by Andy Coghlan Parts of the brain may still be alive after a person's brain activity is said to have flatlined. When someone is in a deep coma, their brain activity can go silent. An electroencephalogram measuring this activity may eventually show a flatline, usually taken as a sign of brain death. However, while monitoring a patient who had been placed in a deep coma to prevent seizures following a cardiac arrest, Bogdan Florea, a physician at the Regina Maria Medical Centre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, noticed a strange thing – some tiny intermittent bursts of activity were interrupting an otherwise flatline signal, each lasting a few seconds. He asked Florin Amzica of the University of Montreal in Canada and his colleagues to investigate what might be happening. To imitate what happened in the patient, Amzica's team put cats into a deep coma using a high dose of anaesthesia. While EEG recordings taken from the surface of the brain – the cortex – showed a flatline, recordings from deep-brain electrodes revealed tiny bursts of activity originating in the hippocampus, responsible for memory and learning, which spread within minutes to the cortex. "These ripples build up a synchrony that rises in a crescendo to reach a threshold where they can spread beyond the hippocampus and trigger activity in the cortex," says Amzica. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 18683 - Posted: 09.21.2013

By John Horgan Once again, antidepressants have been linked to an episode of horrific violence. The New York Times reports that Aaron Alexis, who allegedly shot 12 people to death at a Navy facility in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, received a prescription for the antidepressant trazodone in August. When I first researched antidepressants almost 20 years ago, I encountered claims that they sometimes triggered violent episodes—for example, a 1989 incident in which a Kentucky man taking fluoxetine (brand name Prozac) shot to death eight co-workers and then himself. I dismissed the claims, reasoning that, because people prescribed psychiatric drugs are disturbed to begin with, it is not surprising that a tiny fraction hurt themselves and/or others. By 2004, however, in part because of lawsuits that forced pharmaceutical companies to disclose data on adverse effects, the FDA ordered antidepressant manufacturers to include a warning that antidepressants “increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders.” Alexis, who was 34, was reportedly seeking treatment for insomnia when he received his prescription for trazodone. Originally marketed as an antidepressant after its approval by the FDA in 1981, trazodone is also prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Trazodone was a precursor of the extremely popular selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs); like the SSRIs, trazodone boosts levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression; Depression
Link ID: 18682 - Posted: 09.21.2013

By T. M. LUHRMANN STANFORD, Calif. — THE specter of violence caused by mental illness keeps raising its head. The Newtown, Conn., school killer may have suffered from the tormenting voices characteristic of schizophrenia; it’s possible that he killed his mother after she was spooked by his strange behavior and tried to institutionalize him. We now know that Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, heard voices; many observers assume that he, too, struggled with schizophrenia. To be clear: a vast majority of people with schizophrenia — a disease we popularly associate with violence — never commit violent acts. They are far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. But research shows us that the risk of violence from people with schizophrenia is real — significantly greater than it is in the broader population — and that the risk increases sharply when people have disturbing hallucinations and use street drugs. We also know that many people with schizophrenia hear voices only they can hear. Those voices feel real, spoken by an external, commanding authority. They are often mean and violent. An unsettling question is whether the violent commands from these voices reflect our culture as much as they result from the disease process of the illness. In the past few years I have been working with some colleagues at the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai, India, to compare the voice-hearing experience of people with schizophrenia in the United States and India. The two groups of patients have much in common. Neither particularly likes hearing voices. Both report hearing mean and sometimes violent commands. But in our sample of 20 comparable cases from each country, the voices heard by patients in Chennai are considerably less violent than those heard by patients in San Mateo, Calif. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 18681 - Posted: 09.21.2013

By William Saletan In much of this country, over the last three years, pro-lifers have banned abortions 20 weeks after fertilization. They’ve justified these bans by asserting—contrary to the most authoritative studies—that fetuses at this stage of development can feel pain. Their assertions, in turn, are based on research by several doctors. But the doctors don’t buy the pro-lifers’ conclusions. They say their research doesn’t support the bans. The 12 state bans (several of which have been blocked or limited by courts) begin with legislative “findings.” The findings parrot a 33-page report posted by the National Right to Life Committee and other pro-life organizations. The report cites the work of a number of researchers. Pam Belluck, an enterprising New York Times correspondent, contacted the researchers and asked them about the abortion bans. It turns out there’s a big gap between the science and the legislation. The pro-life report cites Dr. Nicholas Fisk, a former president of the International Fetal Medicine and Surgery Society, 27 times. According to the report, Fisk’s work shows fetal “stress responses” that imply sensitivity to pain. But Fisk tells Belluck that he doesn’t buy the inference from stress hormones and cerebral blood flow to pain. Neural studies, he says, have persuaded him that until 24 weeks gestation—the current abortion limit in many states—fetal pain “is not possible at all.” The report also cites Dr. Mark Rosen, a fetal anesthesia pioneer, 16 times. Rosen’s work, the report suggests, shows that painkillers and anesthesia are common during fetal surgery because unborn children can feel pain. But Rosen tells Belluck that the real purpose of such drugs during fetal surgery is to minimize dangerous movement and harmful stress hormones, thereby facilitating recovery. The drugs don’t signify medical belief in fetal pain. Dr. Scott Adzick, another fetal surgery expert cited in the pro-life report, makes the same point. © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18680 - Posted: 09.21.2013

By William Skaggs At the level of personal experience, there is nothing that seems easier to understand than pain. When I jam my finger in a doorway, I have no difficulty at all recognizing the sensation that results. But this superficial simplicity covers up a world of complexity at the level of brain mechanisms, and the complexities are even greater when we try to identify pain in other people or other species of animals. Some of the complexities are purely scientific, but others are caused by moral or philosophical issues getting mixed up with scientific issues. My provocation for writing this post was a blog post called Do Octopuses Feel Pain?, by Katherine Harmon, who writes the blog Octopus Chronicles, It’s basically a nice article—there’s nothing objectionable about it—but it pressed one of my buttons. She made a number of important points, and altogether what she wrote is well worth reading, but nevertheless the result left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction, as do most scientific discussions about pain in animals. I’d like to try to explain where that discomfort comes from. In her blog post, Harmon listed three elements that are involved in feeling pain: (1) nociception, that is, having mechanisms in the body that are capable of detecting damage and transmuting it into neural signals; (2) the experience of pain; (3) the ability to communicate pain information from sensation to perception. I’m not sure I understand the third aspect, but I take it to mean the ability to transform nociception into experience. In any case, the essence of pain as most people understand it is aspect 2. Most people think of pain as a particular type of experience—as something that happens inside our minds and can only be observed by ourselves. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18679 - Posted: 09.21.2013

JoNel Aleccia NBC News A neurosurgery patient treated at a New Hampshire hospital this spring did have a rare brain disorder known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, health officials confirmed Friday. That means that 15 other people in three states may have been exposed to the invariably deadly infection through potentially tainted surgical equipment. Autopsy results came back positive for CJD from the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center and were reported to the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and Catholic Medical Center, where the surgery took place. Earlier this month, New Hampshire officials notified eight patients who may have been exposed to CJD through shared equipment. Five others in Massachusetts and two in Connecticut were also warned of the risk, health officials in those states said. "Though we are not surprised by the test results, we are saddened by the toll this disease takes on families and our sympathies go out to all those affected," said Dr. Jose Montero, New Hampshire's director of public health, in a statement. The initial patient turned out to have sporadic CJD, which occurs spontaneously. It's not the variant form of the disease that causes a human type of "mad cow disease" and is associated with eating beef contaminated with the cattle version of the infection, called bovine spongiform encephalotpathy, or BSE, experts said. The problem arose because standard hospital disinfection techniques cannot eradicate the prion that causes CJD. A prion is a protein and the type that causes BSE and CJD is misfolded and somehow manages to transform other proteins into disease-causing shape.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 18678 - Posted: 09.21.2013

Billions of dollars have been spent on clinical trials of Alzheimer’s drugs that target amyloid plaques—the hallmark protein tangles that clog brain cells in people with the memory-robbing disease. So far, all have failed, leading some frustrated researchers to say it’s time to move on to other drug targets. Others say the drugs have not yet been fairly tested because they were administered too late, after brain damage is irreversible. Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it is giving $33 million to a study that researchers hope will either revive the amyloid hypothesis, or put it to bed. The new trial—estimated to cost at least $100 million overall, with most of the remaining funds provided by partners in the pharmaceutical industry—will be part of the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative, a large consortium of researchers attempting to identify biomarkers and treatments that can slow or stop the disease. Lead researchers Eric Reiman and Pierre Tariot of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix plan to give a yet-to-be identified anti-amyloid drug, or placebo, to 650 people who carry two copies of the APOE4 gene—a genetic double whammy that confers a 10-fold increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s late in life. All participants will be between the ages of 60 and 75 and healthy, including free of recognized Alzheimer’s symptoms. Roughly a third will likely not have much amyloid in their brains yet, allowing the researchers to track whether the drug affects its accumulation, Reiman says. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18677 - Posted: 09.21.2013

David Hilfiker knows what's coming. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's so early that he's had time to tell his family what he wants to happen once forgetfulness turns incapacitating. "When it's time to put me in an institution, don't have me at home and destroy your own life," said the retired physician, who is still well enough that he blogs about the insidious progress of the disease. "Watching the Lights Go Out," it's titled. Nearly half of all seniors who need some form of long-term care -— from help at home to full-time care in a facility — have dementia, the World Alzheimer Report said Thursday. It's a staggering problem as the global population ages, placing enormous strain on families who provide the bulk of that care at least early on, and on national economies alike. Indeed, cognitive impairment is the strongest predictor of who will move into a care facility within the next two years, 7.5 times more likely than people with cancer, heart disease or other chronic ailments of older adults, the report found. "It's astonishing," said Marc Wortmann, executive director of Alzheimer's Disease International, which commissioned the report and focused on the problems of caregiving. "What many countries try to do is keep people away from care homes because they say that's cheaper. Yes it's cheaper for the government or the health system, but it's not always the best solution." And dropping birth rates mean there are fewer children in families to take care of aging parents, too, said Michael Hodin of the Global Coalition on Aging. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18676 - Posted: 09.21.2013

Eliot Barford A parasite that infects up to one-third of people around the world may have the ability to permanently alter a specific brain function in mice, according to a study published in PLoS ONE today1. Toxoplasma gondii is known to remove rodents’ innate fear of cats. The new research shows that even months after infection, when parasites are no longer detectable, the effect remains. This raises the possibility that the microbe causes a permanent structural change in the brain. The microbe is a single-celled pathogen that infects most types of mammal and bird, causing a disease called toxoplasmosis. But its effects on rodents are unique; most flee cat odour, but infected ones are mildly attracted to it. This is thought to be an evolutionary adaptation to help the parasite complete its life cycle: Toxoplasma can sexually reproduce only in the cat gut, and for it to get there, the pathogen's rodent host must be eaten. In humans, studies have linked Toxoplasma infection with behavioural changes and schizophrenia. One work found an increased risk of traffic accidents in people infected with the parasite2; another found changes in responses to cat odour3. People with schizophrenia are more likely than the general population to have been infected with Toxoplasma, and medications used to treat schizophrenia may work in part by inhibiting the pathogen's replication. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Emotions; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18675 - Posted: 09.19.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Five antidepressant drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. But they are sometimes ineffective, and guidelines suggest adding an antipsychotic drug to the regimen. Now scientists have found that adding cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., may be more effective than an antipsychotic. Researchers studied 100 people with O.C.D. who were taking antidepressants without sufficient improvement. They randomized 40 to the antipsychotic risperidone (brand name Risperdal), 20 to a placebo pill, and 40 to exposure and ritual prevention, a special form of C.B.T. delivered twice a week over eight weeks. All continued their antidepressants as well. The study was published online in JAMA Psychiatry, and several of the authors have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies. Using well-validated scales and questionnaires, the researchers found that 80 percent of the C.B.T. patients responded with reduced symptoms and improved functioning and quality of life. About 23 percent got better on risperidone, and 15 percent on the placebo. “It’s important to discontinue antipsychotics if there isn’t continued benefit after four weeks,” said the lead author, Dr. Helen Blair Simpson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia. “O.C.D. patients who still have symptoms should first be offered the addition of C.B.T., and some will achieve minimal symptoms. “There’s a hopeful message here,” she added. “There are good treatments.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 18674 - Posted: 09.19.2013

by Andy Coghlan The two major brain abnormalities that underlie Alzheimer's disease can now be viewed simultaneously in brain scans while people are still alive, providing new insight into how the disease develops and whether drugs are working. The breakthrough comes from the development of a harmless tracer chemical that is injected into the bloodstream and accumulates exclusively in "tau tangles" – one type of abnormality that occurs in the brains of people with Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia. Fluorescent light emitted from the chemical is picked up using positron emission tomography (PET), showing exactly where the tangles are. The tracer remains in the brain for a few hours before being broken down and expelled from the body. Similar tracers already exist for beta amyloid plaques, the other major anatomical feature of Alzheimer's, so the one for tau tangles completes the picture. "This is a big step forward," says John Hardy, an Alzheimer's researcher at University College London. "This is of critical significance, as tau lesions are known to be more intimately associated with neuronal loss than plaques," says Makoto Higuchi of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, and head of the team who developed the new tracer. The tracer could help researchers unravel exactly how Alzheimer's develops, and enable earlier diagnosis and monitoring of treatments. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18673 - Posted: 09.19.2013

By PAM BELLUCK In the most significant sign yet of a broad shift in the focus of Alzheimer’s research from treating to preventing the disease, the federal government announced on Wednesday its largest grant so far to test an Alzheimer’s drug on healthy people at greatest risk for the most common form of the disease. The $33.2 million grant, and several other prevention studies awarded federal money in the last year, follow years of unsuccessful trials of treatments on people who already have dementia. Those failures have led to the realization that these drugs appear to be ineffective by the time memory and thinking problems have taken hold. At the same time, scientific advances have allowed researchers to identify people at risk for Alzheimer’s long before symptoms emerge. With five million Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s and their ranks projected to surge as baby boomers age, federal health officials consider the disease such a priority that Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, scraped money together when forced budget cuts slashed the Obama administration’s promise of $100 million in additional funding for Alzheimer’s for 2013. Dr. Collins said he dipped into the budgets of the 27 N.I.H. agencies to supply $40 million awarded Wednesday for several Alzheimer’s research projects. Another $5 million was provided by the National Institute on Aging. “The worst thing we could do would be to just hunker down and hold off tackling very important problems,” Dr. Collins said, adding, “Obviously, this is high-risk research, but goodness, the stakes are so high that we felt we had to go forward even in the face of the most difficult budget environment that anyone can remember in the N.I.H.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18672 - Posted: 09.19.2013

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online The thousands of aromas humans can smell can be sorted into 10 basic categories, US scientists say. Prof Jason Castro, of Bates College, and Prof Chakra Chennubhotla, of the University of Pittsburgh, used a computerised technique to whittle down smells to their most basic essence. They told the PLoS One journal they had then tested 144 of these and found they could be grouped into 10 categories. The findings are contentious - some say there are thousands of permutations. Prof Castro said: "You have these 10 basic categories because they reflect important attributes about the world - danger, food and so on. "If you know these basic categories, then you can start to think about building smells. "We have not solved the problem of predicting a smell based on its chemical structure, but that's something we hope to do." He said it would be important to start testing the theory on more complex aromas, such as perfumes and everyday smells. In reality, any natural scent was likely to be a complex mix - a blend of the 10 different categories, he said. Prof Tim Jacob, a UK expert in smell science at Cardiff University, said: "In the 1950s a scientist called John Amoore proposed a theory which involved seven smell categories based upon molecular shape and size. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 18671 - Posted: 09.19.2013

By JEREMY W. PETERS and MICHAEL LUO WASHINGTON — Despite deep divisions that have kept Congress from passing new gun safety laws for almost two decades, there is one aspect of gun control on which many Democrats, Republicans and even the National Rifle Association agree: the need to give mental health providers better resources to treat dangerous people and prevent them from buying weapons. Yet efforts to improve the country’s fraying mental health system to help prevent mass shootings have stalled on Capitol Hill, tied up in the broader fight over expanded background checks and limits on weapons sales. Now the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard by a man who authorities say showed telltale signs of psychosis is spurring a push to move ahead with bipartisan mental health policy changes. The new debate over gun control is beginning to turn not on weapons or ammunition, but on the question of whether to spend more money on treating and preventing mental illness. Proponents again face a steep uphill push, but they see an opening even if it remains unclear whether any changes under consideration could have headed off the latest attack, in which the authorities say Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist, bought the shotgun he used in Virginia. “Given the clear connection between recent mass shootings and mental illness, the Senate should not delay bipartisan legislation that would help address this issue,” Senators Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, and Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, wrote Wednesday in a joint statement to the Senate leadership. The legislation they are pushing, which was held up when a more sweeping gun measure was defeated earlier this year, would establish programs to train teachers to recognize the signs of mental illness and how to defuse potentially violent situations. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 18670 - Posted: 09.19.2013

By Stuart McMillen A classic experiment into drug addiction science. Would rats choose to take drugs if given a stimulating environment and social company?

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18669 - Posted: 09.19.2013

Posted by Gary Marcus On Monday, the National Institutes of Health released a fifty-eight-page report on the future of neuroscience—the first substantive step in developing President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, which seeks to “revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.” Assembled by an advisory panel of fifteen scientists led by Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, and William Newsome, of Stanford, the report assesses the state of neuroscience and offers a vision for the field’s future. The core challenge, as the report puts it, is simply that “brains—even small ones—are dauntingly complex”: Information flows in parallel through many different circuits at once; different components of a single functional circuit may be distributed across many brain structures and be spatially intermixed with the components of other circuits; feedback signals from higher levels constantly modulate the activity within any given circuit; and neuromodulatory chemicals can rapidly alter the effective wiring of any circuit. To tackle the brain’s immense complexity, the report outlines nine goals for the initiative. No effort to study the brain is likely to succeed without devoting serious attention to all nine, which range from creating structural maps of its static, physical connections to developing new ways of recording continuous, dynamic activity as it perceives the world and directs action. A less flashy, equally critical goal is to create a “census” of the brain’s basic cell types, which neuroscientists haven’t yet established. (The committee also devotes attention to ethical questions that could arise, such as what should happen if neural enhancement—the use of engineering to alter the brain—becomes a realistic possibility.) © 2013 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18668 - Posted: 09.18.2013

By Felicity Muth In most animals, females are generally the ones that choose the males. This is a massive generalisation (for example, it doesn’t apply in this case), but I hope people who work on this topic will forgive me for it. Generally speaking, it’s the females that get to size up the males, check out whatever trait it is that’s attractive to them (be it weight, head feather colour, ability to sing, or muscle size) and then choose who they want to mate with. However, how animals (even insects) behave when choosing mates is by no means governed by fixed rules, and is influenced by many different things. I’ve previously written about fish that will change how they court females depending on who’s watching and male crickets that will change their victory displays after fighting with another male depending on their audience. Similarly, what a female chooses in a male mate isn’t totally free from influences outside the quality of the male in question. In some species, such as the field cricket, wolf spider and cowbirds, females with more experience choose differently to naïve females. But what other things might affect what females choose? Pretty much all animals come into contact and may be infected by parasites at some point in their life. Amazingly, parasites seem to affect the mating behaviour of animals in some unusual and unexpected ways. Some parasites castrate their hosts, or change who the host wants to mate with. Others can even cause sex-role reversals, such as in the bush cricket. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 18667 - Posted: 09.18.2013

By JIM DWYER Here are law students on a Tuesday morning in 2013, hearing that researchers hope over the next decade or so to map the wiring of the human brain, seeing how individual cells link to bigger circuits. A decade is a sprint, less time than since 9/11, to use one benchmark. The scientists want to lift the hood and get a look at the human mind. The students, in a seminar at Fordham University School of Law taught by Prof. Deborah W. Denno, wonder what that will mean for the law. Over and over, they put questions to a guest speaker, Joshua R. Sanes, director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard, about the implications for society if and when brain science can identify with confidence a propensity for violence, or for lying. He bats it right back at them. “You tell me,” Dr. Sanes said. “It’s a huge issue. I wish I had something smart to say.” Last year, President Obama announced that the federal government would create a Brain Initiative to speed up the development of tools that can track how the brain works and how it breaks. It is not hard to imagine the benefits, beginning with more carefully targeted treatments for people afflicted with psychiatric ailments. “There has not been a brand new type of drug for antidepression or autism or schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or O.C.D. in something like 25 years,” Dr. Sanes said. “This is where we have to make a long-term investment and come up with some new types of help because what we are doing isn’t working.” Work on animals has shown in broad strokes how information gets into the head and processed, but current imaging tools cannot keep up with the brain’s processing speed, or are not powerful enough to follow the molecular transactions involved in passing information and creating thought. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 18666 - Posted: 09.18.2013

By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News Moving in time to a steady beat is closely linked to better language skills, a study suggests. People who performed better on rhythmic tests also showed enhanced neural responses to speech sounds. The researchers suggest that practising music could improve other skills, particularly speech. In the Journal of Neuroscience, the authors argue that rhythm is an integral part of language. "We know that moving to a steady beat is a fundamental skill not only for music performance but one that has been linked to language skills," said Nina Kraus, of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. More than 100 teenagers were asked to tap their fingers along to a beat. Their accuracy was measured by how closely their responses matched the timing of a metronome. Next, in order to understand the biological basis of rhythmic ability, the team also measured the brainwaves of their participants with electrodes, a technique called electroencephalography. This was to observe the electrical activity in the brain in response to sound. Using this biological approach, the researchers found that those who had better musical training also had enhanced neural responses to speech sounds. In poorer readers this response was diminished. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Language; Hearing
Link ID: 18665 - Posted: 09.18.2013

By Joshua K. Hartshorne There are two striking features of language that any scientific theory of this quintessentially human behavior must account for. The first is that we do not all speak the same language. This would be a shocking observation were not so commonplace. Communication systems and other animals tend to be universal, with any animal of the species able to communicate with any other. Likewise, many other fundamental human attributes show much less variation. Barring genetic or environmental mishap, we all have two eyes, one mouth, and four limbs. Around the world, we cry when we are sad, smile when we are happy, and laugh when something is funny, but the languages we use to describe this are different. The second striking feature of language is that when you consider the space of possible languages, most languages are clustered in a few tiny bands. That is, most languages are much, much more similar to one another than random variation would have predicted. Starting with pioneering work by Joseph Greenberg, scholars have cataloged over two thousand linguistic universals (facts true of all languages) and biases (facts true of most languages). For instance, in languages with fixed word order, the subject almost always comes before the object. If the verb describes a caused event, the entity that caused the event is the subject ("John broke the vase") not the object (for example, "The vase shbroke John" meaning "John broke the vase"). In languages like English where the verb agrees with one of its subjects or objects, it typically agrees with the subject (compare "the child eats the carrots" with "the children eat the carrots") and not with its object (this would look like "the child eats the carrot" vs. "the child eat the carrots"), though in some languages, like Hungarian, the ending of the verb changes to match both the subject and object. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 18664 - Posted: 09.18.2013