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

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17241 - Posted: 09.11.2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17235 - Posted: 09.10.2012

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

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17234 - Posted: 09.10.2012

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

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 17233 - Posted: 09.07.2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 17229 - Posted: 09.07.2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17225 - Posted: 09.07.2012

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

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17224 - Posted: 09.07.2012

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

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

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

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