By Laura Sanders The brain’s power to focus can make a single voice seem like the only sound in a room full of chatter, a new study shows. The results help explain how people can pick out a speaker from a jumbled stream of incoming sounds. A deeper understanding of this feat could help scientists better treat people who can’t sort out sound signals effectively, an ability that can decline with age. “I think this is a truly outstanding study, which has deep implications for the way we think about the auditory brain,” says auditory neuroscientist Christophe Micheyl of the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the new research. For the project, engineer Nima Mesgarani and neurosurgeon Edward Chang, both of the University of California, San Francisco, studied what happens in the brains of people who are trying to follow one of two talkers, a scenario known to scientists as the cocktail party problem. Electrodes placed under the skulls of three people for an epilepsy treatment picked up signs of brain signals called high gamma waves produced by groups of nerve cells. The pattern and strength of these signals reflect which sounds people are paying attention to. “We are able to assess what someone is actually hearing — not just what’s coming in through their ears,” Chang says. Volunteers listened to two speakers, one female and one male, saying nonsense sentences such as “Ready tiger go to red two now.” The participants had to report the color and number spoken by the person who said one of two call signs (“ringo” or “tiger”). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 16671 - Posted: 04.19.2012

by Carl Zimmer Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain. Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Hariri’s graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. “Okay, we’re done,” she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs off on his paperwork. As he’s about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Ross’s brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. “So, am I sane?” Hariri laughs noncommitally. “Well, that I can’t tell you.” © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16670 - Posted: 04.19.2012

Lizzie Buchen Teenagers can do terrible things. In 1999, Kuntrell Jackson, then 14, was walking with his cousin and a friend in Blytheville, Arkansas, when they decided to rob a local video store. On the way there, his friend, Derrick Shields, revealed that he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun in his coat sleeve. During the robbery, Shields shot a shop worker in the face, killing her. Four years later, 14-year-old Evan Miller and an older friend were getting drunk and stoned with a middle-aged neighbour in a trailer park in Moulton, Alabama. A fight broke out, and Miller and the friend beat the neighbour with a baseball bat. Then they set fire to his home and ran, leaving him to die. Both Miller and Jackson were found guilty of homicide and sentenced to life without parole, meaning that both will spend the rest of their lives in prison. They are not alone. The United States currently has more than 2,500 individuals serving such sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles — that is, before their eighteenth birthdays. It is the only country that officially punishes juveniles in this way. Both Miller and Jackson appealed, arguing that their immaturity at the time of the crime rendered them less culpable for their actions than adults, and that they deserved a less severe punishment. The Supreme Court heard arguments in Miller v. Alabama and Jackson v. Hobbs in March, and is expected to deliver its ruling by this summer. The cases are notable not only because they could abolish life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, but also because neuroscience research may play a part in the decision. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Aggression
Link ID: 16669 - Posted: 04.19.2012

Dr. Becca, author of the blog ‘Fumbling Toward Tenure’. Last week, the New York Times’ “Well” section ran a piece titled, “How Exercise Can Prime the Brain for Addiction.” Scary, right? One minute you’re cruising along on the treadmill, and next thing you know, you’re ADDICTED TO COCAINE. Hovering over the web page tab header, however, reveals what may have been the original title—the more qualified, but less provocative “How Exercise May Make Addictions Better, or Worse.” Ironically, it’s the cutting-room-floor version of the title that more accurately (but only marginally so) reflects the findings of Mustroph et al (2012), an Illinois-based research group who studied the influence of exercise on the learning processes associated with drug use. In a nutshell, the researchers showed that the timing of exercise and drug exposure mattered: animals that exercised after getting a few injections of cocaine had an easier time “letting go” of their drug-associated cues than animals that exercised before cocaine exposure did. What Mustroph et al were not studying, though, was addiction—and this is only the beginning of where NYT writer Gretchen Reynolds does a disappointingly poor job of science reporting. This paper is about learning. With every experience we have, we learn something about the circumstances in which that experience occurred, and experience with drugs is no different. If you always do drugs in a certain room of your house, or at one particular club, you’re going to start associating those places with the drug, and, in all likelihood, with the way the drug makes you feel. You might even enjoy hanging out in those places when you’re not using the drug, because of the positive associations you’ve formed. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16668 - Posted: 04.19.2012

by Andy Coghlan A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest effect yet of a single gene on intelligence – although the effect is small. There is little dispute that genetics accounts for a large amount of the variation in people's intelligence, but studies have consistently failed to find any single genes that have a substantial impact. Instead, researchers typically find that hundreds of genes contribute. Following a brain study on an unprecedented scale, an international collaboration has now managed to tease out a single gene that does have a measurable effect on intelligence. But the effect – although measurable – is small: the gene alters IQ by just 1.29 points. According to some researchers, that essentially proves that intelligence relies on the action of a multitude of genes after all. "It seems like the biggest single-gene impact we know of that affects IQ," says Paul Thompson of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the collaboration of 207 researchers. "But it's not a massive effect on IQ overall," he says. The variant is in a gene called HMGA2, which has previously been linked with people's height. At the site of the relevant mutation, the IQ difference depends on a change of a single DNA "letter" from C, standing for cytosine, to T, standing for thymine. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16667 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For a table set up by a campus student group, this one held some unusual items: a gynecologist’s speculum, diaphragms, condoms (his and hers) and several packets of lubricant. Nearby, two students batted an inflated condom back and forth like a balloon. “This is Implanon,” said Gabby Bryant, a 22-year-old senior who had helped set up the table, showing off a sample of the implantable birth control. “Here at Harvard, you get it for free.” It was Sex Week at Harvard, a student-run program of lectures, panel discussions and blush-inducing conversations about all things sexual. The event was Harvard’s first, though the tradition started at Yale in 2002 and has since spread to colleges around the country: Brown, Northeastern, the University of Kentucky, Indiana University and Washington University have all held some version of Sex Week in recent years. Despite the busy national debate over contraception and financing for reproductive health, Sex Week at Harvard (and elsewhere) has veered away from politics, emerging instead as a response to concern among students that classroom lessons in sexuality — whether in junior high school or beyond — fall short of preparing them for the experience itself. Organizers of these events say that college students today face a confusing reality: At a time when sexuality is more baldly and blatantly on display, young people are, paradoxically, having less sex than in generations past, surveys indicate. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16666 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By Ferris Jabr In kindergarten, several of my friends and I were very serious about learning to tie our shoes. I remember sitting on the edge of the playground, looping laces into bunny ears and twisting them into a knot over and over again until I had it just right. A few years later, whistling became my new challenge. On the car ride to school or walking between classes, I puckered my lips and blew, shifting my tongue like rudder to direct the air. Finally, after weeks of nothing but tuneless wooshing, I whistled my first note. Although I had no inkling of it at the time, my persistence rewired my brain. Just about everything we do modifies connections between brain cells—learning and memory are dependent on this flexibility. When we improve a skill through practice, we strengthen connections between neurons involved in that skill. In a recent study, scientists peeked into the brains of living mice as the rodents learned some new tricks. Mice who repeated the same task day after day grew more clusters of mushroomlike appendages on their neurons than mice who divided their attention among different tasks. In essence, the scientists observed a physical trace of practice in the brain. Yi Zuo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues studied how neurons changed in the brains of three groups of mice that learned different kinds of behaviors over four days, as well as a fourth group of mice that went about business as usual, learning nothing new. Of the three learning groups, the first practiced the same task each day, learning how to stretch their paws through gaps in a Plexiglass cage to get a tasty seed just within reach. The second group practiced two tasks: reaching for a seed and learning how to eat slippery bits of capellini, a very thin pasta. Each day mice in the third group played in a cage outfitted with a different set of toys, such as ropes, ladders and mesh on which to scamper and climb. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16665 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By Ferris Jabr In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. "Memory foraging" is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering. Hills and his colleagues asked 141 Indiana University Bloomington students to type the names of as many animals as they could think of in three minutes. For decades, psychologists have used such "verbal fluency tasks" to study memory and diseases in which memory breaks down, such as Alzheimer's and dementia. Again and again, researchers have found that people name animals—or vegetables or movies—in clusters of related items. They might start out saying "cat, dog, goldfish, hamster"—animals kept as pets—and then, having exhausted that subcategory, move onto ocean animals: "dolphin, whale, shark, octopus." © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16664 - Posted: 04.17.2012

by John Bohannon A smile and a frown mean the same thing everywhere—or so say many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, who for more than a century have argued that all humans express basic emotions the same way. But a new study of people's perceptions of computer-generated faces suggests that facial expressions may not be universal and that our culture strongly shapes the way we read and express emotions. The hypothesis that facial expressions convey the same meaning the world over goes all the way back to Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the famed naturalist identified six basic emotional states: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. If facial expressions are just cultural traits, passed down through the generations by imitation, their meanings would have diverged by now, he argued. A smile would signal happiness for some and disgust for others. But that's not what he found, based on his correspondence with researchers around the world using photos of various facial expressions. So Darwin concluded that the common ancestors of all living humans had the same set of basic emotions, with corresponding facial expressions as part of our genetic inheritance. Smiles and frowns are biological, not cultural. Or are they? Rachael Jack, a psychologist at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, says that there is a fundamental flaw in the facial expression studies carried out since Darwin's time: Researchers have been using Darwin's six basic expressions as their starting point, and yet they were first identified by Western European scientists studying Western European subjects. The fact that non-Western subjects can recognize the emotions from photographs of those facial expressions has been taken as support for the universality hypothesis. But what if non-Western cultures have different basic emotions that underlie their expressions? Those expressions may be similar to those of Westerners, but with subtle differences that have gone undetected because no one has looked. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 16663 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By Charles Q. Choi and LiveScience The order in which colors are named worldwide appears to be due to how eyes work, suggest computer simulations with virtual people. These findings suggest that wavelengths of color that are easier to see also get names earlier in the evolution of a culture. A common question in philosophy is whether or not we all see the world the same way. One strategy that scientists have for investigating that question is to see what colors get names in different cultures. Intriguingly, past research has found that colors familiar to one culture might not have names in another, suggesting different cultures indeed have distinct ways of understanding the world. One mystery scientists have uncovered is that color names always seem to appear in a specific order of importance across cultures—black, white, red, green, yellow and blue. "For example, if a population has a name for red, it also has a name for black and for white; or, if it has a name for green, it also has a name for red," said researcher Francesca Tria, a physicist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. But if a population has a name for black and white, that doesn't necessarily mean they have a name for red. To solve the puzzle of this color-name hierarchy, Tria and her colleagues devised a computer simulation with pairs of virtual people, or "agents," who lacked the knowledge of names for colors. One agent, the speaker, is shown two or more objects, invents a name for a color to describe one of the objects, and refers to the item by that color. The other agent, the hearer, then has to guess which item, and thus color, the speaker referred to. Scientists repeated this until all the agents came to a consensus on color names. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Language
Link ID: 16662 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Some people respond to exercise by eating more. Others eat less. For many years, scientists thought that changes in hormones, spurred by exercise, dictated whether someone’s appetite would increase or drop after working out. But now new neuroscience is pointing to another likely cause. Exercise may change your desire to eat, two recent studies show, by altering how certain parts of your brain respond to the sight of food. In one study, scientists brought 30 young, active men and women to a lab at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for two experimental sessions, where they draped their heads in functional M.R.I. coils. The researchers wanted to track activity in portions of the brain known as the food-reward system, which includes the poetically named insula, putamen and rolandic operculum. These brain regions have been shown to control whether we like and want food. In general, the more cells firing there, the more we want to eat. But it hasn’t been clear how exercise alters the food-reward network. To find out, the researchers had the volunteers either vigorously ride computerized stationary bicycles or sit quietly for an hour before settling onto the M.R.I. tables. Each volunteer then swapped activities for their second session. Immediately afterward, they watched a series of photos flash onto computer screens. Some depicted low-fat fruits and vegetables or nourishing grains, while others showcased glistening cheeseburgers, ice cream sundaes and cookies. A few photos that weren’t of food were interspersed into the array. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 16661 - Posted: 04.17.2012

by Jane J. Lee Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you're in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you're in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night's sleep, where you know that you've been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee (Apis mellifera), scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect's circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction. Putting insects to sleep is nothing new. Researchers have used the animals for decades to figure out how anesthetics work, because the drugs elicit the same effects, at the same concentrations, in many different organisms. "You can give the anesthetic to a monkey and a snail, and they'll fall over and stop moving," says study co-author Guy Warman, a chronobiologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The circadian rhythm's daily cycles are also common across organisms. So-called clock genes help regulate the rhythms that make us feel awake during the day and tired at night, while also prompting honeybees to search for nectar at certain times of day. External inputs, such as light, fine-tune those cycles. In our case, they keep us on a roughly 24-hour schedule. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 16660 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Researchers have found further experimental evidence that inadequate sleep can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. A five-week study showed that sleep disruption decreases insulin secretion, increases blood glucose levels and slows metabolism enough to lead to significant weight gain. Scientists kept 24 male and female volunteers in a sleep laboratory for 39 days. After an initial period of normal sleep, the volunteers were put on a schedule by which they slept for 5.6 hours and were kept awake for 21.5 hours, for three weeks. Then the participants had nine days to re-establish normal sleep patterns. Disturbed sleep resulted in a 27 percent average decrease in insulin secretion after eating, and higher glucose levels over a longer period of time, sometimes high enough to make the subject prediabetic. In addition, there was an average 8 percent decrease in resting metabolism rate, a measure of how much energy the body consumes at rest, that translates into a theoretical weight gain of more than 12 pounds a year. Orfeu M. Buxton, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, said the key for people who must work nights, or rapidly change time zones, is to “get better sleep during the day by sleeping in a dark, silent, cool room.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 16659 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By KATE MURPHY Diagnoses of attention hyperactivity disorder among children have increased dramatically in recent years, rising 22 percent from 2003 to 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many experts believe that this may not be the epidemic it appears to be. Many children are given a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., researchers say, when in fact they have another problem: a sleep disorder, like sleep apnea. The confusion may account for a significant number of A.D.H.D. cases in children, and the drugs used to treat them may only be exacerbating the problem. “No one is saying A.D.H.D. does not exist, but there’s a strong feeling now that we need to rule out sleep issues first,” said Dr. Merrill Wise, a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at the Methodist Healthcare Sleep Disorders Center in Memphis. The symptoms of sleep deprivation in children resemble those of A.D.H.D. While adults experience sleep deprivation as drowsiness and sluggishness, sleepless children often become wired, moody and obstinate; they may have trouble focusing, sitting still and getting along with peers. The latest study suggesting a link between inadequate sleep and A.D.H.D. symptoms appeared last month in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers followed 11,000 British children for six years, starting when they were 6 months old. The children whose sleep was affected by breathing problems like snoring, mouth breathing or apnea were 40 percent to 100 percent more likely than normal breathers to develop behavioral problems resembling A.D.H.D. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Sleep
Link ID: 16658 - Posted: 04.17.2012

A Glasgow-based doctor is to lead the world's biggest research study into the cause of Parkinson's disease. The brain condition affects almost 130,000 people in the UK. Dr Donald Grosset, a neurologist at Glasgow University, said he hoped to find better ways of both diagnosing and treating the disease. Charity Parkinson's UK is looking for 3,000 volunteers with the condition - and their siblings - to take part in the study. Parkinson's is a debilitating condition with symptoms which include tremors, mood changes, movement difficulties, loss of smell and speech problems. The charity said it was investing more than £1.6m in the Tracking Parkinson's study with the long-term aim of boosting the chances of finding a cure. The study will follow 3,000 volunteers - people recently diagnosed with the disease, people diagnosed aged under 50 and their brothers and sisters. The aim is to identify markers in the blood which could be used to create a simple diagnostic test for the disease, something which does not yet exist. Parkinson's UK said early diagnosis is crucial if doctors are to be able to prescribe the right drugs for people with the condition. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16657 - Posted: 04.16.2012

Chris McManus, professor of psychology and medical education at University College London, responds: if by intelligent you mean someone who performs better on IQ tests, the simple answer is no. Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy. If by intelligent you mean someone who performs better on IQ tests, the simple answer is no. Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy. Left-handedness is, however, much more common among individuals with severe learning difficulties, such as mental retardation. A slightly higher proportion of left-handers have dyslexia or a stutter. Other problems, such as a higher rate of accidents reported in left-handers, mostly result from a world designed for the convenience of right-handers, with many tools not made for left-handed use. Although some people claim that a higher percentage of left-handers are exceptionally bright, large research studies do not support this idea. If by smarter you mean more talented in certain areas, left-handers may have an advantage. Left-handers’ brains are structured differently from right-handers’ in ways that can allow them to process language, spatial relations and emotions in more diverse and potentially creative ways. Also, a slightly larger number of left-handers than right-handers are especially gifted in music and math. A study of musicians in professional orchestras found a significantly greater proportion of talented left-handers, even among those who played instruments that seem designed for right-handers, such as violins. Similarly, studies of adolescents who took tests to assess mathematical giftedness found many more left-handers in the population. The fact that mathematicians are often musical may not be a coincidence. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Laterality; Intelligence
Link ID: 16656 - Posted: 04.16.2012

by Andy Coghlan THE blind hunter sees. It may not have eyes, but the hydra - a centimetre-long relative of the jellyfish - still senses light to detect and kill its prey. This finding is part of efforts to uncover the evolutionary origins of sight. Two years ago, David Plachetzki of the University of California at Davis showed that Hydra magnipapillata has genes that are involved in light detection. These include the gene coding for opsin, a protein that is key to all animal vision. To find out how the hydra uses these genes, Plachetzki and his colleagues looked at which cells expressed them. This pointed to a complex of cells that is connected to the hydra's hunting equipment. The hydra kills its prey with stings that are propelled like harpoonsMovie Camera. When Plachetzki's team exposed tanks of hydra to periods of bright and dim light, the hydra ejected twice as many stings under dim conditions. This, the team says, shows that hydra use light levels to hunt (BMC Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-10-17). H. magnipapillata may have been one of the first creatures to develop sensitivity to light. Possible explanations for this sensitivity could be that the hydra hunts at dusk when food is more plentiful or by sensing changes in light intensity - releasing stings when the shadows of prey pass overhead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16655 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Michele Solis Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits. Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Re­search­ers think these resting-state patterns reflect how the brain typically operates when we interact with the world. “You can think of it as showing which connections in the brain are on speed dial and which ones aren’t,” says Michael Milham, a psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, who led the study. Using functional MRI, the researchers monitored the resting state of 39 healthy participants and looked for regions that tended to activate together. How tightly coord­inated the activity was between a pair of regions—completely in sync or only somewhat the same—correl­ated with scores from one of five personality domains: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agree­ableness and conscientiousness. For example, neuroti­cism was associated with areas related to self-evaluation and fear. Other results were more surprising, suggesting an unexpected role in personality for the visual cortex and cerebellum—areas better known for visual processing and movement, respectively. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16654 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Maria Konnikova When I was seven years old, my mom took me to see Curly Sue. Though I don’t remember much of the movie, two scenes made quite the impression: the first, when James Belushi asks Alisan Porter to hit him on the head with a baseball bat, and the second, when Bill, Sue, and Grey sit in the 3-D movie theater. At first glance, that second one doesn’t seem to pack quite the same punch–insert pun grimace here–as a little girl swinging a huge bat at a man’s forehead. But I found it irresistible. A wide shot of the entire movie theater, and all of the faces—in 3-D glasses, of course—moving and reacting in perfect unison. Heads swerve left. Heads swerve right. Gasps. Ducks. Frowns. All in a beautifully choreographed synchronicity. What made the scene so memorable to me? I’m not entirely sure, but I can only imagine that it was awe at the realization that, at certain moments, we can all be made to experience the same emotions in similar fashion. I don’t think I ever understood before that when I watched a movie, it wasn’t just me watching and reacting. Everyone else was watching and reacting along with me. And chances are, they were doing it in much the same way. Twenty years later, researchers are finally beginning to understand what it is that makes the present-day film experience so binding on a profound level—and why it’s often difficult for older movies to keep up. It seems that filmmakers have over the years perfected the way to best capture—and keep—viewers’ attention. Through trial, error, and instinct, Hollywood has figured out how best to cater to the natural dynamic of our attention and how to capitalize on our naïve assumptions about the continuity of space, time, and action. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 16653 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times Scientists have published a new map of gene variations that influence the risk for various brain diseases and conditions, including Alzheimer’s. More than 200 researchers involved in Project ENIGMA (for Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) pored over thousands of MRI images and DNA screens from 21,151 healthy people. They looked for specific, heritable gene variations that appeared to cause disease. They sought out gene variants associated with reduced brain size, which is a marker for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, as well as mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They also discovered gene variants associated with larger brain size and increased intelligence. The collaboration was led by the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA and researchers in Australia and in the Netherlands, who recruited scientists at more than 100 institutions to pool brain scans and genetic information. “By sharing our data with Project ENIGMA, we created a sample large enough to reveal clear patterns in genetic variation and show how these changes physically alter the brain,” Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at UCLA who helped lead the effort, said in a statement. The research was published online Sunday by the journal Nature Genetics. Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16652 - Posted: 04.16.2012