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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 18299 - Posted: 06.22.2013

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

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 18298 - Posted: 06.22.2013

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

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18297 - Posted: 06.22.2013

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

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

By IRINA ALEKSANDER At a party not long ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Kaitlin, a 22-year-old senior at Columbia University, was recalling the first time she was offered a drug called Molly, at the elegant Brooklyn home of a cultural figure she admired. “She was, like, 50, and she had been written about in the Talk of the Town,” said Kaitlin, who was wearing black skinny jeans and a tank top. “This woman was very smart and impressive.” At one point, the hostess pulled Kaitlin aside and asked if she had ever tried the drug, which is said to be pure MDMA, the ingredient typically combined with other substances in Ecstasy pills. “She said that it wasn’t cut with anything and that I had nothing to worry about,” said Kaitlin, who declined to give her last name because she is applying for jobs and does not want her association with the drug to scare off potential employers. “And then everyone at the party took it.” Since that first experience, Kaitlin has encountered Molly at a birthday celebration and at a dance party in Williamsburg. “It’s the only drug I can think of that I have to pay for,” she said. “It makes you really happy. It’s very loose. You just get very turned on — not even sexually, but you just feel really upbeat and want to dance or whatever.” Molly is not new, exactly. MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, was patented by Merck pharmaceuticals in 1914 and did not make much news until the 1970s, when psychotherapists began giving it to patients to get them to open up. It arrived at New York nightclubs in the late 1980s, and by the early ’90s it became the preferred drug at raves at Limelight and Shelter, where a weekly party called NASA later served as a backdrop in Larry Clark’s movie “Kids.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18295 - Posted: 06.22.2013

Posted by Gary Marcus Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, enthusiasm has often outstripped the limits of what current science can really tell us, and the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions. A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld. The book, which slams dozens of inconclusive studies that have been spun into overblown and downright dubious fields, like neurolaw and neuromarketing, is a resounding call for skepticism of the most grandiose claims being made in the name of neuroscience. The authors describe it as “an exposé of mindless neuroscience: the oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application of brain science in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains." The book does a terrific job of explaining where and how savvy readers should be skeptical. Unfortunately, the book is also prone to being misread. This is partly because it focusses largely on neuroscience’s current limitations rather than on its progress. Some, like David Brooks in the New York Times, are using books like “Brainwashed” as an excuse to toss out neuroscience altogether. In Brooks’s view, Satel and Lilienfeld haven’t just exposed some bad neuroscience; they’ve gutted the entire field, leading to the radical conclusion that “the brain is not the mind.” Brooks goes so far as to suggest that “it is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind,” and that “there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, ‘That person is experiencing hatred.’ ” The core of his claim is the idea that, if activity is distributed throughout the brain, it cannot be understood or interpreted. © 2013 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18294 - Posted: 06.22.2013

by Traci Watson For the male dark fishing spider, the price of love is death. New research shows that the male Dolomedes tenebrosus (right) expires just after the height of passion, despite no visible assault by his partner. Scientists collected the common U.S. arachnids (see image) in Nebraska parks and did a little matchmaking. In 25 observed matings, after the male stuffed his sperm into the female's body using his antennalike pedipalp, he immediately went limp and his legs curled underneath him, researchers report online today in Biology Letters. By counting the pulse rate in the spiders' abdomens, researchers measured the heartbeat of motionless males and confirmed that they do indeed die. As if death weren't sacrifice enough, the scientists found that lovemaking also disfigures the male. In most spiders, part of the male's pedipalp swells to deliver sperm before shrinking to normal size. In D. tenebrosus, the pedipalp remains enormously enlarged and presumably useless even after the deed is done. Evolutionary theory predicts male monogamy—such as that shown by the dark fishing spider—when females are larger than males. Smaller animals are more likely to survive to mating age than big ones, the thinking goes, making larger females scarcer than smaller males. And that means males must settle for just one inamorata. True to theory, the female dark fishing spider, whose outstretched legs span a human's palm, outweighs her man 14-to-1. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 18293 - Posted: 06.20.2013

By Amy Mathews Amos, My symptoms started in January 2008, with deep pain in my bladder and the sense that I had to urinate constantly. I was given a diagnosis of interstitial cystitis, a chronic bladder condition with no known cure. But in the following months, pain spread to my thighs, knees, hips, buttocks, abdomen and back. By the time my condition was properly diagnosed three years later, I had seen two urogynecologists, three orthopedists, six physical therapists, two manual therapists, a rheumatologist, a neurologist, a chiropractor and a homeopath. What was wrong? Something completely unexpected, given my symptoms: myofascial pain syndrome, a condition caused by muscle fibers that contract but don’t release. That constant contraction creates knots of taut muscle, or trigger points, that send pain throughout the body, even to parts that are perfectly healthy. Most doctors have never heard of myofascial pain syndrome and few know how to treat it. In my case, trigger points in my pelvic floor — the bowl of muscle on the bottom of the pelvis — referred pain to my bladder. Points along my thighs pulled on my knee joints, creating sharp pain when I walked. Points in my hips, buttocks and abdomen threw my pelvis and lower spine out of alignment, pushing even more pain up my back. The pain was so severe at times that I could sit for only brief periods. “Why didn’t anybody know this?” I asked my doctor, Timothy Taylor, soon after he correctly diagnosed the reason for my pain. “Because doctors don’t specialize in muscles,” he said. “It’s the forgotten organ.” © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Muscles
Link ID: 18292 - Posted: 06.20.2013

By Nadja Popovich Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour. Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction. But eye-tracking can do more than help sell products or give your finger a rest while playing Fruit Ninja. Years of research have found that our tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades serve as a window into the brain for psychologists just as for advertisers—but instead of giving clues about our preferred cookie brands (pdf), they elucidate our inner mental functioning. The question is, can capturing such movements help clinicians make diagnoses of mental and neurological disorders, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease and more? For many researchers in this growing field, the outlook so far looks positive. “Visual scanning reflects a model of the world that exists inside the brain of each individual,” explains Moshe Eizenman, a leading eye-tracking researcher at the University of Toronto. “People with mental disorders have a model of the world that is slightly different than that of normal people—and by moving their eyes, they provide information about this different model.” Autistic children, for example, tend to avoid social images in favor of abstract ones, and they also more rarely and fleetingly make eye contact when looking at faces in an image or video in comparison with nonautistic kids. Similarly distinct, abnormal eye-movement patterns occur in a number of mental disorders, scientists have found. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18291 - Posted: 06.20.2013

By Brian Bienkowski and Environmental Health News Women who live in areas with polluted air are up to twice as likely to have an autistic child than those living in communities with cleaner air, according to a new study published today. Building on two smaller, regional studies, the Harvard University research is the first to link air pollution nationwide with autism. It also is the first to suggest that baby boys may be more at risk for autism disorders when their mothers breathe polluted air during pregnancy. Babies born in areas of the United States with high airborne levels of mercury, diesel exhaust, lead, manganese, nickel and methylene chloride were more likely to have autism than those in areas with lower pollution. The strongest links were for diesel exhaust and mercury. “The striking similarity with our results and the previous studies adds a tremendous amount to the weight of evidence that pollutants in the air might be causing autism in children,” said Andrea Roberts, a research associate at the Harvard University School of Public Health and lead author of the new study published online in Environmental Health Perspectives. Scientists have been trying to figure out whether a variety of environmental exposures are linked to autism, a neurological disorder diagnosed in one out of every 50 U.S. children between the ages of 6 and 17. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18290 - Posted: 06.20.2013

Buyer beware. For US$249 a company in the United States is promising to send curious and competitive players of computer games an unusual headset. The device, the company claims, will convert electronic gamers into electronic-gamers. At the touch of a button, the headset will send a surge of electricity through their prefrontal cortex. It promises to increase brain plasticity and make synapses fire faster, to help gamers repel more space invaders and raid more tombs. And, according to the publicity shots on the website, it comes in a choice of red or black. The company is accepting orders, but says that it will not ship its first headsets to customers until next month. Some are unwilling to wait. Videos on the Internet already show people who have cobbled together their own version with a 9-volt battery and some electrical wire. If you are not fussy about the colour scheme, other online firms already promise to supply the components and instructions you need to make your own. Or you could rummage around in the garage. That’s ‘could’ as in ‘you might be able to’, by the way; not ‘could’ as in ‘it’s a good idea’. In fact, to try to boost cognitive performance in this way might be a very bad idea indeed. Would it work? It might or it might not. Nobody knows. All we know for sure is that the technology, known as transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), is likely to soon get into the hands, and onto the heads, of many more people. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18289 - Posted: 06.20.2013

by Sue Langthorp Losing sleep doesn't just make us hazy and irritable. It can also lead to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and a host of other conditions. But catching up on some shuteye may help combat these problems. According to a new study, sleep-deprived men who dozed an extra 2 to 3 hours on the weekend may reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Researchers led by Peter Liu, an endocrinologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at the Harbor-University of California, Los Angeles, Medical Center, recruited 19 men in good health who, due to their workload, were poor sleepers. The subjects, age 29 on average, had been clocking about 6 hours of shuteye on weeknights for just over 5 years. However, they made the most of their weekends and slept an extra 2.3 hours a night on Friday and Saturday. When selecting the candidates for the trial, the scientists verified their reported schedules using sleep actigraphs, devices worn like wrist watches that record sleep patterns. The men slept in the lab for three nights. Some were allowed to sleep 10 hours without interruption, catching up on the sleep that they had lost earlier in the week. Others slept 10 hours with frequent interruption, and still others slept 6 hours without interruption. All the subjects ate the same diet, so the researchers could normalize their insulin and sugar levels. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 18288 - Posted: 06.20.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Obesity in adolescents is associated with a range of cardiovascular and other health risks. Now a new study adds one more: hearing loss. Several studies have demonstrated the association of obesity with hearing loss in adults, but now researchers examining records of a nationwide sample of 1,488 boys and girls ages 12 to 19 have found the same association in teenagers. The study appeared online in The Laryngoscope. The researchers controlled for various factors, including poverty, sex, race and previous exposure to loud noises. They found that being at or above the 95th percentile for body mass index — the definition of obesity in teenagers — was independently associated with poorer hearing over all frequencies, and with almost double the risk of low-frequency hearing loss in one ear. They suggest that this may represent an early stage of injury that will later progress to both ears, as it does in adults. The reason for the connection is not known, but the scientists suggest that inflammation induced by obesity may be a factor in organ damage. “It’s quite possible that early intervention could arrest the progression,” said the lead author, Dr. Anil K. Lalwani, a professor of otolaryngology at Columbia University. “This is another reason to lose weight — but not to lose hope.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hearing
Link ID: 18287 - Posted: 06.20.2013

Maggie Fox, NBC News Researchers have figured out how to read your mind and tell whether you are feeling sad, angry or disgusted – all by looking at a brain scan. The experiment, using 10 acting students, showed people have remarkably similar brain activity when experiencing the same emotions. And a computer could predict how someone was feeling just by looking at the scan. The findings could be used to help treat patients with various mental health conditions, and even provide a hard, medical diagnosis for emotional disorders. It might also be used to get a window into the minds of people with developmental disorders such as autism, the researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh say. And one big, immediate application – testing advertisements. “What emotion do you want to evoke with your ad for the latest BMW?” said psychology professor Marcel Just, who helped oversee the study. "This research introduces a new method with potential to identify emotions without relying on people's ability to self-report," added Karim Kassam, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at CMU, who led the study. "It could be used to assess an individual's emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus, for example, a flag, a brand name or a political candidate."

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18286 - Posted: 06.20.2013

By Scicurious People who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) can’t help some of their actions. They suffer from severely intrusive thoughts and anxiety, which they know are not right. And they feel a compulsion to do rituals to get rid of them. Maybe it’s repetitive hand washing. Maybe it’s checking that the stove is off exactly 7 times each night. Whatever it is, the symptoms can cause severely interfere with their daily lives. What causes these compulsive, repetitive behaviors? We’re not sure, but today’s paper suggests a role of the circuit between the striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex, areas associated with impulsivity and repetitive behaviors. And it could be that increasing activity within certain parts of this circuit might help shut down some repetitive behaviors, giving us important insight into how repetitive behaviors work. I should begin by noting that Ed also covered this paper over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, along with another paper about making compulsive behaviors. It’s a really cool look at the two papers and you should definitely check it out! Me, I’m interested in the circuit involved here, and why stimulating one part may end up inhibiting behavior. The authors of this study started with a model of obsessive behavior, the SAPAP3 knockout mouse, which I actually wrote a bit about recently. This mouse has a knockout of a special protein associated with synapses. Without it, mice display obsessive (well, repetitive, we can’t really ask the mouse if they are obsessing) grooming behavior, grooming their faces so much that they will cause lesions to form. The authors wanted to look at what caused this behavior, and what could potentially stop it. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 18285 - Posted: 06.18.2013