By Morgen E. Peck Anyone who has pulled an all-nighter knows it is possible to be tired without being sleepy. The body slows and concentration slips, even as thoughts spin toward a manic blur. It feels as though the sleep-deprived brain is actually becoming more active. And indeed it is, according to a recent study in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan in Italy, found that the brain becomes more sensitive as the day wears on. The experiment, he explains, is like poking a friend in the ribs to see how high he jumps. Massimini prodded brain cells in the frontal cortex with a jolt of electricity, delivered via noninvasive transcranial magnetic stimulation. Then he observed how the rest of the brain responded, comparing results from subjects who had been awake for two, eight, 12 or 32 hours. “I'm sure if you bump your friend when he's sleep-deprived, he's going to jump higher,” he says. The sleep-deprived brain, it turns out, also gets jumpy, responding to the electrical jolt with stronger, more immediate spikes of activity. The results jibe with a widely held theory that while we are awake, our neurons are constantly forming new synapses, or connections to other neurons, which ramps up the activity in our brain. Many of these connections are irrelevant, but the only way to prune them is by shutting down for a while. The theory explains why it is difficult to cram new information into a sleepy brain. But it also helps to explain some unusual medical observations: epileptics are more likely to have seizures the longer they stay awake, and severely depressed patients with abnormally low brain activity sometimes improve after skipping sleep. “You keep them awake for one night, and, incredibly, they get better,” Massimini says. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 16991 - Posted: 07.02.2012

Adults who were subjected to physical punishment such as spanking as children are more likely to experience mental disorders, say Canadian researchers who encourage other forms of discipline. Monday's issue of the journal Pediatrics includes a study on the proportion of illnesses such as depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse as well as personality disorders that may be attributable to physical punishment. Positive reinforcement techniques have more evidence backing them than physical punishment.Positive reinforcement techniques have more evidence backing them than physical punishment. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press) Physical punishment was defined as pushing, grabbing, shoving, slapping and hitting in the absence of more severe maltreatment of a child through physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect or exposure to intimate partner violence. "It definitely points to the direction that physical punishment should not be used on children of any age and we need to be considering that when we're thinking about policy and programs so we can protect children from potentially harmful outcomes," said study author Tracie Afifi, who is in the department of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba. Afifi hopes the findings from the study that involved more than 34,000 U.S. adults will make parents think twice about spanking. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 16990 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Beverly Purdy The Medivac helicopter made a noisy descent to the landing pad at University Medical Center in Salt Lake City. The patient on board was on the final leg of a long journey home from South Africa. Jeremy Clark, an ambitious 23-year-old college graduate, had been on a Mormon mission in Johannesburg when he awoke one day unable to move his legs. He was briefly hospitalized there, but the South African doctors could not explain his sudden paralysis and found no evidence of injury or infection, so he was transferred back to the States by air ambulance. Medics wheeled Jeremy to the neurology ward, where I was waiting. They said he had been about three weeks into his two-year commitment in South Africa when one morning he did not show up for his assignment, nor did he answer his 
phone. Someone finally went to his apartment and found him lying there, immobilized. “He’s been like this for a week, doctor,” the medic told me. “He hasn’t spoken since this happened.” As the neurology resident, I needed to test Jeremy for a number of disorders, including multiple sclerosis (ms); myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular autoimmune disease that causes varying degrees of muscle weakness; Guillain-Barré syndrome, an acute condition associated with progressive muscle weakness and paralysis; and stroke. I would also have to perform a lumbar puncture to collect fluid from around the brain and inside the spinal cord to rule out infection. Although his symptoms didn’t quite support the diagnosis, I also wondered if he could have been exposed to a toxin that can cause paralysis, such as botulism or tetanus. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16989 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams The vast majority of adults have had a sore back at some point in their lives. If they're lucky, the pain subsides after a few days or weeks. But for some, whose initial injuries appear no different than the fortunate ones, back pain lasts for years. Now, researchers have discovered a difference in brain scans between the two groups of patients that appears early in the course of the pain. The finding could lead to not only ways of identifying patients who are the most at risk for long-term pain but to new treatments or preventions for chronic pain. "This is the very first time we can say that if we have two subjects who have the same type of injury for the same amount of time, we can predict who will become a chronic pain patient versus who will not," says neuroscientist Vania Apkarian of Northwestern University, Chicago, who led the new work. Over the past 2 decades, Apkarian's lab has run many studies comparing the brains of patients with chronic back pain with those of healthy people, finding differences in brain anatomy or the function of certain regions. But the study designs made it hard to sort out which brain changes were consequences of the chronic pain—or the patients' painkillers or altered lifestyles—versus those that drove the pain's chronic nature. Apkarian and colleagues have now tracked the brains of back pain patients over time rather than comparing single neural snapshots. His team began with 39 people who had experienced moderate back pain—a five or six on a self-described scale of 10—for 1 to 4 months. Over the next year, the team scanned the patients' brains four times and followed their pain. By year's end, 20 of the patients had recovered, while 19 continued to hurt, meeting the criteria for chronic pain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stress
Link ID: 16988 - Posted: 07.02.2012

by Andy Coghlan One of the key elements of memory – how we store and retrieve words according to what they mean – has been unravelled by analysing electrical signals from people's brains while they recalled lists of words. Although the discovery cannot identify the individual words being filed, which could effectively make a very basic form of mind-reading possible, it does for the first time reveal the electrical circuitry vital for storing words according to what they mean, rather than where they came in a sequence, for example. "Our main focus is on how people organise their memories," says Jeremy Manning, currently at Princeton University. "So we looked at the degree to which people organised their memories according to the meanings of words." Calling Roget The researchers recruited 46 patients with epilepsy who had already had electrodes implanted in their brains for treatment purposes. The electrodes allowed the researchers to measure electrical activity in the brain as the participants viewed lists of 15 to 20 words. A minute later, the patients were asked to recall aloud as many as possible, in any order. Collectively, the participants viewed 1550 lists, including a total of 24,760 words. The researchers included within each list words with similar meanings or associations, such as "goose" and "duck", to see if recall of one prompted recollection of the other. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Language
Link ID: 16987 - Posted: 06.30.2012

WASHINGTON — A Covidien device for rare malformed blood vessels can get stuck in the brain and has been linked to nine patient deaths, U.S. regulators warned. The device, made by Covidien unit ev3, uses a spongy material to block off blood flow to abnormal tangles of blood vessels before they are removed by surgery. The material is delivered to the brain through a tube inserted into a groin artery, known as a catheter. But the catheter can get stuck in the spongy material while inside the brain, causing serious complications including hemorrhage and death, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a notice posted to its website on Thursday. Since the device was approved in 2005, the FDA said it has received more than 100 reports of the catheter breaking after it became stuck, including nine deaths. In at least 54 cases, the catheter could not be removed, leaving it implanted in the patient. "Neither (the spongy material) nor the catheter is intended to be long-term implants, and patients may need additional medical interventions to have the catheter removed if it becomes entrapped," the FDA said in the notice. If the catheter is not removed, parts of it can also migrate to other parts of the body. (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16986 - Posted: 06.30.2012

by Michael Marshall Step from a sunlit hillside into the darkness of a cave, and you immediately have a problem: you can't see. It's best to stand still for a few minutes until your eyes adjust to the dimness, otherwise you might blunder into a hibernating bear that doesn't appreciate your presence. The same thing will happen when you leave again: the brightness of the sun will dazzle you at first. That's because your eyes have two types of receptor: one set works in bright light and the other in dim light. Barring a few minutes around sunset, only one set of receptors is ever working at any given time. Peters' elephantnose fish has no such limitations. Its peculiar eyes allow it to use the two types of receptor at the same time. That could help it to spot predators as they approach through the murky water it calls home. It's electric Peters' elephantnose fish belongs to a large family called the elephantfish, all of which live in Africa. They get their name from the trunk-like protrusions on the front of their heads. But whereas the trunks of elephants are extensions of their noses, the trunks of elephantfish are extensions of their mouths. To find a Peters' elephantnose fish, you must lurk in muddy, slow-moving water. Look closely, because the fish is brown and so is the background. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16985 - Posted: 06.30.2012

By Ian Chant Psychedelic drugs are making a quiet comeback, as a smattering of recent studies have demonstrated their medicinal potential. The latest finding suggests it is time to revisit LSD as a treatment for addiction. Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Krebs of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology analyzed six clinical trials of LSD from 1966 to 1970 and published their results in March in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The study subjects were being treated for alcohol abuse at inpatient clinics. They all underwent the standard treatment regimen for addiction, but some of them were also given a single, small dose of LSD during a therapeutic session. The results of the old studies were tepid, but they all hinted that LSD had helped. Pooling the data gave Johansen and Krebs more statistical power. “Instead of six small studies, you have one big study,” Krebs says, and the results of that larger study were much more robust. Of those who had taken LSD, 59 percent decreased their alcohol consumption, as compared with 38 percent of subjects who did not take LSD. Six months after leaving treatment, those who took LSD were 15 percent more likely to be sober. For just one dose of a psychiatric drug to remain effective for months is an impressive feat that researchers attribute to the unique qualities of psychedelics such as LSD. The feelings of openness and well-being brought on by the drug seem to help people see themselves—and their problems—in a different light. In this way, LSD could act as a kind of chemical catalyst for the “moment of clarity” cited by many addicts as a turning point in their treatment. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16984 - Posted: 06.30.2012

By Scott Barry Kaufman Scott: So what do you make of general intelligence? John Tooby: [chuckles] To heck if I know! ***Exchange at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society*** Obviously, John Tooby, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, was being a bit cheeky. But there was also a very large grain of truth to his response. Traditionally, evolutionary psychologists have focused their research efforts on discovering dedicated information-processing mechanisms (‘modules’) that operate on specific content. Evolutionary psychologists have done an impressive job looking at these species-typical cognitive adaptations, elucidating the nature of things that are universally important to humans such as love, sex, social status, music, and art. Traveling on a separate path, however, intelligence researchers have amassed just as much evidence that individual differences among many disparate cognitive abilities are correlated with one another. This suggests the possibility of causal forces that influence performance on most cognitively complex cognitive tests, regardless of the content. Recently intelligence researchers have proposed two possible causal forces: (a) deleterious mutations or developmental abnormalities that influence many different cognitive mechanisms or (b) cognitive mechanisms that are utilized to some extent in most or all complex cognitive tasks. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16983 - Posted: 06.28.2012

Analysis by Jesse Emspak The phrase, "use your brainpower" may soon become literal. Engineers at MIT have developed a tiny prototype fuel cell that creates electricy from the body's natural sugars. The fuel cell could be used to power brain implants for treating epilepsy, Parkinson's diseases and paralysis. Currently, devices implanted in the body are typically powered by lithium-ion batteries, but they have a limited lifetime and need to be replaced. Opening up the body to replace a battery is not something doctor like to do, but doing it in the brain is even less desirable. The researchers, led by Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, built the fuel cell using a platinum catalyst at one end and a layer of carbon nanotubes at the other. It rests on a silicon chip, allowing it to be connected to electronics that would be used in brain implants. coughing robot As glucose passes over the platinum, electrons and hydrogen ions are stripped off as it is oxidized. That's what makes the current. At the other end of the cell, oxygen mixes with the hydrogen to make water when it hits the layer of single-walled carbon nanotubes. The cell produces up to 180 microwatts, enough to power a brain implant that might send signals to bypass damaged region, or stimulate part of the brain (a treatment used in disorders such as Parkinson's). © 2012 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 16982 - Posted: 06.28.2012

By MATTHEW PERRONE WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved Arena Pharmaceutical’s anti-obesity pill Belviq, the first new prescription drug for long-term weight loss to enter the U.S. market in over a decade. Despite only achieving modest weight loss in clinical studies, the drug appeared safe enough to win the FDA’s endorsement, amid calls from doctors for new weight-loss treatments. The agency cleared the pill Wednesday for adults who are obese or are overweight with at least one medical complication, such as diabetes or high cholesterol. The drug should be used in combination with a healthy diet and exercise. Obesity Society President Patrick O'Neil said he’s encouraged by the drug’s approval because it underscores the notion that lifestyle changes alone are not enough to treat obesity. ‘‘This is good news because it tells us that the FDA is indeed treating obesity seriously,’’ said O'Neil, who teaches at Medical University of South Carolina and was the lead researcher on several studies of Belviq. ‘‘On the other hand, it’s not the answer to the problem — or even a big part of the answer.’’ Even if the effects of Belviq are subtle, experts say it could be an important first step in developing new treatments that attack the underlying causes of obesity. ‘‘The way these things tend to work is you have some people who do extremely well and other people don’t lose any weight at all. But if we had 10 medicines that were all different and worked like this, we would have a real field,’’ said Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the weight loss program at Weill-Cornell Medical College. © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16981 - Posted: 06.28.2012

by Sara Reardon Forget patches: gene therapy could suppress cigarette cravings by preventing the brain from receiving nicotine. The treatment is effective in mice, but with gene therapy still not fully tested in people, human trials and treatments are a long way off. For drug users who really can't quit, vaccination might one day be an option, and several groups have attempted to develop such treatments. But nicotine vaccines have mostly flopped. This is because nicotine is a very small molecule, so the immune system has difficulty recognising the drug and making antibodies that bind it. Physicians can inject antibodies directly into a patient, but this treatment quickly becomes expensive because the antibodies don't last long. Ronald Crystal of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and his team decided to bypass that problem by putting the gene for a nicotine antibody right into the body. They selected the strongest antibody against nicotine from a mouse and isolated the gene that produced it. They then placed this gene into a carrier called adeno-associated virus (AAV), which is widely used for gene therapyMovie Camera. When the researchers injected the virus and its cargo into nicotine-addicted mice, the rodents' livers took up the virus, began making antibodies and pumped them into the bloodstream. The researchers injected two cigarettes' worth of nicotine into AAV-infected mice. The antibodies were able to bind 83 per cent of the drug before it reached the brain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16980 - Posted: 06.28.2012

By Michael Shermer Where is the experience of red in your brain? The question was put to me by Deepak Chopra at his Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 3. A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as redness) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong. The idea that subjective experience is a result of electrochemical activity remains a hypothesis, Chopra elaborated in an e-mail. It is as much of a speculation as the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that it causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world. Where is Aunt Millie's mind when her brain dies of Alzheimer's? I countered to Chopra. Aunt Millie was an impermanent pattern of behavior of the universe and returned to the potential she emerged from, Chopra rejoined. In the philosophic framework of Eastern traditions, ego identity is an illusion and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal nonlocal, nonmaterial identity. The hypothesis that the brain creates consciousness, however, has vastly more evidence for it than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the brain. Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by functional MRI, electroencephalography and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, on a computer screen, what someone is seeing. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 16979 - Posted: 06.28.2012

by Carrie Arnold In the world of big brains, humans have very few competitors. Dolphins come closest, with a brain to body weight ratio just below ours and just above chimpanzees. Now, a new analysis of these sharp swimmers reveals for the first time some of the genetic changes that led dolphins to evolve such large noggins. "Dolphins evolved from relatively small-brained animals like cows and hippos into this large-brained, highly specialized aquatic organism," said Caro-Beth Stewart, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York, Albany, who was not involved in the research. "This is one of the first comprehensive studies to look at rates of molecular evolution in dolphins." Nearly 50 million years ago, the ancestor of all cetaceans—a group that includes dolphins and whales—began its transition from land lubber to aquatic all-star. To do so, it had to evolve several adaptations: it lost limbs, it developed fins, and it gained the ability to hold its breath for long periods of time. Its brain also grew about three times bigger. To get a sense of how these large brains evolved, Michael McGowen, an evolutionary biologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and his colleagues compared the dolphin's genome with two of its closest land-loving, small-brained relatives, the cow and the horse, as well as the dog. Out of the roughly 10,000 protein-coding genes the researchers examined in the bottlenose dolphin genome, they identified 228 mutations that had swept through the population. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16978 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By JOHN MARKOFF MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain. There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors, which they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items. The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the falling cost of computing and the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers. It is leading to significant advances in areas as diverse as machine vision and perception, speech recognition and language translation. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16977 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, Parkinson's is a devastating disease for those living with the condition and currently there is no cure. Diagnosis can also be slow as there are no blood tests to detect it. But now mathematician Max Little has come up with a non-invasive, cheap test which he hopes will offer a quick new way to identify the disease. He will be kicking off the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh calling for volunteers to contribute to a huge voice database. Mr Little has discovered that Parkinson's symptoms can be detected by computer algorithms that analyse voice recordings. In a blind test of voices, the system was able to spot those with Parkinson's with an accuracy of 86%. Mr Little was recently made a TED Fellow. The non-profit organisation behind the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference creates 40 such fellowships each year. The programme aims to target innovators under the age of 40 and offers them free entry to conferences and other events. Mr Little became interested in understanding voice from a mathematical perspective while he was studying for a PhD at Oxford University in 2003. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16976 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Ferris Jabr Every September arctic ground squirrels in Alaska, Canada and Siberia retreat into burrows more than a meter beneath the tundra, curl up in nests built from grass, lichen and caribou hair, and begin to hibernate. As their lungs and hearts slow, the rivers of blood flowing through their bodies dwindle and their core body temperatures plummet, dipping below the freezing point of water. Electrical signals zipping along crisscrossing neural highways vanish in many areas of the brain. Seven months later the squirrels wake up and return to the surface—famished, eager to mate and perfectly healthy. How hibernating mammals survive for so long at such low temperatures without any food or water beyond what they have stored in their own fat fascinates scientists for many reasons. Hibernation is an amazing biological feat and an opportunity to learn new ways of pushing the human body beyond its ostensible limits, as well as healing it when it breaks down. The arctic ground squirrel's brain, in particular, seems to be incredibly resilient. When ground squirrels hibernate their neurons shrink and many connections between neurons shrivel. But their brains periodically compensate for this loss with massive growth spurts, multiplying neural links beyond what existed before hibernation. Learning how the ground squirrel's brain recuperates could not only help scientists understand the brain's plasticity, but also suggest new ways to reverse or prevent cellular damage in neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, recent research on hibernating brains is changing the way some scientists think about misshapen tau proteins, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Most small hibernating mammals—hamsters, hedgehogs, bats—turn down their body's thermostat during hibernation, relinquishing one of the defining features of all mammals: warm blood. Arctic ground squirrels are the most extreme example. In August 1987 Brian Barnes of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (U.A.F.) captured 12 arctic ground squirrels and implanted tiny temperature-sensitive radio transmitters in the animals' abdomens. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16975 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Bruce Bower Even 6-month-old babies can rapidly estimate approximate numbers of items without counting. But surprisingly, an apparently inborn sense for numbers doesn’t top out until around age 30. Number sense precision gradually declines after that, generally falling to preteen levels by about age 70, say psychologist Justin Halberda of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and his colleagues. They report the findings, based on Internet testing of more than 10,000 volunteers ages 11 to 85, online the week of June 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I expected to see some improvement in number sense into preschool or maybe early elementary school, but not up to age 30,” Halberda says. Evidence of critical mental abilities peaking after young adulthood is rare but has been reported for face memory (SN: 1/1/11, p. 16). Participants in the new study completed a game that tested the precision of their number sense, or how accurately they could assess quantities. Volunteers saw a series of images showing mixes of blue and yellow dots and judged which color dot was more numerous. Each dot array appeared for a fraction of a second. In some dot arrays, one color greatly outnumbered the other. In other arrays, one color slightly outnumbered the other. Test-takers of the same age showed large differences in how accurately they could assess the dots, with the highest average scores coming around age 30, the researchers report. Teens and adults with a robust number sense reported doing moderately better at math in school and on the math portion of the SAT than those with a weak number sense. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16974 - Posted: 06.27.2012

By Brian Palmer, A friend recently asked me whether black bears in Appalachia have Southern accents and whether they have trouble understanding black bears raised in Canada or Alaska. Taken literally, those are notions more fit for a Disney movie than a scientist. In a more abstract sense, however, it’s a profound inquiry that fascinates zoologists and psychologists alike. Is communication learned or innate in nonhuman animals? Can geographically distant groups of the same species develop local culture: unique ways of eating, playing and talking to each other? I posed those questions to Darcy Kelley, a Columbia University professor who studies animal communications. “In most species, communication appears to have a genetic basis,” she said. “Regional accents can only develop in the small number of species that learn their vocalizations from others.” Research suggests that the overwhelming majority of animals are born knowing how to speak their species’s language. It doesn’t really matter where those animals are born or raised, because their speech seems to be mostly imprinted in their genetic code. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Bob Seyfarth and biologist Dorothy Cheney conducted a classic experiment on this question. They switched a pair of rhesus macaques and a pair of Japanese macaques shortly after birth, so that the Japanese macaque parents raised the rhesus macaque babies, and the rhesus macaque parents raised the Japanese macaque babies. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16973 - Posted: 06.27.2012

Mo Costandi How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race1. What does psychology tell us about race? Social psychologists differentiate between the attitudes that people express and their implicit preferences. This can be studied using the implicit association task, which measures initial, evaluative responses. It involves asking people to pair concepts such as black and white with concepts like good and bad. What you find is that most white Americans take longer to make a response that pairs black with good and white with bad than vice versa. This reveals their implicit preferences. What did your review of the neuroscience literature show? My colleagues and I found that there’s a network of brain regions that is consistently activated in neuroimaging studies of race processing. This network overlaps with the circuits involved in decision-making and emotion regulation, and includes the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). What did your previous work show? Our 2000 study was the first to link race preference to brain activity. We measured the eye-blink startle, a reflex response that people display when they hear a loud noise, for example. A lot of studies have shown that this reflex is potentiated [enhanced] when people are anxious or in the presence of something they think is negative. We found that implicit preferences were correlated with potentiated startle, and that both were correlated with the amount of amygdala activation. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 16972 - Posted: 06.27.2012