Karen Ravn Birds of a feather may flock together, but do birds that flock together develop distinct cultures? Two studies published today in Science1, 2 find strong evidence that, at the very least, monkeys that troop together and whales that pod together do just that. And they manage it in the same way that humans do: by copying and learning from each other. A team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, created two distinct cultures — 'blue' and 'pink' — among groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in South Africa1. The researchers trained two sets of monkeys to eat maize (corn) dyed one of those two colours but eschew maize dyed the other colour. The scientists then waited to see how the groups behaved when newcomers — babies and migrating males — arrived. Both sets of newcomers seemed to follow social cues when selecting their snacks. Baby monkeys ate the same colour maize as their mothers. Seven of the ten males that migrated from one colour culture to another adopted the local colour preference the first time that they ate any maize. The trend was even stronger when they first fed with no higher-ranking monkey around, with nine of the ten males choosing the locally preferred variety. The only immigrant to buck this trend was a monkey who assumed the top rank in his new group as soon as he got there — and he may not have given a fig what anyone else ate. “The take-home message is that social learning — learning from others rather than through individual trial and error — is a more potent force in shaping wild animals’ behaviour than has been recognized so far,” says Andrew Whiten, an evolutionary and developmental psychologist at St Andrews and co-author of the paper. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 18079 - Posted: 04.27.2013

Posted by Christy Ullrich Elephants may use a variety of subtle movements and gestures to communicate with one another, according to researchers who have studied the big mammals in the wild for decades. To the casual human observer, a curl of the trunk, a step backward, or a fold of the ear may not have meaning. But to an elephant—and scientists like Joyce Poole—these are signals that convey vital information to individual elephants and the overall herd. Biologist and conservationist Joyce Poole and her husband, Petter Granli, both of whom direct ElephantVoices, a charity they founded to research and advocate for conservation of elephants in various sanctuaries in Africa, have developed an online database decoding hundreds of distinct elephant signals and gestures. The postures and movements underscore the sophistication of elephant communication, they say. Poole and Granli have also deciphered the meaning of acoustic communication in elephants, interpreting the different rumbling, roaring, screaming, trumpeting, and other idiosyncratic sounds that elephants make in concert with postures such as the positioning and flapping of their ears. Poole has studied elephants in Africa for more than 37 years, but only began developing the online gestures database in the past decade. Some of her research and conservation work has been funded by the National Geographic Society. “I noticed that when I would take out guests visiting Amboseli [National Park in Kenya] and was narrating the elephants’ behavior, I got to the point where 90 percent of the time, I could predict what the elephant was about to do,” Poole said in an interview. “If they stood a certain way, they were afraid and were about to retreat, or [in another way] they were angry and were about to move toward and threaten another.” © 1996-2012 National Geographic Society.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18078 - Posted: 04.27.2013

by Helen Thomson "I feel like I have been dropped into my body. I know this is my voice and these are my memories, but they don't feel like they belong to me." It happened out of the blue. Louise Airey was 8 years old, off sick from school, when suddenly she felt like she had been dropped into her own body. "It's just so difficult to verbalise what this feels like," she says. "All of a sudden you're hyper aware, and everything else in the world seems unreal, like a movie." She panicked, but told no one. The feeling soon passed but returned several times until, at the age of 19, a migraine triggered a sensation of being disconnected from the world that was to last 18 months. When she was in her 30s she was diagnosed with depersonalisation disorder – an altered sense of self with all-encompassing feelings of not occupying your own body, and detachment from your thoughts and actions. It has come and gone throughout her life, but since a traumatic pregnancy 20 months ago, these feelings have remained constant. "Other people seem like robots," Airey says. "It's like I'm watching a film, like I'm on my own in the centre of everything and nothing else is real. I'll be speaking to my children and I'll catch my voice talking and it seems really alien and foreign. It makes you feel very separated and lonely from everything, like you're the only person that is real." Depersonalisation disorder is not as rare as you might think, says Anthony David at King's College London and the Maudsley Hospital: it may affect almost 1 per cent of the British population (Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, DOI: 10.1007/s00127-010-0327-7). We've all probably experienced mild versions of it at some point, in the unreal, spaced-out feeling you might get while severely jet-lagged or hung-over, for example. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18077 - Posted: 04.27.2013

Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation Testosterone may trigger a brain chemical process linked to schizophrenia but the same sex hormone can also improve cognitive thinking skills in men with the disorder, two new studies show. Scientists have long suspected testosterone plays an important role in schizophrenia, which affects more men than women. Men are also more likely to develop psychosis in adolescence, previous research has shown. A new study on lab rodents by researchers from Neuroscience Research Australia analysed the impact increased testosterone had on levels of dopamine, a brain chemical linked to psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia. The researchers found that testosterone boosted dopamine sensitivity in adolescent male rodents. “From these rodent studies, we hypothesise that adolescent increases in circulating testosterone may be a driver of increased dopamine activity in the brains of individuals susceptible to psychosis and schizophrenia,” said senior Neuroscience Research Australia researcher and author of the study, Dr Tertia Purves-Tyson, who is presenting her work at the International Congress on Schizophrenia Research in Florida. Dr Philip Mitchell, Scientia Professor and Head of the School of Psychiatry at the University of NSW, said the research was very interesting. © 2013 ScienceAlert Pty Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18076 - Posted: 04.27.2013

by Sara Reardon An electronic patch can analyse complex brainwaves and listen in on a fetus’s heart MIND reading can be as simple as slapping a sticker on your forehead. An "electronic tattoo" containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG. The tattoo could also provide a cheap way to monitor a developing fetus. The first electronic tattoo appeared in 2011, when Todd Coleman at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues designed a transparent patch containing electronic circuits as thin as a human hairMovie Camera. Applied to skin like a temporary tattoo, these could be used to monitor electrophysiological signals associated with the heart and muscles, as well as rudimentary brain activity. To improve its usefulness, Coleman's group has now optimised the placement of the electrodes to pick up more complex brainwaves. They have demonstrated this by monitoring so-called P300 signals in the forebrain. These appear when you pay attention to a stimulus. The team showed volunteers a series of images and asked them to keep track of how many times a certain object appeared. Whenever volunteers noticed the object, the tattoo registered a blip in the P300 signal. The tattoo was as good as conventional EEG at telling whether a person was looking at the target image or another stimulus, the team told a recent Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Robotics
Link ID: 18075 - Posted: 04.27.2013

Published by scicurious under Behavioral Neuro It's late. I've got a lot on my plate. A lot to do. And most of us do. So here I am, burning the midnight oil along with many of my neighbors. I usually count myself lucky to get 7 hours a night, and I AM lucky. For many parents or other caregivers, for example, 7 hours is unheard-of luxury. Is it just me? Probably not. Most of us don't get enough sleep, and those who don't sleep? Snack. But why? And what does this mean for issues like obesity? We know that there has been an increase in obesity in this country. And many people are asking why. There are probably lots of reasons involved: too much sugar, too little exercise, genetics, too much fat. But what about sleep? It turns out that getting less sleep is a risk factor for obesity, but...how are sleep and weight gain related? It turns out that sleep, or lack thereof, can have a lot of influence on how much we need to eat and how much we feel like eating. For example, sleep deprivation changes hunger hormone levels, which can change food intake, and some scientists hypothesize that decreased sleep can change energy expenditure as well. But in order to understand just how lack of sleep influences weight gain, well you need to sleep deprive some people. The authors took 8 men and 8 women who reported getting an average of 8 hours of sleep per night into an inpatient facility. They were taken off caffeine one week before the study and were told to stick to 9 hours of sleep opportunity (stay in bed 9 hours) per night for the first week. They also were put on a diet that was calibrated exactly to maintain their current weight. Copyright © 2013

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 18074 - Posted: 04.25.2013

David Adam David Kupfer is a modern-day heretic. A psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, Kupfer, has spent the past six years directing the revision of a book commonly referred to as the bible of the psychiatric field. The work will reach a climax next month when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) unveils the fifth incarnation of the book, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which provides checklists of symptoms that psychiatrists around the world use to diagnose their patients. The DSM is so influential that just about the only suggestion of Kupfer's that did not meet with howls of protest during the revision process was to change its name from DSM-V to DSM-5. Although the title and wording of the manual are now settled, the debate that overshadowed the revision is not. The stark fact is that no one has yet agreed on how best to define and diagnose mental illnesses. DSM-5, like the two preceding editions, will place disorders in discrete categories such as major-depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). These categories, which have guided psychiatry since the early 1980s, are based largely on decades-old theory and subjective symptoms. The problem is that biologists have been unable to find any genetic or neuroscientific evidence to support the breakdown of complex mental disorders into separate categories. Many psychiatrists, meanwhile, already think outside the category boxes, because they see so many patients whose symptoms do not fit neatly into them. Kupfer and others wanted the latest DSM to move away from the category approach and towards one called 'dimensionality', in which mental illnesses overlap. According to this view, the disorders are the product of shared risk factors that lead to abnormalities in intersecting drives such as motivation and reward anticipation, which can be measured (hence 'dimension') and used to place people on one of several spectra. But the attempt to introduce this approach foundered, as other psychiatrists and psychologists protested that it was premature. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18073 - Posted: 04.25.2013

By Lucy Wallis BBC News Abby and Brittany Hensel are conjoined twins determined to live the normal, active life of outgoing 20-somethings anywhere. They have been to university, they travel, they have jobs. But how easy is it for two people to inhabit one body? Like most 23-year-olds Abby and Brittany Hensel love spending time with their friends, going on holiday, driving, playing sport such as volleyball and living life to the full. The identical, conjoined twins from Minnesota, in the United States, have graduated from Bethel University and are setting out on their career as primary school teachers with an emphasis on maths. Although they have two teaching licences, there is one practical difference when it comes to the finances. "Obviously right away we understand that we are going to get one salary because we're doing the job of one person," says Abby. "As maybe experience comes in we'd like to negotiate a little bit, considering we have two degrees and because we are able to give two different perspectives or teach in two different ways." "One can be teaching and one can be monitoring and answering questions," says Brittany. "So in that sense we can do more than one person." Their friend Cari Jo Hohncke has always admired the sisters' teamwork. "They are two different girls, but yet they are able to work together to do the basic functions that I do every day that I take for granted," says Hohncke. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 18072 - Posted: 04.25.2013

By Meghan Holohan Need to remember some important facts for that big presentation at work? Clench your right hand while preparing to remember. When giving that talk, ball up your left hand and you’ll call to mind those details, no problem. That’s the finding from a new study authored by Ruth Propper, an associate professor and director of the cerebral lateralization laboratory at Montclair State University. Propper has long been intrigued by how body movements impact how the brain works. While most people realize that the brain influences the body (the brain tells your arm there is an itch, and you feel it), less is understood about how the body sways the brain. Past research suggests that clenching our hands can evoke emotions. When people ball up their right hands, for example, the left sides of their brains become more active, causing what’s known as “approach emotions,” feelings such as happiness or excitement. By squeezing the left hand, people engage the right side of the brain, which controls “withdrawal emotions” such as introversion, fear, or anxiety. (It probably seems like these might be less useful, but they come in handy in dangerous situations.) Propper theorized that if clenching hands impacted feelings, these gestures might influence the brain in other ways. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Laterality
Link ID: 18071 - Posted: 04.25.2013

By KATIE THOMAS With the diagnosis of autism on the rise and drug companies facing major setbacks in developing successful treatments, the University of California, Los Angeles will lead a $9 million effort financed by the National Institute of Mental Health to find effective drugs, officials said Wednesday. Under a contract with the institute, U.C.L.A. will form a network of researchers at other academic centers that will try to identify promising new and older drug compounds quickly, and conduct early tests to see if they merit additional investment. The program, part of the “Fast Fail” initiative at the institute, aims to determine within weeks whether a drug works, rather than the years it traditionally takes to evaluate a new drug. “The whole idea is just getting much better in these early phases at identifying drugs that are going to be efficacious and safe, and thereby greatly speeding the development of effective new therapies and reducing the overall cost,” said Dr. James McCracken, who is leading the effort at U.C.L.A. as director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. The number of diagnosed cases of autism, Asperger’s syndrome and related disorders in children has been growing in recent years, largely because of increased awareness. A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Resources and Services Administration concluded that one in 50 children aged 6 to 17 had been found to have autism or a related disorder, a 72 percent increase since 2007. Although more cases are being diagnosed, no drugs are approved to treat the core symptoms of the disorders, which are characterized by delays in developing effective communication and social skills. Other drugs often prescribed to people with the disorders treat difficult behaviors like aggressiveness, hyperactivity and irritability. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18070 - Posted: 04.25.2013

By PAM BELLUCK After most pregnancies, the placenta is thrown out, having done its job of nourishing and supporting the developing baby. But a new study raises the possibility that analyzing the placenta after birth may provide clues to a child’s risk for developing autism. The study, which analyzed placentas from 217 births, found that in families at high genetic risk for having an autistic child, placentas were significantly more likely to have abnormal folds and creases. “It’s quite stark,” said Dr. Cheryl K. Walker, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Mind Institute at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. “Placentas from babies at risk for autism, clearly there’s something quite different about them.” Researchers will not know until at least next year how many of the children, who are between 2 and 5, whose placentas were studied will be found to have autism. Experts said, however, that if researchers find that children with autism had more placental folds, called trophoblast inclusions, visible after birth, the condition could become an early indicator or biomarker for babies at high risk for the disorder. “It would be really exciting to have a real biomarker and especially one that you can get at birth,” said Dr. Tara Wenger, a researcher at the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18069 - Posted: 04.25.2013

By Stephen L. Macknik Why, oh why, would I order a plastic fork, costing $89 (on-sale), 5 months before its scheduled release? Because it promises to help me control my eating speed, which, I am now convinced, is indeed critical to controlling obesity and diabetes. The fork is essentially a Bluetooth device that communicates to your smartphone and counts how many bites you take each meal. More importantly, I believe it counts the amount of time between each bite and if you go too fast, it vibrates. [Insert vibrator to mouth joke here. Yes, I'm blonde.] The reason I think it will help me goes back to my gastric bypass two months ago. Before and after the surgery, patients of Dr. Robin Blackmore at the Scottsdale Healthcare Bariatric Surgery Unit must take a series of courses aimed at preparing patients for life after surgery. One of the main lessons is that patients must now eat each meal over a 20 minute period. No more, no less. As you might surmise, for patients like me, “no more” is ready to achieve, but “no less” than 20 minutes is surprisingly difficult. And they are well aware of how hard it is, demanding that you practice ahead of time. I don’t know about my fellow patients, but I didn’t practice at all and have paid the price numerous times since my surgery for eating too fast: let’s just say it sometimes leads to a temporary obstruction and leave it at that. Because the details are unbelievably disgusting. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 18068 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Konzo, a disease that comes from eating bitter cassava that has not been prepared properly — that is, soaked for days to break down its natural cyanide — has long been known to cripple children. The name, from the Yaka language of Central Africa, means “tied legs,” and victims stumble as if their knees were bound together. Now researchers have found that children who live where konzo is common but have no obvious physical symptoms may still have mental deficits from the illness. Cassava, also called manioc or tapioca, is eaten by 800 million people around the world and is a staple in Africa, where bitter varieties grow well even in arid regions. When properly soaked and dried, and especially when people have protein in their diet, bitter cassava is “pretty safe,” said Michael J. Boivin, a Michigan State psychiatry professor and lead author of a study published online by Pediatrics. “But in times of war, famine, displacement and hardship, people take shortcuts.” In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Boivin and colleagues gave tests of mental acuity and dexterity to three groups of children. Two groups were from a village near the Angolan border with regular konzo outbreaks: Half had leg problems; half did not but had cyanide in their urine. The third was from a village 125 miles away with a similar diet but little konzo because residents routinely detoxified cassava before cooking it. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Intelligence
Link ID: 18067 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By R. Douglas Fields Scientists have speculated that it is a mild manifestation of pain or perhaps a malfunction of overly sensitive nerve endings stuck in a feedback loop. They have even wondered whether itching is mostly psychological (just think about bed bugs for a minute). Now a study rules out these possibilities by succeeding where past attempts have failed: a group of neuroscientists have finally isolated a unique type of nerve cell that makes us itch and only itch. In previous research, neuroscientists Liang Han and Xinzhong Dong of Johns Hopkins University and their colleagues determined that some sensory neurons with nerve endings in the skin have a unique protein receptor on them called MrgprA3. They observed under a microscope that chemicals known to create itching caused these neurons to generate electrical signals but that painful stimuli such as hot water or capsaicin, the potent substance in hot peppers, did not. In the new study published in Nature Neuroscience, the researchers used genetic engineering to selectively kill the entire population of MrgprA3 neurons in mice while leaving all the other sensory neurons intact. These mice no longer scratched themselves when exposed to itchy substances or allergens, but they showed no changes at all in responding to touch or pain-producing stimulation. The mice's behavior confirms that MrgprA3-containing neurons are essential for itch, but it does not rule out the possibility that these cells might respond to other sensations as well. To find out, the neuroscientists engineered a receptor that responds to capsaicin injected into the MrgprA3 neurons, in a type of mouse that lacks the capsaicin receptor in all its other cells. Now the only neurons that would be stimulated by capsaicin were the MrgprA3 neurons. If these cells are indeed itch-specific, injecting capsaicin into a tiny spot on the mouse's skin should make the rodent scratch instead of wincing in pain—which is exactly what happened. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18066 - Posted: 04.24.2013

By Scicurious Generally, I don’t think of being tickled as a particularly pleasurable or calming activity. Most people who are ticklish go immediately on the defensive and tense up, and I always got the impression that most people prefer NOT to be tickled rather than otherwise. However, that’s just us. And we’re not rats. And it turns out, you can calm a rat with tickling. Life is stressful. Whether it’s running from predators, meeting tight deadlines, or trying to keep fed, there’s a lot that seems to bring us down. What saves us from tearing our hair out? Well, the happy things in life. Tasty food, friends, hugs, puppies. You know, the good stuff. These things elicit positive feeling, and positive feeling have been linked to protecting us from stress. Of course, in humans, it’s easy to say that a positive outlook on life makes someone resistant to stress…but is it really true? They may co-occur, but do positive feelings really decrease stress? If you want to get at causes, one of the best ways is to use an animal model. But how do you come up with an animal model for…happiness? Well, you can tickle rats. As you can see in the video above, rats like to be tickled. They even respond with “laughter”! Of course, it’s not laughter as we know it, or even something we can hear. Instead, these are ultrasonic vocalizations at a specific frequency (50 kilohertz). Scientists figured they must be pleasure-sounds because rats make them when they play with other rats. And it turns out that rats make the same noise at the same frequency when they get tickled! © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 18065 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA A cautiously worded study based on data collected in Sweden has found that “in utero exposure to both selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (S.S.R.I.’s) and nonselective monoamine reuptake inhibitors (tricyclic antidepressants) was associated with an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders, particularly without intellectual disability.” The Swedish medical birth register (which contains data on current drug use reported by mothers early in their pregnancies), along with a system of publicly funded screenings for autism spectrum disorders and extensive national and regional registers of various health issues, make a detailed, population-based case-control study possible — one that controls for other variables like family income, parent educational level, maternal and paternal age and even maternal region of birth (all factors the authors note have been previously associated with autism). This is the second study in two years to associate antidepressant use during pregnancy with an increased incidence of autism in exposed children. An earlier, smaller study in California also found a modest increase in risk. The Sweden-based study could not (and did not) exclude the possibility that it was the severe depression, rather than the use of antidepressants, that created the association, but the smaller California study (which considered only S.S.R.I.’s) found “no increase in risk” for mothers with a history of mental health treatment in the absence of prenatal exposure to S.S.R.I.’s. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Depression
Link ID: 18064 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By GREGORY COWLES When John Elder Robison was teaching his young son, Cubby, the finer points of etiquette almost two decades ago, he noted that in addition to “please” and “thank you,” it’s nice to include a salutation while making a request. “For example,” he said, “if you wanted me to get you milk, you could say: ‘Please, wondrous Dada, may I have some milk?’ ” The salutation never caught with Cubby. But by the last page of Mr. Robison’s engaging new memoir, readers may have no problem hailing the author that way. Part parenting guide, part courtroom drama, part catalog of the travails and surprising joys of life with the high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome, this memoir will offer all parents — but particularly fathers — a lot to think about. That its author was almost 40 when he learned he had Asperger’s (a discovery he described in his first memoir, “Look Me in the Eye”), and that he eventually learned his son had the condition as well, make their story more remarkable, but do nothing to diminish its relevance even for readers with no personal experience of autism. Indeed, it can be hard to pinpoint what in the Robisons’ relationship is shaped by Asperger’s and what stems from their own idiosyncratic personalities. Cubby’s name, for instance: Mr. Robison tells us that when his wife (now ex) was pregnant, “I sensed that the best names were not in books at all. For example, if we ended up with a girl, I favored naming her Thugwena, because I knew a girl named Thugwena would be tough and not hassled by bullies.” For boys he liked Thugwald, or else “functional choices” like Kid or Boy. Is this an example of his deadpan humor, in evidence throughout, or is it his Asperger’s blinding him to how others might perceive his actions? Just when you conclude that his tongue is firmly in his cheek, he drops a passing reference to the family cat, Small Animal. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18063 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Canadian doctors say they have found an inventive way to treat lazy eye - playing the Tetris video game. The McGill University team discovered the popular tile-matching puzzle could train both eyes to work together. In a small study, in Current Biology with 18 adults, it worked better than conventional patching of the good eye to make the weak one work harder. The researchers now want to test if it would be a good way to treat children with the same condition. UK studies are already under way. An estimated one in 50 children has lazy eye, known medically as amblyopia. It happens when the vision in one eye does not develop properly, and is often accompanied by a squint - where the eyes do not look in the same direction. Without treatment it can lead to a permanent loss of vision in the weak eye, which is why doctors try to intervene early. Normally, the treatment is to cover the strong eye with a patch so that the child is forced to use their lazy eye. The child must wear the patch for much of the day over many months, which can be frustrating and unpleasant. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18062 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By ABBY ELLIN Marvin Tolkin was 83 when he decided that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. Until then, it had never occurred to him that there might be emotional “issues” he wanted to explore with a counselor. “I don’t think I ever needed therapy,” said Mr. Tolkin, a retired manufacturer of women’s undergarments who lives in Manhattan and Hewlett Harbor, N.Y. Though he wasn’t clinically depressed, Mr. Tolkin did suffer from migraines and “struggled through a lot of things in my life” — the demise of a long-term business partnership, the sudden death of his first wife 18 years ago. He worried about his children and grandchildren, and his relationship with his current wife, Carole. “When I hit my 80s I thought, ‘The hell with this.’ I don’t know how long I’m going to live, I want to make it easier,” said Mr. Tolkin, now 86. “Everybody needs help, and everybody makes mistakes. I needed to reach outside my own capabilities.” So Mr. Tolkin began seeing Dr. Robert C. Abrams, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. They meet once a month for 45 minutes, exploring the problems that were weighing on Mr. Tolkin. “Dr. Abrams is giving me a perspective that I didn’t think about,” he said. “It’s been making the transition of living at this age in relation to my family very doable and very livable.” Mr. Tolkin is one of many seniors who are seeking psychological help late in life. Most never set foot near an analyst’s couch in their younger years. But now, as people are living longer, and the stigma of psychological counseling has diminished, they are recognizing that their golden years might be easier if they alleviate the problems they have been carrying around for decades. It also helps that Medicare pays for psychiatric assessments and therapy. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Depression
Link ID: 18061 - Posted: 04.23.2013

Nathan J. Winograd People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. Most animal lovers find this hard to believe. But seeing is believing. And if it is true that a picture speaks a thousand words, the following images speak volumes about who and what PETA really stands for. The PETA headquarters is on the aptly named Front Street. While claiming to be an animal rights organization, PETA does not believe animals have a right to live. Instead, it believes that people have a right to kill them, as long as the killing is done "humanely," which PETA interprets to mean poisoning them with an overdose of barbiturates, even if the animals are not suffering. In 2012, 733 dogs entered this building. They killed 602 of them. Only 12 were adopted. Also in 2012, they impounded 1,110 cats. 1,045 were put to death. Seven of them were adopted. They also took in 34 other companion animals, such as rabbits, of which 28 were put to death. Only four were adopted. © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18060 - Posted: 04.23.2013