Kat Austen, CultureLab editor Neuroanatomist and stroke survivor Jill Bolte Taylor explains why she hopes her display of cerebral artwork will raise awareness of the brain Why are you opening an outdoor exhibition of giant brains? I care about the brain. I grew up wanting to study it because I have a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then in 1996, when I was a neuroscience researcher at Harvard Medical School, I experienced a rare form of stroke. A few years later, during my recovery, I was in Chicago, and on the streets they had sculptures of these enormous cows painted by individual artists so that every cow was different. I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have brains on public display for art? So for the past 10 years, I've been dreaming about having brains on display. And last year I started a not-for-profit organisation to raise appreciation for and awareness about the human brain. The Brain Extravaganza in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, is the first project. There are 22 enormous brains - five feet long, five feet high and four feet wide. Every brain is anatomically correct with 12 pairs of cranial nerves, and each is decorated by a different artist using different kinds of media. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 16731 - Posted: 05.01.2012

In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. "Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that's probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow," he says. "The reason the technique works really well is because it's directly related to how neurons are actually behaving." Dunn calls this the "fractal solution to the universe," which he sees as the "fundamental beauty of nature." He's fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that's nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch. Since graduating with his PhD last fall, Dunn has continued to spend his days with neurons--big, golden ones ten thousand times the size of neurons in your brain. The former University of Pennsylvania grad student now creates paintings of neurons for a living. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16730 - Posted: 05.01.2012

By Maria Konnikova In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and designed a study. A group of adults and children was given anywhere between 18 and 22 tasks to perform (both physical ones, like making clay figures, and mental ones, like solving puzzles)—only, half of those tasks were interrupted so that they couldn’t be completed. At the end, the subjects remembered the interrupted tasks far better than the completed ones—over two times better, in fact. Zeigarnik ascribed the finding to a state of tension, akin to a cliffhanger ending: your mind wants to know what comes next. It wants to finish. It wants to keep working – and it will keep working even if you tell it to stop. All through those other tasks, it will subconsciously be remembering the ones it never got to complete. Psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls this a Need for Closure, a desire of our minds to end states of uncertainty and resolve unfinished business. This need motivates us to work harder, to work better, and to work to completion. It adds impetus to minds that may otherwise be too busy or oversaturated to bother with the details. In other words, it ensures that those orders will stay in the waiters’ heads until it is certain that your food will hit the table as promised. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16729 - Posted: 05.01.2012

Horrific crimes, such as the Anders Breivik case, illustrate the misconceptions the public has about mental illness, a leading expert says. Professor Simon Wessely, of King's College London, said the simplest responses to mass killings were that the perpetrators "must be mad". But he said the way Breivik carried out the killings suggested otherwise. He said the idea a psychiatric diagnosis could help people avoid punishment was wrong too. Writing in the Lancet medical journal, Professor Wessely said putting forward a mental illness defence in the UK could lead a person to spending more time behind bars than less. "The forensic psychiatry system is not a soft or popular option," he added. The psychiatrist also said the Breivik case highlighted another misconception - that outrageous crimes must mean mental illness. "For schizophrenia to explain Breivik's actions, they would have to be the result of delusions." But he added: "The meticulous way in which he planned his attacks does not speak to the disorganisation of schizophrenia." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 16728 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Kay Lazar LITTLETON - Marjorie Bontempo was a changed woman after moving into Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley, a Littleton nursing home where the staff doesn’t believe in using antipsychotic drugs simply to calm residents. A physician had prescribed an antipsychotic for Bontempo a year earlier, after Alzheimer’s disease had transformed her from an accomplished seamstress and demure family peacekeeper into a cantankerous, confused woman who refused to eat. The medicine eased her aggression but left her dazed, said her daughter, Patty Sinnett. Nashoba’s nurses took Bontempo off the powerful sedative. Sinnett went to visit soon after and found her mother in the activity room watching a Clark Gable movie. “She started explaining the whole movie to me, like a normal person would,’’ Sinnett said. “It was the first time I had had a conversation with her in a year. It was incredible.’’ The Littleton facility is one of a small but growing number of nursing homes that are treating the agitation and disruptive behavior that often accompany dementia without resorting to antipsychotics. Instead, Life Care Center and similar homes try to tailor care to each resident, to make it familiar and comforting. Staffers comb residents’ pasts to learn their preferences, hobbies, and accomplishments, tapping bedrock emotions that endure long after memory fades. © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16727 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Most people who suffer regularly from debilitating migraine headaches don’t get the appropriate treatment to prevent them, according to new guidelines issued earlier this week from the American Academy of Neurology. And a disappointing study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that injections of Botulinum toxin A, or Botox, had smaller-than-expected benefits for those with chronic, near-daily headaches, working only modestly better than a placebo. “There are several reasons why patients aren’t being properly treated,” said Dr. Stephen Silberstein, a neurologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia who led the guideline committee. “They may be misdiagnosed with tension or sinus headaches or may be using a medication that doesn’t work or is prescribed at too low a dose.” (Five of the six guideline authors, including Silberstein, disclosed that they had previously served on advisory boards or accepted honoraria or consulting fees from manufacturers of drugs used to treat migraines.) Migraines -- which are frequently accompanied by nausea, vomiting, visual disturbances or aura, and sensitivity to light -- affect about 1 in 10 Americans and can be triggered by certain foods, lack of sleep, stress, jet lag, fasting, and hormonal changes during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Nearly 40 percent of migraine sufferers have at least four or five headaches a month, and a smaller percentage have “chronic migraines” defined as having pain at least 15 days a month. Women are also more likely to get them than men. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16726 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By DENISE GRADY Obesity and the form of diabetes linked to it are taking an even worse toll on America’s youths than medical experts had realized. As obesity rates in children have climbed, so has the incidence of Type 2 diabetes, and a new study adds another worry: the disease progresses more rapidly in children than in adults and is harder to treat. “It’s frightening how severe this metabolic disease is in children,” said Dr. David M. Nathan, an author of the study and director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s really got a hold on them, and it’s hard to turn around.” Before the 1990s, this form of diabetes was hardly ever seen in children. It is still uncommon, but experts say any increase in such a serious disease is troubling. There were about 3,600 new cases a year from 2002 to 2005, the latest years for which data is available. The research is the first large study of Type 2 diabetes in children, “because this didn’t used to exist,” said Dr. Robin Goland, a member of the research team and co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She added, “These are people who are struggling with something that shouldn’t happen in kids who are this young.” Why the disease is so hard to control in children and teenagers is not known. The researchers said that rapid growth and the intense hormonal changes at puberty might play a part. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16725 - Posted: 04.30.2012

By Linda Carroll It sounds like the stuff of nightmares: A man wakes up in the middle of a surgery and can’t speak, or even twitch a muscle. But that’s exactly what a young man from Sweden says happened to him. The 22-year-old Swede was in the middle of surgery for a collapsed lung when he woke up to hear doctors moving around and operating on him, the Swedish newspaper The Local reported. “It was terrible, my worst nightmare,” he told the Sweden’s English-language paper. The operation was in March and the patient, Simon Rosenqvist, recently filed a complaint with Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, according to a report in the New York Daily News. “My brain kept telling me over and over ‘say your name, say something, do something, wiggle your toes,’ but I was completely incapable of saying something or moving my body at all,’” Rosenqvist wrote in his report. Rosenqvist told The Local that he was awake for some 30 to 35 minutes of the 50 minute procedure and that he was in serious pain and was very angry at the end of the procedure. Experts say that although it’s rare, patients do sometimes wake up during surgeries even when they’ve been given general anesthesia. Overall, this happens in 1 to 2 out of 1,000 procedures, says Dr. Lee A. Fleisher, a professor and chair of anesthesiology and critical care at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16724 - Posted: 04.30.2012

by Jane J. Lee Companies and health organizations spend millions of dollars on surveys, polls, and focus groups trying to suss out what people will like, buy, or do. But research shows that these techniques aren't all that accurate. Can brain scans do any better? It's possible, according to a new study that finds that a neural activity predicts people's responses to a public service ad about cigarette smoking better than simply asking a focus group. Researchers led by neuroscientist Emily Falk at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), located at the front of the brain. Of the many roles its neurons play, scientists were most interested in the ones related to self-reflection, thinking of what you value, and identity. Activity in this region increases when people identify with what they see or try to determine the value of something as it relates to them. A previous study by Falk found that MPFC activity that was recorded while people viewed slides with messages urging regular sunscreen use predicted which individuals were most likely to comply. But Lieberman and Falk wanted to go a step further and see if activity in the MPFC in one group of people could predict the behavior of a much bigger population. They looked at the effectiveness of three ad campaigns aimed at getting smokers to call the National Cancer Institute's quit hotline. The researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of brain activity in 30 heavy smokers who intended to quit, evenly split between men and women and ranging from 28 to 69 years old, as they watched three ad campaigns. Then scientists asked participants to rank the campaigns according to how effective they thought they'd be for the public. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 16723 - Posted: 04.28.2012

By Katherine Harmon It’s always nice to get the full recommended seven or nine hours of sleep every day. But life—and work—often gets in the way. And getting too little sleep can decrease attention and short-term memory and can also alter rational judgment—in addition to increasing the risk for some diseases and making it harder to lose weight. Thus, for those who work in an industry where a simple error can lead to injury or death, missing out on sleep can be seriously dangerous. Moreover, according to a new survey, workers in industries with heavy equipment are among the least likely to be well rested. A study of more than 15,000 employed U.S. adults shows that 30 percent of all workers reported getting fewer than six hours of sleep every day. That’s some 28.3 million workers who are operating (themselves and often machinery) with far less sleep than recommended. The findings were published online April 27 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Night shift workers were, predictably, the most likely to be getting less z’s, with 44 percent—some 2.2 million people—getting fewer than six hours a day. (Trying to sleep during daylight hours can be a challenge because the body’s circadian rhythms are more likely to be sending stay-awake hormonal signals.) Of people who work in transportation and warehousing on overnight shifts, almost 70 percent are getting fewer than six hours of sleep a day. This is of particular concern considering that at least one in five vehicle accidents is the result of a fatigued driver. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16722 - Posted: 04.28.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Think your eyes can detect if an object is upright? A new illusion by video producer Greg Ross shows that it's not always the case as visual detail can sometimes fool our brain. In this video, a balance beam is filled in with a diagonal pattern. Does it seem to be skewed? Keep watching as the lines are slowly removed. Do you notice a difference when the drawing is white? The balance beam should look tilted when it's covered with lines but upright when they are erased. However, measuring the distance between the blocks would prove that the top and bottom are parallel in both cases. According to Ross, the effect is due to the opposing direction of diagonal lines in each rectangle. But the triangle placed on the right side of the top beam accentuates the effect. "We perceive it as weighing down on the right side but only when the diagonal lines are there," says Ross. A similar effect can be observed in other optical illusions, for example radiating lines covering a shape can make it appear to bend. Highlighting the corners of squares on a chessboard can also distort the alignment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16721 - Posted: 04.28.2012

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News Researchers have spotted a group of 53 cells within pigeons' brains that respond to the direction and strength of the Earth's magnetic field. The question of how birds navigate using - among other signals - magnetic fields is the subject of much debate. These new "GPS neurons" seem to show how magnetic information is represented in birds' brains. However, the study reported by Science leaves open the question of how they actually sense the magnetic field. David Dickman of the Baylor College of Medicine in the US set up an experiment in which pigeons were held in place, while the magnetic field around them was varied in its strength and direction. Prof Dickman and his colleague Le-Qing Wu believed that the 53 neurons were candidates for sensors, so they measured the electrical signals from each one as the field was changed. Every neuron had its own characteristic response to the magnetic field, with each giving a sort of 3-D compass reading along the familiar north-south directions as well as pointing directly upward or downward. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 16720 - Posted: 04.28.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A randomized trial of steroid injections for back pain has shown that they are no more effective than a placebo. Because the long-term benefits of surgery remain unproven and pain medicines often have serious side effects, doctors have increasingly turned to steroid injections to treat lumbosacral radiculopathy, a common cause of back pain. The condition stems from damage to the discs between the vertebrae that often leads to sciatica, numbness or pain in the legs. Researchers tested 84 adults with back pain of less than six months’ duration, dividing them into three groups. They received either steroids, etanercept (an arthritis medicine) or an inactive saline solution in two injections given two weeks apart. At the end of one month, they were assessed for pain. Leg and back pain decreased in all three groups, but there were no statistically significant differences among them. The researchers conclude that steroids may provide some short-term analgesic effect, but that the improvement in all of the patients was mainly due to normal healing. The lead author, Dr. Steven P. Cohen, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins, was disappointed with the results but said that he still hopes drugs like etanercept might someday be proven effective. But for now, he said, “the strongest evidence for back pain relief is with exercise.” Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16719 - Posted: 04.28.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey A new treatment mimics acupuncture’s the pain-blocking mechanism of acupuncture but offers longer-lasting pain relief, at least in mice. Injections of an enzyme called PAP into an acupuncture point behind the knees of mice relieved pain caused by inflammation for up to six days, Julie Hurt and Mark Zylka of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill report online April 23 in Molecular Pain. That’s almost 100 times longer than pain relief from acupuncture, which typically lasts about 1½ hours. Long-lasting pain relief “is truly important, clinically,” says Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York. She and colleagues previously demonstrated that inserting and manipulating acupuncture needles causes the body to release a chemical called adenosine. Adenosine acts as a local anesthetic to slow down pain messages sent to the brain, she says. “The beauty of Mark’s study is that it takes advantage of the molecular mechanism of acupuncture and improves upon it,” Nedergaard says. Zylka had already been studying PAP, which stands for prostatic acid phosphatase, when Nedergaard’s research on the release of adenosine during acupuncture was published. The study gave him the idea that boosting adenosine at acupuncture points, which are located where nerves contact muscle, could be a localized way to treat pain. Adenosine lasts only minutes in the human body, so injections of the chemical itself were not an option. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16718 - Posted: 04.28.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS ONE lesson I’ve learned while writing about fitness is that few things impinge on an active life as much as writing about fitness — all that time spent hunched before a computer or puzzling over scientific journals, the countless hours of feckless, seated procrastination. While writing about the benefits of exercise, my muscles slackened. Fat seeped insidiously into my blood, liver and ventricles. Stupor infiltrated my brain. We all know by now that being inactive is unhealthy. But far too many of us think that being inactive is something that happens to other people. Studies of daily movement patterns, though, show that your typical modern exerciser, even someone who runs, subsequently sits for hours afterward, often moving less over all than on days when he or she does not work out. The health consequences are swift, pervasive and punishing. In a noteworthy recent experiment conducted by scientists at the University of Massachusetts and other institutions, a group of healthy young men donned a clunky platform shoe with a 4-inch heel on their right foot, leaving the left leg to dangle above the ground. For two days, the men hopped about using crutches (and presumably gained some respect for those people who regularly toddle about in platform heels). Each man’s left leg never touched the ground. Its muscles didn’t contract. It was fully sedentary. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16717 - Posted: 04.28.2012

by Daniel Strain Sharks may be known as terrors of the sea, but in some cases they're more like night lights. That's because many deep-sea sharks, like the smalleye pygmy shark (Squaliolus aliae), can make their own light, glowing from tail to snout as a possible means of camouflage. Now, a new study shows how this predator, the world's smallest shark, powers its luminescence. Smalleye pygmy sharks aren't just petite—they grow no more than 22 centimeters long—they're also hard to find, says study co-author Julien Claes, a shark biologist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. These fish swim hundreds of meters below the water's surface in the Indian and western Pacific oceans. When scientists do manage to pull one of these animals up, they sometimes catch an odd sight: a blue glow coming mostly from the shark's belly. Claes co-authored a paper in 2009 that showed that a second group of luminescent sharks, called lantern sharks (Etmopterus spinax), trigger their own glow using two hormones common in many animals: melatonin and prolactin. But it wasn't clear if smalleye pygmy sharks and their close relatives relied on the same molecules. So Claes and his colleagues launched a second survey, collecting 27 pygmy sharks off the coast of Taiwan. To determine what controlled their unearthly glow, the researchers took patches of the fish's skin and soaked them in various chemicals known to cue luminescence in other species. They then recorded the resulting glow—often so faint that it was tricky to see at a distance even in a dark room—using a light detector. And sure enough, when Claes tried melatonin, which in people helps to control cycles of sleep and waking, voila! There was light. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 16716 - Posted: 04.26.2012

National Institutes of Health researchers have reversed behaviors in mice resembling two of the three core symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). An experimental compound, called GRN-529, increased social interactions and lessened repetitive self-grooming behavior in a strain of mice that normally display such autism-like behaviors, the researchers say. GRN-529 is a member of a class of agents that inhibit activity of a subtype of receptor protein on brain cells for the chemical messenger glutamate, which are being tested in patients with an autism-related syndrome. Although mouse brain findings often don't translate to humans, the fact that these compounds are already in clinical trials for an overlapping condition strengthens the case for relevance, according to the researchers. "Our findings suggest a strategy for developing a single treatment that could target multiple diagnostic symptoms," explained Jacqueline Crawley, Ph.D., of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). "Many cases of autism are caused by mutations in genes that control an ongoing process — the formation and maturation of synapses, the connections between neurons. If defects in these connections are not hard-wired, the core symptoms of autism may be treatable with medications." Crawley, Jill Silverman, Ph.D., and colleagues at NIMH and Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development, Groton, CT, report on their discovery April 25th, 2012 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16715 - Posted: 04.26.2012

by Anil Ananthaswamy Is our ability to map numbers onto a physical space – such as along a line – a cultural invention rather than an innate ability? Members of a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea understand the concept of numbers but do not map them along a line, which suggests that the 'number line' must be learned. Researchers have long thought that the human brain is hard wired to associate numbers with physical space, and we naturally associate numbers with physical space. The idea received a boost in 2002 when it was discovered that people with brain damage who were unable to fully perceive one side of their body had trouble interpreting the number line – they claimed, for example, that five lies between three and six (Nature, DOI:10.1038/417138a). In 2008, Stanislas Dehaene of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Saclay, France, and colleagues found a subtle variation of the concept in the Mundurucu, an indigenous group in the Amazon with little or no formal education. The Mundurucu map numbers on to a line, but use a logarithmic scale rather than a typical linear scale – they allow plenty of room for small numbers but scrunch larger numbers together at the far end of the line. The finding suggested that the linear number line is a cultural invention, but the number line itself remained intact as an intuition shared by all humanity (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1156540). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16714 - Posted: 04.26.2012

By Laura Sanders Tiny eye movements and blinking can make perfectly frozen snakes appear to dance, a new study shows. The results help explain the mystery of how the Rotating Snakes illusion tricks the brain. Earlier studies have suggested that the perception of motion is triggered by the eyes drifting slowly away from a central target when viewing the illusion. But by tracking eye movements in eight volunteers, vision neuroscientists at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix found a different explanation. Participants held down a button when the snakes seemed to swirl and lifted the button when the snakes appeared still. Right before the snakes started to move, participants began blinking more and making short jumpy eye movements called microsaccades, Jorge Otero-Millan, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde report in the April 25 Journal of Neuroscience. When volunteers’ rates of microsaccades slowed down, the visual illusion faded and the snakes were more likely to stop moving. The results join a growing number of studies that use magic tricks and illusions to reveal people’s perceptual mistakes, such as seeing motion where there is none. Studying the mismatch between perception and reality may lead to a deeper understanding of the mind. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16713 - Posted: 04.26.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Ferrets don’t often figure in studies of exercise, perhaps because they don’t exercise much. They slink like fog through tunnels, sprint briefly over open ground and spend much of their time sleeping. They are, in biological terms, what’s called a noncursorial species, meaning that they are reluctant and lousy distance runners. Which is why they were ideal subjects for a new experiment conducted at the University of Arizona in Tucson looking at whether humans and other species evolved to like running. Many anthropologists and distance runners believe that running guided the evolution of early humans. We ran in search of dinner and away from predators. But running is costly, metabolically. It incinerates energy. It can also cause injury. A twisted ankle would have removed your typical early human from the gene pool. So why did our ancestors continue to run over the millennia “and not evolve other strategies for survival?” asks David A. Raichlen, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, who led the study, which was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology. “We wondered if natural selection might have used neurobiological mechanisms to encourage exercise activity,” he continues. Specifically, he and his colleagues became interested in the evolutionary role of the endocannabinoid system. As the name suggests, endocannabinoids are chemicals that, like cannabis in marijuana, alter and lighten moods. But the body produces endocannabinoids naturally. In other studies, endocannabinoid levels have been shown to increase after prolonged running and cycling, leading many scientists to conclude that endocannabinoids help to create runner’s high. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16712 - Posted: 04.26.2012