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

by Dennis Normile Are you a morning lark or a night owl? Scientists use that simplified categorization to explain that different people have different internal body clocks, commonly called circadian clocks. Sleep-wake cycles, digestive activities, and many other physiological processes are controlled by these clocks. In recent years, researchers have found that internal body clocks can also affect how patients react to drugs. For example, timing a course of chemotherapy to the internal body time of cancer patients can improve treatment efficacy and reduce side effects. But physicians have not been able to exploit these findings because determining internal body time is, well, time consuming. It's also cumbersome. The most established and reliable method requires taking blood samples from a patient hourly and tracking levels of the hormone melatonin, which previous research has tied closely to internal body time. Now a Japanese group has come up with an alternative method of determining internal body time by constructing what it calls a molecular timetable based on levels in blood samples of more than 50 metabolites—hormones and amino acids—that result from biological activity. The researchers established a molecular timetable based on samples from three subjects and validated it using the conventional melatonin measurement. They then used that timetable to determine the internal body times of other subjects by checking the levels of the metabolites in just two blood samples from each subject per day. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 17211 - Posted: 08.28.2012

By SEAN B. CARROLL Early one evening a few years ago, I took a short hike with my wife, Jamie, in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in Belize. The large, lush reserve is known for its healthy population of jaguars, so, following closely behind our guide, we kept our eyes peeled for the elusive cats. We saw a few tracks and some claw marks on trees, but elected to leave the jungle before nightfall. We were very near the end of the trail when we were surprised by a large snake, about six feet long, crossing directly in front of us. Belize has lots of snakes, more than 50 species. Some can get pretty large, like the boa constrictor, which is impressive but harmless. This one was not harmless. Even in the darkening jungle, the triangular pattern on its back allowed me to identify it quickly as a fer-de-lance, the most dangerous snake in Belize. Excited, and comfortable that I was well out of striking range, I reached into my backpack for my video camera and flipped on its “night shot” feature. I now saw the magnificent snake clearly on my LCD screen. As I tried to creep in for a closer shot, however, I felt something holding me back. It was Jamie. She had a grip on my backpack and was concerned that my enthusiasm for snakes had overtaken my judgment. She was not convinced that we were out of range, nor that the snake would not move quickly toward us. I used the zoom and filmed from where I stood. For me to film the snake in the dark, I had to rely on Sony’s innovation and engineering. The camera’s infrared LED source generated light with a longer wavelength than the human eye can detect; those photons then bounced off the snake and were detected by the camera’s infrared sensors and converted into an image. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Hearing
Link ID: 17210 - Posted: 08.28.2012

by Hannah Krakauer The downside to cannabis use has been made clearer. The most detailed study yet of the drug's long-term effects shows that those who start a weed habit as teens enter middle age with an 8-point deficit in IQ compared to non-users. Evidence is growing that cannabis-based drugs can benefit health, but suspicions remain that persistent cannabis use from an early age can have a detrimental effect on cognition. Confirming those suspicions is tricky, though, since cognitive impairment observed later in life could have been present before the drug was first used. To get around the problem Madeline Meier at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and her colleagues have taken the long view. They used a detailed health study which followed 1000 people in Dunedin, New Zealand, from birth until age 38. The data allowed them to compare IQ tests taken by the participants at age 13 – before any of them began using cannabis – with the same participants' IQ scores as adults, in some cases after years of cannabis use. The study showed that those who developed the most persistent dependence on the drug showed the greatest subsequent decline in IQ, losing 6 points on average regardless of how early the habit began. Within that group, those who began taking the drug before their 18th birthday saw a subsequent decline in IQ of 8 points, on average. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17209 - Posted: 08.28.2012

Mo Costandi It sounds like every student's dream: research published today in Nature Neuroscience shows that we can learn entirely new information while we snooze1. Anat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and her colleagues used a simple form of learning called classical conditioning to teach 55 healthy participants to associate odours with sounds as they slept. They repeatedly exposed the sleeping participants to pleasant odours, such as deodorant and shampoo, and unpleasant odours such as rotting fish and meat, and played a specific sound to accompany each scent. It is well known that sleep has an important role in strengthening existing memories, and this conditioning was already known to alter sniffing behaviour in people who are awake. The subjects sniff strongly when they hear a tone associated with a pleasant smell, but only weakly in response to a tone associated with an unpleasant one. But the latest research shows that the sleep conditioning persists even after they wake up, causing them to sniff strongly or weakly on hearing the relevant tone — even if there was no odour. The participants were completely unaware that they had learned the relationship between smells and sounds. The effect was seen regardless of when the conditioning was done during the sleep cycle. However, the sniffing responses were slightly more pronounced in those participants who learned the association during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, which typically occurs during the second half of a night's sleep. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17208 - Posted: 08.27.2012

By ANNE EISENBERG FOOTBALL teams of the future — even high school squads on limited budgets — may someday have a new tool to check players for brain injuries. It’s a special form of headgear, packed with sensors that read the brain waves of athletes after they come off the field, thus detecting changes caused by the trauma of hard knocks. The compact, portable sensors decipher neural activity by measuring changes in the brain’s tiny magnetic field. These small magnetometers — still in the laboratory and in prototype — have yet to be tried on athletes. But their potential is enormous for brain imaging and for inexpensive monitoring of brain diseases, as well as for many other applications like the control of prosthetics, said Dr. José Luis Contreras-Vidal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston. Dr. Contreras-Vidal’s research includes work on a system that will use brain signals to control prosthetic legs. “This is a transformative technology” that could make brain interfaces available at a small cost, he said. “We could potentially use these devices to record in real time brain waves that could be analyzed for specific diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or the progression of these diseases.” The research is occurring at a time of growing concern about collisions and subsequent brain injuries in sports — and the dire effects that may show up only many years later. But an inexpensive system for spotting changes in brain behavior could play an important safety role one day in boxing, football and many other sports. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 17207 - Posted: 08.27.2012

By Chelsea Conaboy Brian Sullivan, a former Army bomb technician, quit treatment for post-traumatic stress when, he said, doctors began pushing him to take medications he didn’t want. His symptoms, however, did not quit. Traffic jams made the 42-year-old Foxborough native anxious. Sullivan couldn’t go into a crowded mall. And he was haunted by the memory of a man who approached him while he was working to disable an improvised explosive device during one of two deployments to Afghanistan, he said. Sullivan faced a choice: Shoot, or risk that the man was a suicide bomber. He didn’t fire, but the stress stuck with him. Last year, Sullivan, who now lives in Virginia, began using a smartphone application developed by the Department of Defense to guide him through breathing exercises when his anxiety began to build. The same agency launched another app earlier this year for veterans to use while in a particular kind of therapy, revisiting difficult memories with a professional. Sullivan became curious, and this summer returned to treatment. Ten years ago, the resources available to veterans with PTSD who were unwilling or unable, because of geography or other factors, to be treated by a therapist were limited. Researchers are developing technologies to reach people like Sullivan wherever they are, putting tools directly into their hands through programs online and on their smartphones. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17206 - Posted: 08.27.2012

By Stephani Sutherland Ice cream headache is a familiar summertime sensation, but the pain's source has been mysterious until now. A team led by Jorge Serrador of Harvard Medical School produced brain scans of “second-by-second changes” in blood flow while subjects sipped iced water through a straw pressed against the roof of the mouth, which caused the brain's major artery to widen. “Blood flow changes actually preceded the pain” that subjects reported, Serrador says. As the vessel narrowed again, the discomfort ebbed. He suspects that the influx of blood is meant to protect the brain from extreme cold and that increased pressure inside the skull could cause the pain. Serrador presented the results at Experimental Biology 2012 in April in San Diego. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 17205 - Posted: 08.27.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Using small nets to extract blood clots from patients' brains may be the future of stroke care, according to two studies. Clots block blood vessels, starving parts of the brain of oxygen, which leads to symptoms such as paralysis and loss of speech. Two studies, presented in the Lancet medical journal, suggest extracting clots with nets could improve recovery. The Stroke Association said it was very excited by the treatment's potential. There are already techniques for reopening blocked blood vessels in people's brains. Some patients will be given "clot-busting" drugs, but this needs to be in the hours just after the stroke and is not suitable for everyone. Other techniques have been developed to extract the clot. Some procedures pass a tube up through the groin to the brain. There the wire passes through the clot, forming a coil on the far side and then pulling the clot out. However, this is far from routine practice. The latest methods involve a tiny wire cage instead of a coil. This pushes the clot up against the walls of the artery and enmeshes the clot in the wires, allowing doctors to pull the clot back out of the groin. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17204 - Posted: 08.27.2012

by Douglas Heaven Where does the mind reside? It's a question that's occupied the best brains for thousands of years. Now, a patient who is self-aware – despite lacking three regions of the brain thought to be essential for self-awareness – demonstrates that the mind remains as elusive as ever. The finding suggests that mental functions might not be tied to fixed brain regions. Instead, the mind might be more like a virtual machine running on distributed computers, with brain resources allocated in a flexible manner, says David Rudrauf at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who led the study of the patient. Recent advances in functional neuroimaging – a technique that measures brain activity in the hope of finding correlations between mental functions and specific regions of the brain – have led to a wealth of studies that map particular functions onto regions. Previous neuroimaging studies had suggested that three regions – the insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex – are critical for self-awareness. But for Rudrauf the question wasn't settled. So when his team heard about patient R, who had lost brain tissue including the chunks of the three 'self-awareness' regions following a viral infection, they immediately thought he could help set the record straight. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 17203 - Posted: 08.25.2012

by Kai Kupferschmidt Farmers have long used antibiotics to make cows, pigs, and turkeys gain weight faster. Now, scientists claim that receiving antibiotics early in life may also make children grow fat. The researchers believe the drugs change the composition of the bacterial population in the gut in a crucial developmental stage that may have a long-lasting impact. Other scientists are casting doubt on the conclusions, however. The new data are "not convincing," says Michael Blaut, a microbiologist at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam, Germany. And David Relman, a microbiologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, calls the work "provocative" but says some of the data are "a bit vague and unclear." Billions of microbial cells live in the guts of humans and other animals. Research on these vast bacterial populations, called microbiomes, is just getting started, but scientists already know that some microbial boarders play a crucial role in breaking down nutrients in our diet. Some have also suspected that low-dose antibiotics, given to farm animals to make them grow bigger, could work by altering the gut microbiome. To test this hypothesis, a team led by microbiologist Martin Blaser of the New York University School of Medicine in New York City added antibiotics to the drinking water of mice that had just been weaned. The medicine—either penicillin, vancomycin, a combination of the two, or chlortetracycline—was given at doses comparable to those approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as growth promoters in farm animals. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17202 - Posted: 08.25.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR For people who are extremely overweight and likely to develop diabetes, surgery may be the best form of prevention. A new study shows that weight-loss surgery not only produced sustained weight loss in obese men and women but substantially reduced their odds of developing Type 2 diabetes. Over the course of a roughly 15-year period, those who had one of three types of bariatric procedures were 80 percent less likely to develop the disease than people who tried losing weight with diet and exercise advice from their doctors. In fact, those who had the worst blood sugar levels at the start of the study, putting them in a high-risk category called prediabetes, benefited the most from surgery. Their risk of becoming diabetic fell by nearly 90 percent. “The message is that bariatric surgery works,” said Dr. Claude Bouchard, an author of the study and a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana. “You can take people on their way to becoming diabetic, and you intervene with bariatric surgery and weight loss, and you have a very, very strong protective effect against Type 2 diabetes.” The findings add to a growing body of literature supporting bariatric surgery as a means for combating diabetes. This year, two studies showed that for people who are obese and already have diabetes, weight-loss surgery was more effective than drugs, diet and exercise in causing a remission of the disease. The new report, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large study to show a long-term preventive effect of surgery in people who are not yet diabetic but well on their way. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 17201 - Posted: 08.25.2012

By Bruce Bower Indo-European languages range throughout Europe and South Asia and even into Iran, yet the roots of this widespread family of tongues have long been controversial. A new study adds support to the proposal that the language family expanded out of Anatolia — what’s now Turkey — between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, as early farmers sought new land to cultivate. A team led by psychologist Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand came to that conclusion by using a mathematical method to calculate the most likely starting point and pattern of geographic spread for a large set of Indo-European languages. The new investigation, published in the Aug. 24 Science, rejects a decades-old idea that Kurgan warriors riding horses and driving chariots out of West Asia’s steppes 5,000 to 6,000 years ago triggered the rise of Indo-European speakers. “Our analysis finds decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin of Indo-European languages,” Atkinson says. He and his colleagues generated likely family trees for Indo-European languages, much as geneticists use DNA from different individuals to reconstruct humankind’s genetic evolution. Many linguists, who compare various features of languages to establish their historical connections, consider Atkinson’s statistical approach unreliable (SN: 11/19/11, p. 22). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 17200 - Posted: 08.25.2012

By Daisy Yuhas How do I love thee? When neuroscientist Young and journalist Alexander started counting, they found many molecular ways. In The Chemistry between Us, the writers highlight the complex chemical processes that create love in the brain and bolster the argument that love is an addiction. Young has devoted his career to studying the behaviors and neural circuitry of love in the prairie vole, a rodent whose monogamous tendencies resemble our own. Once a prairie vole has found “the one,” the pair will most likely remain companions for life. Young's research has implicated a range of chemical activities—mainly during sex—that build this lifelong bond. In particular, he uncovered how two hormones in the brain, vasopressin in male voles and oxytocin in female voles, regulate social behavior and memory—promoting the recognition of a loved one and the urge to cuddle or defend. In addition, the circulation of dopamine and opioids allows the vole to associate his or her partner with pleasure, thus strengthening their bond. Many of these molecules are identical to those activated in human bonding. That loving feeling comes at a price. A hormone called corticotropin-releasing factor, or CRF, builds up in the brains of paramours and parents alike. The CRF system activates a stress response, and this system elicits the painful sensations you feel when your baby cries or your boyfriend dumps you. The system may seem like a nasty trick, but it has its uses. Even when passion fades or a diaper needs changing, the sharp pangs of the CRF system keep families and loved ones together. The CRF system also contributes to the agony an addict feels after the elation wears off. Thus, the authors argue, the highs of intimacy and withdrawals of separation parallel the highs and lows that drug addicts experience. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 17199 - Posted: 08.25.2012