by Alex Stone In magic, choices are rarely what they seem. Magicians know how to manipulate us into a false sense of free will while really holding the puppet strings. Here’s a simple but clever example of a false choice used in magic. Imagine, if you will, the face of an analog clock and think of any hour on the dial (one, two, three….all the way to twelve.) You have a totally free choice. You can even change your mind if you like. Now we’re going to inject some randomness into your decision. Imagine that your finger is the hour hand and, starting at midnight, spell out the hour you chose, moving your finger clockwise by one step for each letter. (For instance, if you thought of seven, you’d spell out s-e-v-e-n, moving the time forward a total of five hours.). After you’ve done that, your finger will be on a new number. Starting there, spell this number, following the same procedure as before, moving your finger around the dial until you land on yet another number. Repeat the procedure one last time, starting where you left off. Remember the hour on which your finger finally lands. This is your selection. You arrived at this number randomly after making a free choice, so I think it’s fair to say that it would be impossible for me to know where your finger ended up. And yet I’m getting an impression right now. In my third eye, a vision of an old mahogany grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum and hand-painted Roman numerals on the dial. The image is ghostly and pale. I can barely make out the face. The hour-hand reads: One o’clock. This elementary ruse is known as a force. (Try starting with another number and you’ll see why it’s a force.) A force is a way to control a spectator’s selection, be it of a card, number, word, letter—just about anything—and it’s one of the most powerful weapons in magic. There are hundreds of methods. (See for instance, 202 Methods of Forcing, by the great mentalist Ted Annemann.) Forcing gets way more sophisticated, but the basic idea is always the same. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17251 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS It’s widely accepted among scientists that regular exercise transforms the brain, improving the ability to remember and think. And a growing and very appealing body of science has established that exercise spurs the creation of new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis. But just how jogging or other workouts affect the structure of the brain has remained enigmatic, with many steps in the process unexplained. A new study published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may fill in one piece of the puzzle, by showing that male sex hormones surge in the brain after exercise and could be helping to remodel the mind. The research was conducted on young, healthy and exclusively male rats – but scientists believe it applies to female rats, too, as well as other mammals, including humans. The decision to use only males was carefully considered. “We’ve known for a while that estrogen,” the female sex hormone, “is produced in the brain” not just of female animals but also, to some degree, in males, says Bruce S. McEwen, the director of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University in New York and an author of the study, which also involved scientists from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and other institutions. Estrogen has been well studied and has many effects, he said, including, scientists suspect, new brain cell growth. But far less has been known about the role of male sex hormones in mammalian brains, particularly after exercise. While both sexes produce male sex hormones, males produce far more of it – mostly in the gonads but, the researchers suspected, also in the brain. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17250 - Posted: 09.13.2012

by Sari van Anders of the University of Michigan is an assistant professor of neurosciences; reproductive sciences; and science, technology and society. Her lecture is called “Beyond Sexual Orientation: Testosterone and Sexuality Diversity in Humans.” What do you mean by “beyond” sexual diversity? Sexual orientation is often assumed to refer to same-gender, other-gender, or mixed-gender sexual attractions. Despite this, we tend to lump sexual minority individuals and communities together whether they fit into this traditional sexual orientation model (lesbian, bisexual, gay) or not (kink, polyamory). With my talk, I plan to discuss how sexual orientation connects with other sexual minority categories and how testosterone research helps to reframe thinking about sexual diversity. What role does testosterone play in sexual orientation? I study adult circulating testosterone. I’ve found evidence that testosterone is related to something I call “relationship orientation” in men, and “relationship status” in women. In my talk I’ll be discussing how sexual diversity — including interest in multiple partners vs. one partner — might be more meaningfully studied in testosterone research. What’s the most interesting aspect of your research? My research moves across a lot of levels. I will be discussing really science-y stuff like hormones, really cultural stuff like identity and lots in between. © 2009 City Pulse

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17249 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By Susan Milius Snakes in the wild sometimes forgo the mom-and-dad method of reproducing and have babies without having sex, researchers have confirmed with genetic testing. Occasional no-sex reproduction has been seen in captivity among snakes, Komodo dragons and sharks. But until now there has been no conclusive evidence for wild virgin birth among species that normally reproduce sexually, says Warren Booth of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. (In about 80 kinds of vertebrates, a single sex carries on the species quite well on its own.) Booth and his colleagues examined dozens of litters of wild-caught copperheads and cottonmouths. The team found one case in each species of a male baby born without littermates. Genetic testing showed that these babies’ maternal and apparently paternal DNA was identical at multiple locations, making the chances that a daddy snake actually was involved in the reproductive process vanishingly small. The researchers report their findings online September 12 in Biology Letters. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17248 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By Scicurious Scientists like to study choice behavior. It’s an important area of study for lots of different applications, including things like, say, marketing, but also things including mate choice, nutrition, drug addiction, and well…your life is FULL of choices. When you’re at the store facing that huge freaking WALL full of different kinds of cereal? When you decide to hit snooze on your alarm? When you decide to see the dessert menu after dinner? All of these are different kinds of choices, and our brain has different ways of calculating the cost and benefits of each one (or, in the case of mine, going into complete shut down at the sight of that gigantic cereal aisle. I hate that thing). But when scientists study choice and decision making, they often study it in something of a vacuum. Not a literal vacuum, but in an environment with very few variables. You have a rat with a choice of levers or in a maze with a choice of directions. You have a human in a scanner making a choice of two different objects or how much to wager. This is really great for studying how different kinds of decisions are made, but as we get to know more about choice, we have to begin adding more variables. And with choice in real life comes something else: competition. A lot of the most important decisions are made in the presence of competition, like decisions for resources. Find a good patch of berries? Someone was probably there before you. Come across a lovely lady or boy vole you’d like to woo? There’s probably another suitor knocking at the door. So the question now becomes, how does the brain deal with decision making in the presence of competition? © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 17247 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By TARA PARKER-POPE How do we decide whether to trust somebody? An unusual new study of college students’ interactions with a robot has shed light on why we intuitively trust some people and distrust others. While many people assume that behaviors like avoiding eye contact and fidgeting are signals that a person is being dishonest, scientists have found that no single gesture or expression consistently predicts trustworthiness. But researchers from Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell recently identified four distinct behaviors that, together, appear to warn our brains that a person can’t be trusted. The findings, to be published this month in the journal Psychological Science, may help explain why we are sometimes quick to like or dislike a person we have just met. More important, the research could one day be used to develop computer programs that can rapidly assess behavior in airports or elsewhere to flag security risks. In the first experiment, 86 undergraduates from Northeastern were given five minutes to get to know a fellow student they hadn’t met before. Half the pairs met face to face; the other half interacted online by instant message. Then the students were asked to play a game in which all the players got four tokens and the chance to win money. A token was worth $1 if a player kept it for himself or $2 when he gave it to his partner. Players could win $4 each if both partners kept their tokens, but if they worked together and traded all four tokens, then each partner could win $8. But the biggest gain — $12 — came from cheating a partner out of his tokens and not giving any in return. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17246 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By Amr Abouelleil Twenty years ago I joined my high school’s football team and over the next four years became intimately acquainted with pasta – the delicious flavor and al dente texture, the margherita and alfredo sauces that could drown it, and the marvelous butter and garlic soaked breads that could accompany it. I owed the joys of these team-bonding dinners to one of the coaches of my team. What I was too meatball-addled to realize then was that like a pig for Christmas dinner, we were being fattened up – not for the December dinner table, but for the football field. All this because my high school football team had a size problem. Our affluent little town – full of band geeks, video game nerds and lean soccer stars, couldn’t find but a few mountains to hold the line of scrimmage (and those few were bused in from the city). Most of our players were smaller than our opponents – some who produced players who’d later play for Notre Dame. Though it took years of parental indoctrination, I was finally convinced – my coaches had decided to solve the team’s size problem by fattening us up with all-you-can-eat pasta dinners. Ever since then, it’s been my size problem. I’ve done battle with the self-esteem and social issues obesity presents. I’ve had surgery on a disc that ruptured simply because I bent to pick up my jacket from the floor, and every backache since has me worried that I’ll end up under the knife again. Last year, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Then there are the risks I have yet to experience: diabetes, stroke, and coronary artery disease, to name a few. I don’t blame my coaches for this – I doubt they knew any better. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Emotions
Link ID: 17245 - Posted: 09.11.2012

Moms suffering the blues in the months after giving birth may be more likely to end up with kids who are shorter than their peers, a new study shows. Researchers who followed more than 6,000 mothers and babies found that when moms reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression in the nine months following delivery, their children were more likely to be shorter than others as kindergarteners, according to the report published in the journal Pediatrics. In fact, 5-year-olds with moms who’d suffered symptoms of postpartum depression were almost 50 percent more likely than their peers to be in the shortest 10 percent of kids that age. The new research doesn’t explain how kids with depressed moms end up shorter. That’s something the researchers are looking into right now, said the study’s lead author Pamela J. Surkan, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Surkan suspects, however, that depression might get in the way of nurturing. “We think that mothers who are depressed or blue might have a hard time following through with caregiving tasks,” Surkan said. “We know that children of depressed mothers often suffer from poor attachment and the depression seems to have effects on other developmental outcomes. It makes sense that mothers who have depressive symptoms might have reduced ability to take care of infants, that they might not always pick up cues from their kids.” © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17244 - Posted: 09.11.2012

by Sara Reardon You can run from a crow that you've wronged, but you can't hide. Wild crows remember human faces in the same way that mammals do. Crows can distinguish human faces and remember how different people treated them, says John Marzluff of the University of Washington in Seattle. To work out how the crows process this information, Marzluff had members of his team wear a latex mask as they captured 12 wild American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). The crows learned to associate the captor's mask with this traumatic experience. While in captivity, the crows were fed and looked after by people wearing a different mask. After four weeks, the researchers imaged the birds' brains while they were looking at either the captor or feeder mask. The brain patterns looked similar to those seen in mammals: the feeder sparked activity in areas involved in motivation and reward, whereas the captor stimulated regions associated with fear. The result makes sense, says Kevin McGowan of Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Crows don't mind if humans are in their habitat – but they need to keep a close eye on what we do. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1206109109 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 17243 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. When children learn to play a musical instrument, they strengthen a range of auditory skills. Recent studies suggest that these benefits extend all through life, at least for those who continue to be engaged with music. But a study published last month is the first to show that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop. Researchers at Northwestern University recorded the auditory brainstem responses of college students — that is to say, their electrical brain waves — in response to complex sounds. The group of students who reported musical training in childhood had more robust responses — their brains were better able to pick out essential elements, like pitch, in the complex sounds when they were tested. And this was true even if the lessons had ended years ago. Indeed, scientists are puzzling out the connections between musical training in childhood and language-based learning — for instance, reading. Learning to play an instrument may confer some unexpected benefits, recent studies suggest. We aren’t talking here about the “Mozart effect,” the claim that listening to classical music can improve people’s performance on tests. Instead, these are studies of the effects of active engagement and discipline. This kind of musical training improves the brain’s ability to discern the components of sound — the pitch, the timing and the timbre. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17242 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik “There are things in that [wall]paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 1892 The protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffers from the most notable case of pareidolia in fiction. Pareidolia, the misperception of an accidental or vague stimulus as distinct and meaningful, explains many supposedly paranormal and mystical phenomena, including UFO and Bigfoot sightings and other visions. In Gilman's story, the heroine, secluded in her hideously wallpapered bedroom and having nothing with which to occupy herself, is driven to insanity>—full-blown paranoid schizophrenia>—by the woman behind the yellow pattern. As she descends into madness, she comes to believe that she is imprisoned by the wallpaper. Mental disease can aggravate pareidolia, as can fatigue and sleepiness. After a recent surgery, one of us (Martinez-Conde) noticed faces everywhere, in places as unlikely as the ultrasound images of her left arm during an examination of potential postsurgical blood clots. She realized at once that the ubiquitous faces were the product of lack of sleep and the high titer of pain medication in her bloodstream, so she was more fascinated than concerned. Her doctor agreed but made a note in her file for a different drug regime in the future. Just in case. Luckily, the hospital room's walls were bare, and there was no yellow wallpaper in sight. Our brain is wired to find meaning. Our aptitude to identify structure and order around us, combined with our superior talent for face detection, can lead to spectacular cases of pareidolia, with significant effects in society and in culture. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17241 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ MOTHERHOOD begins as a tempestuously physical experience but quickly becomes a political one. Once a woman’s pregnancy goes public, the storm moves outside. Don’t pile on the pounds! Your child will be obese. Don’t eat too little, or your baby will be born too small. For heaven’s sake, don’t drink alcohol. Oh, please: you can sip some wine now and again. And no matter how many contradictory things the experts say, don’t panic. Stress hormones wreak havoc on a baby’s budding nervous system. All this advice rains down on expectant mothers for the obvious reason that mothers carry babies and create the environments in which they grow. What if it turned out, though, that expectant fathers molded babies, too, and not just by way of genes? Biology is making it clearer by the day that a man’s health and well-being have a measurable impact on his future children’s health and happiness. This is not because a strong, resilient man has a greater likelihood of being a fabulous dad — or not only for that reason — or because he’s probably got good genes. Whether a man’s genes are good or bad (and whatever “good” and “bad” mean in this context), his children’s bodies and minds will reflect lifestyle choices he has made over the years, even if he made those choices long before he ever imagined himself strapping on a Baby Bjorn. Doctors have been telling men for years that smoking, drinking and recreational drugs can lower the quality of their sperm. What doctors should probably add is that the health of unborn children can be affected by what and how much men eat; the toxins they absorb; the traumas they endure; their poverty or powerlessness; and their age at the time of conception. In other words, what a man needs to know is that his life experience leaves biological traces on his children. Even more astonishingly, those children may pass those traces along to their children. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17240 - Posted: 09.10.2012

by Carrie Arnold More than a kilometer below the ocean's surface, where the sunless water is inky black, scientists have documented one of nature's most spectacular living light shows. An underwater survey has found that roughly 20% of bottom-dwelling organisms in the Bahamas produce light. Moreover, all of the organisms surveyed by the researchers proved to have visual senses tuned to the wavelengths of light generated by this bioluminescence. The work speaks to the important role self-generated light plays in deep-sea communities, marine biologists say. Bioluminescence has evolved many times in marine species and may help organisms find mates and food or avoid predators. In the middle depths of the ocean—the mesopelagic zone that is located 200 to 1000 meters below the surface—the vast majority of organisms can bioluminesce. Much less was known about bioluminescence in organisms living close to the sea floor. Such benthic organisms are harder to visit or sample and therefore study, says Sönke Johnsen, a marine biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. With Tamara Frank, a marine biologist at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, and colleagues, Johnsen recently explored four sites in the northern Bahamas in a submersible. The researchers collected the benthic organisms by suctioning them gently into a lightproof box with a vacuum hose. Once back in their shipboard labs, they stimulated bioluminescence in the captured organisms by softly prodding the animals. Those that glowed were tested further to determine the exact wavelength of light emitted. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Evolution
Link ID: 17239 - Posted: 09.10.2012

Daniel Cressey Rabbits are the latest focus of work seeking to measure animal discomfort by assessing facial expressions. Researchers working with animals often find it difficult to scientifically assess when their study subjects are in pain. Traditional methods rely on after-the-fact measurements involving weight loss or food and water consumption, or on subjective judgements such as how an animal moves. In an attempt to make pain assessment more scientific, geneticist Jeffrey Mogil at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues developed the 'mouse grimace scale', which was published in Nature Methods1 in May 2010 (see 'Mice pull pained expressions'). The scale relies on the scoring of five ‘action units’ — such as narrowing of the eyes and bulging of the cheeks — between zero (not present) and two (obviously present), with the combined score indicating total pain. The scale rapidly caught on among veterinarians to assess post-operative pain. “I’m surprised how quickly it was adopted as a practical thing to use in real-time for animal care,” says Mogil. Matthew Leach, who researches animal welfare at Newcastle University, UK, and led the work in rabbits, has been working on facial expressions of pain in various animals since the original mouse grimace scale came out. "The only way you can alleviate pain is to be able to identify it, and to understand how much pain an animal is in," he says. "There is a broad interest in grimace scales,” he notes, adding that compared with traditional models, “I would argue it’s potentially better and faster in many circumstances”. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17238 - Posted: 09.10.2012

by Andy Coghlan Muscles that burn energy without contracting have yielded new clues about how the body retains a constant temperature – and they may provide new targets for combating obesity. Traditionally, the body's main thermostat was thought to be brown fat. It raids the body's white fat stores in cold conditions to burn energy and keep the body warm. Muscles also play a role in keeping the body warm by contracting and triggering the shiver response – but this is only a short-term fix because prolonged shivering damages muscles. Now it seems that muscles have another way to turn up the heat. "Our findings demonstrate for the first time that muscle, which accounts for 40 per cent of body weight in humans, can generate heat independent of shivering," says Muthu Periasamy of Ohio State University in Columbus. Surviving the chill Through experiments on mice that had their usual thermostat – brown fat – surgically removed, Periasamy and his colleagues proved that a protein called sarcolipin helps muscle cells keep the body warm by burning energy, almost like an idling motor car, even if the muscles do not contract. All of the mice had their brown fat removed, but some of them had been genetically engineered to lack sarcolipin too. These rodents could not survive when held at 4 °C, and died of hypothermia within 10 hours. By contrast, mice that could make sarcolipin were able to survive the chilly temperatures and maintained their core body temperature – despite having no brown fat. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Muscles
Link ID: 17237 - Posted: 09.10.2012

By Matthew Perrone, Associated Press "Do you have a decrease in libido?" "Have you noticed a recent deterioration in your ability to play sports?" "It could be Low-T." Welcome to the latest big marketing push by the nation's drug companies. In this case, it's a web page for Abbott Laboratories' Androgel, a billion-dollar selling testosterone gel used by millions of American men struggling with the symptoms of growing older that are associated with low testosterone, such as poor sex drive, weight gain and fatigue. Androgel is one of a growing number of prescription gels, patches and injections aimed at boosting the male hormone that begins to decline after about age 40. Drugmakers and some doctors claim testosterone therapy can reverse some of the signs of aging — even though the safety and effectiveness of such treatments is unclear. "The problem is that we don't have any evidence that prescribing testosterone to older men with relatively low testosterone levels does any good," says Dr. Sergei Romashkan, who oversees clinical trials for the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health conglomerate of research centers. Low testosterone is the latest example of a once-natural part of getting old that has become a target for medical treatment. Bladder problems, brittle bones and hot flashes have followed a similar path: from inconvenient facts of life, to ailments that can be treated with drugs. The rise of such therapies is being fueled by both demographics and industry marketing. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17236 - Posted: 09.10.2012

By Elizabeth Quill Half a dozen times each night, your slumbering body performs a remarkable feat of coordination. During the deepest throes of sleep, the body’s support systems run on their own timetables. Nerve cells hum along in your brain, their chitchat generating slow waves that signal sleep’s nether stages. Yet, like buses and trains with overlapping routes but unsynchronized schedules, this neural conversation has little to say to your heart, which pumps blood to its own rhythm through the body’s arteries and veins. Air likewise skips into the nostrils and down the windpipe in seemingly random spits and spats. And muscle fluctuations that make the legs twitch come and go as if in a vacuum. Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently. Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network — run via the group effort of its own muscular, cellular and molecular players — joins the larger team. This change, marking the transition from deep to light sleep, has only recently been understood in detail — thanks to a new look at when and how the body’s myriad networks link up to form an übernetwork. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17235 - Posted: 09.10.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Impossible objects, like those drawn by artist M. C. Escher, don't seem like they could exist in the real world. But Kokichi Sugihara from Meiji University in Kawasaki, Japan, is well known for building 3D versions of these structures. Now a new video shows his latest construction: a gravity-defying roof that seems to attract and balance balls on its edge. When the house is rotated, its true form is revealed. According to Sugihara, this type of ambiguous shape is interesting because we perceive the illusion again even after we have seen what the object really looks like. After studying a variety of these objects, he concludes that our brain seems to choose the most rectangular configuration when it tries to make sense of features that can have different interpretations. The brain trick was presented this week at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Alghero, Italy. If you would like to build your own impossible objects, check out printable copies of Sugihara's designs. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17234 - Posted: 09.10.2012

by Hal Hodson IF YOU can hear, you probably take sound for granted. Without thinking, we swing our attention in the direction of a loud or unexpected sound - the honk of a car horn, say. Because deaf people lack access to such potentially life-saving cues, a group of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon built a pair of glasses which allows the wearer to "see" when a loud sound is made, and gives an indication of where it came from. An array of seven microphones, mounted on the frame of the glasses, pinpoints the location of such sounds and relays that directional information to the wearer through a set of LEDs embedded inside the frame. The glasses will only flash alerts on sounds louder than a threshold level, which is defined by the wearer. Previous attempts at devices which could alert deaf users to surrounding noises have been ungainly. For example, research in 2003 at the University of California, Berkeley, used a computer monitor to provide users with a visual aid to pinpoint the location of a sound. The Korean team have not beaten this problem quite yet - the prototype requires a user to carry a laptop around in a backpack to process the signal. But lead researcher Yang-Hann Kim stresses that the device is a first iteration that will be miniaturised over the next few years. Richard Ladner at the University of Washington in Seattle questions whether the device would prove beneficial enough to gain acceptance. "Does the benefit of wearing such a device outweigh the inconvenience of having extra technology that is seldom needed?" he asks. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17233 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Laura Sanders A single four-month deployment to Afghanistan is associated with brain changes and diminished attention, Dutch scientists report. Most changes went away a year and a half after returning from combat, suggesting that the brain can largely heal itself — and that longer breaks between combat tours might be a good idea. The study, which focused on healthy Dutch soldiers, reveals how the brain responds to stress outside of a laboratory, says clinical neuroscientist Rajita Sinha of the Yale University School of Medicine. “It’s a nice way to start looking at natural high levels of stress we experience as humans,” she says. Although the soldiers came back mentally and physically healthy, in Afghanistan they had fought, come under enemy fire and seen their fellow soldiers and civilians wounded or dead. Researchers led by Guido van Wingen of the University of Amsterdam conducted brain scans while the soldiers performed a lab test that required them to hold several numbers in their memory simultaneously. Initially, the researchers found no brain differences between 33 soldiers who were about to be deployed for the first time and 26 who were still in training. Nor were there differences in a lab task that required intense concentration for several minutes. But the story changed after some soldiers experienced combat, the team reports online September 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Stress; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17232 - Posted: 09.07.2012