By Tori Rodriguez Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire (those who scored in the neutral range—about half of initial respondents—were excluded). Wieth instructed them to solve three analytic problems and three insight-oriented ones. No time-of-day effect was found for analytic problem solving, but subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day. Wieth believes this effect is the result of a reduction in inhibitory attentional control—the ability to filter information that is irrelevant to the task at hand. “This less focused cognitive state makes people more susceptible to think about other, seemingly unrelated information—like things they experienced earlier or their to-do list,” she explains. “This additional information floating around in your mind during your nonoptimal time of day ultimately helps you reach that creative aha! moment.” © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 16757 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By DENISE GRADY He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm. By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce. But in 2007, she found out what was wrong. “I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.” Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis. But recently, researchers have been making important discoveries about the biochemical and genetic defects that cause some forms of the disease. And for the first time, they have identified drugs that may be able to treat one of those defects, the buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain. Tests in people, the first ever such drug trials in this disease, could begin as soon as early next year at the University of California, San Francisco. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Attention
Link ID: 16756 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By ANNE EISENBERG DIGITAL hearing aids can do wonders for faded hearing. But other devices can help, too, as audio technology adds new options to help people converse at a noisy restaurant, or talk quietly with a pharmacist at a crowded drugstore counter. Richard Einhorn, a composer who suddenly lost much of his hearing two years ago, relies on his hearing aid, of course, for general use. But when he is meeting friends at a busy coffee shop — where his hearing aid is not always good at distinguishing their voices amid the clatter — he removes it. He has a better solution. He pops on a pair of in-ear earphones and snaps a directional mike on his iPhone, which has an app to amplify and process sound. “I put the iPhone on the table,” he said. “I point it at whoever’s talking, and I can have conversations with them. Soon we forget the iPhone is sitting there.” Mr. Einhorn’s ad hoc solution to restaurant racket is a feasible one, said Jay T. Rubinstein, a professor of bioengineering and otolaryngology at the University of Washington. “It makes sense when you need to capture a speaker’s voice in a noisy environment,” he said. “A system that gives you a high-quality directional mike and good earphones can help people hear in a complex setting.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 16755 - Posted: 05.07.2012

By Gary Stix “Superwoman has been rumbled,” declared a Daily Telegraph article in 2001 that chronicled how the human brain’s inability to “multitask” undercuts the prospects for a woman to juggle career and family with any measure of success. The brain as media icon has emerged repeatedly in recent years as new imaging techniques have proliferated—and, as a symbol, it seems to confuse as much as enlighten. The steady flow of new studies that purport to reduce human nature to a series of illuminated blobs on scanner images have fostered the illusion that a nouveau biological determinism has arrived. More often than not, a “neurobiological correlate”— tying together brain activity with a behavioral attribute (love, pain, aggression)—supplies the basis for a journal publication that translates instantly into a newspaper headline. The link between blob and behavior conveys an aura of versimilitude that often proves overly seductive to the reporter hard up to fill a health or science quota. A community of neuroscience bloggers, meanwhile, has taken on the responsibility of rectifying some of these misinterpretations. A study published last week by University College of London researchers—“Neuroscience in the Public Sphere”—tried to imbue this trend with more substance by quantifying and formally characterizing it. “Brain-based information possesses rhetorical power,” the investigators note. “Logically irrelevant neuroscience information [the result of the multitude of correlations that turn up] imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.” © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16754 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Ewen Callaway Humans walk on two feet and (mostly) lack hair-covered bodies, but the feature that sets us furthest apart from other apes is a brain capable of language, art, science, and other trappings of civilisation. Now, two studies published online today in Cell1, 2 suggest that DNA duplication errors that happened millions of years ago might have had a pivotal role in the evolution of the complexity of the human brain. The duplications — which created new versions of a gene active in the brains of other mammals — may have endowed humans with brains that could create more neuronal connections, perhaps leading to greater computational power. The enzymes that copy DNA sometimes slip extra copies of a gene into a chromosome, and scientists estimate that such genetic replicas make up about 5% of the human genome. However, gene duplications are notoriously difficult to study because the new genes differ little from their forebears, and tend to be overlooked. Evan Eichler, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author of one of the Cell papers, previously found that humans have four copies of a gene called SRGAP2, and he and his colleagues decided to investigate. In their new paper, they report that the three duplicated versions of SRGAP2 sit on chromosome 1, along with the original ancestral gene, but they are not exact copies. All of the duplications are missing a small part of the ancestral form of the gene, and at least one duplicate, SRGAP2C, seems to make a working protein. Eichler’s team has also found SRGAP2C in every individual human genome his team has examined – more than 2,000 so far – underscoring its significance. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16753 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By Bruce Bower Feeling peppy may lead older adults to settle for less. In a new study, seniors in a good mood compared fewer options and made worse choices than did those in a bad mood or younger participants. “Positive emotions may have costs for older adults’ decision making,” says study coauthor Bettina von Helversen, a psychologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. A bright mood makes it harder to select a quality option from a series of choices, such as finding a bargain on a new computer offered at different prices by various online sites, say von Helversen and University of Basel colleague Rui Mata. Though the study looked at comparing prices on products, picking from a series of choices, what psychologists call sequential decision making, especially comes into play in situations such as choosing an apartment, hiring a caretaker or selecting a mate. Previous research has found that people’s moods generally become increasingly upbeat as they age. It’s this good mood, perhaps more than intellectual declines, that undermine seniors’ sequential decisions by promoting a limited search of available options, the researchers report in an upcoming Psychology and Aging. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 16752 - Posted: 05.05.2012

by Sara Reardon Their dads may be up with the sun, but it takes more than that to wake up a chick still in its egg. Unhatched chicks aren't roused from slumber by random noise, but they do wake up if they hear a chicken danger call. Evan Balaban of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says we still don't know when fetuses begin to experience sleep cycles the way adults do. It makes sense for the developing brain to stay in a state of suspended animation, similar to that of someone in a coma, to conserve oxygen. If the fetus brain is too active, it runs the risk of running out of oxygen and damaging itself. To find out more, Balaban and colleagues looked at developing chicks still in their eggs. Unlike mice, the chicks in their eggs are separated from any influence by the mother's hormones, making them easier to study. The researchers labelled sugar molecules with radioactive tracers and injected the sugar into the chick embryos. When the brain is active, it uses the sugar and lights up with the radioactive tracer. Using this method, the researchers found that the chicks' brains were fairly inactive until 80 per cent of the way through their development inside the egg. At that point, the brains began to take up the sugar in a regular cycle, suggesting they were passing through phases of sleep and wakefulness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16751 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV Seeing an object move doesn't actually mean that it's moving. In this video, the psychedelic patterns might look like they're rotating, but pause the video and you'll see that they are actually static images. This striking illusion, created by visual perception researcher Akiyoshi Kitaoka from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, is commonly known as the 'rotating snakes' and exploits a peripheral vision effect where motion is perceived in one direction due to gradual changes in brightness of segments in the pattern. Rounded edges also seem to enhance the illusion. The brain trick was thought to occur when our eyes slowly move across the image. But now a new study by Susana Martinez-Conde from Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and colleagues is uncovering that superfast eye movements are responsible for the phantom motion. Since the effect isn't perceived continuously, the team tracked eye movements of volunteers just before they started to see rotation. They found that people usually blinked, or moved their eyes so quickly they didn't realise it, right before their brain was tricked. Conversely, their eyes were stable when they didn't perceive motion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16750 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. On Thursday I challenged Well readers to figure out a medical mystery involving a middle-aged woman who learned she had an unusual disease after visiting an ophthalmologist. The case was surprising because the woman didn’t feel sick, yet the doctor made the diagnosis just by looking at her and asking her a few simple questions that confirmed his diagnostic suspicions. The first reader to figure it out completely was Dr. Eric Gierke, a neurologist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. He said he recognized the condition because he had a patient who had acromegaly and only a few very subtle physical changes. In submitting his answer, Dr. Gierke also guessed one of the questions that the diagnosing physician asked the patient — “Has your shoe size changed recently?” — making him the clear winner. A few other readers also guessed both the questions and the diagnosis, but Dr. Gierke was first and the most specific. In all, 16 readers figured out the correct diagnosis. Well done! Acromegaly is a disease caused by a tumor, usually found in the pituitary gland, that secretes an excess of growth hormone, the blood chemical that tells our bodies to grow. Children with acromegaly can grow to extraordinary stature. André the Giant, the French professional wrestler and actor whose height was billed at 7 feet 4 inches, and Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor who played the villain Jaws in two James Bond movies, both had acromegaly from childhood. Their distinctive faces reveal some of the characteristic acromegalic changes: Their brows are prominent, and they have wide, square chins and large noses. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16749 - Posted: 05.05.2012

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service Up to 90% of school leavers in major Asian cities are suffering from myopia - short-sightedness - a study suggests. Researchers say the "extraordinary rise" in the problem is being caused by students working very hard in school and missing out on outdoor light. The scientists told the Lancet that up to one in five of these students could experience severe visual impairment and even blindness. In the UK, the average level of myopia is between 20% and 30%. According to Professor Ian Morgan, who led this study and is from the Australian National University, 20-30% was once the average among people in South East Asia as well. "What we've done is written a review of all the evidence which suggests that something extraordinary has happened in east Asia in the last two generations," he told BBC News. "They've gone from something like 20% myopia in the population to well over 80%, heading for 90% in young adults, and as they get adult it will just spread through the population. It certainly poses a major health problem." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16748 - Posted: 05.05.2012

Tom Lawrence The first UK clinical trials of an electronic eye implant designed to restore the sight of blind people have proved successful and "exceeded expectations", scientists said today. Eye experts developing the pioneering new technology said the first group of British patients to receive the electronic microchips were regaining "useful vision" just weeks after undergoing surgery. The news will offer fresh hope for people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa (RP) - a genetic eye condition that leads to incurable blindness. Retina Implant AG, a leading developer of subretinal implants, fitted two RP sufferers with the wireless device in mid-April as part of its UK trial. The patients were able to detect light immediately after the microchip was activated, while further testing revealed there were also able to locate white objects on a dark background, Retina Implant said. Ten more British sufferers will be fitted with the devices as part of the British trial, which is being led by Tim Jackson, a consultant retinal surgeon at King's College Hospital and Robert MacLaren, a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford and a consultant retinal surgeon at the Oxford Eye Hospital. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 16747 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Scicurious Only a few weeks ago I looked at a study on fast food consumption and depression, and only a few days ago I talked about a brand new study looking at high fat diets and protection from heart attack damage. And today, we’ve got another study on high fat diet, this time in mice, and depressive-like behavior. What is the effect of a high fat diet? Well, it appears to be getting more complicated with each new study. But it this study, at least, it looks like diet-induced obesity might produce depressive-like effects in mice. But how the diet is doing that is not so well defined. Several studies in humans have found a correlation between obesity and the development of depression. But it’s important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation. Many people who become obese also have other things going on (socioeconomic status, family history, comorbid disorders) which can influence the development of depression. In order to determine if obesity itself is causing depression, you first have to deliberately cause obesity in a controlled population. And this is where mice come in. Using a specialty high fat and high sugar diet, Sharma and Fulton fed up a set of mice for 12 weeks, until they were significantly fatter than control mice. They then looked at behavioral tests for anxiety and depression. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 16746 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Laura Sanders Scientists have caught tiny amounts of a strangely shaped protein — a relative of a well-known suspect in Alzheimer’s disease —spreading destruction throughout the brains of mice. If a similar process happens in the human brain, it could help explain how Alzheimer’s starts, and even suggest new ways to stop the dangerous molecule’s spread. Many Alzheimer’s researchers believe the abundance of a molecule called A-beta in the brain is one of the key steps in developing the disease. A-beta commonly takes the form of a chain of 42 protein building blocks called amino acids. The new study chronicles the dangers of a modified A-beta that lacks the first two amino acids in the chain. Capping this stub is a rare, circular amino acid called pyroglutamate. Until recently, this form “has been largely ignored as some minor mysterious form of amyloid-beta,” says study coauthor George Bloom of the University of Virginia. Yet even trace amounts of this version, called pyroglutamylated A-beta, or pE A-beta, are devastating to mouse nerve cells, he and colleagues report online May 2 in Nature. “This opens up a whole new view of the disease,” says neurogeneticist Rudy Tanzi of Harvard Medical School. Instead of focusing just on the amount of A-beta in the brain, scientists need to pay attention to modifications of the molecule, too, he says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16745 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Gary Stix NFL legend Junior Seau died today after reportedly shooting himself in the chest, according to various news reports. What prompted the apparent suicide is still unknown. But Seau’s taking of his own life will inevitably raise questions about a possible role of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disorder that results from repeated concussions and that can produce dementia and other forms of cognitive dysfunction. The NFL has had to contend with a growing incidence of this disorder. Dave Duerson, an NFL safety, committed suicide in 2011 by shooting himself in the chest and directed that his brain be used for research on CTE. Any player in the NFL, and in other contact sports like hockey, probably leaves a long career with some traces of brain injury. But tests will be needed to determine whether Seau merited a clinical diagnosis. No reports have emerged so far that Seau suffered from dementia-like symptoms. An SUV that Seau was driving in 2010 near his home in Oceanside, Calif., went over a cliff that fronted on a beach, according to The Los Angeles Times. The incident occurred following his arrest that year related to suspicion of domestic violence. Seau, a 12-time NFL Pro linebacker following a career as an All-American at University of Southern California, registered 13 seasons with the San Diego Chargers, three seasons with the Miami Dolphins and ended his career with the New England Patriots. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Depression
Link ID: 16744 - Posted: 05.03.2012

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent Two research papers published this week throw further light on the health risks of the Taser stun gun. This striking image shows the central issue examined in one of the papers: what happens when one of the two barbed darts fired by a police Taser struck a 27-year-old man on the side of the head. Although Isabel Le Blanc-Louvry and colleagues at the department of forensic medicine at Rouen University Hospital in France do not reveal when or where this occured, they say the victim had been drunk and resisted police requests for his ID. The police fired the pneumatically powered Taser to incapacitate and subdue him - but somehow nobody noticed a dart remained stuck in his head, until he later went to hospital complaining of a persistent headache. In the ER, the dart was found to "have penetrated the frontal part of the skull and damaged the underlying frontal lobe", the team report in Forensic Science International. "We observed that the length of the Taser dart is sufficient to allow brain penetration," they write. The man made a full recovery. The controversial weapon's woes continued in the journal Circulation this week, where cardiologist Douglas Zipes at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis reports that Taser strikes near the heart can kill. In a study of eight cases where cardiac arrest was induced after tasings by US police departments, seven victims died. "Electronic control device stimulation can cause cardiac arrest" due to ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, he concludes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 16743 - Posted: 05.03.2012

Daniel Cressey With the official opening of a £5.4-million (US$8.7-million) facility at its UK base on 30 April, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly says it is reaffirming its commitment to neuroscience research at a time when other drug firms are mostly avoiding the field. The site, at Erl Wood in Windlesham, Surrey, will house around 130 scientists working on the early phases of clinical drug development, making it Lilly's second-largest research site worldwide, after the company’s headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. Researchers will work on conditions ranging from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, says Sarah Chatham, managing director of the centre. The investment contrasts with lay-offs at other pharma companies. Many have turned their attention to acquiring smaller firms to get new drugs, instead of using large in-house research teams. Lilly’s focus on neuroscience is also unusual, with Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca all bailing out of much brain work in recent years (see 'Novartis to shut brain research facility'). The centre was welcomed by UK science minister David Willetts, not least because policy-makers have grown anxious that Britain is no longer perceived as a good place to do medical research. Academics are concerned that their research environment is overburdened with red tape, especially because of what they see as the bureaucratic way the United Kingdom implemented the European Union Clinical Trials Directive in 2004 (see 'UK health research to be rehabilitated'). © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16742 - Posted: 05.03.2012

By Neil Bowdler Health reporter, BBC News A trial has begun of a portable brain-cooling device which could enhance the survival prospects of cardiac patients. Ground-based cars in the service of the charity London's Air Ambulance are the first in the UK to carry the Rhinochill machine. Larger brain-cooling devices are already used in UK hospitals on cardiac and stroke patients to aid recovery. But cooling the body earlier in the field, during resuscitation, could save more lives, early research suggests. "We know quite well that if you're cooled after your heart attack, it can not only mean that your chances of surviving are greatly increased, but your chances of surviving without brain damage are too," Dr Richard Lyon, a registrar with London's Air Ambulance, told BBC News. "For the last 10 years or so, the big thrust has been to cool you as quickly as possible, but usually after you get delivered to hospital, after your heart has been restarted. "What we're doing is bringing everything much further forward - starting this brain-cooling process while CPR is still being carried out in the field." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 16741 - Posted: 05.03.2012

by Helen Thompson Reports of ‘mad cow’ disease in the United States erupted in the news this week after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that the remains of a California dairy cow had tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This marks the fourth case of BSE identified in the US, and the first case in six years. In spongiform encephalopathy diseases, abnormally folded prion proteins accumulate in the brain, causing other proteins to deform as well. BSE has proved to be unusually adept at jumping between species; humans exposed to BSE can develop its human counterpart: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). In a statement released on 24 April, Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture said, “The detection of BSE shows that the surveillance program in place in California and around the country is working.” Food safety advocates such as Yonkers, New York, -based Consumers Union say it’s a warning sign that surveillance is inadequate and needs to be stepped up. Ross’s statement also makes a point of noting a key feature of this particular case: The infected cow carried what is known as ‘L-type’ BSE, a version of the disease that has not been detected before in the US and has so far not been associated with transmission through animal feed. As the policy debate over testing rumbles on, here is a short guide to what is known and not known about this rare strain and its unexpected appearance. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 16740 - Posted: 05.02.2012

By Christof Koch In the 1954 foundational text of the Age of Aquarius, The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes his encounters with mescaline, a psychoactive substance derived from the peyote cactus and traditionally used by Native Americans for religious purposes. Huxley’s experiences include profound changes in the visual world, colors that induce sound, the telescoping of time and space, the loss of the notion of self, and feelings of oneness, peacefulness and bliss more commonly associated with religious visions or an exultant state: “A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue.... I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.” Yet remarkably these enhanced percepts are not grounded in larger but in reduced brain activity, as a recent experiment reports. More on that in a moment. Mescaline, together with psilocybin, another natural psychoactive compound produced by “magic” mushrooms, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or, simply, acid), a potent synthetic psychedelic drug, became widely popular in the 1960s counterculture. The striking similarities between the reports of LSD users and symptoms of acute psychosis led researchers to postulate that serotonin, a chemical-signaling compound or neurotransmitter released by certain groups of neurons in the brain stem, helped to mediate both types of experiences. Indeed, it is now quite certain that the characteristic subjective and behavioral effects of psychedelics are initiated via stimulation of serotonin 2A receptors (known as 5-HT2A) on cortical neurons. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16739 - Posted: 05.02.2012

The number of babies born in the United States with signs of drug withdrawal has tripled in a decade because more pregnant women are using narcotics, according to a new study. The rate of infants born with withdrawal symptoms reached about one every hour in 2009, researchers report in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Aileen Dannelley and her baby, Savannah, of Oak Lawn, Ill., both fought addiction to prescription painkillers, an increasing issue in the U.S. Aileen Dannelley and her baby, Savannah, of Oak Lawn, Ill., both fought addiction to prescription painkillers, an increasing issue in the U.S. (Dannelley Family/Associated Press) "What we found was that from 2000 to 2009, the number of babies having drug withdrawal increased by three times," said the study’s lead author, Dr. Stephen Patrick of the University of Michigan's division of neonatal-perinatal medicine in Ann Arbor. For the study, Patrick and his co-authors reviewed hospital billing data from across the U.S. They looked at how many women were using opiates at the time of delivery as well as whether the newborns showed drug withdrawal symptoms. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16738 - Posted: 05.02.2012