By Jonah Lehrer Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel demonstrated that reductionist techniques could be applied to the brain, so that even something as mysterious as memory might be studied in sea slugs, as a function of kinase enzymes and synaptic proteins. (The memories in question involved the “habituation” of the slugs to a poke; they basically got bored of being prodded.) Because natural selection is a deeply conservative process – evolution doesn’t mess with success – it turns out that humans rely on almost all of the same neural ingredients as those inveterbrates. Memory has a nearly universal chemistry. But Kandel is not just one of the most important scientists of our time – he’s also an omnivorous public intellectual, deeply knowledgeable about everything from German art to the history of psychoanalysis. In his marvelous new book, The Age of Insight, Kandel puts this learning on display. He dives into the cultural ferment of 19th century Vienna, seeking to understand why the city was such a fount of new ideas, but he also explores the neuroscience of aesthetics, attempting to explain why some works of art, such as Klimt’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” continue to haunt us. In many respects, the book imitates those famous Viennese salons, in which artists, scientists and doctors exchanged ideas and gave birth to a new way of thinking about the mind. (The city was a case-study in consilience.) If you’re interested in the intersection of art and science, the book is a must-read. © 2012 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16622 - Posted: 04.09.2012

By LISA SANDERS, M.D., Columnist On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to figure out the diagnosis for a 27-year-old woman with an odd walk and slowly progressive weakness of her hips and thighs. The correct diagnosis is… Adult-onset Tay-Sachs disease The first person to get it right was Jason Maley, a third-year medical student at Tulane University. His answer came in just after 1 a.m., an hour after the case was posted. He says that all the clues were there; he just had to put it all together. He’s planning to go into internal medicine. (I certainly hope that he will!) Tay-Sachs is an inherited disease in which the inability to get rid of discarded parts of the cell membrane causes the death of certain nerve cells. There are several forms of the disease. The most common affects infants. Babies born with this version of the disease usually die by age 4. Another form of the disease affects children who usually die before reaching adulthood. Late-onset Tay-Sachs, the form of the disease this patient has, doesn’t manifest itself until adolescence or young adulthood and causes a slow loss of strength and coordination. While the form seen in children was first described over a century ago, this version wasn’t recognized until the 1970s. Patients with this form of the disease can get rid of some but not all of the fatty components of the cell wall and so have a much slower rate of cell death and disability. The degree of disability varies widely in this group, and there are patients who have the disease but appear to be completely asymptomatic. For many with this disease, life expectancy is normal, but most eventually require a wheelchair. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16621 - Posted: 04.07.2012

by Michael Marshall One of the most important things any animal can do is to tell potential mates about themselves. They have all sorts of ways to do it, from peacocks' ridiculously large and ornamented tails to the sharp suits and gym-honed bodies of posing human males. If it weren't a matter of life and death, it would all seem very, very silly. Many of these signals come in the form of secondary sexual characteristics: parts of the body that aren't directly involved in producing offspring, but are nevertheless associated with the process. The peacock's train is one example; in humans, male body hair is a signal of reproductive maturity, and large female breasts are renowned for attracting male attention. But female red-spotted newts may need to look a little more closely when they choose their mates. Specifically, if they want a good one, they would be well-advised to take a look at his kidneys. The same may be true of many salamanders. Kidneys before sex Red-spotted newts have a peculiar way of mating. In common with many other salamanders, the male produces a blob of jelly called a spermatophore, which carries a consignment of sperm. The female stores it until she is ready to reproduce. But according to Dustin Siegel of Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, before all this happens, the male's kidneys have to do their bit. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16620 - Posted: 04.07.2012

By Laura Sanders CHICAGO — Certain brain areas are sluggish in people who eat too little and hyperactive in people who eat too much, a new study finds. The results, presented April 3 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, are based on brain activity in people who ranged from dangerously thin to morbidly obese. The findings help clarify the complicated relationship between the brain and food, and may even offer ways to treat conditions such as anorexia and obesity, said study coauthor Laura Holsen of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Although scientists have looked for brain differences among particular groups of people with disordered eating habits, no previous study had compared responses to food across such a wide spectrum. “It’s important to study the extremes, because the biology is clearer in those individuals,” said psychologist Susan Carnell of the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and Columbia University. “That helps us understand normal weight variation.” One of five groups studied by the researchers consisted of people with anorexia, defined as being 85 percent or less of a healthy weight. A second group enlisted people who formerly had anorexia but had recovered to a healthy weight. Healthy people with a normal weight formed the third group; the fourth was composed of people who were obese. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 16619 - Posted: 04.07.2012

For children with autism, it's a confusing world. Trying to communicate with these kids can be a struggle as they often seem to be locked inside their own impenetrable worlds. Therapists who work with autistic children are constantly on the lookout for ways to get them to engage with others. Now, researchers at York University in Toronto are carrying out the first study of a play-based therapy program that has had some remarkable success in drawing some autistic children out of their solitary worlds and into a shared one. In this video, the CBC's Ioanna Roumeliotis offers a moving look inside floortime therapy ... and how it's given one Ontario family new hope for their son. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16618 - Posted: 04.07.2012

By Susan Milius Watching coworkers in paper masks swim among the office cubicles acting out fish personalities turns out to be pretty informative. Admittedly, “informative” didn’t seem to be the word on the tip of the tongue of Science News’ editor in chief when, in the grip of urgent editorial business, he charged up the stairs and happened upon writers neglecting their keyboards for make-believe group swims. After some hasty smoothing over, though, he joined in as a virtual predator, sending fish of all personality types scattering for shelter. Predators, information, group-ups and even games all have their place in studies of animal personality, including the mosquito fish research that inspired the office fish simulation. Even though fish dynamics over generations were mimicked by just a few terrestrial mammals between deadlines, the mix of personalities proved as important for animal welfare in cubicles as in real waterways. Differences in the ways individual fish act, once groaned about as the inevitable messiness of gathering data on real animals, have in recent years become their own topic of research. Geese, hissing cockroaches, cichlids, great tits, mallards, sparrows and European rabbits have all starred in such studies. Now that the idea of individual animals having a version of personality — or, more formally, “behavioral type” — has become unsurprising in scientific discourse, the next wave of research is looking at the consequences of the mix of personalities in a group. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16617 - Posted: 04.07.2012

By Phyllis Richman, Parkinson’s disease is a thief. It robbed me of the ability to turn over in bed. I can no longer take a long walk. Opening a plastic bag or turning a newspaper page has become a challenge. We PWPs (Persons With Parkinson’s) become familiar with loss. In my case, though, Parkinson’s has also granted one of my keenest desires. After decades of hopelessly wishing on birthday candles and turkey collarbones that I could carry a tune, suddenly I can unashamedly join in family singalongs. I can sing. That’s thanks to fellow PWP Judy Dodge. A retired church music director and organist, she arranged with the Parkinson Foundation of the National Capital Area to lead a weekly PWP choir class. I would never have signed up, but she persuaded me that the voice exercises would be good for my stiffening vocal cords, and my tunelessness would not be a drag on the group. While some had signed up simply for a chance to do choral singing, the class was designed to be therapeutic as well, to counterbalance Parkinson’s softening our voices and flattening our tone, to strengthen our lungs and our enunciation. Mine wasn’t the worst among the hesitant and scratchy voices, and there were some talented singers to drown us out. But even they needed to practice projecting their voices and keeping their muscles supple. Every Wednesday afternoon for about a year now, a dozen or more PWPs gather in a Chevy Chase church hall where the heating system breathes more loudly than we do. We warm up our throats by humming and singing scales. We try to breathe slowly and project strongly. We massage our cheeks, stretch out our tongues and read poetry. We belt out folk songs, gospel and show tunes. It isn’t always tuneful, but it is fun. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16616 - Posted: 04.05.2012

By Susan Milius The first big study of daily rhythms in fruit flies outdoors doesn’t match some of the basic results from decades of lab tests. Fruit flies flittering in lab containers have revealed much about how light can set the master molecular clock that ticks out a daily beat in living organisms. Yet watching daily rhythms in fruit flies caged outdoors reveals regular surges in activity not seen in the lab, says geneticist Rodolfo Costa of the University of Padova in Italy. And certain patterns of activity seen in the lab don’t show up in the real world, he and his colleagues report online April 4 in Nature. A major difference, he says, is that the typical increase in fruit fly motion as day dawns doesn’t seem to need a built-in clock in the real world. Flies with genetic mutations that disable their biological clocks don’t join in the usual laboratory bustle of activity before lights-on. Yet outdoors they perk up and get moving just like clock-normal flies. “This was something really unexpected,” Costa says. “We are not saying that everything that has been done until now is useless,” he adds. But some of the assumptions based on laboratory experiments, he says, should be expanded to account for behavior in nature. “The new study very nicely illustrates the risks of extrapolating from laboratory studies to natural conditions,” says neuroscientist and chronobiologist F. Rob Jackson of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Evolution
Link ID: 16615 - Posted: 04.05.2012

By Emma Seppala What's the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked bread and noticing that you're out of breath? Both require attention. However, the direction of that attention differs: it is either turned outward, as in the case of noticing a stop sign or a tap on your shoulder, or turned inward, as in the case of feeling full or feeling love. Scientists have long held that attention – regardless to what – involves mostly the prefrontal cortex, that frontal region of the brain responsible for complex thought and unique to humans and advanced mammals. A recent study by Norman Farb from the University of Toronto published in Cerebral Cortex, however, suggests a radically new view: there are different ways of paying attention. While the prefrontal cortex may indeed be specialized for attending to external information, older and more buried parts of the brain including the “insula” and “posterior cingulate cortex” appear to be specialized in observing our internal landscape. Most of us prioritize externally oriented attention. When we think of attention, we often think of focusing on something outside of ourselves. We "pay attention" to work, the TV, our partner, traffic, or anything that engages our senses. However, a whole other world exists that most of us are far less aware of: an internal world, with its varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and sensations. Yet it is often the internal world that determines whether we are having a good day or not, whether we are happy or unhappy. That’s why we can feel angry despite beautiful surroundings or feel perfectly happy despite being stuck in traffics. For this reason perhaps, this newly discovered pathway of attention may hold the key to greater well-being. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress; Attention
Link ID: 16614 - Posted: 04.05.2012

by Mark Cohen The five-year-old ran into my exam room with his mother trailing behind. He wore a Transformers T-shirt and jeans that each bore signs of a recent encounter with a chocolate bar. Immediately he took a toy train apart and scattered the pieces all over the floor. “The kindergarten teacher said she doesn’t think Jason belongs in the class,” the mother said to me. “But we’re not sure.”
Jason’s pediatrician had referred him to me because of his hyperactive behavior. “New patient to me,” her note said. “No old records available. Very hyperactive, difficult to examine, possible 
developmental delay: refer to developmental pediatrician.” Having been a general pediatrician for many years before specializing in developmental pediatrics, I sympathized with her. The 20 minutes allotted for a standard exam wasn’t nearly enough to try to figure out what was going on with this child. Jason was now busy with a ball, but then quickly moved to a book and began turning the pages and pointing to every picture, labeling each one: “House! Duck! Train!” Then he was off to crash two trucks together. His mother looked at him uncomfortably, clearly unsure whether she should try to guide him or let him alone. “It’s OK, nothing here is breakable,” I reassured her. “Tell me what he’s like at home.” “He’s into everything, just like he is here,” she said. “He can’t sit still for a minute. That’s probably why the kindergarten teacher doesn’t think he belongs there. But...” She paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to say something. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: ADHD; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16613 - Posted: 04.05.2012

By Christof Koch What is the relation between selective attention and consciousness? When you strain to listen to the distant baying of coyotes over the sound of a campsite conversation, you do so by attending to the sound and becoming conscious of their howls. When you attend to your sparring opponent out of the corner of your eye, you become hyperaware of his smallest gestures. Because of the seemingly intimate relation between attention and consciousness, most scholars conflate the two processes. Indeed, when I came out of the closet to give public talks on the mind-body problem in the early 1990s (at that time, it wouldn’t do for a young professor in biology or engineering who had not even yet attained the holy state of tenure to talk about consciousness: it was considered too fringy), some of my colleagues insisted that I replace the incendiary “consciousness” with the more neutral “attention” because the two concepts could not be distinguished and were probably the same thing anyway. Two decades later a number of experiments prove that the two are not the same. Stage magicians are superb at manipulating the audience’s attention. By misdirecting your gaze using their hands or a beautiful, bikini-clad assistant, you look but don’t see, inverting Yogi Berra’s famous witticism, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” Scientists can do the same, sans the sexy woman. I described a psychophysical technique called continuous flash suppression in an earlier column [see “Rendering the Visible Invisible,” October/November 2008], in which a faint image in one eye—say, an angry face in the left eye—becomes invisible by flashing a series of colorful overlaid rectangles into the other eye. As long as you keep both eyes open, you see only the flashed pictures. Attention is drawn to the rapidly changing images, effectively camouflaging the angry face. As soon as you wink with the right eye, however, you see the face. This technique has been used to great effect both to hide things from consciousness—such as a naked man or woman—and to demonstrate that the brain will still attend to them. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 16612 - Posted: 04.05.2012

Kerri Smith The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. With their heads held still, the volunteers watched flashing lights or tensed their hands, while the research teams built the data flowing from the machines into grainy images showing parts of the brain illuminated as multicoloured blobs. The results showed that a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could use blood as a proxy for measuring the activity of neurons — without the injection of a signal-boosting compound1, 2. It was the first demonstration of fMRI as it is commonly used today, and came just months after the technique debuted — using a contrast agent — in humans3. Sensitive to the distinctive magnetic properties of blood that is rich in oxygen, the method shows oxygenated blood flowing to active brain regions. Unlike scanning techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which detects electrical activity at the skull's surface, fMRI produces measurements from deep inside the brain. It is also non-invasive, which makes it safer and more comfortable than positron emission tomography (PET), in which radioactive compounds are injected and traced as they flow around the body. fMRI has been applied to almost every aspect of brain science since. It has shown that the brain is highly compartmentalized, with specific regions responsible for tasks such as perceiving faces4 and weighing up moral responsibility5; that the resting brain is in fact humming with activity6; and that it may be possible to communicate with patients in a vegetative state by monitoring their brain activity7. In 2010, neuroscientists used fMRI in more than 1,500 published articles (see 'The rise of fMRI'). © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16611 - Posted: 04.05.2012

Researchers have turned up a new clue to the workings of a possible environmental factor in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs): fathers were four times more likely than mothers to transmit tiny, spontaneous mutations to their children with the disorders. Moreover, the number of such transmitted genetic glitches increased with paternal age. The discovery may help to explain earlier evidence linking autism risk to older fathers. The results are among several from a trio of new studies, supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, finding that such sequence changes in parts of genes that code for proteins play a significant role in ASDs. One of the studies determined that having such glitches boosts a child’s risk of developing autism five to 20 fold. Taken together, the three studies represent the largest effort of its kind, drawing upon samples from 549 families to maximize statistical power. They reveal sporadic mutations widely distributed across the genome, sometimes conferring risk and sometimes not. While the changes identified don’t account for most cases of illness, they are providing clues to the biology of what are likely multiple syndromes along the autism spectrum. All three teams sequenced the protein coding parts of genes in parents and an affected child – mostly in families with only one member touched by autism. One study also included comparisons with healthy siblings. Although these protein-coding areas represent only about 1.5 percent of the genome, they harbor 85 percent of disease-causing mutations. This strategy optimized the odds for detecting the few spontaneous errors in genetic transmission that confer autism risk from the “background noise” generated by the many more benign mutations.

Keyword: Autism; Epigenetics
Link ID: 16610 - Posted: 04.05.2012

By Bruce Bower New federal data indicate that 1 in 88 U.S. children had autism or other autism spectrum disorders in 2008, up from 1 in 110 kids in 2006 and 1 in 150 in 2002. Although that’s a worrisome trend, reasons for autism’s rising prevalence — measured in nonrepresentative national samples of 8-year-olds — remain unclear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta released the latest autism figures on March 30. CDC researchers used health records, educational records or both to identify children with autism spectrum disorders in parts of 14 states. Data for more than 38,000 kids were consulted. “Such a big increase in autism spectrum disorders in such a short time seems a little odd, and there’s a lot of noise in these data,” says psychiatrist Fred Volkmar of the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Conn. Some of the clatter stems from divergent diagnostic and record-keeping practices across states and school districts, Volkmar says. Children with various learning problems sometimes get labeled with autism spectrum disorders to receive special education services, he adds. Rates of autism spectrum disorders fluctuated markedly from one state to another, the CDC reports. Prevalence ranged from 21.2 cases for every 1,000 children in Utah to 4.8 cases for every 1,000 kids in Alabama. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16609 - Posted: 04.05.2012

By Erica Westly Millions of patients benefit from opioids such as morphine and codeine, but the pain relief they provide often comes with intense itching. In some cases, the irritation is so bad that patients will opt to cut back on painkillers. Now a study in the October 14 issue of Cell has found a possible explanation—the first step to creating drugs that will not make patients choose between experiencing itchiness and pain. Until recently, many experts had assumed that itching from opioids was unavoidable because it is a common side effect of drugs that interact with the nervous system. The brain has four main types of receptors that respond to opioids, and every type has many structural variants, called isoforms. Most opioids are nonspecific, which means they bind to all the isoforms. This leads to powerful pain relief, although scientists do not know exactly why. In the new research, a team led by itch researcher Zhou-Feng Chen of Washington University in St. Louis showed that only one opioid receptor isoform is responsible for itching—and it is not involved in pain. Mice bred to have fewer of these particular receptors did not scratch themselves when given an opioid, but they did exhibit the telltale mouse signs of pain relief, such as less flinching when researchers flicked their tails. Now that scientists know that pain relief and itching can be decoupled, they will try to make itch-free opioid drugs a reality. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16608 - Posted: 04.04.2012

By Laura Sanders CHICAGO — As any high school senior staring down the SAT knows, when the stakes are high, some test-takers choke. A new study finds that activity in distinct parts of the brain can predict whether a person will remain cool or crumble under pressure. The results, presented April 1 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, offer some great new clues that may help scientists understand how the brain copes with stressful situations, says psychologist Thomas Carr of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Sometimes you come across a study you wish you'd done yourself,” he says “This is such a study.” In the study, Andrew Mattarella-Micke and Sian Beilock, both of the University of Chicago, had volunteers perform math problems, some easy, some hard, while undergoing a functional MRI scan. These two-step calculations were designed to tap into a person’s working memory: Participants had to hold an intermediate number in mind to correctly calculate the final answer. After volunteers had performed about 25 minutes of low-stakes math, the researchers ratcheted up the pressure. Participants were told that their performance had been monitored the whole time, and if they improved, they would get 60 bucks instead of the 30 they had been promised. In addition to raising the financial stakes, the researchers added social pressure, too. They told volunteers that if the participants failed to improve, a teammate would lose money. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16607 - Posted: 04.04.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News The obesity problem in the US may be much worse than previously thought, according to researchers. They said using the Body Mass Index or BMI to determine obesity was underestimating the issue. Their study, published in the journal PLoS One, said up to 39% of people who were not currently classified as obese actually were. The authors said "we may be much further behind than we thought" in tackling obesity. BMI is a simple calculation which combines a person's height and weight to give a score which can be used to diagnose obesity. Somebody with a BMI of 30 or more is classed as obese. The US Centers for Disease Control says at least one in three Americans is obese. Many more? Other ways of diagnosing obesity include looking at how much of the body is made up of fat. A fat percentage of 25% or more for men or 30% or more for women is the threshold for obesity. One of the researchers Dr Eric Braverman said: "The Body Mass Index is an insensitive measure of obesity, prone to under-diagnosis, while direct fat measurements are superior because they show distribution of body fat." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16606 - Posted: 04.04.2012

By Laura Sanders CHICAGO — A brain zapping technique helps people recover language after a stroke, new research shows. The results may point to a better way for people to relearn how to talk after a brain injury. “I think this work is very promising,” said cognitive neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. The study, presented April 2 at the annual meeting of Cognitive Neuroscience Society, represents one of the first attempts to successfully apply brain stimulation techniques to a clinical population, he said. Speech therapist and neuroscientist Jenny Crinion of University College London and collaborators focused on people who had trouble finding the right word after a stroke. Known as anomia, the condition is frustrating, leaving people unable to call the correct word to mind. Crinion and her colleagues paired a word-training technique with brain stimulation. The training regimen was intense. In the lab and at home, participants studied 150 cards with pictures of one-syllable words of everyday objects: cat, bed, car and so on for a total of about 60 hours over six weeks. Three days a week, six volunteers came into the lab to receive a type of electrical brain stimulation known as transcranial direct current stimulation. Volunteers received the stimulation, which doesn’t seem to cause pain or any ill effects, while training on the vocabulary words. Seven volunteers received a sham treatment without stimulation. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Stroke; Language
Link ID: 16605 - Posted: 04.04.2012

By Scicurious One of the interesting things about this paper is that it highlights to me how different the perspectives on a specific data set can be when you’re coming from two different fields. These scientists are coming from the field of cognition and decision making, whereas I come from a field of pharmacology and drug abuse. While I think the data are equally interesting, it makes me think of very different things than they talked about in their discussion. To me, that’s a sign of just how different our readings in the field can be. The authors of this article were coming at this study from the perspective of studies in choice and decision making. They were interested in finding a model of choice and decision making in rats that better mimics the way humans make decisions. In particular, they are interested in the amount of effort that it takes to achieve a goal. This has important clinical implications for changes that take place in depression or traumatic brain injury, where you sometimes see dramatic changes in motivation in humans. To look at this, they had rats perform a modified cognitive task. In the task, the rats were given a choice between an easy and a hard task, and they could press a lever indicating which task they wanted. After the lever press, they had to watch a series of 5 lights. One of the lights would light up. If the rat correctly pressed his nose into the area under the lit up light, he got a sugar pellet. In the easy task, the light was on for a little while, but in the hard task, it was on for a short time, so the rat had to pay closer attention. But if he chose the hard task and completed it successfully, the rat got double the reward. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 16604 - Posted: 04.04.2012

By Karen Weintraub On a recent Sunday, while Walt was baking gluten-free cookies, his mother had to remind him to check the recipe, put the eggs away, and close the refrigerator door. But he navigated the oven and timer just fine, and carefully used a spatula to shift the warm cookies from the baking sheet to the cooling rack. A few minutes later, after a quick, reassuring hug, the 16-year-old resumed the scrapbook he had started that morning, printing out pictures of his favorite Theodore Tugboats, trimming them to fit, and labeling each one. “I did so awesome,’’ he said excitedly when he was done. He piled five of the now-cool cookies onto a plate, hurried off into another room, and crooned Christmas carols to calm himself down. Life with Walt alternates between moments of enthusiasm and anxiety, scowls and spontaneous hugs, typical teenage behavior and younger-than-his-age interests. Diagnosed with autism as a preschooler, Walt went through years of temper tantrums, diarrhea, skin scratching, unpredictable behaviors, and obvious physical pain. A few minutes spent at his airy Groton home reveal both that Walt, now 5 feet 6 inches tall, is not a typical teenager, and that he and his family - including two siblings not on the autism spectrum - manage his challenges with good nature, warmth, and lots of humor. Like many parents of autistic children, Walt’s mother, Sarah Connell has often been ahead of his doctors and caregivers in coming up with new ways to help him. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 16603 - Posted: 04.04.2012