set of anatomical guideposts could allow researchers to merge different types of data — such as gene expression, neuroanatomy and neural activity — more precisely onto specific regions of the brain. The brain is comprised of a heterogeneous network of neurons of different sizes and with shapes that vary from triangular to round, packed more or less tightly in different areas. BigBrain reveals variations in neuronal distribution in the layers of the cerebral cortex and across brain regions — differences that are thought to relate to distinct functional units. The atlas was compiled from 7,400 brain slices, each thinner than a human hair. Imaging the sections by microscope took a combined 1,000 hours and generated 1 trillion bytes of data. Supercomputers in Canada and Germany churned away for years reconstructing a three-dimensional volume from the images, and correcting for tears and wrinkles in individual sheets of tissue. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18296 - Posted: 06.22.2013