By Alyssa A. Botelho When Jerry Berrier dreams, he hears and touches and smells and talks, but he doesn’t see. Blind since birth, he rarely remembers his dreams, however, because his sleep has been so poor. At 15, Berrier had both of his eyes removed and lost the little light perception he had as a child. Ever since, the Everett resident, now 60, has battled a vicious sleep cycle — a few days of sleep followed by weeks of hardly any. The bouts of sleeplessness come suddenly and subside without warning. When they hit, Berrier can’t sleep more than a couple hours a night, no matter how tired he is. Though physicians haven’t given him a formal diagnosis, scientists believe he suffers from a rare condition called non-24 sleep-wake disorder, or “non-24.” The chronic condition is characterized by a body clock that is out of synch with the 24-hour cycle of the Earth day. Non-24 can affect those with normal vision, but it especially plagues the totally blind who can’t perceive light, the strongest external signal that keeps the brain’s sleep-wake cycle aligned to the pattern of night and day. Of approximately 100,000 totally blind people in the United States, anywhere from 55 percent to 70 percent of them may suffer from non-24, according to Harvard neuroscientist Steven Lockley, one of the lead researchers in an ongoing clinical trial investigating sleep disorders in the blind. With 25 sites around the country, it’s the largest study of non-24 to date. Berrier is a participant in Boston. The toll of having an internal clock in competition with the 24-hour world can be high, adding another layer of challenge to life without sight. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 17514 - Posted: 11.20.2012

By BENEDICT CAREY Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work out of their home in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it. The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes. “I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.” In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA. The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17513 - Posted: 11.20.2012

By Scicurious Last week, Sci covered a paper on the nematode “version” of oxytocin, nematocin, and its role in learning behavior. We usually think of oxytocin-like peptides (including oxytocin and vasopressin), as being linked with emotion, trust, love, and of course, sex. But oxytocin also tends to get a lot of hype, especially as the “love”‘ or “trust” hormone. But it’s not that. It’s much more complicated than that. And understanding the evolution of oxytocin, and its very long history, allows us to understand HOW much more complicated than that. Because while nematodes have an oxytocin-like molecule that has roles in learning behavior…well it also has roles in mating. But I wouldn’t go do far as to call nematocin (oxytocin + nematode = nematocin!) the nematode love drug. Unless, of course, you believe nematodes have deep, passionate, trusting, and communicative one-night worm stands which commence upon immediate contact and end immediately after. Hey, you never know. This happens to be an interesting issue of Science, in which TWO papers were published, both identifying nematocin, at the same time. As they both call the new molecule nematocin, I have hopes that the two groups were happily collaborating with each other to further the interests of science (though I know that many times, when two groups find the name new, hot thing, it’s often a very bitter race to publish). So what is nematocin? Nematocin appears to be a chemical closely related to oxytocin and vasopressin, those much vaunted chemical in mammals which are making so much press for their role in our emotions and moral behavior. But oxytocin and vasopressin are both more complicated than emotion. Vasopressin, for example, plays a role in water balance. And it appears that the newly discovered nematocin in the nematode C. elegans may be similar, with more than one role in more than one system. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17512 - Posted: 11.20.2012

By Bruce Bower MINNEAPOLIS — Baboons use the order of regularly appearing letter pairs to tell words from nonwords, new evidence suggests. Psychologist Jonathan Grainger of the University of Aix-Marseille reported earlier this year that baboons can learn to tell real four-letter words from nonsense words (SN: 5/5/12, p. 5). But whether these animals detect signature letter combinations that enable their impressive word feats has been tough to demonstrate. Monkeys that previously learned to excel on this task are more likely to mistake nonwords created by reversing two letters of a word they already recognize as real, much as literate people do, Grainger reported November 16 at the Psychonomics Society annual meeting. “Letters played a role in baboons’ word knowledge,” Grainger concluded. “This is a starting point for determining how they discriminate words from nonwords.” Grainger’s team tested the six baboons in their original investigation. Some of the monkeys had previously learned to recognize many more words than others. In new trials, the best word identifiers made more errors than their less successful peers when shown nonwords that differed from known words by a reversed letter combination, such as WSAP instead of WASP and KTIE instead of KITE. Grainger’s team fed the same series of words and nonwords into a computer simulation of the experiment. The computer model best reproduced the animals’ learning curves when endowed with a capacity for tracking letter combinations. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17511 - Posted: 11.20.2012

by Sid Perkins If you play sounds of many different frequencies at the same time, they combine to produce neutral "white noise." Neuroscientists say they have created an analogous generic scent by blending odors. Such "olfactory white" might rarely, if ever, be found in nature, but it could prove useful in research, other scientists say. Using just a few hundred types of biochemical receptors, each of which respond to just a few odorants, the human nose can distinguish thousands of different odors. Yet humans can't easily identify the individual components of a mixture, even when they can identify the odors alone, says Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Now, he and his colleagues suggest, various blends made up of a large number of odors all begin to smell the same—even when the blends share no common components. For their study, the researchers used 86 nontoxic odorants that had a wide variety of chemical and physical properties such as molecular structure, molecular weight, and volatility. Those chemicals also spanned a perceptual scale from "pleasant" to "unpleasant" and another such scale on which scents were judged to range from "edible" to "poisonous." The researchers then diluted the chemicals so that their odors were equally intense. Finally, they created mixtures by dripping individual odorants onto separate regions of an absorptive pad in a jar, a technique that prevented the substances from reacting in liquid form to create new substances or odors. The odor blends contained anywhere from one to 43 of the chemicals, Sobel says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17510 - Posted: 11.20.2012

Scientists have reversed paralysis in dogs after injecting them with cells grown from the lining of their nose. The pets had all suffered spinal injuries which prevented them from using their back legs. The Cambridge University team is cautiously optimistic the technique could eventually have a role in the treatment of human patients. The study is the first to test the transplant in "real-life" injuries rather than laboratory animals. The only part of the body where nerve fibres continue to grow in adults is the olfactory system. Found in the at the back of the nasal cavity, olfactory ensheathing cells (OEC) surround the receptor neurons that both enable us to smell and convey these signals to the brain. The nerve cells need constant replacement which is promoted by the OECs. For decades scientists have thought OECs might be useful in spinal cord repair. Initial trials using OECs in humans have suggested the procedure is safe. In the study, funded by the Medical Research Council and published in the neurology journal Brain, the dogs had olfactory ensheathing cells from the lining of their nose removed. These were grown and expanded for several weeks in the laboratory. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Regeneration; Stem Cells
Link ID: 17509 - Posted: 11.19.2012

By Maggie Fox, NBC News Researchers trying to find a way to treat multiple sclerosis think they’ve come up with an approach that could not only help patients with MS, but those with a range of so-called autoimmune diseases, from type-1 diabetes to psoriasis, and perhaps even food allergies. So far it’s only worked in mice, but it has worked especially well. And while mice are different from humans in many ways, their immune systems are quite similar. “If this works, it is going to be absolutely fantastic,” said Bill Heetderks, who directs outside research at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the research. “Even if it doesn’t work, it’s going to be another step down the road.” In autoimmune disease, the body’s immune cells mistakenly attack and destroy healthy tissue. In MS, it’s the fatty protective sheath around the nerves; in type-1 or juvenile diabetes it’s cells in the pancreas that make insulin; in rheumatoid arthritis it’s tissue in the joint. Currently, the main treatment is to suppress the immune system, an approach that can leave patients vulnerable to infections and cancer. The new treatment re-educates the immune cells so they stop the attacks. The approach uses tiny little balls called nanoparticles made of the same material used to make surgical sutures that dissolve harmlessly in the body. They’re attached to little bits of the protein that the immune cells are attacking, the researchers report in Sunday’s issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology. © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 17508 - Posted: 11.19.2012

By JUSTIN HECKERT The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, “I just put my fingers in!” Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. “Oh, my lord!” she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse. “I showed her how to get another utensil and fish the spoon out,” Tara said with a weary laugh when she recounted the story to me two months later. “Another thing,” she said, “she’s starting to use flat irons for her hair, and those things get superhot.” Tara was sitting on the couch in a T-shirt printed with the words “Camp Painless But Hopeful.” Ashlyn was curled on the living-room carpet crocheting a purse from one of the skeins of yarn she keeps piled in her room. Her 10-year-old sister, Tristen, was in the leather recliner, asleep on top of their father, John Blocker, who stretched out there after work and was slowly falling asleep, too. The house smelled of the homemade macaroni and cheese they were going to have for dinner. A South Georgia rainstorm drummed the gutters, and lightning illuminated the batting cage and the pool in the backyard. Without lifting her eyes from the crochet hooks in her hands, Ashlyn spoke up to add one detail to her mother’s story. “I was just thinking, What did I just do?” she said. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17507 - Posted: 11.19.2012

Richard A. Lovett Scientists have known for years that human medications, from anti-inflammatories to the hormones in birth-control pills, are ending up in waterways and affecting fish and other aquatic organisms. But researchers are only beginning to compile the many effects that those drugs seem to be having. And it isn't good news for the fish. One such drug, fluoxetine, is the active ingredient in the antidepressant Prozac. Like some other pharmaceuticals, fluoxetine is excreted in the urine of people taking it, and reaches lakes and waterways through sewage-treatment plants that are unequipped to remove it. To investigate the effects of fluoxetine, researchers have turned to a common US freshwater fish species called the fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas). Normally, fathead minnows show a complex mating behaviour, with males building the nests that females visit to lay their eggs. Once the eggs are laid and fertilized, the males tend to them by cleaning away any fungus or dead eggs. But when fluoxetine is added to the water, all of this changes, said Rebecca Klaper, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Great Lakes Water Institute. Klaper presented her results this week at the 2012 meeting of the North American division of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Long Beach, California. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17506 - Posted: 11.19.2012

by Sara Reardon , Debora MacKenzie and Jessica Griggs TWO states in the US are now more cannabis-friendly than many parts of Europe. Thanks to ballot initiatives passed by Colorado and Washington last week, people there now have legal access to as much recreational marijuana as they can grow, sell or smoke. This is still illegal under US federal law, but if the states are left alone, the legalisation could launch a living experiment into how people behave when drug laws are relaxed, and into the public-health implications and the effect on the drug cartels. "The Feds now have to decide whether to make that experiment impossible," says Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Obama administration has yet to give its response to the votes, but a statement from the US Drug Enforcement Agency, which treats marijuana as an illegal drug, said: "The department's enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged." Robert Mikos of Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, says that federal agencies have the authority to arrest anyone possessing marijuana, but they cannot stop the states from passing the laws, or make the states enforce federal law. Still, the federal government could make life very difficult for the new industry, Mikos says, by seizing growers' assets or prohibiting banks from opening accounts for people committing federal crimes. But even if the US government does crack down, Mikos says, it is not going to make much of a difference. "It will put a dent in the industry, but it will also affect the shape of it." Small businesses will learn how to fly under the radar, he says, and state regulators will have to craft their new laws around federal law. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17505 - Posted: 11.19.2012

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Jorge Cham draws the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper at www.phdcomics.com. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17504 - Posted: 11.19.2012

By Laura Beil Kotex, the company that first capitalized on the concept of “feminine hygiene” more than 90 years ago, recently gained newfound success after it began targeting an underserved market: girls who start their periods before they start middle school. With hearts, swirls and sparkles, the U brand offers maxi pads and tampons for — OMG! — girls as young as 8, promoted through a neon-hued website with chatty girl-to-girl messages and breezy videos. “When I had my first period I was prepared,” reads one testimonial. “It was the summer before 4th grade….” Today it has become common for girls to enter puberty before discovering Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Over the second half of the 20th century, the average age for girls to begin breast development has dropped by a year or more in the industrialized world. And the age of first menstruation, generally around 12, has advanced by a matter of months. Hispanic and black girls may be experiencing an age shift much more pronounced. The idea of an entire generation maturing faster once had a strong cadre of doubters. In fact, after one of the first studies to warn of earlier puberty in American girls was published in 1997, skeptics complained in the journal Pediatrics that “many of us in the field of pediatric endocrinology believe that it is premature to conclude that the normal age of puberty is occurring earlier.” Today, more than 15 years later, a majority of doctors appear to have come around to the idea. Have a conversation with a pediatric endocrinologist, and it isn’t long before you hear the phrase “new normal.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17503 - Posted: 11.19.2012

by Douglas Heaven MEANINGS of words can be hard to locate when they are on the tip of your tongue, let alone in the brain. Now, for the first time, patterns of brain activity have been matched with the meanings of specific words. The discovery is a step forward in our attempts to read thoughts from brain activity alone, and could help doctors identify awareness in people with brain damage. Machines can already eavesdrop on our brains to distinguish which words we are listening toMovie Camera, but Joao Correia at Maastricht University in the Netherlands wanted to get beyond the brain's representation of the words themselves and identify the activity that underlies their meaning. Somewhere in the brain, he hypothesised, written and spoken representations of words are integrated and meaning is processed. "We wanted to find the hub," he says. To begin the hunt, Correia and his colleagues used an fMRI scanner to study the brain activity of eight bilingual volunteers as they listened to the names of four animals, bull, horse, shark and duck, spoken in English. The team monitored patterns of neural activity in the left anterior temporal cortex - known to be involved in a range of semantic tasks - and trained an algorithm to identify which word a participant had heard based on the pattern of activity. Since the team wanted to pinpoint activity related to meaning, they picked words that were as similar as possible - all four contain one syllable and belong to the concept of animals. They also chose words that would have been learned at roughly the same time of life and took a similar time for the brain to process. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Brain imaging
Link ID: 17502 - Posted: 11.17.2012

By GINA KOLATA He learned there was a new brain scan to diagnose the disease and nervously agreed to get her one, secretly hoping it would lay his fears to rest. In June, his wife became what her doctor says is the first private patient in Arizona to have the test. “The scan was floridly positive,” said her doctor, Adam S. Fleisher, director of brain imaging at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix. The Jimenezes have struggled ever since to deal with this devastating news. They are confronting a problem of the new era of Alzheimer’s research: The ability to detect the disease has leapt far ahead of treatments. There are none that can stop or even significantly slow the inexorable progression to dementia and death. Families like the Jimenezes, with no good options, can only ask: Should they live their lives differently, get their affairs in order, join a clinical trial of an experimental drug? “I was hoping the scan would be negative,” Mr. Jimenez said. “When I found out it was positive, my heart sank.” The new brain scan technology, which went on the market in June, is spreading fast. There are already more than 300 hospitals and imaging centers, located in most major metropolitan areas, that are ready to perform the scans, according to Eli Lilly, which sells the tracer used to mark plaque for the scan. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 17501 - Posted: 11.17.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Improving your mathematical skills could now be as easy as playing a Kinect video game in a hat. In preliminary tests of the system, developed by Roi Cohen Kadosh and colleagues from the University of Oxford, participants were better with numbers after just two days of training. In this video, our technology features editor Sally Adee gives the game a go while testing a new cap that wirelessly delivers electrical brain stimulation. The device is controlled by a computer, which controls things like the duration of the zapping. Although it can stimulate various brain regions, in this case it sends current to the right parietal cortex. "The parietal region is involved in numerical understanding," says Cohen Kadosh. "So amplifying the function of this region should lead to a better performance." So far, the team has shown that brain stimulation while doing computer-based mathematics exercises helped maintain better mathematical skills in adults even six months later. But Cohen Kadosh thinks that the Kinect game is much more promising as a training tool because it's fun and engaging. By requiring a player to represent a fraction by moving their body to position it on a line, the gameplay also integrates three key components linked to mathematical ability: numerical understanding, the ability to perceive the spatial relationship of visual representations and embodiment. Cohen Kadosh believes this enhances the training. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17500 - Posted: 11.17.2012

By Laura Sanders The insidious spread of an abnormal protein may be behind Parkinson’s disease, a study in mice suggests. A harmful version of the protein crawls through the brains of healthy mice, killing brain cells and damaging the animals’ balance and coordination, researchers report in the Nov. 16 Science. If a similar process happens in humans, the results could eventually point to ways to stop Parkinson’s destruction in the brain. “I really think that this model will increase our ability to come up with Parkinson’s disease therapies,” says study coauthor Virginia Lee of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia. The new study targets a hallmark of Parkinson’s disease — clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein. The clumps, called Lewy bodies, pile up inside nerve cells in the brain and cause trouble, particularly in cells that make dopamine, a chemical messenger that helps control movement. Death of these dopamine-producing cells leads to the characteristic tremors and muscle rigidity seen in people with Parkinson’s. Lee and her team injected alpha-synuclein into the brains of healthy mice. After 30 days, the protein had spread to connected brain regions, suggesting that rouge alpha-synuclein moves from cell to cell, the scientists found. Months later, the spreading was even more extensive. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 17499 - Posted: 11.17.2012

Daniel Cressey Rappers making up rhymes on the fly while in a brain scanner have provided an insight into the creative process. Freestyle rapping — in which a performer improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics — is a highly prized skill in hip hop. But instead of watching a performance in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues had 12 rappers freestyle in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The artists also recited a set of memorized lyrics chosen by the researchers. By comparing the brain scans from rappers taken during freestyling to those taken during the rote recitation, they were able to see which areas of the brain are used during improvisation. The study is published today in Scientific Reports1. The results parallel previous imaging studies in which Braun and Charles Limb, a doctor and musician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, looked at fMRI scans from jazz musicians2. Both sets of artists showed lower activity in part of their frontal lobes called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation, and increased activity in another area, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The areas that were found to be ‘deactivated’ are associated with regulating other brain functions. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging; Laterality
Link ID: 17498 - Posted: 11.17.2012

by Douglas Heaven All the better to hear you with, my dear. A chance discovery has revealed that some insects have evolved mammal-like ears, with an analogous three-part structure that includes a fluid-filled vessel similar to the mammalian cochlea. Fernando Montealegre-Z at the University of Lincoln, UK, and colleagues were studying the vibration of the tympanal membrane – a taut membrane that works like an eardrum – in the foreleg of Copiphora gorgonensis, a species of katydid from the South American rainforest, when they noticed tiny vibrations in the rigid cuticle behind the membrane. When they dissected the leg behind that membrane, they unexpectedly burst a vessel filled with high-pressure fluid. The team analysed the fluid to confirm that it was not part of the insect's circulatory system and concluded instead that it played a cochlea-like role in sound detection. In most insects, sound vibrations transmit directly to neuronal sensors which sit behind the tympanal membrane. Mammals have evolved tiny bones called ossicles that transfer vibrations from the eardrum to the fluid-filled cochlea. The analogous structure in the katydid is a vibrating plate, exposed to the air on one side and fluid on the other. Smallest ear In mammals, the cochlea analyses a sound's frequency – how high or low it is – and the new structure found by the team appears to do the same job. Spanning only 600 micrometres, it is the smallest known ear of its kind in nature. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 17497 - Posted: 11.17.2012

Mo Costandi Albert Einstein is considered to be one of the most intelligent people that ever lived, so researchers are naturally curious about what made his brain tick. Photographs taken shortly after his death, but never before analysed in detail, have now revealed that Einstein’s brain had several unusual features, providing tantalizing clues about the neural basis of his extraordinary mental abilities1. While doing Einstein's autopsy, the pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the physicist's brain and preserved it in formalin. He then took dozens of black and white photographs of it before it was cut up into 240 blocks. He then took tissue samples from each block, mounted them onto microscope slides and distributed the slides to some of the world’s best neuropathologists. The autopsy revealed that Einstein’s brain was smaller than average and subsequent analyses showed all the changes that normally occur with ageing. Nothing more was analysed, however. Harvey stored the brain fragments in a formalin-filled jar in a cider box kept under a beer cooler in his office. Decades later, several researchers asked Harvey for some samples, and noticed some unusual features when analysing them. A study done in 1985 showed that two parts of his brain contained an unusually large number of non-neuronal cells called glia for every neuron2. And one published more than a decade later showed that the parietal lobe lacks a furrow and a structure called the operculum3. The missing furrow may have enhanced the connections in this region, which is thought to be involved in visuo-spatial functions and mathematical skills such as arithmetic. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging; Intelligence
Link ID: 17496 - Posted: 11.17.2012

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times If retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus had gotten an occasional dose of supplemental oxytocin, a brain chemical known to promote trust and bonding, he might still be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, new research suggests. A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience has uncovered a surprising new property of oxytocin, finding that when men in monogamous relationships got a sniff of the stuff, they subsequently put a little extra space between themselves and an attractive woman they'd just met. Oxytocin didn't have the same effect on single heterosexual men, who comfortably parked themselves between 21 and 24 inches from the comely female stranger. The men who declared themselves in "stable, monogamous" relationships and got a dose of the hormone chose to stand, on average, about 6 1/2 inches farther away. When researchers conducted the experiment with a placebo, they found no differences in the distance that attached and unattached men maintained from a woman they had just met. Even when an attractive woman was portrayed only in a photograph, the monogamous men who received oxytocin put a bit more distance between themselves and her likeness. But when the new acquaintance was a man, administration of oxytocin did not prompt attached men to stand farther away than single men, the researchers reported. Los Angeles Times, Copyright 2012

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17495 - Posted: 11.17.2012