By Ferris Jabr On any given day, millions of conversations reverberate through New York City. Poke your head out a window overlooking a busy street and you will hear them: all those overlapping sentences, only half-intelligible, forming a dense acoustic mesh through which escapes an exclamation, a buoyant laugh, a child’s shrill cry now and then. Every spoken consonant and vowel begins as an internal impulse. Electrical signals crackle along branching neurons in brain regions specialized for language and movement; further pulses spread across facial nerves, surge toward the throat and chest and zip down the spine. The diaphragm contracts—pulling air into the lungs—and relaxes, pushing air into that birdcage of calcium and cartilage—the larynx—within which wings of tissue draw near one another and hum. As this vibrating air enters the mouth, the tongue guides its flow and the lips give each breath a final shape and sound. Liberated syllables travel between one person and another in waves of colliding air molecules. All these conversations are matched in number and complexity by much more elusive discourses. The human brain loves soliloquy. Even when speaking with others—and especially when alone—we continually talk to ourselves in our heads. Such speech does not require the bellows in the chest, quivering flaps of tissue in the throat or a nimble tongue; it does not need to disturb even one hair cell in our ears, nor a single particle of air. We can speak to ourselves without making a sound. Stick your head out that same window above the crowded street and you will hear nothing of what people are saying to themselves privately. All that inner dialogue remains submerged beneath the ocean of human speech, like a novel written in invisible ink behind the text of another book. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 18095 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By Meghan Rosen A child who is good at learning math may literally have a head for numbers. Kids’ brain structures and wiring are associated with how much their math skills improve after tutoring, researchers report April 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Certain measures of brain anatomy were even better at judging learning potential than traditional measures of ability such as IQ and standardized test results, says study author Kaustubh Supekar of Stanford University. These signatures include the size of the hippocampus — a string bean–shaped structure involved in making memories — and how connected the area was with other parts of the brain. The findings suggest that kids struggling with their math homework aren’t necessarily slacking off, says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia. “They just may not have as much brain region devoted to memory formation as other kids.” The study could give scientists clues about where to look for sources of learning disabilities, he says. Scientists have spent years studying brain regions related to math performance in adults, but how kids learn is still “a huge question,” says Supekar. He and colleagues tested IQ and math and reading performance in 24 8- and 9-year-olds, then scanned their brains in an MRI machine. The scans measured the sizes of different brain structures and the connections among them. “It’s like creating a circuit diagram,” says study leader Vinod Menon, also of Stanford. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18094 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By TARA PARKER-POPE Are doctors nicer to patients who aren’t fat? A provocative new study suggests that they are — that thin patients are treated with more warmth and empathy than those who are overweight or obese. For the study, published in the medical journal Obesity, researchers at Johns Hopkins obtained permission to record discussions between 39 primary care doctors and more than 200 patients who had high blood pressure. Although patients were there to talk about blood pressure, not weight, most fell into the overweight or obese category. Only 28 were of normal weight, meaning they had a body mass index below 25. Of the remaining patients, 120 were obese (B.M.I. of 30 or greater) and 60 were classified as overweight (index of 25 to 30). For the most part, all of the patients were treated about the same; there were no meaningful differences in the amount of time doctors spent with them or the topics discussed. But when researchers analyzed transcripts of the visits, there was one striking difference. Doctors seemed just a bit nicer to their normal-weight patients, showing more empathy and warmth in their conversations. Although the study was relatively small, the findings are statistically significant. “It’s not like the physicians were being overtly negative or harsh,” said the lead author, Dr. Kimberly A. Gudzune, an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “They were just not engaging patients in that rapport-building or making that emotional connection with the patient.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Emotions
Link ID: 18093 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By Stephani Sutherland Itching is not the only sensation to arise from unique neurons. A team at the California Institute of Technology has identified neurons that transmit the pleasurable sensations of massage, at least in mice. The cells responded to gentle rubbing but not to pinching or poking. Activation of the cells requires “a pressure component,” says lead investigator David Anderson, a neuroscientist at Caltech, “much like you would apply if you were stroking your cat.” The team first identified the mysterious cells several years ago by an unusual protein on their surface called MrgprB4—closely related to the receptor expressed by the newly identified itch cells. The rare sensory cells make up only about 2 percent of the body's peripheral neurons that respond to external stimuli, but they seem to cover about half the skin's surface with large, branching nerve endings. Whereas sensory neurons that transmit pain have been intensely studied, this is the first demonstration in live animals of a sensory cell that gives pleasure. After the scientists activated those neurons with a designer drug, the mice came to favor the place where they received the drug, according to the paper published January 31 in Nature. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18092 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By Christie Wilcox What does your voice say about you? Our voices communicate information far beyond what we say with our words. Like most animals, the sounds we produce have the potential to convey how healthy we are, what mood we’re in, even our general size. Some of these traits are important cues for potential mates, so much so that the sound of your voice can actually affect how good looking you appear to others. Which, really, brings up one darn good question: what makes a voice sound sexy? To find out, a team spearheaded by University College London researcher Xi Yu created synthetic male and female voices and altered their pitch, vocal quality and formant spacing (an acoustics term related to the frequencies of sound), the last of which is related to body size. They also adjusted the voices to be normal (relaxed), breathy, or pressed (tense). Through several listening experiments, they asked participants of the opposite gender to say which voice was the most attractive and which sounded the friendliest or happiest. The happiest-sounding voices were those with higher pitch, whether male or female, while the angriest were those with dense formants, indicating large body size. As for attractiveness, the men preferred a female voice that is high-pitched, breathy and had wide formant spacing, which indicates a small body size. The women, on the other hand, preferred a male voice with low pitch and dense formant spacing, indicative of larger size. But what really surprised the scientists is that women also preferred their male voices breathy. “The breathiness in the male voice attractiveness rating is intriguing,” explain the authors, “as it could be a way of neutralizing the aggressiveness associated with a large body size.”

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18091 - Posted: 04.30.2013

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early ’90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg’s door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend. Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.” Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. And just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study indicating that eating meat made people selfish and less social. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 18090 - Posted: 04.29.2013

By Scicurious Say you are out on a camping trip with some friends. You’re in the woods, the tents are up, the beer is out, the sun is down, the campfire is starting up. As you sit there, you hear the campfire crackling loudly. To most people, the crackling of the campfire is just that: a campfire. Nothing threatening at all. But for someone with a severe anxiety disorder such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the crackling of the campfire may be associated with terrible memories, a huge conflagration during house to house fighting or a house fire that destroyed all they loved, causing them horrible distress and terrible anxiety. A campfire during a camping trip and the horrible things they endured are entirely dissimilar things, but in severe anxiety disorders, that makes no difference at all. No, this post is not about whether or not anxiety disorders are being over diagnosed. Rather, it’s about how over-generalization within the brain might influence the development of anxiety disorders. What is the difference between a house fire and a campfire? How does your brain know? It’s the idea of pattern separation, an idea that the authors of this review believe could be incredibly important in treating some types of anxiety disorders. Pattern separation is one of the many actions of the hippocampus, the large, curved area in the interior of the brain which is thought to play a role in things like memory and in disorders such as anxiety and depression. Pattern separation was originally observed related to memory, but the authors of this review propose that it may also relate to things like anxiety. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 18089 - Posted: 04.29.2013

By Nathan Seppa The tobacco and fruit mixture smoked in public hookah bars might be considerably more dangerous than its pleasant scent would suggest. An analysis of people who smoked from water pipes three times a day finds that the pipes deliver more carbon monoxide and benzene, a carcinogen, than does smoking half a pack of cigarettes daily. In an upcoming issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers document those and several other cancer-causing compounds that showed up in urine tests of the water-pipe smokers. The research calls into question a common assumption: that hookahs are safe. “This is a great addition to the literature,” says Thomas Eissenberg, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He and his colleagues had previously found toxic substances in hookah smoke. The new paper extends his findings by detecting carcinogens and other bad actors in water-pipe smokers themselves, he says. Hookah smoking goes back hundreds of years in India, the Middle East and North Africa, but it is newer in parts of Europe and North America. The substances heated in a hookah vary. In the study, researchers used pastes chosen by the participants that were 5 to 10 percent tobacco combined with honey, molasses and bits of fruit. This paste goes in the bowl of the pipe, which is covered with a perforated piece of aluminum foil and topped with a burning piece of charcoal, says study coauthor Peyton Jacob III, a research chemist at the University of California, San Francisco. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18088 - Posted: 04.29.2013

The Brain: Our Food-Traffic Controller By KATHLEEN A. PAGE and ROBERT S. SHERWIN IMAGINE that, instead of this article, you were staring at a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. The mere sight and smell of them would likely make your mouth water. The first bite would be enough to wake up brain areas that control reward, pleasure and emotion — and perhaps trigger memories of when you tasted cookies like these as a child. That first bite would also stimulate hormones signaling your brain that fuel was available. The brain would integrate these diverse messages with information from your surroundings and make a decision as to what to do next: keep on chewing, gobble down the cookie and grab another, or walk away. Studying the complex brain response to such sweet temptations has offered clues as to how we might one day control a profound health problem in the country: the obesity epidemic. The answer may partly lie in a primitive brain region called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus, which monitors the body’s available energy supply, is at the center of the brain’s snack-food signal processing. It keeps track of how much long-term energy is stored in fat by detecting levels of the fat-derived hormone leptin — and it also monitors the body’s levels of blood glucose, minute-to-minute, along with other metabolic fuels and hormones that influence satiety. When you eat a cookie, the hypothalamus sends out signals that make you less hungry. Conversely, when food is restricted, the hypothalamus sends signals that increase your desire to ingest high-calorie foods. The hypothalamus is also wired to other brain areas that control taste, reward, memory, emotion and higher-level decision making. These brain regions form an integrated circuit that was designed to control the drive to eat. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 18087 - Posted: 04.28.2013

By VATSAL G. THAKKAR IN the spring of 2010, a new patient came to see me to find out if he had attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. He had all the classic symptoms: procrastination, forgetfulness, a propensity to lose things and, of course, the inability to pay attention consistently. But one thing was unusual. His symptoms had started only two years earlier, when he was 31. Though I treat a lot of adults for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the presentation of this case was a violation of an important diagnostic criterion: symptoms must date back to childhood. It turned out he first started having these problems the month he began his most recent job, one that required him to rise at 5 a.m., despite the fact that he was a night owl. The patient didn’t have A.D.H.D., I realized, but a chronic sleep deficit. I suggested some techniques to help him fall asleep at night, like relaxing for 90 minutes before getting in bed at 10 p.m. If necessary, he could take a small amount of melatonin. When he returned to see me two weeks later, his symptoms were almost gone. I suggested he call if they recurred. I never heard from him again. Many theories are thrown around to explain the rise in the diagnosis and treatment of A.D.H.D. in children and adults. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 percent of school-age children have now received a diagnosis of the condition. I don’t doubt that many people do, in fact, have A.D.H.D.; I regularly diagnose and treat it in adults. But what if a substantial proportion of cases are really sleep disorders in disguise? © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; ADHD
Link ID: 18086 - Posted: 04.28.2013

By LINDA LOGAN The last time I saw my old self, I was 27 years old and living in Boston. I was doing well in graduate school, had a tight circle of friends and was a prolific creative writer. Married to my high-school sweetheart, I had just had my first child. Back then, my best times were twirling my baby girl under the gloaming sky on a Florida beach and flopping on the bed with my husband — feet propped against the wall — and talking. The future seemed wide open. I don’t think there is a particular point at which I can say I became depressed. My illness was insidious, gradual and inexorable. I had a preview of depression in high school, when I spent a couple of years wearing all black, rimming my eyes in kohl and sliding against the walls in the hallways, hoping that no one would notice me. But back then I didn’t think it was a very serious problem. The hormonal chaos of having three children in five years, the pressure of working on a Ph.D. dissertation and a genetic predisposition for a mood disorder took me to a place of darkness I hadn’t experienced before. Of course, I didn’t recognize that right away. Denial is a gauze; willful denial, an opiate. Everyone seemed in league with my delusion. I was just overwhelmed, my family would say. I should get more help with the kids, put off my Ph.D. When I told other young mothers about my bone-wearying fatigue, they rolled their eyes knowingly and mumbled, “Right.” But what they didn’t realize was that I could scarcely push the stroller to the park, barely summon the breath to ask the store clerk, “Where are the Pampers?” I went from doctor to doctor, looking for the cause. Lab tests for anemia, low blood sugar and hypothyroidism were all negative. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18085 - Posted: 04.28.2013

By Russell Foster "Making teens start school in the morning is ‘cruel,’ brain doctor claims." So declared a British newspaper headline in 2007 after a talk I gave at an academic conference. One disbelieving reader responded: "This man sounds brain-dead." That was a typical reaction to work I was reporting at the time on teenage sleep patterns and their effect on performance at school. Six years on, there is growing acceptance that the structure of the academic day needs to take account of adolescent sleep patterns. The latest school to adopt a later start time is the UCL Academy in London; others are considering following suit. So what are the facts about teenage slumber, and how should society adjust to these needs? The biology of human sleep timing, like that of other mammals, changes as we age. This has been shown in many studies. As puberty begins, bedtimes and waking times get later. This trend continues until 19.5 years in women and 21 in men. Then it reverses. At 55 we wake at about the time we woke prior to puberty. On average this is two hours earlier than adolescents. This means that for a teenager, a 7 a.m. alarm call is the equivalent of a 5 a.m. start for people in their 50s. Precisely why this is so is unclear, but the shifts correlate with hormonal changes at puberty and the decline in those hormones as we age. However, biology is only part of the problem. Additional factors include a more relaxed attitude to bedtimes by parents, a general disregard for the importance of sleep, and access to TVs, DVDs, PCs, gaming devices, cellphones, and so on, all of which promote alertness and eat into time available for sleep. © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18084 - Posted: 04.27.2013

By David Levine Sleep deprivation is a quick and efficient way to treat depression. It works 60 to 70 percent of the time—far better than existing drugs—but the mood boost usually lasts only until the patient falls asleep. As an ongoing treatment, sleep deprivation is impractical, but researchers have been studying the phenomenon in an effort to uncover the cellular mechanisms behind depression and remission. Now a team at Tufts University has pinpointed glia as the key players. The researchers previously found that astrocytes, a star-shaped type of glial cell, regulate the brain chemicals involved in sleepiness. During our waking hours, astrocytes continuously release the neurotransmitter adenosine, which builds up in the brain and causes “sleep pressure,” the feeling of sleepiness and its related memory and attention impairments. The neurotransmitter causes this pressure by binding to adenosine receptors on the outside of neurons like a key fitting into a lock. As more adenosine builds up, more receptors are triggered, and the urge to sleep gets stronger. In the new study, published online January 15 in the journal Translational Psychiatry, the scientists investigated whether this process is responsible for the antidepressant effects of sleep deprivation. Mice with depressivelike symptoms were administered three doses of a compound that triggers adenosine receptors, thus mimicking sleep deprivation. Although the mice continued to sleep normally, after 12 hours they showed a rapid improvement in mood and behavior, which lasted for 48 hours. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Sleep
Link ID: 18083 - Posted: 04.27.2013

by Emily Underwood In the cartoon series named after them, Pinky and the Brain, two laboratory mice genetically enhanced to increase their intelligence plot to take over the world—and fail each time. Perhaps their creators hadn't tweaked the correct gene. Researchers have now found a genetic mutation that causes mammalian neural tissue to expand and fold. The discovery may help explain why humans evolved more elaborate brains than mice, and it could suggest ways to treat disorders such as autism and epilepsy that arise from abnormal neural development. In mice and humans alike, the cerebral cortex—the outermost layer of brain tissue associated with high-level functions such as memory and decision-making—starts out as a spherical sheet of tissue made up of only neural stem cells. As these stem cells divide, the cortex increases its surface area, expanding like an inflating balloon, says neuroscientist Victor Borrell of the Institute of Neurosciences of Alicante in Spain. Unlike the small, smooth mouse brain, however, the uppermost layers of tissue in the human brain cram millions of neurons into specialized folds and furrows responsible for complex tasks such as language and thought. Because the human cerebral cortex is generally considered "special," some scientists have hypothesized that the genes that govern its development of cortical folds and furrows are also unique to humans, Borrell says. In studies of neural development in mice, Stahl found that TRNP1 produces a protein that determines whether neural stem cells self-replicate, leading to a balloonlike expansion of cortical surface area, or whether they differentiate into a plethora of intermediate stem cell types and neurons, thickening the cortex and forming more complex brain structures. Based on that discovery, the team hypothesized that varying levels of the gene's expression in mice and humans might account for the varying levels of cortical thickness and different shapes between the two species. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18082 - Posted: 04.27.2013

by Dr. Claire McCarthy April is Autism Awareness Month--and if there's anything that we need when it comes to autism, it's awareness. We need people to be aware of this condition that affects a staggering 1 in 50 children, so that we can understand what causes it, and find ways to prevent it. And we need people to be aware of the signs of autism--because getting help early can make a real difference. Many children aren't diagnosed with autism until they get to preschool, or sometimes even later--and that means important time is lost. The signs of autism can be present in toddlers--and when we find it then, we can get help to those children and their families right away. The trick is in asking the right questions--and acting on the answers. In the practice where I work, as in many other practices, we ask parents to fill out questionnaires about the behavior and development of their children. At the 18 month and 24 month visits, we ask parents to fill out one called the MCHAT (Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers)--that's the tool we've chosen to help us look for autism. It's a list of questions that parents answer yes or no to, questions about how their child acts, plays and interacts with other people. While all the questions on the MCHAT are important, there are six that are most important: Does your child take an interest in other children? Does your child ever use his finger to point at or ask for something? Does your child ever bring objects over to you to show you something? Does your child imitate you? Does your child respond to his name when you call? If you point at a toy across the room, does your child look at it? © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18081 - Posted: 04.27.2013

By Karen Rowan and MyHealthNewsDaily Children at an increased risk of autism may have abnormal structures in the placenta that can be detected at birth, a new study finds. The findings suggest behavioral interventions aimed at social and motor skill development in these children could be started right away, the researchers said. Studies have shown that such interventions are more effective in children with autism when they are started earlier. It's much too early to say that an examination of the placenta could be used as a definitive test for autism at birth, said study researcher Dr. Harvey Kliman, director of Reproductive and Placental Research at the Yale University School of Medicine. Autism spectrum disorders are typically diagnosed when children are ages 3 or 4, or even older. However, if these structures were found upon a child's birth and interventions were started, the child might benefit greatly if they did turn out to have autism, while there would be little downside if a child turned out not to have autism -- it's unlikely they would be harmed by the effort, Kliman said. In the study, Kliman and his colleagues collected samples of placenta tissue from 117 children born to families who already had a child with autism, and compared them with placentas from 100 babies born into families in which no older children had autism. The researchers, who didn't know which placentas had come from each group of children, examined samples of the placentas under microscopes. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18080 - Posted: 04.27.2013

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