By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Intelligence
Link ID: 16542 - Posted: 03.19.2012

By Eric Michael Johnson In my cover article out this week in Times Higher Education I featured the life and work of famed primatologist and evolutionary theorist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. While she never intended to be a radical, she has nevertheless had a radical influence on how primatology and evolutionary biology address female strategies as well as the evolutionary influences on infants. Hrdy graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard. She is a former Guggenheim fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the California Academy of Sciences. She is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. In our discussion, Hrdy explores both her own life as well as how her personal experiences inspired her to ask different questions than many of her scientific colleagues. While it may not seem like a particularly dramatic idea to emphasize the evolutionary selection pressures on mothers and their offspring, it is a telling insight into the unconscious (and at times fully conscious) sexism that has long been a part of the scientific process. Through her work, in books such as The Woman that Never Evolved, selected by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of 1981, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, chosen by both Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal as one of the “Best Books of 1999″ and, her latest, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Hrdy has challenged, and transcended, many of the flawed assumptions that biologists have held dating back to the Victorian era. It is a body of work that continues to provoke and inspire a new generation of scientists and was highly influential in my own scientific work. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16541 - Posted: 03.19.2012

By Melinda Wenner Moyer Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science. Researchers at Michigan State University asked 25 undergraduate students to participate in a simple, repetitive computer task: they had to press a button whenever the letters that appeared on the screen conformed to a particular pattern. When they made a mistake, which happened about 9 percent of the time, the subjects realized it almost immediately—at which point their brain produced two tiny electrical responses that the researchers recorded using electrodes. The first reaction indicates awareness that a mistake was made, whereas the second, called error positivity, is believed to represent the desire to fix that slipup. Later, the researchers asked the students whether they believed intelligence was fixed or could be learned. Although everyone slowed down after erring, those who were “growth-minded”—that is, people who considered intelligence to be pliable—elicited stronger error-positivity responses than the other subjects. They subsequently made fewer mistakes, too. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I did something wrong, I should slow down,’ but it was only the growth-minded individuals who actually did something with that information and made it better,” explains lead author Jason Moser, a clinical psychologist at Michigan State. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16540 - Posted: 03.19.2012

Ewen Callaway A bone-marrow transplant can treat a mouse version of Rett syndrome, a severe autism spectrum disorder that affects roughly 1 in 10,000–20,000 girls born worldwide (boys with the disease typically die within a few weeks of birth). The findings, published today in Nature1, suggest that brain-dwelling immune cells called microglia are defective in Rett syndrome. The authors say their findings also raise the possibility that bone-marrow transplants or other means of boosting the brain’s immune cells could help to treat the disease. “If we show the immune system is playing a very important role in Rett patients and we could replace it in a safe way, we may develop some feasible therapies in the future,” says Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville, who led the study. Mutations in a single gene on the X chromosome, MECP2, cause the disease. Because they have only one X chromosome, boys born with the mutation die within weeks of birth. Girls with one faulty copy develop Rett syndrome. Symptoms of Rett syndrome typically set in between 6 and 18 months of age. Girls with the disease have trouble putting on weight and often do not learn to speak. They repeat behaviours such as hand-washing and tend to have trouble walking. Many develop breathing problems and apnoea. Rett syndrome is classified as an autism spectrum disorder, and treatments focus on symptoms such as nutritional and gastrointestinal problems. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 16539 - Posted: 03.19.2012

MONKEYS with Parkinson's disease-like symptoms have had their suffering eased by an injection of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) into their brain. Jun Takahashi of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues injected these cells into monkeys whose brains had been damaged by a chemical that destroys dopamine-producing neurons and so causes Parkinson's symptoms. Two monkeys received hESCs that had been matured into an early form of neural cell. Six months later, the monkeys had recovered 20 to 45 per cent of the movement they had lost before treatment. Post-mortems a year after treatment showed that the cells had developed into fully functioning dopamine-secreting neurons. Another monkey that received less-mature neural cells also showed improvements (Stem Cells, DOI: 10.1002/stem.1060). "Monkeys starting with tremors and rigidity [began] to move smoothly, and animals originally confined to sitting down were able to walk around," says Takahashi. The team says it will probably be four to six years before clinical trials in humans begin. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 16538 - Posted: 03.19.2012

Researchers believe they have identified why a mutation in a particular gene can lead to obesity. Mouse experiments suggested the body's message to "stop eating" was blocked if the animals had the mutation. The study, published in Nature Medicine, said the brain's response to appetite hormones was being disrupted. The Georgetown University Medical Center researchers hope their findings could lead to new ways to control weight. Many genes have been linked to obesity, one of them - brain-derived neurotrophic factor gene - has been shown to play a role in putting on weight in animal and some human studies. However, scientists at the Georgetown University Medical Center said the explanation for this link was unknown. In studies on mice which had been genetically modified to have the mutation, the mice consumed up to 80% more food than normal. After a meal, hormones such as insulin and leptin should tell the brain that the body is full and should stop eating. The researchers showed that in the mutated mice the message was not being passed on from the hormones in the blood to the correct part of the brain. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16537 - Posted: 03.19.2012

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16536 - Posted: 03.19.2012

By Kathleen McAuliffe No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 53-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair that encircles his head like a ring of fire. Certainly Flegr’s thinking is jarringly unconventional. Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others. The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom. But if Flegr is right, the “latent” parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. And that’s not all. He also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. When you add up all the different ways it can harm us, says Flegr, “Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.” Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 16535 - Posted: 03.19.2012

Distinct patterns of activity — which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants — appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face — even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward. The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights not only into the caregiver response, but also when the response fails, such as in instances of child neglect or abuse. While the researchers recorded participants' brain activity, the participants did not speak or move. Yet their brain activity was typical of patterns preceding such actions as picking up or talking to an infant, the researchers explained. The activity pattern could represent a biological impulse that governs adults' interactions with small children. From their study results, the researchers concluded that this pattern is specific to seeing human infants. The pattern did not appear when the participants looked at photos of adults or of animals — even baby animals. Their findings appear in the journal NeuroImage.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16534 - Posted: 03.17.2012

Martin E. Schwab & Anita D. Buchli Recently, at the annual retreat of the Zurich Neuroscience Center, we ran into a former colleague who had often helped us to prepare for courses we were teaching. But he was not there to teach — he was participating in a demonstration as a patient. A stroke had left him paralysed on one side, wheelchair-bound and unable to speak. He had been looking forward to interacting with the students, but when he could not communicate with them, he broke into tears. After a difficult rehabilitation, he was able to resume some of his work, but he still cannot speak. His arm and leg will probably remain paralysed for the rest of his life. Our colleague was one of the 8.2 million Europeans who experience stroke every year1. The brain is a source of many devastating disorders — such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — and injuries to the spinal cord or brain can lead to lifelong impairments. At present, disabling spinal-cord injuries affect roughly 350,000 people in Europe and 250,000 in the United States. Traumatic brain injuries are about ten times more common. Treatments that could restore lost functions to people with such injuries would radically change their lives and decrease the burden to their families and social environment. The economic interest to drug companies and health insurers seems obvious. Yet drug companies have withdrawn from neuroscience, more so than from any other disease area. Last year, Novartis closed its preclinical neuroscience research facility in Basel, Switzerland. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca had already made similar moves. Merck and Sanofi are also cutting research on brain diseases. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Stroke; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16533 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By HENRY ALFORD COILED viper-like within the word “insomnia” is the terrifying “omnia.” Why does sleeplessness seem all-powerful? Because some nights I can’t get down into the Valley regardless of how many Dolls I lash to my burro. I’m not alone. It’s difficult to go to a Manhattan cocktail party these days and not get roped into a discussion of someone’s insomnia or the relative merits of melatonin and “snore absorption rooms.” If you find yourself buttonholed by a well-heeled but heavy-lidded person, prepare for a slightly defensive diatribe called “Why I Have Recently Purchased a $60,000 Mattress.” Glamorous (and sometimes dubious-sounding) treatments continue to pop up, a fact underlined by last week’s designation by the National Sleep Foundation as sleep awareness week. Europe’s first “nap bar” recently opened in Paris, giving the weary a place to rest on a massage chair or zero-gravity chair. The Grand Resort Bad Ragaz in Switzerland will film your sleeping patterns during the night and then analyze them and suggest cures. At La Mansión del Rio in San Antonio, you’re encouraged to put some of the resort’s “worry dolls” (one doll for each of your worries) under your pillow so that, through Indian magicking, you’ll awake liberated, fresh, burden-free — a person who can crush a plaything solely with the force of his head. In Midtown Manhattan, the Benjamin Hotel employs a sleep concierge, on call to help guests choose from 12 free sleep-friendly pillows, as well as field requests for sleep aids like massages and midnight snacks (e.g., hot chocolate or milk and cookies). © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 16532 - Posted: 03.17.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV No, it's not science fiction: a new illusion that looks like a flight through space simultaneously tricks your brain in three different ways. Watch the moving white dots and their shadows as they move forwards and backwards. They should appear to change in contrast, grow and shrink in size and vary in depth, since the distance between the dots and their shadows seems to change. But none of these factors are actually changing: the pairs of dots are only moving to a different position on the screen. Aptly named the Star Trek illusion by researcher Yury Petrov and his team from Northeastern University in Boston, who developed the effect, the trick occurs since our brain perceives the motion as a change in viewing distance. Normally, when you move closer or further away from a scene, colour contrast, depth cues and object size are altered to account for the new viewpoint. So the strong flow in the animation tricks our brain and causes it to infer the new cues it's expecting. In their recent paper, Petrov and his colleague found that our brain first rescales the size of the dots and then adjusts contrast. Although the depth effect was predicted, it was only observed when they produced the new version of the illusion, shown above, containing shadows. The illusion has been submitted to this year's Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16531 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Katherine Harmon Giant and colossal squid can grow to be some 12 meters long. But that alone doesn’t explain why they have the biggest eyeballs on the planet. At 280 millimeters in diameter, colossal squid eyes are much bigger than those of the swordfish, which at 90 millimeters, measure in as the next biggest peepers. “It doesn’t make sense a giant squid and swordfish are similar in size but the squid’s eyes are proportionally much larger, three times the diameter and 27 times the volume,” Sönke Johnsen, a biologists at Duke University, said in a prepared statement. Why would these cephalopods evolve soccer-ball-size eyes? The better to see you with, of course. Well, not you, exactly—unless you happen to be a hungry sperm whale. Scientists have found that having these extreme eyeballs likely allows these squid to spot whales when they’re still far enough away to escape the huge predators. The findings were described online March 15 in Current Biology. Bigger eyes might seem an obvious solution for acquiring better vision. “For seeing in dim light, a large eye is better than a small eye, simply because it picks up more light,” co-author Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University said in a prepared statement. But the low-light, low-contrast world of the pelagic oceans, where these squids and whales live and die, is much murkier than our airy environment here on land. “We have found that for animals living in water, it does not pay to make eyes much bigger than an orange,” Nilsson said. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16530 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Katherine Harmon Years of surgeries and medications were unable to stop Sultan Kosen’s runaway growth. In 2010 at age 27 and a height of 2.46 meters (eight feet, one inch), he became the world’s tallest living man, according to Guinness World Records. But he wasn’t done growing. Kosen had been diagnosed with a growth disorder at age 10 after doctors in his native Turkey found a tumor on his pituitary gland. The tumor triggered the gland to release too much growth hormone. As a result, he has suffered from both gigantism, a condition in which too much growth hormone is secreted during childhood, and acromegaly, a condition caused by too much growth hormone in adulthood. The tumor was technically benign, but it was lodged near the bottom of his brain, making it difficult to operate on. Thus ensconced, the tumor—along with Kosen’s whole body—continued to grow to dangerous proportions. sultan kosen uva surgery So in May 2010, doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center put Kosen on new medication to limit growth hormone production. Perhaps more importantly, they were also able to perform gamma-knife radiosurgery on his hard-to-reach tumor. Guided by MRI, the doctors used this super-precise technique, which harnesses high-power gamma rays, to disable the tumor without having to do more dangerous invasive surgery. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16529 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey Reading the genetic instruction books of gorillas and chimpanzees has provided more insight into what sets humans apart from their closest primate relatives. The two new studies also provide details about how these primate species may have evolved. Comparing a newly compiled genetic blueprint, or genome, of a western lowland gorilla named Kamilah with the genomes of humans and chimpanzees has revealed that the three species didn’t make a clean break when splitting from a common ancestor millions of years ago. Although humans are more closely related to chimps over about 70 percent of the human genome, about 15 percent of the human genome bears a closer relationship to gorillas. An international group of researchers reports the findings, which come from the first gorilla genome to be deciphered, in the March 8 Nature. A separate study of western chimpanzees, published online March 15 in Science, also has implications for understanding the human-chimp split. The new work shows that humans and chimps have different strategies for shuffling their genetic decks before dealing genes out to their offspring. Neither humans nor chimps shuffle genetic material randomly across the genome. Instead, both species have what are called hot spots, locations in the genetic material where matching sets of chromosomes recombine most often, Gil McVean, a statistical geneticist at the University of Oxford in England and colleagues report. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16528 - Posted: 03.17.2012

It's not always clever to use brain science as an explanation for the most complex human problems. In the vast literature documenting the possible causes of the financial crises, from tepid governments to loose monetary policy to greedy bankers, there was the more lucid theme of a belief in the infallible nature of modern economic models, those mathematical pieces of wonder that tried to incorporate everything from the weather to political power-plays into the all-encompassing term that is risk. At the heart of this flawed world-view was the idea that economics had become a science much like physics and biochemistry - quantifiable, measurable and able to be modelled. In the wreckage thereafter, the reductionism inherent in such hubris was there for all to see. But the scientism that had inebriated the world of economics is part of a broader trend of viewing our very natures in a stripped back to the biological bones caricature. It is best epitomised by the ubiquity of musings about the brain from those attempting to bolster their authority, which includes everyone from leadership gurus to astrologers. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. The republic of letters is in thrall to the idea of neuroplasticity, imagining in wonder their brains modifying cells in parallel with their daily meanderings. © 2012 Fairfax Media

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 16527 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Japanese honeybees' response to a hive-invading giant hornet is efficient and dramatic; they form a "bee ball" around it, serving to cook and asphyxiate it. Now, researchers in Japan have measured the brain activity of honeybees when they form this killer ball. One highly active area of the bees' brains, they believe, allows them to generate the constant heat which is deadly for the hornet. The team published their findings in the open-access journal, PLoS One. Prof Takeo Kubo from the University of Tokyo explained that "higher centres" of the bee's brain, known as the mushroom bodies, were more active in the brains of Japanese honeybees when they were a part of the "hot defensive bee ball". To find this out, the team lured the bees to form their ball by attaching a hornet to the end of a wire and inserting the predator into the hive. This simulated invasion caused the bees to swarm around the hornet. The researchers then plucked a few of the bees from the ball and measured, throughout each of their tiny brains, the relative amount of a chemical that is known to be a "marker" of brain activity. "We found that similar [brain] activity is evoked when the Japanese honeybees are simply exposed to high temperature (46C) in the laboratory," the researcher told BBC Nature. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 16526 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Aimee Cunningham The chemical bisphenol A, known as BPA, has become familiar in the past decade, notably to parents searching for BPA-free bottles for their infants. Animal studies have found that BPA, which resembles the sex hormone estrogen, harms health. The growing brain is an especially worrisome target: estrogen is known to be important in fetal brain development in rodents. Now a study suggests that prenatal, but not childhood, exposure to BPA is connected to anxiety, depression and difficulty controlling behaviors in three-year-olds, especially girls. More than 90 percent of Americans have detectable amounts of BPA in their urine; for most people, the major source of exposure is diet. BPA is a component of the resins that line cans of food and the plastics in some food packaging and drink containers, and the chemical leaches into the edible contents. Other sources of BPA exposure include water-supply pipes and some paper receipts. Epidemiologist Joe M. Braun of Harvard University and his colleagues studied 240 women and their children in the Cincinnati area. The researchers collected urine samples from the mothers twice during pregnancy and within 24 hours of birth and from the children at ages one, two and three. BPA was detectable in 97 percent of the samples. They also surveyed parents about their kids’ behavior and executive functions—a term for the mental processes involved in self-control and emotional regulation. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: ADHD; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 16525 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Marla Cone and Environmental Health News That is a main finding of a report, three years in the making, published Wednesday by a team of 12 scientists who study hormone-altering chemicals. Dozens of substances that can mimic or block estrogen, testosterone and other hormones are found in the environment, the food supply and consumer products, including plastics, pesticides and cosmetics. One of the biggest, longest-lasting controversies about these chemicals is whether the tiny doses that most people are exposed to are harmful. In the new report, researchers led by Tufts University's Laura Vandenberg concluded after examining hundreds of studies that health effects "are remarkably common" when people or animals are exposed to low doses of endocrine-disrupting compounds. As examples, they provide evidence for several controversial chemicals, including bisphenol A, found in polycarbonate plastic, canned foods and paper receipts, and the pesticide atrazine, used in large volumes mainly on corn. The scientists concluded that scientific evidence "clearly indicates that low doses cannot be ignored." They cited evidence of a wide range of health effects in people – from fetuses to aging adults – including links to infertility, cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer and other disorders. "Whether low doses of endocrine-disrupting compounds influence human disorders is no longer conjecture, as epidemiological studies show that environmental exposures are associated with human diseases and disabilities," they wrote. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16524 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By Cari Nierenberg A Dutch woman recovering from a stroke had an unusual response to seeing her family: The faces of her closest family members looked strange and distorted to her -- even repulsive. But at the same time, strangers' faces seemed normal. In fact, she had much less trouble recognizing the faces of strangers and celebrities than she did her own flesh and blood. This fascinating case of a 62-year-old woman referred to as JS is described in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase. Hospitalized after having an ischemic stroke, JS was unable to recognize one of her daughters with whom she had regular contact. But she immediately recognized her other daughter, whom she hadn't seen in eight years. When her grandchildren visited, she wouldn't let them sit on her lap because she thought they looked repulsive. "Of course, JS felt bad and ashamed about not recognizing family members or perceiving them as ugly," says Dr. Joost Heutink, the lead author of the case study. "As soon as we established that JS had a problem recognizing faces, we informed her family that a perceptual disorder prevented her from recognizing people she loved," he explains. Prosopagnosia. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16523 - Posted: 03.17.2012