By JESSE McKINLEY SAN FRANCISCO — With a couple of old desks, a beat-up couch and an off-white white board, the office space at 149 Turk Street, in this city’s seedy Tenderloin district, is hardly remarkable. A collection of worn detective novels sits on the bookshelf, a couple of American flags hang limply from the wall and a coffee machine constantly percolates in the back kitchen. It is the tenants who set 149 Turk apart: a ragtag group of current and former drug users who make no apologies about their fondness for illegal narcotics, intravenous experiences and the undeniable rush of getting high. “If you pass a drug test,” joked Gary West, a member, “you’re outta here.” But the group, the San Francisco Drug Users’ Union, has more on its mind than simply turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The union is one of several groups in the United States and Canada that advocate for the rights of drug users, following the lead of older European drug user organizations. Their goals are often varied, but carry a common refrain: to represent the political interests — and practical needs — of chronic drug abusers, a sometimes grim agenda that includes everything from providing clean needles to finding safe places to nod out. It is a job, members say, that requires firsthand experience to connect with a population that is often wary of law enforcement and social service agencies. “People don’t trust them,” said Isaac Jackson, who helped found the group and is, with Mr. West, one of two so-called peer organizers. “So someone being a drug user here is somewhat desirable, because who knows best about drugs than those that use them?” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16502 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By Melissa Dahl One of the less-talked-about side effects of being blind: fielding many (many!) questions from us sighted folks -- enough questions, apparently, to program a YouTube channel. Tommy Edison, who is blind, hosts the popular YouTube series "The Tommy Edison Experience," where he answers viewer questions: How do blind people use an ATM? How do blind people use paper money? In one of his latest videos, he posts his answer to a fascinating question: How do blind people dream? Edison explains that he's been blind since birth, so, no, he doesn't "see" in his dreams. "I think because I’ve never seen in real life, that my sub-conscious doesn’t know what it’d be like to see, either, so, no. I don’t see in my dreams,” Edison explains in the video. “I mean, the way it works for me, is just the way my life occurs, right? So it’s all smell, sound, taste and touch," he continues. "That’s all there is. Just like your life works. I mean, you see in your life, so, obviously, you’d see in your dreams." To someone who's always been able to see, though, that description might be surprising. (Edison dreams in Smell-O-Vision?) Most sighted people remember the images and emotions from a dream -- but smells, sounds, tastes and touches, maybe not so much. "You guys, you’re visually driven," Edison said to me in a phone interview. "I don’t know, 'cause I’ve never seen, but I would think if there was something very prevalent -- like if there was a fire in your dream -- I would think you would remember the smell of it. Or take a bite of the hamburger, and it tastes like lobster -- that’s going to be a funny thing you'd remember." © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 16501 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By Eric Michael Johnson Americans take their rights seriously. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what actually constitutes a ‘right.’ Religious believers are correct that they have a right to freely express their beliefs. This right is protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits Congress from making any “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” However, as a result, devout believers feel it is a violation of their rights when intelligent design creationism is forbidden in the classroom or when prayer during school sporting events is banned. After all, shouldn’t the First Amendment prohibit the government from interfering with this basic right? The answer is no and represents an important distinction when understanding what a right actually is. Because public schools are government-run institutions, allowing prayer during school activities or promoting religious doctrines in the classroom is a direct violation of the First Amendment. These activities infringe on the rights of those who do not share the same religious beliefs (or any at all). The key point is that rights are obligations that require governments to act in certain ways and refrain from acting in others. The First Amendment obligates the government to protect the rights of all citizens from an establishment of religion. You may have the right to freely exercise your beliefs, but that doesn’t give you the right to impose your views on others in public school. It was just this understanding of rights as obligations that governments must obey that formed the basis for a declaration of rights for cetaceans (whales and dolphins) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Vancouver, Canada last month. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 16500 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By SUSAN DOMINUS Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girls who kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an older woman, age 36. Parents wept as their daughters stuttered at the dinner table. Teachers shut their classroom doors when they heard a din of outbursts, one cry triggering another, sending the increasingly familiar sounds ricocheting through the halls. Within a few months, as the camera crews continued to descend, the community barely seemed to recognize itself. One expert after another arrived to pontificate about what was wrong in Le Roy, a town of 7,500 in Western New York that had long prided itself on the things it got right. The kids here were wholesome and happy, their parents insisted — “cheerleaders and honor students,” as one father said — products of a place that, while not perfect, was made up more of what was good about small-town America than what was bad. Now, though, the girls’ writhing and stuttering suggested something troubling, either arising from within the community or being perpetrated on it, a mystery that proved irresistible for onlookers, whose attention would soon become part of the story itself. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Tourettes
Link ID: 16499 - Posted: 03.10.2012

by Jane J. Lee Like a football player who just scored a touchdown, male white-flippered penguins (Eudyptula minor albosignata) perform triumph displays after defeating an opponent. Now, researchers in New Zealand have found that those victory dances, complete with a braying, donkeylike call and flipper waving, make it less likely that nearby penguins will challenge the winner. "Scientists have spent a lot of time studying antagonistic interactions, but quite often, they turn the camera off after the fight, so they miss a lot," says Tom Sherratt, an evolutionary ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, who was not involved in the current study. Researchers have investigated the effects of triumph displays on the loser, but because this is a fairly recent field of study, the new research is probably the first published account of its effects on nearby birds, he added. Explanations for the function of triumph displays include browbeating an opponent so that he doesn't forget who beat him and signaling to an audience not to mess with you. Researchers at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, wanted to know whether penguins near a fight picked up on those signals. So they studied the effects of triumph displays on nesting white-flippered penguins in a colony at Flea Bay in New Zealand. These penguins were ideal study subjects because they're really aggressive and squabble frequently, says Joseph Waas, a behavioral ecologist and a co-author on the study. Only about 5% to 10% of their aggressive encounters lead to a full-fledged fight, complete with slashing bill hooks and flipper bashing, he says. But it's not unusual to see male penguins that are missing an eye. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Animal Communication
Link ID: 16498 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By Ferris Jabr As a baby bird develops, its body contorts to fit within the confines of its egg. The bird's neck twists so that one side of its head is tucked against its chest. In this position, the bird's left eye remains nestled among sprouting feathers—where it does not receive much light from the outside world—whereas the right eye is pressed up against the eggshell, glimpsing flickers of light and shadow through a veil of calcium carbonate. Even though this uneven stimulation of the eyes lasts only one or two days before the chick hatches, it seems to be crucial for typical brain development. Pigeons incubated in the dark have a much harder time solving puzzles as adults than pigeons exposed to light before hatching. The reason, some researchers think, is that the brain's two hemispheres cannot properly integrate information if they miss a critical window period of learning in the egg. Martina Manns of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany has been studying pigeon brains for the past 20 years. For a new study published in the February issue of Nature Communications, Manns and her colleague Juliane Römling focused on 14 domestic pigeons raised in normal lighting conditions by local breeders and another eight pigeons raised in dark incubators in their lab. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Through various memory tests and logic puzzles, Manns and Römling compared the problem-solving abilities of the two groups of birds. One by one, Manns and Römling presented each pigeon with different pairs of plastic cups filled with colorful aquarium gravel, only one of which concealed a kernel of corn. There were four pairings: red and blue, blue/green, green/yellow and yellow/violet. Through trial and error the pigeons learned to prefer one color in each pair, because gravel of that color always contained the tasty snack. Given a choice between blue and green gravel, for instance, blue was always the right answer; green gravel always contained the reward when matched with yellow, etcetera. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 16497 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By JESSE McKINLEY Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate. “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.” Mr. Robertson’s remarks echoed statements he made last week on “The 700 Club,” the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs. “I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said. Mr. Robertson’s remarks were hailed by pro-legalization groups, who called them a potentially important endorsement in their efforts to roll back marijuana penalties and prohibitions, which residents of Colorado and Washington will vote on this fall. “I love him, man, I really do,” said Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former law enforcement officials who oppose the drug war. “He’s singing my song.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16496 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Arran Frood The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The study1, by neuroscientist Teri Krebs and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, is the first-ever quantitative meta-analysis of LSD–alcoholism clinical trials. The researchers sifted through thousands of records to collect data from randomized, double-blind trials that compared one dose of LSD to a placebo. Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. “We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs. She says that the problem with most studies done at that time was that there were too few participants, which limited statistical power. “But when you combine the data in a meta-analysis, we have more than 500 patients and there is definitely an effect,” she says. In general, the reported benefits lasted three to six months. Their findings are published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Psychedelics were promoted by psychiatrists in the 1950s as having a range of medical uses — to treat conditions such as schizophrenia, for example — before political pressures in the United States and elsewhere largely ended the work. “Alcoholism was considered one of the most promising clinical applications for LSD,” says Johansen. Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson is said to have espoused the benefits of LSD in the book Pass It On: The Story of Bill Wilson and How the AA Message Reached the World. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16495 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Powerful but misleading marketing that for years pushed the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin has left potentially tens of thousands of Canadians with the burden of addiction, critics claim. OxyContin helped transform the medical landscape after it was introduced in the late 1990s, touted by doctors and pitched as a less addictive alternative to other opioids. Cancer patients and others suffering from chronic pain considered the pill — twice as strong as morphine — to be a godsend. But the CBC's The Fifth Estate found that as soon as several provinces dropped OxyContin this year as a publicly funded medication and it vanished from shelves, the drug once praised as a blessing became a curse for some addicts. Watch The Fifth Estate Unknown to some doctors and pharmacists when OxyContin debuted were its extremely addictive properties, a fact that may have contributed to its becoming an international best-selling painkiller. OxyContin was taken off the Canadian market this month. To replace the drug, Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, began manufacturing a new formulation called OxyNeo. The replacement pill can't be crushed or liquefied and has thus been promoted as less prone to abuse. There are otherwise no clinical differences between the two brand names. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16494 - Posted: 03.10.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It seems like it would be hard to miss the face of an actress morphing into another. But a new animation by psychologist Sebastiaan Mathôt from VU University in Amsterdam shows that Natalie Portman can turn into Leighton Meester right before your eyes and you won't notice when there's motion in the scene. In the first clip, fix your eyes on the cross in the centre of the video. As the changing faces rotate, you probably won't notice that they're morphing. But when they stop turning, the transformation becomes apparent. A second example shows that the faces themselves don't need to move to trick your brain. As you stare at a green dot in the centre, a rapidly-changing background makes you blind to the shifting face. When the motion stops, the creepy metamorphosis is obvious once again. The illusion is a version of a novel brain trick, devised last year by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez from Harvard University, which won first place at the Best Illusion of the Year contest. It occurs due to a phenomenon called change blindness, where you can completely miss an obvious change when looking at a busy scene. When nothing much is happening, your visual system is more sensitive to change, but as the action increases, a transformation needs to be more dramatic to be detected. "In a sense, we protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by too much change," says Mathôt. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16493 - Posted: 03.10.2012

By Rachel Ehrenberg That honeybee lazily probing a flower may actually be a stealth explorer, genetically destined to seek adventure from birth. Bees who consistently explore new environments for food have different genetic activity in their brains than their less-adventurous hive mates, scientists report in the March 9 Science. This genetic activity relates to making particular chemical signals, some of which are linked to behaviors such as thrill-seeking in people. “This is an exciting paper that raises a lot of interesting questions,” says neurobiologist Alison Mercer of the University of Otago in New Zealand. To test the notion of whether bees have personality, scientists led by entomologist Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on scout bees that embark on reconnaissance missions for food. The team, which included bee expert Tom Seeley of Cornell University, placed a hive in an enclosure with a brightly colored feeder full of sugar water and marked the bees that visited. A few days later, the researchers added a new feeder to the enclosure, while keeping the original one full of fresh sugar water. Some of the bees discovered the new feeder and were also marked. Then the researchers removed the new feeder and added a different one in a new place. Again, some of the bees discovered this new feeder. The bees that found the new feeder both times were considered scouts, while the bees that ate only at the same old feeder were considered nonscouts. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 16492 - Posted: 03.10.2012

by Elizabeth Pennisi Ever since the human genome was sequenced a decade ago, researchers have dreamed about deciphering DNA from our three great ape cousins as well. Now the final remaining genome, that of the gorilla, is in hand, and it reveals interesting connections between us and them. Surprisingly, parts of our genome are more similar to the gorilla's than they are to the chimp's, and a few of the same genes previously thought key to our unique evolution are key to theirs, too. Today there are four groups of great apes: chimps and bonobos, humans, gorillas, and orangutans. The genome of the chimp—our closest relative—was published in 2005; the orangutan sequence came out in early 2011. Now researchers have analyzed the DNA of a western lowland gorilla named Kamilah, who lives at the San Diego Zoo. In addition, they sequenced DNA from three other gorillas, including one eastern lowland gorilla, a rare species estimated at only 20,000 individuals. "It's essential to have all of the great ape genomes in order to understand the features of our own genome that make humans unique," says Gregory Wray, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. Adds paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto in Canada: "It will allow us to begin to identify genetic changes specific to humans since our divergence from chimps." Humans and apes are nearly identical in the vast majority of base pairs, or letters of the genetic code: The human genome is 1.37% different from the chimp's; 1.75% different from the gorilla's; and 3.4% different from the orangutan's, researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., and their colleagues report today in Nature. Although chimps and humans are indeed closest kin, 15% of the human genome more closely matches the gorilla's. Those genes' activity patterns are similar too, says Sanger evolutionary genomicist and lead author of the study Aylwyn Scally: "Some of our functional biology is more gorillalike than chimplike." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16491 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By DENISE GRADY MORE and more retired people are heading back to the nearest classroom — as students and, in some cases, teachers — and they are finding out that school can be lovelier the second time around. Some may be thinking of second careers, but most just want to keep their minds stimulated, learn something new or catch up with a subject they were always curious about but never had time for. For many, at least part of the motivation is based on widespread reports that exercising the brain may preserve it, forestalling mental decline and maybe even Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. Is there any truth to it? And if there is, what type of learning is best suited to the older brain? Many studies do find that being mentally active is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease. But the standard caveat applies: association does not prove cause and effect, and there is always the chance that the mentally active people who never got Alzheimer’s simply had healthier brains to begin with. Even, so, researchers say, there is no harm in telling people to try to stay engaged. “When you and I are having this conversation, you’re taking notes, thinking, remembering pieces of it, trying to relate it to other things,” said Arthur Toga, a professor of neurology and director of the laboratory of neuroimaging at the University of California, Los Angeles. “You’re changing the circuitry in your brain. That is because you have changed something in your brain to retain that memory.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16490 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Jane Dreaper Health correspondent, BBC News Thousands of patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease could benefit from drugs, research suggests. A study in the the New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who stayed on the dementia drug Aricept had a slower decline in their memory. The drug tends not to be prescribed once sufferers progress beyond moderate symptoms. Medicines regulator NICE said its guidelines supported continuing treatment where there were benefits. The patent for the medicine Aricept, which is used to treat Alzheimer's disease, expired recently. Much cheaper versions under the generic name donepezil are already available for about £12 a month. The researchers say their new evidence could lead to twice as many Alzheimer's sufferers worldwide being given medication. The trial involved 295 Alzheimer's patients in England and Scotland who had been taking Aricept. One set were given placebo tablets while another set stayed on Aricept. A third set were given another drug, Ebixa, or memantine, which is usually prescribed only in the later stages of Alzheimer's. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16489 - Posted: 03.08.2012

Andrew Purcell, online producer “If you’ve known one person with Alzheimer’s disease… you’ve known one person with Alzheimer’s disease,” asserts sociologist Cathy Greenblat. Greenblat, professor emerita of sociology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, has spent years taking photographs of people with Alzheimer’s and their families around the world, visiting homes, memory clinics and residential centres on three continents. This week, she launched her second photographic compendium illustrating the diversity of Alzheimer’s, Love, Loss and Laughter: Seeing Alzheimer’s differently, alongside an accompanying global exhibition tour. According to Greenblat, the different ways Alzheimer’s disease manifests itself is key to people with the condition being helped to live full and rich lives. This diversity comes across in her photographs, some of which emphasise the importance of art and music in helping Alzheimer’s patients stay active and mentally stimulated. Greenblat argues that art therapy can be useful for those with both early and advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She says that music in particular can be a great tool for improving concentration, bonding and releasing pent-up emotions: “Because music is processed in many areas of the brain, people with Alzheimer’s disease are often able to engage meaningfully with live music even when they have severe cognitive impairment.” She also says that the term “art” should be interpreted as broadly as possible to include things like creative storytelling and visits to cultural venues. For example, an art therapy session may include a visit to the local art gallery or natural history museum, followed by discussion and interpretation of what the group has seen. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16488 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Robin Marantz Henig In “Lifting the Black Cloud,” Robin Henig surveys the search for new, improved antidepressants. Much research in the area involves laboratory mice and rats. Here, Henig explains how scientists determine whether a rodent is depressed. It’s hard to develop an animal model for depression. As Michael Kaplitt of Cornell Medical College puts it, “A mouse can’t tell you how it’s feeling.” Scientists have had to come up with proxy behaviors, actions that they interpret as “depressionlike,” to measure whether particular drugs or therapies are having an effect. To identify depression in laboratory animals, investigators rely on the following: Forced swimming test. The rat or mouse is placed into a cylinder partially filled with water from which escape is difficult. The longer it swims, the more actively it is trying to escape; if it stops swimming, this cessation is interpreted as depressionlike behavior, a kind of animal fatalism. Tail suspension test. A mouse (it does not work in rats) is hung upside down from its tail, and the sooner it stops wiggling, the greater its depressionlike behavior is said to be. Administering an antidepressant usually increases the length of time that a mouse will struggle when suspended by the tail. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16487 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Ricki Rusting Antidepressants restore well-being to many people, but sometimes at the cost of such side effects as weight gain or loss of interest in sex. And these side effects can be just part of the frustration. As Robin Marantz Henig wrote in "Lifting the Black Cloud," in the March issue of Scientific American, the drugs that have long dominated the market—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—"do not help everyone and eventually fail in more than a third of users. A pill that seems to be working today might well stop helping tomorrow. And the drugs can take several weeks to start having a marked effect." Equally disturbing, some major pharmaceutical houses, such as GlaxoSmithKline, are pulling back from developing psychiatric medicines. But not everyone is abandoning the effort, she noted. Researchers in government and small biotech firms are trying to pick up some of the slack and are searching for agents that work in new ways. For instance, some investigators, such as Ronald Duman of Yale University, are focusing on finding compounds that will kick in more quickly in our bodies. Duman and his colleagues are trying to learn lessons from ketamine, an anesthetic and painkiller that is also sold illicitly under the name "Special K." The group has shown in rats that ketamine rapidly causes neurons to make new contacts with one another and, apparently by so doing, produces antidepressant effects. Based on an understanding of the molecular basis of those changes, the researchers are now looking for safer agents that operate in a similar way. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16486 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Laura Sanders As anyone who has typed an outdated e-mail password before finally dredging up the new one knows, it’s easy to remember the wrong thing. Now, by capturing the battle between right and wrong memories in the brain, scientists have found that the struggle can get messy. The results, published March 7 in the Journal of Neuroscience, bring scientists closer to understanding how people usually manage to pull up the right memory, and what goes wrong when this process fails. “To me, one of the most remarkable things isn’t how much we store in memory, but how well we’re able to find a memory,” says study coauthor Brice Kuhl of Yale University. To study this battle of new versus old memories in the brain, Kuhl and his team had 24 undergraduates learn a picture-word pair, then learn a different one and finally describe the more recent pair. To create the original memory, participants were twice shown a word above an unrelated picture of a face, an object or a scene. For instance, the word “swim” would appear over a picture of Al Gore. The researchers then shuffled the association, replacing Gore with an image of the Grand Canyon, and showed the participants the new pair. While in a brain scanner, participants were then shown the word “swim” and asked what kind of picture went underneath it in the newer memory. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16485 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Parents may want to pay a bit more attention to how their toddlers sleep -- whether they snore, gasp for breath, or breathe with their mouth open -- since a new study published today in Pediatrics links these disordered breathing behaviors to a higher likelihood of behavioral problems all the way through second grade. Examining surveys filled out by more than 8,000 British parents, researchers from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that those who reported that their children snored or had other breathing abnormalities while sleeping from the age of 6 months to 7 years were 50 percent more likely than their peers who breathed normally to exhibit some sort of behavioral problem such as hyperactivity, frequent temper tantrums, or anxiety. Children who fell into the “worst case” group, where snoring and other breathing issues started early, occurred frequently, and lasted into elementary school, were more than twice as likely to wind up with behavior issues. Nearly 18 percent of them had some sort of behavioral problem by age 7 compared with slightly more than 8 percent of those who didn’t snore. (The researchers took into account differences between the groups on characteristics including body mass index, premature birth, and whether their mothers smoked during pregnancy.) © 2012 NY Times Co

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16484 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Jonah Lehrer In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art: We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art. I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would “freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience.” There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David Foster Wallace. And this brings me to Charles Fernyhough, a science writer, novelist and academic psychologist. His most recent project is A Box of Birds, a novel that explicitly attempts to explore the impact of neuroscience on our self-conception. Here’s how Charles summarizes his goals for the fictional work: © 2012 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 16483 - Posted: 03.08.2012