By Gary Stix New types of drugs for schizophrenia, depression and other psychiatric disorders are few and far between—and a number of companies have scaled back or dropped development of this class of pharmaceuticals. One exception stands out. Ketamine, the anesthetic and illegal club drug, is now being repurposed as the first rapid-acting antidepressant drug and has been lauded as possibly the biggest advance in the treatment of depression in 50 years. A few trials by large pharma outfits are now underway on a new, purportedly improved and, of course, more profitable variant of ketamine, which in its current generic drug form does not make pharmaceutical marketing departments salivate. Some physicians have decided they simply can’t wait for the lengthy protocols of the drug approval process to be sorted out. They have read about experimental trials in which a low-dose, slow-infusion of ketamine seems to produce what no Prozac-like pill can achieve, lifting the black cloud in hours, not weeks. With nothing to offer desperate, sometimes suicidal patients, physicians have decided against waiting for an expensive, ketamine lookalike to arrive and have started writing scripts for the plain, vanilla generic version that has been used for decades as an anesthetic. Ketamine, it seems, has captivated a bunch of white coats with the same grassroots energy that has propelled the medical marijuana movement. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18640 - Posted: 09.12.2013

by Andy Coghlan Normal adult cells have been reprogrammed to become stem cells inside live mice for the first time. As stem cells can be coaxed into developing into almost any kind of cell, being able to prompt this behaviour in the body could one day be used to repair ailing organs including the heart, liver, spinal cord and pancreas. "By doing it in situ, the cells are already there in the tissue, in the right position," says Manuel Serrano at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, and co-leader of the new work. The technique overcomes the difficulties inherent in making cells outside the body, grafting them into people, and then of potential rejection. It opens up new clinical opportunities, say the researchers. Since 2006, when Nobel-prizewinning researcher Shinya Yamanaka first made adult cells return to a stem-cell-like state of being pluripotent – able to turn into almost any cell type – all such induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have been made in vitro. This is done by taking a sample of adult cells, such as skin cells, and treating them with four proteins that rewind the cells back to an embryonic-like state. Serrano genetically altered mice to give them extra copies of the four genes that produce these proteins: Oct, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc. The genes were programmed to kick into action when exposed to doxycycline, an antibiotic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stem Cells; Regeneration
Link ID: 18639 - Posted: 09.12.2013

Associated Press It's the ape equivalent of Google Maps and Facebook. The night before a big trip, Arno the orangutan plots his journey and lets others know where he is going with a long, whooping call. What he and his orangutan buddies do in the forests of Sumatra tells scientists that advance trip planning and social networking aren't just human traits. A new study of 15 wild male orangutans finds that they routinely plot out their next-day treks and share their plans in long calls, so females can come by or track them, and competitive males can steer clear. The researchers closely followed the males as they traveled on 320 days during the 1990s. The results were published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. Typically, an orangutan would turn and face in the direction of his route and let out a whoop, sometimes for as long as four minutes. Then he'd go to sleep and 12 hours later set on the heralded path, said study author Carel van Schaik, director of the Anthropological Institute at the University of Zurich. "This guy basically thinks ahead," van Schaik said. "They're continuously updating their Google Maps, so to speak. Based on that, they're planning what to do next." The apes didn't just call once - they kept at it, calling more than 1,100 times over the 320 days. © 2013 The Hearst Corporation

Keyword: Animal Migration; Animal Communication
Link ID: 18638 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By GINA KOLATA It is the scourge of many a middle-aged man: he starts getting a pot belly, using lighter weights at the gym and somehow just doesn’t have the sexual desire of his younger years. The obvious culprit is testosterone, since men gradually make less of the male sex hormone as years go by. But a surprising new answer is emerging, one that doctors say could reinvigorate the study of how men’s bodies age. Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s. The discovery of the role of estrogen in men is “a major advance,” said Dr. Peter J. Snyder, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who is leading a big new research project on hormone therapy for men 65 and over. Until recently, testosterone deficiency was considered nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife. The new frontier of research involves figuring out which hormone does what in men, and how body functions are affected at different hormone levels. While dwindling testosterone levels are to blame for middle-aged men’s smaller muscles, falling levels of estrogen regulate fat accumulation, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, which provided the most conclusive evidence to date that estrogen is a major factor in male midlife woes. And both hormones are needed for libido. “Some of the symptoms routinely attributed to testosterone deficiency are actually partially or almost exclusively caused by the decline in estrogens,” said Dr. Joel Finkelstein, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, in a news release on Wednesday. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18637 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By Melanie Tannenbaum I can remember exactly where I was twelve years ago when I learned why the sky was starting to fill with smoke about 30 miles to the west. Though I live in Illinois now, I’m originally from Long Island. In September 2001, I was just beginning the 9th grade at Friends Academy, my new high school in Locust Valley. I had just started getting to know the people who would become my closest friends over the next four years. I was on my way to Computer Programming when I ran into Molly, a girl on my bus. “Hey, did you hear?” Molly asked, somewhat casually. “No, what’s up? Oh, is Maggie taking the bus today?!” I asked excitedly. Maggie was Molly’s adorable baby sister, whose expeditions onto our bus were rare (but exciting) events. “No…apparently something really big just happened in the city. They’re canceling class right now and calling an all-school assembly in the Dolan Center. You didn’t hear?” “Oh, no, but thank God. I didn’t finish my math homework last night and I didn’t have time to do it on the bus, this is awesome,” I said with a smile. “Do you have any idea why they’re canceling class, though?!” I had no idea at the time how much I would cringe for the rest of my life whenever I looked back and thought about my first reaction to hearing that “something big” was going on in the city. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18636 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By Susan Milius Mice in the wild have no problem dining where someone else has pooped. Animals with higher standards of hygiene, reported in earlier studies, may not face the same dangers as small, hungry creatures scurrying around the woods. Feeding among feces of your own species raises the risk of catching nasty intestinal parasites, explains behavioral ecologist Patrick T. Walsh of University of Edinburgh. So far most tests of fecal avoidance have focused on hoofed animals. Horses, cows, sheep, reindeer and even wild antelopes tend not to graze in heavily poop-dotted areas. White-footed and deer mice, however, show no such daintiness of manners in a test in the woods, Walsh and his colleagues report in the September Animal Behaviour. Wild mice may have more immediate problems, like starvation or predators that domesticated--or just plain bigger--animals don’t. For the wild mice, Walsh says, fecal avoidance may be “a luxury.” Learning whether and when animals avoid poop helps clarify how parasites spread, an issue important for the health of both wildlife and people. So far no one has tested fecal avoidance for mice feeding in the lab, but research has shown that female lab mice tend to avoid the urine of parasite-infected males. To see whether mice in the wild dodge parasite risks, Amy Pedersen, a coauthor of the study also at Edinburgh, designed an experiment with a long plastic box divided into zones, some of which had mouse droppings in them. In the experiment, researchers tested more than 130 wild Peromyscus mice, of either the leucopus or maniculatus species, held captive for less than a day in the mountains of Virginia. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Evolution
Link ID: 18635 - Posted: 09.12.2013

By Ben Thomas As Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The history of science is littered with so-called “intractable” problems that researchers later cracked wide open using techniques their ancestors could hardly imagine. Biologists in the 1950s looked at the staggeringly complex (and beautiful) three-dimensional shapes into which proteins fold and declared that a reliably predictive mathematical model of these convolutions might be unachievable in our lifetimes. But over the past few years, folks with home computers have joined forces to crack many longstanding protein-folding problems using the online game FoldIt. Instead of relying on the number-crunching power of a single supercomputer or network, crowdsourced games like FoldIt translate vast and complex data sets into simple online interfaces that anyone can learn to operate. The crowdsourced astronomy game Galaxy Zoo also depends on an army of “citizen scientists” for classification of stars hundreds of light years away; while Google built its image search technology on an image-labeling game. In fact, every time you “verify your humanity” on a web form by typing out nonsensical reCAPTCHA text, you’re actually helping Google transcribe books from the world’s libraries into a digital format. And now, a worldwide team of neuroscience researchers have begun using this crowdsource approach to crack open one of the greatest problems in any scientific field: The construction of a complete wiring diagram for a mammalian brain. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18634 - Posted: 09.12.2013

Amanda Fiegl What's the difference between a spicy meal and being tickled? Not much, from your lips' perspective. A new study reports that Szechuan pepper activates the same nerves that respond to a light physical touch. Researchers at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience found that people experienced the same sensation when either Szechuan pepper—a spice used in many types of Asian cuisine—or a machine vibrating at a particular frequency was placed on their lips. "The pepper is sending the same information to the brain as having a buzzer on your lips," the study's lead author, Nobuhiro Hagura, said in an email. The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B with the wry headline "Food Vibrations," delves into the little-known field of psychophysics, which "describes the relation between physical reality and what we actually perceive," Hagura said. "Our research shows just one interesting example of a case where we perceive something quite different than what is actually there," he said. "In many cases, the difference between perception and reality can be explained by understanding how the nervous system transmits information about the outside world to the brain." Previous studies have shown that other spicy ingredients, such as chili peppers and mustard oils, activate the nerve fibers associated with pain and physical heat. And studies in animals indicated that the spicy chemical in Szechuan pepper—sanshool—acts on the nervous system's "light touch" fibers. So Hagura and his colleagues wanted to find out whether sanshool produces a conscious sensation of touch in humans. © 1996-2013 National Geographic Society.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 18633 - Posted: 09.11.2013

By Michele Solis Like truth and beauty, pain is subjective and hard to pin down. What hurts one moment might not register the next, and our moods and thoughts color the experience of pain. According to a report in April in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, researchers may one day be able to measure the experience of pain by scanning the brain—a much needed improvement over the subjective ratings of between one and 10 that patients are currently asked to give. Led by neuroscientist Tor Wager of the University of Colorado at Boulder, researchers used functional MRI on healthy participants who were given heated touches to their arm, some pleasantly warm, others painfully hot. During the painful touches, a scattered group of brain regions consistently turned on. Although these regions have been previously associated with pain, the new study detected a striking and consistent jump in their activity when people reported pain, with much greater accuracy than previous studies had attained. This neural signature appeared in 93 percent of subjects reporting to feel painful heat, ramping up as pain intensity increased and receding after participants took a painkiller. The researchers determined that the brain activity specifically marked physical pain rather than a generally unpleasant experience, because it did not emerge in people shown a picture of a lover who had recently dumped them. Although physical pain and emotional pain involve some of the same regions, the study showed that fine-grained differences in activation separate the two conditions. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18632 - Posted: 09.11.2013

Bird species with larger than average brains have lower levels of a key stress hormone, an analysis of nearly 200 avian studies has concluded. Such birds keep their stress down by anticipating or learning to avoid problems more effectively than smaller-brained counterparts, researchers suggest. Birds in the wild lead a stressful life. Constantly spotting predators lurking in the trees or sensing dramatic changes in temperature is essential for survival, but can leave birds on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Reading these cues triggers changes in the birds’ metabolism, particularly increases in the stress hormone corticosterone. A sharp release of the hormone within 1 to 2 minutes after a cue triggers an emergency response and prepares birds to react quickly to the threat. However, regular exposure to the dangers of the wild and, hence, to high levels of this hormone, has serious health consequences and shortens life expectancy. Not all birds respond to stress in the same way, however, notes Daniel Sol an ornithologist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain. He and colleagues have for years looked at the differences between big-brained birds, such as crows and parrots, and those with smaller brains, such as chickens and quails. The former survive better in nature and are also more successful at establishing a community in a new environment. In their new work, they connect brain size to handling stress. Sol; Ádám Lendvai, an evolutionary biologist at the College of Nyíregyháza in Hungary; and colleagues scoured the avian research literature to find studies that had measured corticosterone levels in birds in varying situations. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18631 - Posted: 09.11.2013

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

Keyword: Emotions; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18630 - Posted: 09.11.2013

Sarah Zhang Fathers with smaller testes are more involved in child care, and their brains are also more responsive when looking at photos of their own children, according to research published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Evolutionary biologists have long observed a trade-off in male primates between mating efforts to produce more offspring and the time males spend caring for their progeny. For instance, male chimpanzees, which are especially promiscuous, sport testes that are twice as big as those of humans, make a lot of sperm and generally do not provide paternal care. By contrast, male gorillas have relatively small testes and protect their young. The latest study suggests that humans, whose paternal care varies widely, show evidence of both approaches. The analysis1 incorporates measures of testicular volume, brain activity and paternal behaviour, notes Peter Gray, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study. “We’ve got something that pulls those strands together, and it does so in a really interesting way.” The research team — led by James Rilling, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia — set out to investigate why some fathers are more involved in child care than others. The researchers recruited 70 fathers of children aged between one and two years, and scanned the men’s brains and testes in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The fathers and the children's mothers also filled out surveys rating the fathers' commitment to child care. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18629 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By Scicurious Effective treatments for drug addiction have been hard to come by. There’s behavioral interventions, methadone maintenance for heroin users, nicotine patches for smokers, antabuse for acoholics, but while all of these are effective in a minority of users, they aren’t effective in all. Many require repeat behaviors that are difficult for addicts. As examples: getting to the methadone center every day can be difficult if you have bad transportation. Alcoholics often need to go to AA meetings several times a week if not several times a day. Antabuse make you feel like crap when you drink…and all you have to do is NOT take it. Nicotine patches don’t tend to scratch the smoking itch in the same way. In the case of cocaine, where is there no drug intervention option at all, when you have someone who is in serious danger of overdose, you need something to take away the effects of the cocaine. Something to work immediately. Enter the idea of a vaccine against cocaine. For those used to thinking about vaccines as things that fight chicken pox and whooping cough, the idea of a vaccine against a drug can seem a little foreign. But it’s a concept that’s been in development for some time. Not so much in the context of vaccinating against potential cocaine use, but as a way to help people get off the drug. But the question still remains: will it work? The idea is to use a vaccine made of a drug that is very close to cocaine (norcocaine), combined with an inactivated virus. The presence of the virus causes the body’s immune system to try and fight it off, creating antibodies to different parts of the molecule, both the cocaine part and the virus part. The antibodies serve as a signal for other immune cells to come along and gobble up the cocaine. After the original vaccine is gone, the antibodies stay circulating in your blood, ready to attack is they see the cocaine signal again. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18628 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By Bruce Bower Babies have an ear for primeval dangers, a new study suggests. By age 9 months, infants pay special attention to sounds that have signaled threats to children’s safety and survival throughout human evolution, say psychologist Nicole Erlich of the University of Queensland, Australia, and her colleagues. Those sounds include a snake hissing, adults’ angry voices, a crackling fire, thunder claps and — as a possible indicator of a nearby but unseen danger — another infant’s cries. Noises denoting modern dangers, as well as pleasant sounds, failed to attract the same level of interest from 9-month-olds, Erlich and her colleagues report Aug. 27 in Developmental Science. People can learn to fear just about anything. But tens of thousands of years of evolution have primed infants’ brains to home in on longstanding perils, the scientists propose. “There is something special about evolutionarily threatening sounds that infants respond to,” Erlich says. Another study that supported that idea, by psychologist David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, found that 11-month-olds rapidly learn to associate fearful faces with images of snakes and spiders (SN: 9/26/09, p. 11). “There is now a coherent argument that infants are biologically prepared in at least two sensory systems to learn quickly which evolutionarily relevant objects to fear,” Rakison says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 18627 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, Amy Epstein Gluck remembers how relieved she felt when it seemed that the vision of her youngest child, 9-month-old Sam, might turn out to be normal. Months earlier, doctors had worried that he was blind, possibly as the result of an inherited disorder or a brain tumor. But subsequent tests and consultations with pediatric specialists in Washington and Baltimore instead suggested a temporary developmental delay. Epstein Gluck and her husband, Ira Gluck, were so thrilled with Sam’s progress that they threw a big party to celebrate the end of an arduous year and, they hoped, their son’s frightening problem. But two months later, on Sam’s first birthday in February 2006, the pediatric ophthalmologist who had been treating him delivered news that made it clear a celebration had been premature. “It was such a blow,” Epstein Gluck recalled. On the way to Johns Hopkins, the couple had discussed finding a specialist closer to their Bethesda home, assuming they no longer needed a neuro-ophthalmologist. The ride home was somber: “I was so upset I couldn’t even recount the conversation,” she said. “I had thought we were done.” Instead, they were struggling with the implications of an unexpected finding that, more than a year later, would culminate in a new diagnosis. In March 2005, when Sam was about 5 weeks old, his mother noticed that his eyes would periodically oscillate back and forth. Epstein Gluck, whose other children were then 3 and 5, called her pediatrician. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18626 - Posted: 09.10.2013

Two pioneers in the study of neural signaling and three researchers responsible for modern cochlear implants are winners of The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation’s annual prize, announced today. The prestigious award honoring contributions in the medical sciences is often seen as a hint at future Nobel contenders. The prizes for basic and clinical research each carry a $250,000 honorarium. Richard Scheller of the biotech company Genentech and Thomas Südhof of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, got their basic research Laskers for discovering the mechanisms behind rapid the release of neurotransmitters—the brain’s chemical messengers—into the space between neurons. This process underlies all communication among brain cells, and yet it was “a black box” before Scheller and Südhof’s work, says their colleague Robert Malenka, a synaptic physiologist at Stanford. The two worked independently in the late 1980s to identify individual proteins that mediate the process, and their development of genetically altered mice lacking these proteins was “an ambitious and high-risk approach,” Malenka says. Although “they weren’t setting out to understand any sort of disease,” their discoveries have helped unravel the genetic basis for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. This year’s clinical research prizes went to Graeme Clark, Ingeborg Hochmair, and Blake Wilson for their work to restore hearing to the deaf. In the 1970s, Hochmair and Clark of the cochlear implant company MED-EL in Innsbruck, Austria, and the University of Melbourne, respectively, were the first to insert multiple electrodes into the human cochlea to stimulate nerves that respond to different frequencies of sound. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 18625 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By RONI JACOBSON We have seven deadly sins, seven days of the week, seven seas, seven dwarfs. The recurrence of the number seven so impressed the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller that, in an oft-cited paper in 1956, he wrote, “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.” Miller went on to describe several experiments where seven pieces of information — plus or minus two — appeared to be the limit of what our minds could retain in the short term. Since then, Miller’s theory — that our short-term memory can hold about seven items before we start to forget them — has been refined. It is now understood that the capacity of short-term memory depends on several factors, including age, attention and the type of information presented. For instance, long words like “onomatopoeia” and “reciprocate” take up more memory span than short words like “cat” and “ball.” Grouping smaller bits of information into a meaningful unit, like a word of many syllables or an abstract concept, is called “chunking,” and our ability to retain information decreases as the chunk becomes more complex. Psychologists now believe that we can recall about four chunks of information at a time, which works out to approximately six letters, five one-syllable words and seven digits. As for the ubiquity of the number seven, Miller came to suspect that that is just a coincidence. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18624 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By Athena Andreadis Recently, two studies surfaced almost simultaneously that led to exclamations of “Vulcan mind meld!”, “Zombie armies!” and “Brains in jars!” One is the announcement by Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco of Washington U. that they “achieved the first human-to-human brain interface”. The other is the Nature paper by Madeline Lancaster et al about stem-cell-derived “organoids” that mimic early developmental aspects of the human cortex. My condensed evaluation: the latter is far more interesting and promising than the former, which doesn’t quite do what people (want to) think it’s doing. The purported result of brain interfacing hit many hot buttons that have been staples of science fiction and Stephen King novels: primarily telepathy, with its fictional potential for non-consensual control. Essentially, the sender’s EEG (electroencephalogram) output was linked to the receiver’s TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) input. What the experiment actually did is not send a thought but induce a muscle twitch; nothing novel, given the known properties of the two technologies. The conditions were severely constrained to produce the desired result and I suspect the outcome was independent of the stimulus details: the EEG simply recorded that a signal had been produced and the TMS apparatus was positioned so that a signal would elicit a movement of the right hand. Since both sender and receiver were poised over a keyboard operating a video game, the twitch was sufficient to press the space bar, programmed by the game to fire a cannon. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 18623 - Posted: 09.10.2013

By Nathan Seppa A tiny probe equipped with a laser might reveal what the human eye doesn’t always see: the difference between a tumor and healthy tissue. A new study suggests the device might provide brain surgeons with a roadmap as they go about the delicate business of removing tumors. Surgeons try to excise as much of brain tumors as possible, but they risk harming the patient if they remove healthy tissue. “This problem,” says surgeon Daniel Orringer of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, “has vexed brain surgeons for as long as they have taken out tumors,” since the first half of the 20th century. “Basically, we do it by feel — the texture, color and vascularity of the tissues. Tumors tend to bleed a little more than normal brain.” Although removing and testing tissue samples, or biopsies, can help to characterize the tissue at the tumor margins, it’s a cumbersome and time-consuming process. In the new study, Orringer and his colleagues instead exposed such borderline brain tissues to a weak laser. Then they used Raman spectroscopy, a technique that reveals vibrations of specific chemical bonds in tissues. The revved up form of Raman spectroscopy that the researchers used is sensitive enough to distinguish between proteins and lipids. Since tumors are higher in protein than healthy brain tissue, the authors designed the technique to present protein signatures as blue images on a screen, and lipids as green. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18622 - Posted: 09.09.2013

By ERIC R. KANDEL THESE days it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging — for example, that a single fMRI scan can reveal our innermost feelings — and with inflated claims about our understanding of the biological basis of our higher mental processes. Such irritation has led a number of thoughtful people to declare that we can never achieve a truly sophisticated understanding of the biological foundation of complex mental activity. In fact, recent newspaper articles have argued that psychiatry is a “semi-science” whose practitioners cannot base their treatment of mental disorders on the same empirical evidence as physicians who treat disorders of the body can. The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart. But this is starting to change. Consider the biology of depression. We are beginning to discern the outlines of a complex neural circuit that becomes disordered in depressive illnesses. Helen Mayberg, at Emory University, and other scientists used brain-scanning techniques to identify several components of this circuit, two of which are particularly important. One is Area 25 (the subcallosal cingulate region), which mediates our unconscious and motor responses to emotional stress; the other is the right anterior insula, a region where self-awareness and interpersonal experience come together. These two regions connect to the hypothalamus, which plays a role in basic functions like sleep, appetite and libido, and to three other important regions of the brain: the amygdala, which evaluates emotional salience; the hippocampus, which is concerned with memory; and the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of executive function and self-esteem. All of these regions can be disturbed in depressive illnesses. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Depression
Link ID: 18621 - Posted: 09.09.2013