by Douglas Heaven A glimpse of consciousness emerging in the brains of babies has been recorded for the first time. Insights gleaned from the work may aid the monitoring of babies under anaesthesia, and give a better understanding of awareness in people in vegetative states – and possibly even in animals. The human brain develops dramatically in a baby's first year, transforming the baby from being unaware to being fully engaged with its surroundings. To capture this change, Sid Kouider at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical activity in the brains of 80 infants while they were briefly shown pictures of faces. In adults, awareness of a stimulus is known to be linked to a two-stage pattern of brain activity. Immediately after a visual stimulus is presented, areas of the visual cortex fire. About 300 milliseconds later other areas light up, including the prefrontal cortex, which deals with higher-level cognition. Conscious awareness kicks in only after the second stage of neural activity reaches a specific threshold. "It's an all-or-nothing response," says Kouider. Adults can verbally describe being aware of a stimulus, but a baby is a closed book. "We have learned a lot about consciousness in people who can talk about it, but very little in those who cannot," says Tristan Bekinschtein at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Consciousness
Link ID: 18047 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Puneet Kollipara Brain research has been on a lot of minds lately in the nation’s capital. After offering a brief shout-out to Alzheimer’s research in his February State of the Union address, President Barack Obama went a step further in April by announcing a decade-long effort to develop advanced tools for tracking human brain activity. The administration dubbed it the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative, and proposed spending $100 million on the program in the 2014 fiscal year. Scientists have discussed such an endeavor for years, and pushed hard for it in the past few months. Writing March 15 in Science, researchers say the project would develop technologies to probe brain activity on a far greater scale and with higher resolution than is now possible. Current tools can monitor only small numbers of individual neurons at a time or capture blurry, bird’s-eye views of brain activity. The new tools would enable real-time mapping of how the thousands or millions of neurons in coordinated groups, known as circuits, work together. Brain functions — and, in many cases, dysfunctions — are thought to emerge from this still poorly described circuit level. “There’s no way to build a map until you develop the tools,” says Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science and one of the project’s proponents. Researchers call for developing three sets of tools to better understand brain circuits. One focus is on the creation of tools to measure the activities of all the individual neurons in a circuit. Another is on technologies to experimentally manipulate these neurons. The third tool set would store, analyze and make the data accessible to all researchers. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18046 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By Neuroskeptic A new paper could prompt a rethink of a technique that’s become very hot in neuroscience lately: Confounds in multivariate pattern analysis The authors are Princetonians Michael T. Todd and colleagues, and the method in question is multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA). I’ve written about this before and there’s a blog dedicated to it. MVPA searches for relatively subtle patterns of brain activity, most commonly in fMRI data. For example, a conventional fMRI study might compare activity when someone’s looking at a picture, compared to a blank screen, and would find increases of activity in the visual cortex. But MVPA might take two different pictures, and see if there’s a pattern of activity that’s unique to one picture over the other – even if overall activity in the visual cortex is the same. Neuroscientists have fallen in love with MVPA (and related methods) over the past 5 years, mainly I think because it’s promised to let us ‘read’ the brain: to not just see where in the brain things happen, but to glimpse what information is being represented. In the new paper, Todd et al make a very simple point: all MVPA really shows is that there are places where, in most people’s brain, activity differs when they’re doing one thing as opposed to another. But there infinite reasons why that might be the case, many of them rather trivial. The authors give the example of two very similar tasks, A and B. We’ll say these are imagining apples and imagining bananas. You scan some people doing A and B. You run a standard fMRI analysis, and find that nowhere in the brain shows a difference in activity, on average, between the two (as expected – they are similar.)

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18045 - Posted: 04.20.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS If you give a rat a running wheel and it decides not to use it, are genes to blame? And if so, what does that tell us about why many people skip exercise? To examine those questions, scientists at the University of Missouri in Columbia recently interbred rats to create two very distinct groups of animals, one of which loves to run. Those in the other group turn up their collective little noses at exercise, slouching idly in their cages instead. Then the scientists closely scrutinized and compared the animals’ bodies, brains and DNA. For some time, exercise scientists have suspected that the motivation to exercise — or not — must have a genetic component. When researchers have compared physical activity patterns among family members, and particularly among twins, they have found that close relations tend to work out similarly, exercising about as much or as little as their parents or siblings do, even if they grew up in different environments. These findings suggest that the desire to be active or indolent is, to some extent, inherited. But to what extent someone’s motivation to exercise is affected by genes — and what specific genes may be involved — has been hard to determine. There are only so many human twins around for study purposes, after all. And even more daunting, it’s difficult to separate the role of upbringing from that of genetics in determining whether and why some people want to exercise and others don’t. So the University of Missouri researchers decided to create their own innately avid runners or couch potatoes, provide them with similar upbringings, and see what happened next. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18044 - Posted: 04.18.2013

By David Brown, As a bioterrorism agent, ricin has the advantage of being easily made and highly potent. But there have been few fatal cases in the past 50 years, and there is little precise information about the substance’s effects on human beings. Ricin is not a microbe. It does not grow inside the body and can’t be passed from person to person. It is a toxin produced by the castor bean plant. When the beans are crushed for oil, the compound is left behind in the mashed material, of which more than a million tons is produced around the world each year. “It is a plant that grows wild throughout much of North America. You can buy the seeds online,” said Jennifer A. Oakes, a physician and expert in ricin poisoning at Albany Medical College. “It doesn’t take much to get a fatal dose. Somebody could do this in their house if they are motivated to.” Ricin’s best-known victim is Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist who was stabbed by an umbrella on a London street in 1978. The umbrella’s tip injected a tiny metal capsule containing ricin into Markov’s leg. He died three days later. Apart from him, the only other ricin fatalities in the past 50 years have been a few suicides and accidental poisonings, usually after castor beans were eaten but at least once by injecting a crude extract. A person needs to take about 1,000 times as much ricin by mouth as by other routes to get a fatal dose. Unlike nerve agents and botulinum toxin, which disrupt nerve transmission and can cause death in minutes, ricin acts slowly. It stops the synthesis of proteins in cells, killing them over hours or days. A person dies of multi-organ failure as cells break down and fluid and essential electrolytes are lost. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18043 - Posted: 04.18.2013

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Laura Ward, 41, had always attributed her excess pounds to the drugs she takes for major depression. So Ms. Ward, who is 5-foot-6 and once weighed 220 pounds, didn’t try to slim down or avoid dietary pitfalls like fried chicken. But in a clinical trial, Ms. Ward managed to lose more than 30 pounds doing low-impact aerobics three times a week. During the 18-month experiment, she was introduced to cauliflower and post-workout soreness for the first time. She and the other participants attended counseling sessions where they practiced refusing junk food and choosing smaller portions. She drank two liters of Diet Dr Pepper daily instead of eight. Eventually, Ms. Ward, who lives in Baltimore, realized her waistline wasn’t simply a drug side effect. “If it was only the medications, I would have never lost all that weight,” she said. People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression, are at least 50 percent more likely to be overweight or obese than the general population. They die earlier, too, with the primary cause heart disease. Yet diet and exercise usually take a back seat to the treatment of their illnesses. The drugs used, like antidepressants and antipsychotics, can increase appetite and weight. It has been a difficult issue for mental health experts. A 2012 review of health promotion programs for those with serious mental illness by Dartmouth researchers concluded that of 24 well-designed studies, most achieved statistically significant weight loss, but very few achieved “clinically significant weight loss.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18042 - Posted: 04.16.2013

A study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health gives insight into changes in the reward circuitry of the brain that may provide resistance against cocaine addiction. Scientists found that strengthening signaling along a neural pathway that runs through the nucleus accumbens — a region of the brain involved in motivation, pleasure, and addiction — can reduce cocaine-seeking behavior in mice. Research suggests that about 1 in 5 people who use cocaine will become addicted, but it remains unclear why certain people are more vulnerable to drug addiction than others. “A key step in understanding addiction and advancing treatment is to identify the differences in brain connectivity between subjects that compulsively take cocaine and those who do not,” said Ken Warren, Ph.D., acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Researchers at NIAAA, part of NIH, conducted the study. “Until now, most efforts have focused on finding traits associated with vulnerability to develop compulsive cocaine use. However, identifying mechanisms that promote resilience may prove to have more therapeutic value,” said the paper’s senior author, Veronica Alvarez, Ph.D., acting chief of the Section on Neuronal Structure in the NIAAA Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience. The study is available on the Nature Neuroscience website ahead of print. In the study, mice were conditioned to receive an intravenous dose of cocaine each time they poked their nose into a hole in their enclosure. Cocaine was then made unavailable for periods of time during the day. Some of the mice would stop seeking the drug once it was removed while others would obsessively continue to poke the hole in an effort to obtain the drug.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18041 - Posted: 04.16.2013

By Sandra G. Boodman, For someone who had been such a healthy child, Nancy Kennedy couldn’t figure out how she had become the kind of sickly adult whose life revolved around visits to a seemingly endless series of doctors. Beginning in 2005, shortly after a job transfer took her from Northern Virginia to St. Louis, Kennedy, then 47, developed a string of vexing medical problems. Her white blood cell count was inexplicably elevated. Her sinuses were chronically infected, although her respiratory tract seemed unusually dry. She often felt fatigued, and her joints hurt. “It felt as though an alien had invaded my body,” said Kennedy, formerly a manager at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “I felt like I was in doctors’ offices all the time.” Tests for possible ailments — including blood disorders, cancer, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis — were negative. For seven years. Kennedy and her primary-care physician, who said she felt as though she sent Kennedy to “every specialist that walked,” had no clear idea what might be wrong. But during a physical in January 2012, her doctor, Melissa Johnson, struck by Kennedy’s trouble walking and her accelerating deterioration, decided to check for a condition not previously considered. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18040 - Posted: 04.16.2013

by Meredith Wadman Fresh from attending President Barack Obama’s announcement of the BRAIN Initiative at the White House on April 2nd, Society for Neuroscience president Larry Swanson, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California, composed this letter to SFN’s nearly 42,000 members. In the 5 April missive, Swanson, writing on behalf of SFN’s executive committee, calls the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative “tremendously positive” for neuroscience. Its aim is to let scientists examine and record the activity of millions of neurons at they function at the speed of thought; ultimately, applications to several human diseases are hoped for. The project comes at a critical time in neuroscience, Swanson writes: a time of huge new opportunities coupled with stagnant or slumping government budgets for basic science research. (In the budget he released last week, Obama asked Congress to provide about $100 million to launch the BRAIN Initiative in 2014.) But the SFN letter makes it clear that Swanson wants a lid put on public criticism of the nascent project, which is expected to last more than a decade and ultimately cost several billion dollars. “It is important that our community be perceived as positive about the incredible opportunity represented in the President’s announcement,” Swanson wrote. “If we are perceived as unreasonably negative or critical about initial details, we risk smothering the initiative before it gets started.” In case anyone missed the point, he adds that he encourages “healthy debate” and “rigorous dialogue” but urges SFN members to “bring all this to the table through our scientific communications channels and venues.” He also notes that the National Institutes of Health has enlisted a team of “distinguished” neuroscientists to conduct a “rigorous” planning process. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18039 - Posted: 04.16.2013

By Jill U. Adams, Urban living may be harmful to your ears. That’s the takeaway from a study that found that more than eight in 10 New Yorkers were exposed to enough noise to damage their hearing. Perhaps more surprising was that so much of the city dwellers’ noise exposure was related not to noisy occupations but rather to voluntary activities such as listening to music. Which makes it hard for me not to worry that when my 16-year-old son is sitting nearby with his earbuds in, I can hear his music. There’s a pretty good chance that he’s got the volume up too loud — loud enough to potentially damage the sensory cells deep in his ear and eventually lead to permanent hearing loss. That’s according to Christopher Chang, an ear, nose and throat doctor at Fauquier ENT Consultants in Warrenton, who sees patients every day with hearing-related issues. “What he’s hearing is way too loud, because it’s concentrated directly into the ear itself,” he says of my son, adding that the anatomy of the ear magnifies sound as it travels through the ear canal. Listening to music through earbuds or headphones is just one way that many of us are routinely exposed to excessive noise. Mowing the lawn, going to a nightclub, riding the Metro, using a power drill, working in a factory, playing in a band and riding a motorcycle are activities that can lead to hearing problems. Aging is the primary cause of hearing loss; noise is second, says Brian Fligor, who directs the diagnostic audiology program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and it’s usually the culprit when the condition affects younger people. Approximately 15 percent of American adults between the ages of 20 and 69 have high-frequency hearing loss, probably the result of noise exposure, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 18038 - Posted: 04.15.2013

By ERIC R. KANDEL THIS month, President Obama unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious initiative to map the human brain, the ultimate goal of which is to understand the workings of the human mind in biological terms. Many of the insights that have brought us to this point arose from the merger over the past 50 years of cognitive psychology, the science of mind, and neuroscience, the science of the brain. The discipline that has emerged now seeks to understand the human mind as a set of functions carried out by the brain. This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience. Consider what we can learn about the mind by examining how we view figurative art. In a recently published book, I tried to explore this question by focusing on portraiture, because we are now beginning to understand how our brains respond to the facial expressions and bodily postures of others. The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth. As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to communicate those mental processes. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 18037 - Posted: 04.15.2013

By Gary Stix People who lose a limb often experience the sensation of still having the missing arm or leg. Phantom limbs, in fact, have spurred a whole line of independent research among neuroscientists. But it appears that all of us may be capable of these sensations, even if arms and legs remain intact. If we can conjure a phantom limb just like that, it raises all kinds of enticing questions for philosophers as well as scientists about what exactly constitutes our perception of the physical self. Karolinska Institute researchers report online in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that they can induce a sensation of a phantom hand in just a short time. Watch this simple experiment here: © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18036 - Posted: 04.15.2013

Nearly half of those with Parkinson's face regular discrimination, such as having their symptoms mistaken for drunkenness, a survey suggests. The survey of more than 2,000 people was commissioned by charity Parkinson's UK. One person in 500 people is affected by the condition in Britain. Parkinson's sufferer Mark Worsfold was arrested during last year's Olympics because police thought he looked suspicious. He was detained during the cycling road race in Leatherhead, Surrey, reportedly because he was not smiling - the condition means his face can appear expressionless. Parkinson's is a progressive neurological condition that attacks the part of the brain that controls movement. The main symptoms of Parkinson's are tremors or shaking that cannot be controlled, and rigidity of the muscles, which can make movement difficult and painful. Speech, language and facial expressions can also be affected. Most people who get it are aged 50 or over but younger people can have it too. The survey found that one in five people living with Parkinson's had been mistaken for being drunk, while one in 10 had been verbally abused or experienced hostility in public because of their condition. Around 62% said they thought the public had a poor understanding of how the condition affects people. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 18035 - Posted: 04.15.2013

By IAN LOVETT WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — A potentially deadly strain of meningitis, which has left one resident brain dead, has sent a shiver through the large gay community here, as public health officials have urged residents to be on the lookout for any symptoms of the disease. Although only one case has been confirmed in the area, officials said, the onset follows an outbreak of deadly meningitis among gay men in New York City. At least 22 men have contracted meningitis in New York since 2010, 13 of them this year, and 7 have died. Health officials have not yet determined if there is any connection between the cases in New York and the one here. But the similarities have ignited fears that this case could be an early sign of a bicoastal outbreak. “The lesson we learned 30 years ago in the early days of H.I.V. and AIDS is that people were not alerted to what was going on and a lot of infections occurred that didn’t need to occur,” said John Duran, a West Hollywood city councilman and one of the few openly H.I.V.-positive elected officials in the country. “So even with an isolated case here, we need to sound the alarms, especially given the cases in New York.” In New York, the city health department issued a warning last month, urging all men who regularly have intimate contact with other men to be vaccinated for meningitis. Officials here have thus far been reluctant to do the same. At a news conference on Friday, Dr. Maxine E. Liggins, with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, warned residents to watch for early signs of meningococcal meningitis, including a severe headache and stiff neck. The disease, a bacterial infection of the membrane surrounding the brain and the spinal cord, can be effectively treated with antibiotics if detected early, although it can intensify quickly. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18034 - Posted: 04.15.2013

Geeta Dayal Earlier this month, Barack Obama unveiled a grand, new U.S. government initiative called BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) that he said would provide “a dynamic picture of the brain in action” and help humanity “better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember.” The brain-mapping effort is set to cost $100-million in 2014, and hundreds of millions more in the years to come. This follows last year’s move in Ottawa to create a Canada Brain Research Fund with up to $100-million in matching funds to the Brain Canada Foundation. For Mr. Obama, it may be a way to put a triumphant stamp on the presidential legacy, but to those familiar with the field, the new program is a question mark. “This sounds like, um, a PR splash,” David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, told National Public Radio. Donald Stein, an Emory University neuroscientist, argued on LiveScience.com that “without specific goals, hypotheses or endpoints, the research effort becomes a fishing expedition.” Mr. Obama compared BRAIN to the Human Genome Project for its potential return on investment. The comparison is also apt on another level: Like genetics in the past decade, neuroscience seems to have reached a peak in the public consciousness. And that’s big business not just for science, but for the media and publishing industries. Peruse bestseller lists during the past few years and you’ll find a host of titles in neuroscience and cognitive or social psychology, from Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Brain That Changes Itself to Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife and How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. The well of material is virtually endless – after all, every aspect of the human experience can be tied, somehow, to the brain. As a result, the hype can be bottomless too. Lately a wave of “neuroskeptics” have been calling for more sober second thought. © Copyright 2013 The Globe and Mail Inc

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18033 - Posted: 04.13.2013

Kristoffer Famm, et al. Imagine a day when electrical impulses are a mainstay of medical treatment. Your clinician will administer 'electroceuticals' that target individual nerve fibres or specific brain circuits to treat an array of conditions. These treatments will modulate the neural impulses controlling the body, repair lost function and restore health. They could, for example, coax insulin from cells to treat diabetes, regulate food intake to treat obesity and correct balances in smooth-muscle tone to treat hypertension and pulmonary diseases. All this is within reach if researchers from disparate disciplines in academia and industry work together. Here, we outline what needs to be done to bring about electroceuticals and unveil a public–private research initiative and an award that we hope will catalyse the field. Electrical impulses — action potentials — are the language of the body's nervous system. Virtually all organs and functions are regulated through circuits of neurons communicating through such impulses1. Two features make these circuits excellent targets for therapeutic intervention. First, they comprise discrete components — interconnected cells, fibre tracts and nerve bundles — allowing for pinpoint intervention. Second, they are controlled by patterns of action potentials, which can be altered for treatment. Already, devices that harness electrical impulses are used to treat disease. Pacemakers and defibrillators save millions of lives each year; deep-brain stimulation dramatically improves the quality of life for people with Parkinson's disease and depression; sacral-nerve stimulation restores some bladder control in people with paraplegia, and vagus-nerve stimulation shows clinical benefits in diseases ranging from epilepsy to rheumatoid arthritis2. But these devices do not target specific cells within circuits. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18032 - Posted: 04.13.2013

By Steven E. Hyman During the past three years the global pharmaceutical industry has significantly decreased its investment in new treatments for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric disorders.1 Some large companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline, have closed their psychiatric laboratories entirely. Others, such as Pfizer, have markedly decreased the size of their research programs. Yet others, such as AstraZeneca, have brought their internal research to a close and are experimenting with external collaborations on a smaller scale. This retreat has occurred despite the fact that mental disorders are not only common worldwide, but also increasingly recognized by healthcare systems. There is, moreover, vast unmet medical need, meaning that many individuals with mental disorders remain symptomatic and often disabled despite existing treatments. For example, people suffering with the depressed phase of bipolar disorder often continue to experience severe symptoms even when they take multiple medications with serious side effects. For some significantly disabling conditions, such as the core social deficits of autism and the cognitive impairments of schizophrenia, there simply are no effective treatments. Because mental disorders are highly prevalent and our ability to treat them remains limited, these illnesses cause enormous societal burden. In aggregate, they are the world’s leading cause of disability.2 In addition, this retreat has happened despite the fact that different classes of psychiatric drugs have been among the industry’s most profitable products during the last several decades—and despite the fact that, according to Medco Health Solutions, one in five American adults now takes at least one psychiatric drug. Among the earliest commercial successes were the Valium-like benzodiazepines, used both as tranquilizers and as sleeping pills. These were followed by the Prozac-like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Most recently, “second-generation” antipsychotic drugs have been among the global revenue leaders for the pharmaceutical industry, serious side effects notwithstanding. That’s why it’s surprising that almost all industry research dollars are invested in cancer, metabolism, autoimmunity, and other disease areas. Copyright 2013 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 18031 - Posted: 04.13.2013

By Meghan Rosen Whether you’re rocking out to Britney Spears or soaking up Beethoven’s classics, you may be enjoying music because it stimulates a guessing game in your brain. This mental puzzling explains why humans like music, a new study suggests. By looking at activity in just one part of the brain, researchers could predict roughly how much volunteers dug a new song. When people hear a new tune they like, a clump of neurons deep within their brains bursts into excited activity, researchers report April 12 in Science. The blueberry-sized cluster of cells, called the nucleus accumbens, helps make predictions and sits smack-dab in the “reward center” of the brain — the part that floods with feel-good chemicals when people eat chocolate or have sex. The berry-sized bit acts with three other regions in the brain to judge new jams, MRI scans showed. One region looks for patterns, another compares new songs to sounds heard before, and the third checks for emotional ties. As our ears pick up the first strains of a new song, our brains hustle to make sense of the music and figure out what’s coming next, explains coauthor Valorie Salimpoor, who is now at the Baycrest Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. And when the brain’s predictions are right (or pleasantly surprising), people get a little jolt of pleasure. All four brain regions work overtime when people listen to new songs they like, report the researchers, including Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18030 - Posted: 04.13.2013

by Patrick Russell Many people who have had a limb amputated report feeling sensations that appear to come from their missing arm or leg. Now researchers have found that anyone can experience having such a phantom limb. "Previous research shows that you can convince a person that a rubber hand is their own by putting it on a table in front of them and stroking it in synchrony with their real hand," explains Arvid Guterstam at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who led the study. The illusion does not work with a block of wood, he says. "But our study shows that if you take away this rubber hand, people will attribute sensations to an invisible entity." Guterstam and his colleagues made volunteers sit at a table with their right arm hidden from view behind a screenMovie Camera. An experimenter then applied brush strokes to the concealed hand and, simultaneously, to a portion of empty space in full view of each volunteer. "We discovered that most participants, within less than a minute, transfer the sensation of touch to the region of empty space where they see the paintbrush move, and experience an invisible hand in that position," says Guterstam. Mock stabbing Experimenters also mimicked stabbing the phantom hand with a kitchen knife, while monitoring volunteers' stress level. To minimise any effect related to seeing the knife for the first time, the volunteers were warned that it would be used at some point. The researchers found that during the mock stabbing, stress levels, measured using a type of sweat test, went up in about 75 per cent of the 234 participants. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 18029 - Posted: 04.13.2013

By Bill Andrews In a paper sure to please lazy stand-up comics and beleaguered husbands everywhere, scientists say that men do indeed have a hard time understanding women. Recent results show that men have a significantly harder time recognizing women’s emotions than they do men’s, and that men seem to use different parts of their brain when ascribing intentions and feelings to women versus men. Previous experiments had suggested that men are naturally wired to be more intuitive toward other men’s mental states and emotions. Eager to figure out why and how this could be, the researchers studied the brains of 22 male participants as they received a version of a well-known empathy test called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.” (You can take a version of the test online here.) As the name suggests, the test consists of snapshots of pairs of eyes. Pairs of eyes were shown in succession to each participant, who had to determine either the gender or the emotional state of the person pictured. This all took place within an MRI machine, allowing the researchers to see which parts of the brain were active while participants made their determinations. Participants were about equally good at guessing the gender of male and female eyes, but the men did significantly worse at recognizing the emotions of the female eyes. They correctly interpreted about 87 percent of men’s eyes but only about 76 percent of women’s eyes. Participants also took longer to judge women’s emotions—about 40 milliseconds longer on average. Thus, in effect, men can “read” other men’s eyes faster and better, the researchers report in PLOS ONE.

Keyword: Emotions; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18028 - Posted: 04.13.2013