by Colin Barras ON THE face of it, the placebo effect makes no sense. Someone suffering from a low-level infection will recover just as nicely whether they take an active drug or a simple sugar pill. This suggests people are able to heal themselves unaided - so why wait for a sugar pill to prompt recovery? New evidence from a computer model offers a possible evolutionary explanation, and suggests that the immune system has an on-off switch controlled by the mind. It all starts with the observation that something similar to the placebo effect occurs in many animals, says Peter Trimmer, a biologist at the University of Bristol, UK. For instance, Siberian hamsters do little to fight an infection if the lights above their lab cage mimic the short days and long nights of winter. But changing the lighting pattern to give the impression of summer causes them to mount a full immune response. Likewise, those people who think they are taking a drug but are really receiving a placebo can have a response which is twice that of those who receive no pills (Annals of Family Medicine, doi.org/cckm8b). In Siberian hamsters and people, intervention creates a mental cue that kick-starts the immune response. There is a simple explanation, says Trimmer: the immune system is costly to run - so costly that a strong and sustained response could dangerously drain an animal's energy reserves. In other words, as long as the infection is not lethal, it pays to wait for a sign that fighting it will not endanger the animal in other ways. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 17231 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey The human genetic instruction book just got more readable. Nearly a decade after the Human Genome Project assembled the genome’s 3 billion chemical units, an international consortium has revealed how the components fit together into sentences and chapters. Already, the genome’s tales are revealing how genetic variants contribute to disease, giving researchers insights into human evolution and even changing how scientists define a gene. “The questions we can now ask are more sophisticated and will yield better answers than the ones we were asking nine years ago,” says Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which coordinated and funded the mammoth Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or ENCODE, project. Results from ENCODE, which involves more than 400 researchers around the globe, appear in the Sept. 6 Nature, with more than 30 companion papers published in Science, Genome Research, Genome Biology, Cell and BMC Genetics. When scientists announced the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, researchers could pick out genes that carry instructions for building proteins. But that information comprises less than 2 percent of the genome. Some people passed the rest of the genome off as “junk DNA.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17230 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato | The doctors told her she needed surgery — brain surgery. Operations on such a complex organ are never simple, but this procedure was exceptionally difficult. There was a high risk of complications, of debilitation, of post-op problems. Alvarez might wake up paralyzed. She might wake up legally blind. Worse still, there was a chance she might not wake up at all. Her mad dash to the emergency room had all begun with a walk in the park four days earlier. It was December 20, 2010, in Sunnyvale, Calif., a town that lives up to its name. The West Coast winter, not as long or as harsh as seasons in the East, gave her the opportunity to take her youngest child out for an afternoon stroll. In the fading light of dusk, Alvarez, too, began to fade. She lost the feeling in her right leg. Her right foot followed suit. She couldn’t lift or move her right hand. She was weak, and her body was numb. There was fear then, too. At 10:15 p.m., Alvarez says her husband drove her to Redwood City. That night she became a patient at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Hospital. She says the doctors batted diagnoses back and forth. It was a tumor. No, it was cancer. It was Christmas, and Alvarez’s children cried and prayed, terrified that an unknown affliction would steal their mother away. Finally a CT scan revealed the malady. Alvarez had neurocysticercosis — a calcified tapeworm lodged in her brain. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17229 - Posted: 09.07.2012

Problems sleeping may be an early sign of Alzheimer's if a study in mice also applies to people, say researchers. Clumps of protein, called plaques, in the brain are thought to be a key component of the illness. A study, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, showed that when plaques first developed, the mice started having disrupted sleep. Alzheimer's Research UK argued that if the link was proven it could become a useful tool for doctors. The hunt for early hints that someone is developing Alzheimer's is thought to be crucial for treating the disease. People do not show problems with their memory or clarity of thought until very late on in the disease. At this point, parts of the brain will have been destroyed, meaning treatment will be very difficult or maybe even impossible. It is why researchers want to start early, years before the first symptoms. One large area of research is in plaques of beta amyloid which form on the brain. Levels of the beta amyloid protein naturally rise and fall over 24 hours in both mice and people. However, the protein forms permanent plaques in Alzheimer's disease. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers; Sleep
Link ID: 17228 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Susan Milius Caterpillars way too immature for actual sex turn out to detect and take an interest in adult sex pheromones. Caterpillars of the cotton leafworm moth (Spodoptera littoralis) don’t have working sex organs. They’re just long, black-green larvae eating as much as they can before transforming into the completely different body shape and lifestyle of an adult moth. Yet these caterpillars can sense, and appear to like, the adult sex pheromone of their species, an international team reports September 4 in Nature Communications. “This is a funny fact because sex pheromones are supposed to be for sex,” says coauthor Emmanuelle Jacquin-Joly of the French agricultural research agency INRA in Versailles. Adult female moths release puffs of these chemicals, and males catching a whiff — sometimes from considerable distances — sniff their way through the night to the female. Evolution may have repurposed some chemistry in this species, Jacquin-Joly and her colleagues propose. What means “come hither” to adult moths may indicate something quite different, perhaps “here’s food,” to a youngster, she says. She began looking for a cotton leafworm caterpillar pheromone response after another lab found that larval silkworm antennae make the adult-style proteins required to bind molecules of adult sex pheromones from the air and shuttle them to nerve cells. Young silkworms didn’t seem to use the information, but Jacquin-Joly wondered if young cotton leafworms, with a much broader diet, might respond differently. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17227 - Posted: 09.07.2012

Analysis by Sheila Eldred Kids with metabolism problems may be at risk of brain impairment, a new study in the journal Pediatrics suggests. Researchers at the NYU School of Medicine linked adolescents who experienced a few years of problems with metabolism to brain complications. "The kids with MetS [metabolic syndrome] took longer to do tasks, could not read as well and had poorer math scores," lead investigator Dr. Antonio Convit, professor of psychiatry and medicine, said in a press release. "These findings indicate that kids with MetS do not perform well on things that are very relevant to school performance." Children are diagnosed with metabolic syndrome when they have at least three of five health issues: abdominal obesity, low HDL (good cholesterol), high triglycerides, high blood pressure and pre-diabetic insulin resistance. The syndrome, which increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, stroke and coronary artery disease, has risen along with the increase in childhood obesity. To determine how metabolic syndrome might affect brain development, the researchers compared 49 kids with the syndrome to 62 without the syndrome, balancing the groups according to age, socioeconomic status, gender and ethnicity. © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17226 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Ranit Mishori, One of the least fun moments I recall from my years of growing up with an autistic brother was when he bit me on the cheek — just in time for my class photo. I was 12 and he was 11. I went into school with visible bite marks, and when they sat me in the chair for my solo shot, I told them that the cat had done it. That’s one of the bad stories. As for a good one . . . um, to be honest, I have a hard time coming up with much. I know that people are warmed by stories of siblings who selflessly shower the disabled child with love, attention and support. I think that’s great, too. And it’s for real for some siblings. But for many of us, relating to a sibling who is on the autism spectrum can be complicated. The challenges to a warm, close relationship are many. Normal sibling rivalry doesn’t work, because it can never be a fair fight. These are all fertile ground for building resentment. And then feeling guilty about feeling resentment. Because, after all, even as youngsters, we do understand that our disabled sibling cannot help being disabled. The feeling that our needs come second is echoed in the small volume of research on how autism affects siblings. Understandably, most of the scientific focus goes to the child who has the condition. (One in 88 children in the United States has some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17225 - Posted: 09.07.2012

Ewen Callaway A rare, hereditary form of autism has been found — and it may be treatable with protein supplements. Genome sequencing of six children with autism has revealed mutations in a gene that stops several essential amino acids being depleted. Mice lacking this gene developed neurological problems related to autism that were reversed by dietary changes, a paper published today in Science shows1. “This might represent the first treatable form of autism,” says Joseph Gleeson, a child neurologist at the University of California, San Diego, who led the study. “That is both heartening to families with autism, and also I think revealing of the underlying mechanisms of autism.” He emphasizes, however, that the mutations are likely to account for only a very small proportion of autism cases. “We don’t anticipate this is going to have implications for patients in general with autism,” says Gleeson. And there is as yet no proof that dietary supplements will help the six children, whose mutations the researchers identified by sequencing the exome — the part of the genome that codes for proteins. The children came from three families with Middle Eastern ancestry; in each case the parents were first cousins. Studying such families makes the hunt for the rare recessive mutations underlying some forms of autism simpler than it would be among the general population, Gleeson says, because the odds are higher that children will be born with two copies of the recessive mutation. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17224 - Posted: 09.07.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams To run or to hide? For an elk trying to avoid a gun-wielding hunter, the choice depends on personality. Gutsy, bold elk are more likely to sprint faster and farther when they encounter a threat. Others shy away from danger in the first place, shunning human-frequented areas and exploring new places less often. Human hunters more often kill animals that fall into the bolder group, new research has found. And this tendency could put evolutionary pressure on elk populations to become more skittish, the scientists hypothesize. "There has been a lot of work in the past on humans selecting for appearance of animals," says biologist John Fryxell of the University of Guelph in Canada, who was not involved in the study. "What really distinguishes this paper is the fact that it focuses on selecting behavior." Previous studies have found that hunters are most likely to target animals that are the biggest or have the largest antlers. To test whether hunting also selected for elk with certain behavioral traits, researchers led by biologist Simone Ciuti of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, put GPS collars on 122 male and female elk (Cervus elaphus) in the Canadian Rockies and monitored their movement throughout the year. By the end of hunting season, 25 elk had been killed by hunters. The researchers analyzed the GPS data to determine whether the way elk move correlated with whether they’d been killed. Hunters, they found, typically picked the elk that moved more often and traveled longer distances and that were more likely to spend time in open areas. The trend was particularly noticeable for male elk, which had larger variation in their movement patterns. The researchers found much less difference in movement patterns between the killed and nonkilled females. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17223 - Posted: 09.07.2012

Jeannine Stamatakis psychologist John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, once said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select.” If we take Watson's logic one step further, it may be possible to mold someone into a psychopath. Psychopathy, also called sociopathy, is defined by a lack of empathy, deceitfulness and complete selfishness. Current thinking is that although certain genes may predispose people toward psychopathy, their environment seems to provide the ultimate catalyst. Thus, a person who possesses the particular genes associated with this malady and is brought up in an abusive or neglectful household will be at a higher risk of exhibiting the traits associated with this disorder. Severe trauma to specific regions of the brain can cause a person to undergo marked personality changes, such as in the famous case of Phineas Gage. While working as a railroad construction foreman in Vermont in 1848, he survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven through his head, damaging much of his brain's left frontal lobe. Although he did not become a sociopath, the reported effects on his personality and behavior were so profound that friends saw him as “no longer Gage.” An incident two decades ago supports the idea that brain trauma can lead to psychopathic behaviors. In 1991 convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard and kept her as a prisoner in his home for 18 years. Experts believe that Garrido experienced severe brain damage after a serious motorcycle accident as a teenager, which was compounded by intense drug use. Garrido's father said that his son had been a “good boy” as a child but that he had changed radically after the accident and had become unstable. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17222 - Posted: 09.07.2012

By Nathan Seppa Decades of research have linked low-calorie diets with extended survival, but a new report finds that rhesus monkeys on strict diets don’t live longer than their counterparts getting a standard diet. The findings, reported August 29 in Nature, run counter to a 2009 study from the University of Wisconsin–Madison that showed a clear survival advantage in a calorie-restricted group of similar rhesus monkeys. Scientists suspect that differences in the two studies’ designs might explain the discordant findings, leaving the question of longevity still dangling. Both research groups will need to wait another decade or more before all the monkeys live out their lives. But the authors of the new study, conducted at a National Institute on Aging laboratory in Baltimore, say their data are unlikely to change, since calculations show that the chance of a survival difference arising in the remaining monkeys is exceedingly low. “I don’t think one study overturns 75 years of research,” says Steven Austad, a bio-gerontologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, who isn’t part of either study team. But he notes that most previous calorie-restriction studies have been done in short-lived animals. “It’s always been possible that whatever you used to increase their lives might not work the same in long-lived animals.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17221 - Posted: 08.30.2012

By Miguel A. L. Nicolelis In 2014 billions of viewers worldwide may remember the opening game of the World Cup in Brazil for more than just the goals scored by the Brazilian national team and the red cards given to its adversary. On that day my laboratory at Duke University, which specializes in developing technologies that allow electrical signals from the brain to control robotic limbs, plans to mark a milestone in overcoming paralysis. If we succeed in meeting still formidable challenges, the first ceremonial kick of the World Cup game may be made by a paralyzed teenager, who, flanked by the two contending soccer teams, will saunter onto the pitch clad in a robotic body suit. This suit—or exoskeleton, as we call it—will envelop the teenager's legs. His or her first steps onto the field will be controlled by motor signals originating in the kicker's brain and transmitted wirelessly to a computer unit the size of a laptop in a backpack carried by our patient. This computer will be responsible for translating electrical brain signals into digital motor commands so that the exoskeleton can first stabilize the kicker's body weight and then induce the robotic legs to begin the back-and-forth coordinated movements of a walk over the manicured grass. Then, on approaching the ball, the kicker will visualize placing a foot in contact with it. Three hundred milliseconds later brain signals will instruct the exoskeleton's robotic foot to hook under the leather sphere, Brazilian style, and boot it aloft. This scientific demonstration of a radically new technology, undertaken with collaborators in Europe and Brazil, will convey to a global audience of billions that brain control of machines has moved from lab demos and futuristic speculation to a new era in which tools capable of bringing mobility to patients incapacitated by injury or disease may become a reality. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17220 - Posted: 08.30.2012

by Douglas Heaven Nanoparticles often meet a sticky end in the brain. In theory, the tiny structures could deliver therapeutic drugs to a brain tumour, but navigating the narrow, syrupy spaces between brain cells is difficult. A spot of lubrication could help. Justin Hanes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, was surprised to discover just how impermeable brain tissue is to nanoparticles. "It's very sticky stuff," he says, similar in adhesiveness to mucus, which protects parts of the body – such as the respiratory system – by trapping foreign particles. It was thought that the adhesiveness of brain tissue limited the size of particles that can smoothly spread through the brain. Signalling molecules, nutrients and waste products below 64 nanometres in diameter can pass through the tissue with relative ease, but larger nanoparticles – suitable for delivering a payload of drugs to a specific location in the brain – quickly get stuck. Now Hanes and his colleagues have doubled that size limit. They coated their nanoparticles with a densely-packed polymer shield, which lubricates their surface by preventing electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions with the surrounding tissue. "A nice hydrated shell around the particle prevents it from adhering to cells," says Hanes. Using this approach, they were able to observe the diffusion of nanoparticles 114 nanometres in diameter through live mouse brains and dissected human and rat brain tissue. Hanes believes the true upper size limit now lies somewhere between 114 nm and 200 nm. "Things were starting to slow down at 114," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17219 - Posted: 08.30.2012

By Gary Stix Evolutionary psychology has typically tried to identify the piece parts of human cognition shaped by the rigors of natural selection. New questions have arisen in this contentious discipline about what exactly is on that parts list—or whether the list itself really exists. One of the foremost debating points centers on whether the brain consists of a series of Lego-like modules, each one produced from evolutionary adaptations that resulted in mental tools for things like going after Mastodons, forming clans and communicating the daily incidentals related to food, shelter and mating. Another way to think about all this is to invoke the metaphor of a Swiss-Army knife, with each adaptive module the equivalent of a corkscrew, nail clipper or a myriad of cutting implements. The revisionist viewpoint rejects this neat tailoring of mental functioning championed by psychologists like Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Instead, upstarts trot out the human hand as a replacement analogy for the pocket knife, a single all-purpose implement that can poke, prod, pull and push. A walk through the new thinking on evolutionary psychology appears in the Aug. 5 edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B. (The original journal, founded in 1665, was the first anywhere to deal solely with science—and this issue is open to everyone for a download.) The metaphor of the hand, notes Cecilia Heyes of Oxford in an introductory article, alludes to the ability of a limb extension that can “strip the defensive spines from a piece of fruit, making it safe to eat, but in Thai dancing it can also signal the smallest nuances of emotion. The human hand performs with equal facility a vast array of tasks that natural selection did and did not ‘foresee’.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17218 - Posted: 08.30.2012

The stresses of poverty — such as crowded conditions, financial worry, and lack of adequate child care — lead to impaired learning ability in children from impoverished backgrounds, according to a theory by a researcher funded by the National Institutes of Health. The theory is based on several years of studies matching stress hormone levels to behavioral and school readiness test results in young children from impoverished backgrounds. Further, the theory holds, finding ways to reduce stress in the home and school environment could improve children's well being and allow them to be more successful academically. High levels of stress hormones influence the developing circuitry of children's brains, inhibiting such higher cognitive functions such as planning, impulse and emotional control, and attention. Known collectively as executive functions, these mental abilities are important for academic success. Clancy Blair, Ph.D., of New York University, concludes that this altered stress response and its effect on executive function helps to explain one way in which poverty affects children’s development of school readiness skills and later classroom performance. Although poverty is considered a major source of stress, the findings also suggest that other sources of stress may affect children in all income groups — for example, from divorce, harsh parenting, or struggles with a learning disability.

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17217 - Posted: 08.29.2012

Tuning a piano also tunes the brain, say researchers who have seen structural changes within the brains of professional piano tuners. Researchers at University College London and Newcastle University found listening to two notes played simultaneously makes the brain adapt. Brain scans revealed highly specific changes in the hippocampus, which governs memory and navigation. These correlated with the number of years tuners had been doing this job. The Wellcome Trust researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of 19 professional piano tuners - who play two notes simultaneously to make them pitch-perfect - and 19 other people. What they saw was highly specific changes in both the grey matter - the nerve cells where information processing takes place - and the white matter - the nerve connections - within the brains of the piano tuners. Investigator Sundeep Teki said: "We already know that musical training can correlate with structural changes, but our group of professionals offered a rare opportunity to examine the ability of the brain to adapt over time to a very specialised form of listening." Other researchers have noted similar hippocampal changes in taxi drivers as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Hearing; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17216 - Posted: 08.29.2012

Helen Shen Automated assistance may soon be available to neuroscientists tackling the brain’s complex circuitry, according to research presented last week at the Aspen Brain Forum in Colorado. Robots that can find and simultaneously record the activity of dozens of neurons in live animals could help researchers to reveal how connected cells interpret signals from one another and transmit information across brain areas — a task that would be impossible using single-neuron studies. The robots are designed to perform whole-cell patch-clamping, a difficult but powerful method that allows neuroscientists to access neurons' internal electrical workings, says Edward Boyden of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who is leading the work. Manually performing the method on live animals requires extensive training to perfect and, as a result, only a handful of neurophysiologists use the technique, says Boyden, who presented at the conference. He is developing the automated tool with Craig Forest at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and others. “We think that it helps democratize procedures that require a lot of skill,” he says. In May, the group described how a basic version of the robot can record electrical currents in single neurons in the brains of anaesthetized mice1. The robot finds its target on the basis of characteristic changes in the electrical environment near neurons. Then, the device nicks the cell’s membrane and seals itself around the tiny hole to access the neuron's contents. On 24 August, Boyden presented results showing that a more advanced version of the robot could be used to identify and probe four neurons at once — and he says he wants to push the design further, perhaps to tap as many as 100 neurons at a time. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17215 - Posted: 08.29.2012

by David Hambling ROBOTS developed in the safety of a laboratory can be too slow to react to the dangers of the real world. But software inspired by biology promises to give robots the equivalent of the mammalian amygdala, a part of the brain that responds quickly to threats. STARTLE, developed by Mike Hook and colleagues at Roke Manor Research of Romsey in Hampshire, UK, employs an artificial neural network to look out for abnormal or inconsistent data. Once it has been taught what is out of the ordinary, it can recognise dangers in the environment. For instance, from data fed by a robotic vehicle's on-board sensors, STARTLE could notice a pothole and pass a warning to the vehicle's control system to focus more computing resources on that part of the road. "If it sees something anomalous then investigative processing is cued; this allows us to use computationally expensive algorithms only when needed for assessing possible threats, rather than responding equally to everything," says Hook. This design mimics the amygdala, which provides a rapid response to threats. The amygdala helps small animals to deal with complex, fast-changing surroundings, allowing them to ignore most sensory stimuli. "The key is that it's for spotting anomalous conditions," says Hook, "not routine ones." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Robotics
Link ID: 17214 - Posted: 08.29.2012

By Scicurious We’ve all heard of the legendary monogamous prairie vole, haven’t we? Our adorable rodent friend forms the kind of attachments that make us humans feel slightly ashamed of our more promiscuous habits. And of course, if we know about prairie voles, we know about oxytocin (and I’ve got a whole series on it over at the ‘Science! 101′ page of my other site). Prairie voles are monogamous primarily due to the actions of oxytocin in the female, and vasopressin in the male. Without these two hormones, the prairie voles will love ‘em and leave ‘em just like their close cousins, the meadow vole. But is that all there really is to pair bonding? Just one hormone, a desire to stay with your furry mate forever…and that’s it? No, it’s more complicated than that. There are two real aspects to a pair bond. The first is the prosocial bit, the animal preferring to associate with one particular other animal. In voles, this requires the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, and the neurotransmitter dopamine. But there’s another aspect to pair bonding: maintenance. And that requires more than fuzzy feelings, it also requires rejection of other potential mates, and guarding your mate against all comers. This aggressive behavior also involves dopamine, but in this case, a different population of receptors. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 17213 - Posted: 08.28.2012

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS The developmental psychologist Daphne Maurer made headlines this year with research suggesting that people born with cataracts could improve their eyesight by playing Medal of Honor, the “first-person shooter” video game. But her fame goes far beyond the video screen. Dr. Maurer, 56, director of the Visual Development Lab at McMaster University in Ontario, is an author, with her husband, Charles, of the pioneering 1988 book “The World of the Newborn,” an inventory of what babies sense and experience. In recent years she has been directing a study tracking infants born with visual impairments into later life. This longitudinal study is her attempt to learn how early sensory deprivation affects vision over a lifetime. We spoke in person earlier this year and again by telephone last month. An edited and condensed version of the two conversations follows. How did computer games enter your life? Are you a gamer? No, not at all. I’m a reader. My husband and I don’t have children. So computer games wouldn’t be a part of our lives. I’ve never played one. I can’t imagine enjoying playing one. For more than 25 years, I’ve been an investigator on a longitudinal study following the visual development of infants born with cataracts in their eyes. These youngsters went through a period of temporary visual deprivation. They didn’t get any of that early patterning in the world that regularly sighted infants get. As soon as possible, they received surgeries and corrective contact lenses at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, after which their vision improved. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17212 - Posted: 08.28.2012