By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Recently, researchers in England set out to determine whether weekend golfers could improve their game through one of two approaches. Some were coached on individual swing technique, while others were instructed to gaze fixedly at the ball before putting. The researchers hoped to learn not only whether looking at the ball affects performance, but also whether where we look changes how we think and feel while in action. Back in elementary school gym class, virtually all of us were taught to keep our eyes on the ball during sports. But a growing body of research suggests that, as adults, most of us have forgotten how to do this. When scientists in recent years have attached sophisticated, miniature gaze-tracking devices to the heads of golfers, soccer players, basketball free throw shooters, tennis players and even competitive sharpshooters, they have found that a majority are not actually looking where they believe they are looking or for as long as they think. It has been less clear, though, whether a slightly wandering gaze really matters that much to those of us who are decidedly recreational athletes. Which is in part why the British researchers had half of their group of 40 duffers practice putting technique, while the other half received instruction in a gaze-focusing technique known as “Quiet Eye” training. Quiet Eye training, as the name suggests, is an attempt to get people to stop flicking their focus around so much. But “Quiet Eye training is not just about looking at the ball,” says Mark Wilson, who led the study, published in Psychophysiology, and is a senior lecturer in human movement science at the University of Exeter in England. “It is about looking at the ball for long enough to process aiming information.” It involves reminding players to first briefly sight toward the exact spot where they wish to send the ball, and then settle their eyes onto the ball and hold them there. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17548 - Posted: 11.28.2012

By Christina Agapakis White is a mixture, made by a combination of signals at equal intensity across a perceptual space. White light can be split up into all the colors of the visible spectrum, and white noise covers a range of frequencies within the audible range. Our other senses don’t have as clearly defined ranges of perception. We can’t give a smell, a taste, or a texture a number the same way that a color or a tone can be defined by a wavelength, but a fascinating recent paper shows that by mixing many different smelly molecules at equal intensities, our perception of the odor will converge on “olfactory white.” The researchers created this strangely neutral smell from different mixtures of up to thirty odors, chosen from a set of 86 molecules that represent a wide range of the kinds of things that we can smell. Human “olfactory stimulus space” contains thousands of molecules, from the fragrant and floral to the putrid. We can distinguish and name many smells, but odors don’t map neatly onto a one dimensional spectrum. Sampling the multidimensional stimulus space of odors requires a much more complicated mapping of the smell universe. The figure on the left shows the position of the 86 molecules within two maps of olfactory stimulus space. The first is based on the way that we perceive odors (perceptual space, A) and the second based on the chemical structures of the molecules (physicochemical space, B). The perceptual map is built with data from Dravnieks’ Atlas of Odor Character Profiles of 144 different molecules. Each smell was compared by 150 professional noses against a list of 146 different odor descriptions like “fruity” “etherish” “decayed” or “seasoning for meat.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17547 - Posted: 11.28.2012

By Tanya Lewis A coma patient’s chances of surviving and waking up could be predicted by changes in the brain’s ability to discriminate sounds, new research suggests. Recovery from coma has been linked to auditory function before, but it wasn’t clear whether function depended on the time of assessment. Whereas previous studies tested patients several days or weeks after comas set in, a new study looks at the critical phase during the first 48 hours. At early stages, comatose brains can still distinguish between different sound patterns,. How this ability progresses over time can predict whether a coma patient will survive and ultimately awaken, researchers report. “It’s a very promising tool for prognosis,” says neurologist Mélanie Boly of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, who was not involved with the study. “For the family, it’s very important to know if someone will recover or not.” A team led by neuroscientist Marzia De Lucia of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland studied 30 coma patients who had experienced heart attacks that deprived their brains of oxygen. All the patients underwent therapeutic hypothermia, a standard treatment to minimize brain damage, in which their bodies were cooled to 33° Celsius for 24 hours. De Lucia and colleagues played sounds for the patients and recorded their brain activity using scalp electrodes — once in hypothermic conditions during the first 24 hours of coma, and again a day later at normal body temperature. The sounds were a series of pure tones interspersed with sounds of different pitch, duration or location. The brain signals revealed how well patients could discriminate the sounds, compared with five healthy subjects. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Consciousness; Brain imaging
Link ID: 17546 - Posted: 11.27.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News The possibility that autism is linked to traffic pollution has been raised by researchers in California. Their study of more than 500 children said those exposed to high levels of pollution were three times more likely to have autism than children who grew up with cleaner air. However, other researchers said traffic was a "very unlikely" and unconvincing explanation for autism. The findings were presented in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal. Data from the US Environmental Protection Agency were used to work out levels of pollution for addresses in California. This was used to compare exposure to pollution, in the womb and during the first year of life, in 279 children with autism and 245 without. The researchers from the University of Southern California said children in homes exposed to the most pollution "were three times as likely to have autism compared with children residing in homes with the lowest levels of exposure". BBC © 2012

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 17545 - Posted: 11.27.2012

By JAMES GORMAN For the first time, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report, brain imaging has been able to show in living patients the progressive damage Parkinson’s disease causes to two small structures deep in the brain. The new technique confirms some ideas about the overall progress of the disease in the brain. But the effects of Parkinson’s vary in patients, the researchers said, and in the future, the refinement in imaging may help doctors monitor how the disease is affecting different people and adjust treatment accordingly. The outward symptoms and progress of Parkinson’s disease — tremors, stiffness, weakness — have been well known since James Parkinson first described them in 1817. But its progress in the brain has been harder to document. Some of the structures affected by the disease have been buried too deep to see clearly even with advances in brain imaging. An important recent hypothesis about how the disease progresses was based on the examinations of brains of patients who had died. Now, a group of scientists at M.I.T. and Massachusetts General Hospital report that they have worked out a way to combine four different sorts of M.R.I. to get clear pictures of damage to two brain structures in people living with Parkinson’s. In doing so, they have added support to one part of the recent hypothesis, which is that the disease first strikes an area involved in movement and later progresses to a higher part of the brain more involved in memory and attention. Suzanne Corkin, a professor emerita of behavioral neuroscience at M.I.T. and the senior author on the paper published online Monday in The Archives of Neurology, said that this progression was part of the hypothesis put forward in 2003 by Heiko Braak, a German neuroscientist, based on autopsies. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 17544 - Posted: 11.27.2012

By Maggie Fox, NBC News Seniors who fit in the most daily physical activity – from raking leaves to dancing – can have more gray matter in important brain regions, researchers reported on Monday. The scientists have images that show people who were the most active had 5 percent more gray matter than people who were the least active. Having more little gray brain cells translates into a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, other studies have shown. “People really want to know what they can do to reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Cyrus Raji of the University of California in Los Angeles, who presented his team’s findings to a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. Raji’s team looked at the records of 876 adults, who were recruited into a larger study on heart health starting in 1989. They all got magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans in 1998 and 1999, when they were on average 78 years old, and filled out detailed questionnaires on exercise and other types of activity. Most of them were a little overweight – with a body mass index or BMI of 27. People with BMIs above 25 are considered overweight and at 30 they are considered clinically obese. The researchers found a huge difference in the amount of activity people reported. They were asked about everything from cycling to yard work, dancing and bicycle riding. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17543 - Posted: 11.27.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY For years they have lived as orphans and outliers, a colony of misfit characters on their own island: the bizarre one and the needy one, the untrusting and the crooked, the grandiose and the cowardly. Their customs and rituals are as captivating as any tribe’s, and at least as mystifying. Every mental anthropologist who has visited their world seems to walk away with a different story, a new model to explain those strange behaviors. This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders. Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities. But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people. The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17542 - Posted: 11.27.2012

The long-held view that a full moon or even a new moon triggers psychological problems has been debunked by a study from Montreal. Researchers at the University of Laval's School of Psychology evaluated patients visiting Montreal's Sacré-Coeur Hospital and Hôtel-Dieu de Lévis between March 2005 and April 2008 and found no correlation between anxiety disorders and the phases of the moon — despite, it seems, what 80 per cent of nurses and 64 per cent of doctors surveyed believe. These researchers analyzed 771 individuals who had shown up at the emergency room with chest pains for which no medical cause could be determined. Psychological evaluations indicated many were suffering anxiety, panic attacks, mood disorders or suicidal thoughts. The time of their visit was then correlated with the phase of the moon at that moment. "We observed no full-moon or new-moon effect on psychological problems," said lead researcher Genevieve Belleville whose study is published in General Hospital Psychiatry. The study went on to suggest that health professionals may think there are more mental problems during a full-moon phase due to "self-fulfilling prophecies." © CBC 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 17541 - Posted: 11.27.2012

Philip Ball Learning to read Chinese might seem daunting to Westerners used to an alphabetic script, but brain scans of French and Chinese native speakers show that people harness the same brain centres for reading across cultures. The findings are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Reading involves two neural systems: one that recognizes the shape of the word and a second that asseses the physical movements used to make the marks on a page, says study leader Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. But it has been unclear whether the brain networks responsible for reading are universal or culturally distinct. Previous studies have suggested that alphabetic writing systems (such as French) and logographic ones (such as Chinese, in which single characters represent entire words) writing systems might engage different networks in the brain. To explore this question, Dehaene and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity in Chinese and French people while they read their native languages. The researchers found that both Chinese and French people use the visual and gestural systems while reading their native language, but with different emphases that reflect the different demands of each language. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 17540 - Posted: 11.27.2012

By Scicurious Animals don’t handle stress well. I’m not talking about acute stressors, the predator charging at you through the brush, you run away and it’s over. We handle that stress very well indeed. But severe stress, losing a job, a divorce, a death in the family, these can really wear us down. Severe life stressors can not only impact your physical health, they also often occur before the onset of mental illness, particularly major depressive disorder. Depression takes many forms (lack of interest in activities, sleep changes, eating changes, severely depressed mood), but one of the most debilitating ones is the way that it impacts motivation. While some stressors (like, say, a deadline), might before have been a motivator, making you work to get it done, during depression, these stressors become insurmountable obstacles. Things you did before you couldn’t possibly get done now. You’ll never make the deadline. You can’t run the race. Stress can’t motivate you any more. What has changed? To look at this, Lemos et al at the University of Washington, Seattle, looked at one of the signals in response to stress in the brain: corticotropin releasing factor (CRF). CRF is the first step in the process that eventually allows cortisol to be released into the bloodstream, the molecule we usually associate with stress. You can see at the top of the chain there CRF being released from the hypothalamus. From there the next step in the chain is the anterior pituitary, and from there adrenocorticotropic releasing hormone (ACTH) is released, and stimulates the adrenal glands (sitting in little pads of fat above your kidneys) to release cortisol. But in the brain, it’s more complicated than that. CRF isn’t just released from the hypothalamus to the pituitary, it’s released to other regions, too. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17539 - Posted: 11.27.2012

David Perlman With an ultimate goal to help paralyzed patients achieve a degree of independence, Stanford brain researchers report they have taken a promising step forward in efforts to link nerve centers in the human brain with computers controlled by only a person's thought. In their latest development, the Stanford scientists have successfully enabled a pair of rhesus monkeys to move a virtual cursor across a computer screen merely by thinking about their response to human commands. The monkeys' ability to manipulate a cursor without using a mouse is based on a powerful new algorithm, a mathematical computing program devised by Vikash Gilja, a Stanford electrical engineer and computer scientist. Four years ago, neurosurgeons at Brown University and Massachusetts General Hospital had demonstrated a simpler version of an algorithm that enabled completely paralyzed humans with implanted sensors in their brains to command a cursor to move erratically toward targets on a computer screen. But with Gilja's algorithm, called ReFit, the monkeys showed they could aim their virtual cursor, a moving dot of light, at another bright light on a computer screen, and hold it steadily there for 15 seconds - far more precisely than the humans four years ago. With the new algorithm, they were able to perform their thinking tasks faster and more accurately as they sat comfortably in a chair facing the computer. The development is "a big step toward clinically useful brain-machine technology that has faster, smoother, and more natural movements" than anything before it, said James Gnadt of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. © 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17537 - Posted: 11.26.2012

Alla Katsnelson Human eyes, set as they are in front-facing sockets, give us a limited angle of view: we see what is directly in front of us, with only a few degrees of peripheral vision. But bats can broaden and narrow their 'visual field' by modulating the frequency of the squeaks they use to navigate and find prey, researchers in Denmark suggest today in Nature1. Bats find their way through the night by emitting sonar signals and using the echoes that return to them to create a map of their surroundings — a process called echolocation. Researchers have long known that small bats emit higher-frequency squeaks than larger bats, and most assumed that the difference arises because the smaller animals must catch smaller insects, from which low-frequency sound waves with long wavelengths do not reflect well. That didn't sound right to Annemarie Surlykke, a neurobiologist who studies bat echolocation at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. “When you look at the actual frequencies, small bats would be able to detect even the smallest prey they take with a much lower frequency,” she says. “So there must be another reason.” Surlykke and her colleagues decided to test the hypothesis by studying six related species of bat that varied in size. They captured the animals in the wild and set them loose in a flight room — a pitch-dark netted corridor 2.5 metres high, 4.8 metres wide and 7 metres long, rigged on all sides with microphones and infrared cameras. “It’s a pretty confined space, so this corresponds to flying close to vegetation,” says Surlykke. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17536 - Posted: 11.26.2012

Published by drrubidium Out-of-control libido or drug habit? Take Nervine. Nervous, excitable, wakeful, or restless? Take Nervine. Over-the-counter Nervine wasn't a wonder drug, just a cocktail of the oldest class of sedatives - inorganic bromides. Nervine contained the most commonly used bromides - sodium bromide (NaBr), potassium bromide (KBr), and ammonium bromide (NH4Br). These particular bromides were once so popular that only aspirin sold better. The use of bromides to treat "nerves" was so prevalent that 'bromide' entered the lexicon of common speech. Instead of "calm down", people were instructed to "take a bromide". Instead of calling someone a 'bore', the term 'bromide' was a used to denote "a commonplace or tiresome person". Bromides may owe their sedative effect to a family connection. The element bromine is in the same chemical family as the element chlorine – the halogens. Being a chemical family, chlorine and bromine have similar properties. Both form single, negatively charged ions (monovalent anions) via oxidation-reduction reactions - chloride (Cl-) and bromide (Br-). Chloride is found in nearly all of our cells, having its own set cell membrane-crossing highways (chlorine channel). The regulated flow of chloride (as hydrated chloride) across neuron membranes is key to communication between neurons. Being family and all, bromide (as hydrated bromide) can travel along chloride's highways. But hydrated bromide is a teeny bit smaller than hydrated chloride, allowing hydrated bromide to get into cells faster than hydrated chloride. A flood of anions, such as bromide or chloride, into a neuron makes it more negative than it would be at rest, a state called 'hyperpolarization'. It's hard for other neutrons to stimulate - talk to - hyperpolarized neurons. Less neuron stimulation can translate to a feeling of calm. Thirty-Seven Copyright © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17535 - Posted: 11.26.2012

Smoking "rots" the brain by damaging memory, learning and reasoning, according to researchers at King's College London. A study of 8,800 people over 50 showed high blood pressure and being overweight also seemed to affect the brain, but to a lesser extent. Scientists involved said people needed to be aware that lifestyles could damage the mind as well as the body. Their study was published in the journal Age and Ageing. Researchers at King's were investigating links between the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke and the state of the brain. Data about the health and lifestyle of a group of over-50s was collected and brain tests, such as making participants learn new words or name as many animals as they could in a minute, were also performed. They were all tested again after four and then eight years. Decline The results showed that the overall risk of a heart attack or stroke was "significantly associated with cognitive decline" with those at the highest risk showing the greatest decline. It also said there was a "consistent association" between smoking and lower scores in the tests. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 17534 - Posted: 11.26.2012

A substance made by the body when it uses fat as fuel could provide a new way of treating epilepsy, experts hope. Researchers in London who have been carrying out preliminary tests of the fatty acid treatment, report their findings in Neuropharmacology journal. They came up with the idea because of a special diet used by some children with severe, drug resistant epilepsy to help manage their condition. The ketogenic diet is high in fat and low in carbohydrate. The high fat, low carbohydrate diet is thought to mimic aspects of starvation by forcing the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates. Although often effective, the diet has attracted criticism, as side-effects can be significant and potentially lead to constipation, hypoglycaemia, retarded growth and bone fractures. By pinpointing fatty acids in the ketogenic diet that are effective in controlling epilepsy, researchers hope they can develop a pill for children and adults that could provide similar epilepsy control without the side-effects. In early trials, the scientists, from Royal Holloway and University College London, say they have identified fatty acids that look like good candidates for the job. They found that not only did some of the fatty acids outperform a regular epilepsy medication called valproate in controlling seizures in animals, they also had fewer side-effects. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Epilepsy; Obesity
Link ID: 17533 - Posted: 11.24.2012

By Carrie Arnold Researchers have untangled some of the neurological events that may ultimately lead to Alzheimer's disease. Two new studies show that a protein implicated in this form of dementia can infect other neurons to spread disease across the brain. These problematic proteins clump together, which can lead to cognitive problems. A protein's shape—the way its chains of amino acids fold—determines its function. If a protein misfolds, its structure and function change. In Alzheimer's, researchers have long suspected that misfolded versions of a protein called amyloid-beta might travel from cell to cell and cause more amyloid-beta proteins to take on a deformed shape. To test this idea, biophysicist Jan Stöhr of the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues injected synthetic amyloid-beta proteins into the brains of mice and found that plaques began to form in less than six months. Even when the synthetic proteins were injected into only one side of the brain, over time plaques materialized throughout the organ, the researchers found. “If these aggregates are not cleared by the brain, they will start to recruit more amyloid-beta peptides into the diseased conformation, and the spread throughout the brain begins,” Stöhr says. The results appeared in the June Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. In a separate study using a cell culture, a team of researchers led by Martin Hallbeck of Linköping University in Sweden tracked amyloid-beta transmission from neuron to neuron for the first time. The results, published in the June 27 Journal of Neuroscience, also show that neurons containing misfolded amyloid-beta can cause neighboring, connected neurons to break down, eventually infecting the entire culture. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17532 - Posted: 11.24.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Health officials are warning parents not to use a special device designed to help keep babies in certain positions as they sleep. The device, called a sleep positioner, has been linked to at least 13 deaths in the last 15 years, officials with two federal agencies said on Wednesday. “We urge parents and caregivers to take our warning seriously and stop using these sleep positioners,” Inez Tenenbaum, the chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in a statement. The sleep positioner devices come primarily in two forms. One is a flat mat with soft bolsters on each side. The other, known as a wedge-style positioner, looks very similar but has an incline, keeping a child in a very slight upright position. Makers of the devices claim that by keeping infants in a specific position as they sleep, they can prevent several conditions, including acid reflux and flat head syndrome, a deformation caused by pressure on one part of the skull. Many are also marketed to parents as a way to help reduce a child’s risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, which kills thousands of babies every year, most between the ages of 2 months and 4 months. But the devices have never been shown in studies to prevent SIDS, and they may actually raise the likelihood of sudden infant death, officials say. One of the leading risk factors for sudden infant death is placing a baby on his or her stomach at bedtime, and health officials have routinely warned parents to lay babies on their backs. They even initiated a “Back to Sleep” campaign in the 1990s, which led to a sharp reduction in sudden infant deaths. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17531 - Posted: 11.24.2012

by Greg Miller Hitting the wall in the middle of a busy work day is nothing unusual, and a caffeine jolt is all it takes to snap most of us back into action. But people with certain sleep disorders battle a powerful urge to doze throughout the day, even after sleeping 10 hours or more at night. For them, caffeine doesn't touch the problem, and more potent prescription stimulants aren't much better. Now, a study with a small group of patients suggests that their condition may have a surprising source: a naturally occurring compound that works on the brain much like the key ingredients in chill pills such as Valium and Xanax. The condition is known as primary hypersomnia, and it differs from the better known sleep disorder narcolepsy in that patients tend to have more persistent daytime sleepiness instead of sudden "sleep attacks." The unknown cause and lack of treatment for primary hypersomnia has long frustrated David Rye, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "A third of our patients are on disability," he says, "and these are 20- and 30-year-old people." Rye and colleagues began the new study with a hunch about what was going on. Several drugs used to treat insomnia promote sleep by targeting receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that dampens neural activity. Rye hypothesized that his hypersomnia patients might have some unknown compound in their brains that does something similar, enhancing the activity of so-called GABAA receptors. To try to find this mystery compound, he and his colleagues performed spinal taps on 32 hypersomnia patients and collected cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the liquid that bathes and insulates the brain and spinal cord. Then they added the patients' CSF to cells genetically engineered to produce GABAA receptors, and looked for tiny electric currents that would indicate that the receptors had been activated. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17530 - Posted: 11.24.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Everyone yawns. And we start yawning even before we are born. Now, using ultrasound video recordings, researchers have worked out a technique to distinguish prenatal yawns from the simple mouth openings that we also engage in well before birth. For the study, published on Wednesday in PLoS One, scientists scanned 15 healthy fetuses, eight girls and seven boys, at 24, 28, 32 and 36 weeks’ gestation. They distinguished yawns from jaw openings by the timing of the action and shape of the fetuses’ mouths. In all, they counted 56 yawns and 27 non-yawn mouth openings. By 36 weeks, the yawning had completely disappeared. Why fetuses yawn is unclear — for that matter, it is unclear why adults yawn. In any case, the study’s lead author, Nadja Reissland, a developmental psychologist at Durham University in England, said that yawning in a fetus is different from yawning in adults. “When you see a fetus yawning, it’s not because it’s tired,” she said. “The yawning itself might have some kind of function in healthy development. Fetuses yawn, and then as they develop they stop yawning. There’s something special in yawning.” Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Sleep
Link ID: 17529 - Posted: 11.24.2012

By Wray Herbert In 2009 a regiment of Danish soldiers, the Guard Hussars, was deployed for a six-month tour in Afghanistan's arid Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold. They were stationed along with British soldiers—270 in all—at a forward operating base called Armadillo. Although none of the Guard Hussars were killed during the tour of duty, they nonetheless experienced many horrors of battle. A commander was seriously injured by a roadside bomb, and a night patrol ended in a firefight that killed and dismembered several Taliban combatants. The Guard Hussars' war experience is graphically depicted in the award-winning documentary film Armadillo, which debuted in 2010. It follows the soldiers from their emotional farewells in Denmark through their months in combat and, finally, back to joyous homecomings and family reunions. The film is a study of the inner lives of young men as they experience the excitement and camaraderie, the tedium and—mostly—the terror and trauma of war. Coincidentally, these same soldiers were also the subject of another, very different kind of study. At the same time that the film was being shot, the men were part of a larger group of Danish soldiers who were being scientifically observed and tested for emerging symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. A large team of Danish and American psychological scientists, led by Dorthe Berntsen of Aarhus University, wanted to do what had never been done before in this field of research: instead of studying soldiers who were already suffering from PTSD, they decided to assess young recruits before they were sent off to war, when they were still relatively unscathed, then to record them during the war experience, and finally to follow them back home and through several months of readjustment. In this way, the scientists hoped to see why some soldiers develop PTSD and others do not and how the symptoms of the disorder progress. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17528 - Posted: 11.24.2012