By Maria Popova The secret of happiness is arguably humanity's longest-standing fixation, and its mechanisms are among the most consuming obsessions of modern science. In The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional -- and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy -- lens to the holy grail of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain's capacity for well-being. What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes -- memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language -- to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness. As it turns out, a fundamental truth about happiness lies in the very language of the Declaration of Independence, which encouraged its pursuit: The focus on the pursuit of happiness, endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, fits well with the idea of life as a journey -- a bright thread that runs through the literary cannon of the collective human culture. With the world at your feet, the turns that you should take along the way depend on what you are at the outset and on what you become as the journey lengthens. Accordingly, the present book is an attempt to understand, in a deeper sense than merely metaphorical, what it means to be human and how humans are shaped by the journey thorough this world, which the poet John Keats called 'the vale of soul-making' -- in particular, how it puts within the soul's reach 'a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16591 - Posted: 03.31.2012

The brain appears to be wired more like the checkerboard streets of New York City than the curvy lanes of Columbia, Md., suggests a new brain imaging study. The most detailed images, to date, reveal a pervasive 3D grid structure with no diagonals, say scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain's connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” explained Van Wedeen, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Harvard Medical School. “This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species.” Wedeen and colleagues report new evidence of the brain's elegant simplicity March 30, 2012 in the journal Science. The study was funded, in part, by the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Human Connectome Project of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, and other NIH components. “Getting a high resolution wiring diagram of our brains is a landmark in human neuroanatomy,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “This new technology may reveal individual differences in brain connections that could aid diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders.” Knowledge gained from the study helped shape design specifications for the most powerful brain scanner of its kind, which was installed at MGH's Martinos Center last fall. The new Connectom diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner can visualize the networks of crisscrossing fibers — by which different parts of the brain communicate with each other — in 10-fold higher detail than conventional scanners, said Wedeen.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16590 - Posted: 03.31.2012

By Maria Popova The nature vs. nurture debate pitted the hard and social sciences against each other for decades, if not centuries, stirred by a central concern with consciousness, what it means to be human, what makes a person, and, perhaps most interestingly to us egocentric beings, what constitutes character and personality. In Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based on the emerging science of connectomics -- a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome. A "connectome" denotes the sum total of connections between the neurons in a nervous system and, like "genome," implies completeness. It's a complex fingerprint of identity, revealing the differences between brains and, inversely, the specificity of our own uniqueness. Seung proposes a simple theory: We are different because our connectomes differ from one another. With that lens, he argues, any kind of personality change -- from educating yourself to developing better habits -- is a matter of rewiring your connectome. That capacity is precisely what makes the connectome intriguing and infinitely promising -- unlike the genome, which is fixed from the moment of conception, the connetome changes throughout life. Seung explains: Neuroscientists have already identified the basic kinds of change. Neurons adjust, or "reweight," their connections by strengthening or weakening them. Neurons reconnect by creating and eliminating synapses, and they rewire by growing and retracting branches. Finally, entirely new neurons are created and existing ones eliminated through regeneration. © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16589 - Posted: 03.31.2012

by Virginia Morell The male dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, are known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. Their relationships with each other are so unusual—they're more like the intricate webs of the Mafia than the vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees—that, in a new paper, one team of scientists argues that the dolphins live in a social system that is "unique among mammals." Intriguingly, the researchers also suggest that these complex, and often cooperative, relationships may stem in part from one simple, unexpected factor: the dolphins' low cruising speed. Mammals have evolved a variety of social structures. For example, chimpanzees live in what ethologists call "semiclosed groups"—that is, a community comprised of individuals who are well-known to each other. The members generally aren't friendly to chimps in other communities; the males practice what's known as community defense, patrolling and guarding their territory and fighting their neighbors. Inside that tight group, the chimpanzees also have male-male alliances. At first glance, dolphins seem to have a somewhat similar social system. Two or three adult males form a tight alliance and cooperate to herd a female for mating. (Female dolphins rarely form strong alliances.) Other male teams may try to spirit away the female—particularly if she is in estrus. To fight back, the first-level alliances form partnerships with other first-level alliances, thus creating a larger second-level alliance. Some of these second-level alliances have as many as 14 dolphins and can last 15 years or more. On some occasions, the second-level alliance can call in the troops from yet another group, "a third-order alliance," as the researchers call them—leading to huge battles with more than 20 dolphins biting and bashing each other with their heads and tails over the right to keep or steal a single female. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16588 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By NEIL GENZLINGER Perhaps years from now, after a scientific breakthrough has turned Alzheimer’s disease into a memory as distant as polio wards are to younger Americans today, someone will stumble upon Scott Kirschenbaum’s hard-to-watch documentary, “You’re Looking at Me Like I Live Here and I Don’t,” and be stunned. “I’ve read about Alzheimer’s,” this person will say, “but I had no idea what it was actually like.” Alzheimer’s has been a trendy topic for writers of plays and television scripts in recent years. But those stories have often been primarily about the people surrounding the patient — family members, friends — and the effect of the disease on their lives. Mr. Kirschenbaum, whose film will be broadcast nationally on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on Thursday (on Sunday on Channel 13 in New York), takes the simple but bold step of making Alzheimer’s the only thing in his tale. It’s not a plot point that propels a narrative; it’s an inescapable box. The film zeros in on one woman, Lee Gorewitz, in a residential care center in Danville, Calif., and follows her through her daily routines. There are no talking heads describing current research into the disease, no family members waxing nostalgic about Ms. Gorewitz’s life before Alzheimer’s. Mr. Kirschenbaum sprinkles in some unobtrusive music and prods with an occasional question from behind the camera, but that’s it. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16587 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Scicurious I’m sitting here, preparing to write a blog post on thermoregulation. I finished a good run a while ago. The temperatures outside weren’t too extreme (50ish degrees F, so comfortable for a good run), and I was sweating freely when I finished. About an hour later, here I am, in fleecey pants, shirt, socks, hoodie…and sleeping bag. And afghan. And cat. I’m freezing. Really, seriously cold. My nailbeds are almost purple, my hands are like ice, and I’ve got goosebumps all over. I’m almost too cold to shiver. This happens every time I run more than about 5 miles. It happens winter or summer (I think winter is worse, usually in summer it’s a relief!). I’ll go out, run 5 or more miles, come home sweaty and glowing with my happy runner’s high, and about 30 minutes later, once all the sweat is dried, I’ll descend into what I call the “post-run shivers”. They last up to two hours after the run, and are the reason I keep my sleeping bag close to hand. When I’ve asked other runners about it, many of them are mystified. Some of them have only experienced the hot feeling post-run, and tell me they can’t shower immediately, or they’ll come out still sweating! But a few others know what I mean. And I’ve always wondered, what is happening to me? Is it normal? Is it ok? When I learned about how humans regulate their body temperature, I learned that we have a natural temperature “set point” of around 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit), based in the hypothalamus of our brains, and your body regulates its temperature around that set point. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16586 - Posted: 03.29.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams Ten minutes after they play in a competitive soccer match with an audience of friends and family cheering them on, men from the Tsimane people in lowland Bolivia have testosterone levels 30% higher than they were before the game. If the players were athletes in the United States, this number wouldn't be surprising. But Tsimane men have much lower levels of testosterone throughout their lives than do men in developed countries. The findings may provide clues to how the body regulates short-term versus long-term increases in the hormone. The Tsimane, a population of 15,000 spread among small villages in the Amazon, rely on farming, hunting, and gathering to survive. With only recent exposure to immunizations and modern sanitation methods, the people are plagued by infections, pathogens, respiratory illnesses, and gastrointestinal diseases. This disease burden suggested to anthropologist Benjamin Trumble of the University of Washington, Seattle, that the men would likely have low testosterone levels. "Testosterone is quite energetically expensive and is also thought to interfere with immune functioning," he notes. "So if you're part of a population that faces lots of parasites and pathogens, generally you've adapted to have less testosterone." To confirm his hypothesis, Trumble and colleagues recruited 88 Tsimane men who were playing in a competitive inter-village soccer tournament. Despite their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the Tsimane have had increasing contact with other populations over the past few decades and have become avid fans of soccer. Men who were participating in the tournament play, on average, three times a week. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16585 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Janelle Weaver Birth-control pills are known to affect women’s taste in men, at least in laboratory experiments. Now a study of real-world couples suggests that this pill-related preference change could have long-term consequences for a relationship’s quality and outcome. In the lab, women using oral contraceptives show a weaker preference for masculine men—those with high testosterone levels and the corresponding physical hallmarks—than their non-pill-using counterparts. To investigate this issue in a real-world setting, psychologist S. Craig Roberts of the University of Stirling in Scotland and his collaborators gave online surveys to more than 2,500 women from various countries. According to the results, published online October 12 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, participants who used hormonal contraceptives while choosing their partner were less attracted to him and less sexually satisfied during their relationship than were individuals who did not use hormonal birth control. Pill users were happier with their mate’s financial support and other nonsexual aspects of the relationship, however, and they were less likely to separate. This relationship stability might be caused by the bias of women on the pill toward low-testosterone men, who tend to be more faithful. Roberts suggests that women who met their mate while taking the pill might want to switch to nonhormonal contraceptives several months before getting married to test whether their feelings for their partner remain the same. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16584 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Bruce Bower An ancient member of the human evolutionary family has put what’s left of a weird, gorillalike foot forward to show that upright walking evolved along different paths in East Africa. A 3.4 million-year-old partial fossil foot unearthed in Ethiopia comes from a previously unknown hominid species that deftly climbed trees but walked clumsily, say anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and his colleagues. Their report appears in the March 29 Nature. To the scientists’ surprise, this creature lived at the same time and in the same region as Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid species best known for a partial skeleton dubbed Lucy. Another recent fossil discovery in Ethiopia suggests that Lucy’s kind walked much as people do today (SN: 7/17/10, p. 5). “For the first time, we have evidence of another hominid lineage that lived at the same time as Lucy,” says anthropologist and study coauthor Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “This new find has a grasping big toe and no arch, suggesting [the species] couldn’t walk great distances and spent a lot of time in the trees.” Lucy’s flat-footed compatriot adds to limited evidence that some hominids retained feet designed for adept tree climbing several million years after the origin of an upright gait, writes Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman in a comment published in the same issue of Nature. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16583 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Stephen Dougherty In the film Amèlie, the main character is a young eccentric woman who attempts to change the lives of those around her for the better. One day Amèlie finds an old rusty tin box of childhood mementos in her apartment, hidden by a boy decades earlier. After tracking down Bretodeau, the owner, she lures him to a phone booth where he discovers the box. Upon opening the box and seeing a few marbles, a sudden flash of vivid images come flooding into his mind. Next thing you know, Bretodeau is transported to a time when he was in the schoolyard scrambling to stuff his pockets with hundreds of marbles while a teacher is yelling at him to hurry up. We have all experienced this: a seemingly insignificant trigger, a scent, a song, or an old photograph transports us to another time and place. Now a group of neuroscientists have investigated the fascinating question: Can a few neurons trigger a full memory? In a new study, published in Nature, a group of researchers from MIT showed for the first time that it is possible to activate a memory on demand, by stimulating only a few neurons with light, using a technique known as optogenetics. Optogenetics is a powerful technology that enables researchers to control genetically modified neurons with a brief pulse of light. To artificially turn on a memory, researchers first set out to identify the neurons that are activated when a mouse is making a new memory. To accomplish this, they focused on a part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in learning and memory, especially for discriminating places. Then they inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into hippocampal neurons, enabling them to use light to control the neurons. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16582 - Posted: 03.29.2012

By Scicurious Could stress play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s? Right now we’re not sure, but this latest study shows that it may play a role, though exactly how? Well, we’re still not sure. So what does stress have to do with Alzheimer’s? To look at this we’ll have to start by bringing two areas of study together: stress, and Tau. Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by the development of two different globs of proteins, beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. This study focuses on neurofibrillary tangles, or NFTs, which are made up of aggregates of a protein called tau. Tau is normally a protein used in the cytoskeleton to build and maintain cellular structure. In the case of Alzheimer’s Disease, tau proteins end up getting phosphorylated, have phosphorous attached to them, which causes them to be able to aggregate in groups, and if those get large enough, into neurofibrillary tangles. These tangles in your brain cells correlate with the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s (though as yet we have no definitive proof that they CAUSE Alzheimer’s). Studying the tau protein, how it becomes phosphorylated and then aggregates, could thus allow us to study one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, and if these tangles cause some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, studies of tau could also provide us with new methods to attack the development of the disease. And now what about stress? Stress has been linked to the development of many psychiatric diseases such as anxiety and depression, but it is also a natural response to, well, stressful situations. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers; Stress
Link ID: 16581 - Posted: 03.27.2012

OUR intelligence, more than any particular behaviour or anatomical feature, is what distinguishes humans from the myriad other species with which we share our planet. It is a key factor in everything from our anatomy to our technology. To ask why we are intelligent is to ask why we are human; it admits no discrete answer. But let's ask it here anyway. Why are we, alone in nature, so smart? Perhaps we are not. Maybe our anthropocentric conceit prevents us from fully appreciating the intelligence of other animals, be they ants, cephalopods or cetaceans. As Douglas Adams put it: "Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons." So let's rephrase the question. There is a cluster of abilities that seems unique to humans: language, tool use, culture and empathy. Other animals may have rudimentary forms of these abilities, but they do not approach humans' sophistication and flexibility. Why not? Some come closer than others. German psychologists say they have identified a chimp whose mental abilities far surpass those of its peers (see "Chimp prodigy shows signs of human-like intelligence"). Intriguingly, they go on to suggest that this might be because Natasha, the simian prodigy, exhibits strong social-reasoning skills, such as learning from others. These are the same skills to which the explosive development of human intelligence is increasingly attributed. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 16580 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By JOHN O’NEIL The first time Jillian Serpa tried to learn to drive, the family car wound up straddling a creek next to her home in Ringwood, N.J. Ms. Serpa, then 16, had gotten flustered trying to sort out a rapid string of directions from her father while preparing to back out of their driveway. “There was a lack of communication,” she said. “I stepped on the gas instead of the brake.” On her second attempt to learn, Ms. Serpa recalled, she “totally freaked out” at a busy intersection. It was four years before she tried driving again. She has made great progress, but so far has still fallen short of her goal: Two weeks ago she knocked over a cone while parallel parking and failed the road test for the fourth time. Learning to drive is hard and scary for many teenagers, and driving is far and away the most dangerous thing teenagers do. But the challenges are significantly greater for young people who, like Ms. Serpa, have attention problems. A number of cognitive conditions can affect driving, and instructors report a recent increase in the number of teenagers with Asperger syndrome seeking licenses. But the largest group of challenged teenage drivers — and the mostly closely studied — appears to be those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A 2007 study, by Russell A. Barkley of the Medical University of South Carolina and Daniel J. Cox of the University of Virginia Health System, concluded that young drivers with A.D.H.D. are two to four times as likely as those without the condition to have an accident — meaning that they are at a higher risk of wrecking the car than an adult who is legally drunk. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 16579 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. Like creatures battling undersea, pro-life and right-to-die forces are locked in mortal but only intermittently visible combat. The last prominent battle ended almost seven years ago, after the death of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman with brain damage whose feeding tube was removed by court order in the spring of 2005. Since then, all has been quiet on the surface, belying the continuing turmoil in hospitals and courtrooms over what, exactly, marks the end of life. Invariably, the louder the background tumult, the more useful is the quiet, dispassionate narrative. And so one turns to Dick Teresi’s new book with considerable hope: Surely Mr. Teresi, a veteran science journalist, past editor in chief of Science Digest and Omni, will be the ideal guide through those dim purgatories where life and death can be difficult to distinguish. All starts out promisingly enough. An indefatigable researcher and fluid writer, Mr. Teresi provides a good long riff on death past and present, from the Egyptian mummies, dehydrated into “the deadest people on the planet,” to the ever-hopeful terminally ill of our own age, still flossing their teeth and eating healthy meals in hospice care. Mr. Teresi points out that conclusive signs of death have always been subject to debate. All the great civilizations argued about them, with various expert commentators proposing various fail-safe criteria and yet (Mr. Teresi notes with some pleasure) specifying that they themselves should be left unburied for a few days just to avoid any unfortunate mistakes. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16578 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By Robert Bazell, Chief Science and Health Correspondent A "sensational" new finding could be the beginning of a cure for type 2 diabetes, a disease described in an editorial accompanying the research in the New England Journal of Medicine as “one of the fastest growing epidemics in human history.” Two studies find that weight loss surgery can eliminate the symptoms of type 2 diabetes in a large proportion of volunteers. That might not seem surprising, since obesity is the major risk factor for the disease. But in these studies, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Monday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, many of the patients got better within weeks, days, sometimes even hours after the surgery -- long before they lost any weight. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Dr. Phil Schauer of the Cleveland Clinic, the lead author on one of the studies. Schauaer’s study divided 150 patients with out-of-control diabetes into three groups. One-third got the best drug therapy, the next gastric-banding surgery, and last gastric bypass. The goal was to get the patients’ blood sugar (measured by the A1C test familiar to diabetics) below the normal level of 6 percent. Forty-two percent of the bypass patients reached the goal after one year compared to 37 percent of the banding patients and only 12 percent on medical therapy. But those numbers “don’t even begin to show how successful this was," according to Dr. Steve Nissen, another author of the paper from the Cleveland Clinic. He points out that at the beginning of the study most of the patients were taking three or more medications to control their diabetes. But after a year almost none of the gastric-bypass patients needed medication. Forty-four percent required daily insulin injections before surgery and none did after. Diabetes is a major risk factor for heart disease. Most of the surgery patients saw their HDL, the good cholesterol, shoot way up and their artery clogging triglycerides drop sharply. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16577 - Posted: 03.27.2012

People who eat chocolate frequently tend to have a lower body mass index than those who don't eat it as often, U.S. researchers have found. For the study in Monday's online issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers asked 1,017 healthy men and women aged 20 to 85 how many times a week they ate chocolate. Participants also filled in questionnaires about their diet and lifestyle. Study author Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor in the medical department at the University of California, San Diego, advised people to feel less guilty about indulging in the sweet treat. "I joke that chocolate is my favourite vegetable," Golomb said in an email. In the study, Golomb and her colleagues concluded that adults who ate chocolate more frequently had a lower BMI than those who ate it less often. Earlier studies suggested that chocolate has beneficial effects on metabolism, which may extend to lower body mass index, the researchers said. In human experiments, chocolate showed benefits for insulin sensitivity, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. To explore how the rich dessert may help, the researchers considered factors like the saturated fat content of chocolate, calories, physical activity levels and mood. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16576 - Posted: 03.27.2012

By Laura Sanders Cheeseburgers pack on the pounds, but in mice a high-fat diet also packs on new nerve cells in the brain. More brain cells may seem like a good thing, but these newly sprouted cells appear to trigger weight gain in the animals, a new study finds. The results offer insight into how the brain controls weight. If the same thing happens in humans, these nerve cells may be a target for anti-obesity treatments. “This kind of work will definitely inform how we think about the underlying factors that relate to obesity,” says endocrinologist Jeffrey Flier of Harvard Medical School in Boston. There’s increasing interest, he says, in how long-term changes in brain circuitry — like new nerve cell production — affect eating and hunger. “That is going to be a very interesting frontier.” With some key exceptions, most regions in the adult brain don’t make new nerve cells. But in a small sliver of brain tissue called the median eminence, new nerve cells are born throughout life, neuroscientist Seth Blackshaw of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues report online March 25 in Nature Neuroscience. The median eminence is part of the brain’s metabolism hub known as the hypothalamus. And one signal to step up production in the median eminence, the team found, is a diet high in fat. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16575 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By Bruce Bower Meeting the Almighty takes hallucinatory talent and training. And Hannah, a member of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, has got it down. She talks with God every day. Sometimes she imagines that God is walking beside her, although no vision of the Almighty appears. On other occasions, Hannah goes on what she calls “date nights” with God. She buys a sandwich, finds a secluded bench and imagines that the big guy is sitting next to her. In both cases, imagination occasionally gives way to a sense of truly hearing God speak. During these divine experiences, Hannah gets in touch with her unconscious mind, an undercurrent of thoughts and feelings she regards not as her own but as those of the Holy Spirit. “I recognize that it’s not me, but God inside me, that I’m having a conversation with,” Hannah told Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. “Which makes this relationship way more complicated … trying to imagine some real but not real figure outside of my own self.” Luhrmann spent more than four years interviewing evangelical Christians in Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., for her 2012 book When God Talks Back. Her conversations with Vineyard members, including the young woman given the pseudonym Hannah, are part of an ongoing effort to try to understand how ordinary people can meet God through spiritual hallucinations. Researchers studying hallucinations often focus on people with schizophrenia and other psychotic ailments who experience incessant, unwanted and distressing hallucinations. But emotionally stable, well-functioning individuals can have unusual sensory experiences too. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16574 - Posted: 03.26.2012

Roger Dobson , Sanjeela Pahl It's bad enough that they suffer second-degree burns at the drop of a sunhat and hurt feelings from a barrage of barbs aimed at their fiery heads. Now it seems nature might have added injury to the insults heaped on redheads, by making them extra sensitive to physical pain. Researchers at Southampton University Hospital are carrying out trials this year to discover whether pale-skinned patients who share their hair colour with Elizabeth I may require more anaesthetic than the rest of the population. The results should either confirm or disprove previous research in the United States suggesting that redheads are indeed more susceptible to pain. Red hair results from variants of a gene that plays a key role in human hair and skin colour. The same gene is involved in the production of endorphins, the body's natural painkillers. The Southampton study aims to find out whether this could explain redheads' apparently heightened sensitivity. In the trials, due to end in September, volunteers aged over 30 with red hair are anaesthetised and subjected to electrical charges through their thigh. Their reactions will be compared with those of a group of men and women with brown or black hair. If it turns out that red-haired people do feel more pain, it will help to explain previous research showing they are more fearful than other groups about visiting the dentist. An American study found that redheads were more anxious about dental treatment and more than twice as likely to avoid it. A second study by the same researchers found that women with red hair needed 19 per cent more painkiller to stop them flinching from unpleasant stimulation than women with dark hair. "Redheads experience more pain from a given stimulus and therefore require more anaesthesia to alleviate that pain," said Dr Edwin Liem, who led the study at Louisville University. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16573 - Posted: 03.26.2012

By Sandra G. Boodman, Driving south on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway bound for his Adams Morgan home in June 2009, Michael Herndon struggled to cope with the implications of what the doctor had just told him. For months Herndon had tried to find out why the headache he developed on Nov. 15, 2008 — he remembered the exact date — had not gone away. The 41-year-old had consulted neurologists and ear, nose and throat specialists as well as an allergist and ophthalmologist, but none of them had figured out what was causing his pain. “I was starting to hit a mental and physical wall,” recalled Herndon, a consumer outreach specialist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “I’d been chasing this for more than six months. No one could tell me what it was. I just remember thinking, ‘How am I going to be able to function if it never goes away?’ ” He had taken multiple courses of antibiotics and corticosteroids as well as over-the-counter pain relievers, and he had even undergone sinus surgery, all to no avail. Doctors had ruled out a brain tumor and other ailments but had no idea why his head, and increasingly his nose, still hurt. A month later, Herndon learned the name of his disorder. It would be another year before he found effective help to cope with his chronic, and still largely inexplicable, head pain. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16572 - Posted: 03.26.2012