By Joan Raymond For years, the conventional wisdom was that babies learned how to talk by listening to their parents. But a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that our little angels are using more than their ears to acquire language. They’re using their eyes, too, and are actually pretty good lip readers. The finding could lead to earlier diagnosis and intervention for autism spectrum disorders, estimated, on average, to affect 1 in 110 children in the United States alone. In the study, researchers from Florida Atlantic University tested groups of infants, ranging from four to 12 months of age and a group of adults for comparison. advertisement The babies watched videos of women speaking either in English, the native language used in the home, or in Spanish, a language foreign to them. Using an eye tracker device to study eye movements, the researchers looked at developmental changes in attention to the eyes and mouth. Results showed that at four months of age, babies focused almost solely on the women’s eyes. But by six to eight months of age, when the infants entered the so-called “babbling” stage of language acquisition and reached a milestone of cognitive development in which they can direct their attention to things they find interesting, their focus shifted to the women’s mouths. They continue to “lip read” until about 10 months of age, a point when they finally begin mastering the basic features of their native language. At this point, infants also begin to shift their attention back to the eyes. © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Language; Autism
Link ID: 16265 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. In certain quarters of academia, it’s all the rage these days to view human behavior through the lens of evolutionary biology. What survival advantages, researchers ask, may lie hidden in our actions, even in our pathologies? Depression has come in for particular scrutiny. Some evolutionary psychologists think this painful and often disabling disease conceals something positive. Most of us who treat patients vehemently disagree. Consider a patient I saw not long ago, a 30-year-old woman whose husband had had an affair and left her. Within several weeks, she became despondent and socially isolated. She developed insomnia and started to ruminate constantly about what she might have done wrong. An evolutionary psychologist might posit that my patient’s response has a certain logic. After all, she broke off her normal routine, isolated herself and tried to understand her abandonment and plan for the future. You might see a survival advantage in the ability of depressed people like her to rigidly and obsessively fix their attention on one problem, tuning out just about everything and everyone else around them. Certain studies might seem to support this perspective. Paul W. Andrews, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, reported that normal subjects get sadder while trying to solve a demanding spatial pattern recognition test, suggesting that something about sadness might improve analytical reasoning. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Evolution
Link ID: 16264 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By JANE E. BRODY Hearing loss, a disability currently untreated in about 85 percent of those affected, may be the nation’s most damaging and costly sensory handicap. It is a hidden disability, often not obvious to others or even to those who have it. Its onset is usually insidious, gradually worsening over years and thus easily ignored. Most of those affected can still hear sounds and think the real problem is that people aren’t speaking clearly. They often ask others to speak up, repeat what was said or speak more slowly. Or they pretend they can hear, but their conversations may be filled with non sequiturs. As hearing worsens, they are likely to become increasingly frustrated and socially isolated. Unable to hear well in social settings, they gradually stop going to the theater, movies, places of worship, senior centers or parties or out to restaurants with friends or family. Social isolation, in turn, has been linked to depression and an increased risk of death from conditions like heart disease. And now there is another major risk associated with hearing problems: dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. This finding alone should prompt more people to get their hearing tested and, if found impaired, get properly fitted with aids that can help to keep them cognitively engaged. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16263 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By Chelsea Conaboy A. Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal canal that can - but does not always - cause pain in the legs and other problems. It is typically the result of degenerative effects of aging. Disks or joints in the back may bulge or vertebral bones grow spurs that push into the space where the spinal cord and nerves sit, compressing them. The condition is not uncommon, said Dr. Carol Hartigan, a physiatrist in the Spine Center at New England Baptist Hospital. Researchers using imaging tests have found that as many as 30 percent of people over age 60 may have a narrowed canal, but not all experience symptoms, she said. Especially when the narrowing happens slowly over time, the spinal cord and the nerves can adjust to the change, “like a tree that grows around a fence,’’ she said. But some people will experience pain or weakness in the front or back of their legs, often more severe when they are standing or walking. Some, depending on the location of the stenosis, can have bowel and bladder problems. Hartigan said people should see a doctor if the symptoms persist or if they are interfering with daily activities. Staying physically fit is important to controlling symptoms of stenosis, Hartigan said. Often changing the position of the spine slightly can relieve pain enough to keep moving. Some who have trouble walking, might have an easier time riding a bike or even using a treadmill. Steroid injections can provide temporary relief for some, Hartigan said. © 2012 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16262 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By Andrew Newberg Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet complete. Several studies have revealed that people who practice meditation or have prayed for many years exhibit increased activity and have more brain tissue in their frontal lobes, regions associated with attention and reward, as compared with people who do not meditate or pray. A more recent study revealed that people who have had “born again” experiences have a smaller hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in emotions and memory, than atheists do. These findings, however, are difficult to interpret because they do not clarify whether having larger frontal lobes or a smaller hippocampus causes a person to become more religious or whether being pious triggers changes in these brain regions. Various experiments have also tried to elucidate whether believing in God causes similar brain changes as believing in something else. The results, so far, show that thinking about God may activate the same parts of the brain as thinking about an airplane, a friend or a lamppost. For instance, one study showed that when religious people prayed to God, they used some of the same areas of the brain as when they talked to an average Joe. In other words, in the religious person’s brain, God is just as real as any object or person. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16261 - Posted: 01.17.2012

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 16260 - Posted: 01.16.2012

By Maria Konnikova What if every visit to the museum was the equivalent of spending time at the philharmonic? For painter Wassily Kandinsky, that was the experience of painting: colors triggered sounds. Now a study from the University of California, San Diego, suggests that we are all born synesthetes like Kandinsky, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another. The work, published in the August issue of Psychological Science, has become the first experimental confir­mation of the infant-synesthesia hy­pothesis—which has existed, unproved, for almost 20 years. Researchers presented infantsand adults with images of repeating shapes (either circles or triangles) on a split-color background: one side was red or blue, and the other side was yellow or green. If the infants had shape-color asso­ciations, the scientists hypoth­esized, the shapes would affect their color preferences. For in­stance, some infants might look significantly longer at a green back­ground with circles than at the same green background with triangles. Absent synesthesia, no such dif­ference would be visible. The study confirmed this hunch. Infants who were two and three months old showed significant shape-color associations. By eight months the preference was no longer pronounced, and in adults it was gone altogether. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16259 - Posted: 01.16.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Drinking alcohol causes a pleasant feeling because it releases endorphins, the brain’s natural opioids. But a new study has found that problem drinkers differ from social drinkers in the way alcohol affects one part of the brain. The report appeared Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. Researchers performed PET imaging on 13 heavy drinkers and 12 social drinkers after each had had a standardized amount of alcohol. The scientists traced the release of endorphins in two regions of the brain — the nucleus accumbens and the orbitofrontal cortex — and recorded the volunteers’ subjective feelings of intoxication. All subjects reported feelings of intoxication as the researchers observed changes in opioid release in the nucleus accumbens. There was no difference between heavy drinkers and the control group when it came to changes in blood alcohol levels over time. But with the heavy drinkers, unlike with the healthy controls, there was a positive correlation between the release of endorphins in the orbitofrontal cortex and the subjects’ subjective feeling of drunkenness. This phenomenon, the authors write, may contribute to an increased perception of pleasure and to excessive alcohol consumption in these drinkers. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16258 - Posted: 01.16.2012

By Janet Raloff A new study may explain how rising carbon dioxide concentrations — and the ocean acidification they induce — can cause topsy-turvy changes in the behavior of fish. Like a flipped switch, the normal response of nerve cells can reverse as acidifying seawater perturbs how a fish regulates acids and bases in its body, including the brain. “This could be a big deal,” says neurobiologist Andrew Dittman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. Dittman, who was not affiliated with the study, says the new findings could go a long way toward explaining curious sensory changes observed in fish exposed to acidifying waters. The scary scent of predators, for example, can suddenly become alluring. For the new study, published online January 15 in Nature Climate Change, Göran Nilsson of the University of Oslo and his colleagues homed in on brain chemistry. The idea emerged after Philip Munday of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, told Nilsson of behavioral quirks his laboratory fish were exhibiting in a high–carbon dioxide environment — conditions exemplifying ocean waters a half-century or more from now. Nilsson, a neurophysiologist, speculated that a connection between nerves and chemistry might be involved. “It was very much an ‘Aha’ moment,” Munday says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16257 - Posted: 01.16.2012

By DIANE ACKERMAN WHAT’S the quickest way to a man’s heart? No, not through the chest wall with a knife. According to Mom wisdom, it’s a cozy meal, in a penumbra of pleasure that mingles the fragrant food with the cook. If men are anything like common fruit flies — and who’s to say they’re not at times; heaven knows women are — Mom was right. Anyway, that’s the romantic ploy of female fruit flies, for whom a dinner date is the ultimate rush. And rush it literally is, since they live only about 25 days and can’t afford to be shy. Still, the males need to be in the right mood, and the females are surprisingly picky and manipulative, given their short careers. Did I mention that some fruit flies have come-hither eyes? I don’t mean the dozens of mosaic facets, so evocative of hippie sunglasses, but the zingy psychedelic eye colors lab folk like to breed into them, the better to study mutant genes. As a Cornell grad student, I often stopped by the fetid biology lab to admire the eggplant-blackness of the abdomens, the spiky hairs, the gaudy prisms of the eyes — some apricot, some teal, some purple, some the brick-red of Ming vases. A favorite of biologists, fruit flies have it all — they’re prowling for mates within 12 hours of birth, they’re easy to raise and they can lay 100 eggs a day. Plus, they share most of our genes, including about 70 percent of those we’ve linked to such diseases as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16256 - Posted: 01.16.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR A new study has found that among immigrants, younger age at the time of migration predicts a higher incidence of psychotic disorders. The study, published in December in The American Journal of Psychiatry, was conducted from 1997 to 2005 in The Hague, where there are detailed records on almost everyone ages 15 to 54 who has made contact with the health care system for a possible psychotic disorder. The researchers found 273 immigrants, 119 second-generation citizens and 226 Dutch citizens who fit the criteria. In four ethnic groups — people from Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Turkey and Morocco — the risk of psychosis was most elevated among those who immigrated before age 4. There was no association of psychosis with age among immigrants from Western countries. The researchers, led by Dr. Wim Veling of the Parnassia Psychiatric Institute in The Hague, investigated various possible explanations — that social factors may be involved, that people may migrate because they are prone to psychosis, that a decision to migrate is influenced by the early appearance of psychosis, among many others. But the correlation between younger age of migration and the development of psychosis persisted. “We don’t know the reason,” said Dr. Ezra Susser, the senior author and a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, “but it might be related to early social context, which we know has an important influence on later health and mental health.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16255 - Posted: 01.14.2012

Using MR spectroscopy, a team of researchers has developed a way to measure whether brain tumors have a mutation in a gene called IDH. The tissue being analyzed is inside the red boxes. The tumor on the left has the mutation, while the tumor on the right does not. A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Agios Pharmaceuticals are using MR spectroscopy to measure whether brain tumors have a mutation in the IDH gene. Scientists are now targeting isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) in a hope to slow tumor growth and find new ways to treat gliomas. Gliomas, the most common types of brain tumor, are also among the deadliest cancers: Their mortality rate is nearly 100 percent, in part because there are very few treatments available. A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Agios Pharmaceuticals has now developed a way to identify a particular subset of brain tumors, which may help doctors choose treatments and create new drugs that target the disease’s underlying genetic mutation. Scientists have known for several years that many brain tumors involve a mutation in the gene for an enzyme called isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH). This enzyme is involved in cell metabolism — the process of breaking down sugar molecules to extract energy from them. IDH mutations are found in up to 86 percent of low-grade gliomas, which have a better prognosis than high-grade gliomas, also called glioblastomas. Patients with low-grade gliomas can survive for years, though the tumors almost always prove fatal. SciTechDaily Copyright © 1998 - 2012

Keyword: Brain imaging; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16254 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By msnbc.com staff and news services A 9-year-old Detroit-area girl whose battle with Huntington's disease drew attention after she was taunted online in 2010 by her grandmother's former neighbor has died. Michigan Memorial Funeral Home in Flat Rock, which is handling arrangements, says Kathleen Edward died Wednesday. One Facebook posting was of her doctored photo placed above a set of crossbones and another included a photo of her mother in the arms of the grim reaper. The conflict with the neighbor reportedly stemmed from a misunderstanding with the girl's family. After the Facebook taunts appeared, people worldwide voiced their support of the young girl on Facebook and raised money to send her on a shopping spree in 2010, according to the Detroit Free Press. Huntington's disease is a genetic, incurable brain disorder which, in children, can cause tremors, slow, rigid movements and seizures. Kathleen's mother also died from the degenerative disease in 2009, the newspaper reported. If one parent has Huntington's disease, a child has a 50 percent chance of getting it. Most people with Huntington's disease develop symptoms in their 40s or later, but when younger people get it, the disease tends to progress more quickly, according to the Mayo Clinic. "She suffered with this disease for a while, and she never complained," her grandmother, Rebecca Rose, told the Detroit Free Press. "She was always happy, always smiling." © 2012 msnbc.com

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 16253 - Posted: 01.14.2012

Caitlin Stier, video intern Don't believe your eyes as you watch this video: although the rectangles moving in sync suddenly seem to shuffle, their motion hasn't actually changed. Keep watching when a backdrop of morphing stripes appears and a caterpillar-like motion can be seen. Created by graduate student Sebastiaan Mathôt from VU University of Amsterdam, the brain trick occurs when the background is striped rather than solid, an illusion originally developed by researcher Stuart Anstis from University of California, San Diego. The effect is caused by the influence of contrast on motion. When there is a big difference in contrast between a moving object and its background, it appears to move faster than when brightness levels are similar. In this case, the top rectangle is brighter than the maroon one below it. So when their front edges are superimposed on a dark stripe, the top block seems to move faster than the bottom one. Similarly, the speed effect is reversed when they cover the lighter stripe. In the second version of the illusion with morphing stripes, the front and back edges of the blocks sit on different colours. Since the motion of each edge is perceived independently, the front and back of the blocks appear to move at different speeds, creating a caterpillar-like sashay. According to Anstis, the contrast effect is also experienced by drivers. On a foggy day, the difference in brightness between an object and its surroundings is generally less than on a sunny day. This can cause drivers to underestimate how fast they're travelling and speed up, sometimes with disastrous consequences. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16252 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik Our brains are exquisitely tuned to perceive, recognize and remember faces. We can easily find a friend’s face among dozens or hundreds of unfamiliar faces in a busy street. We look at each other’s facial expressions for signs of appreciation and disapproval, love and contempt. And even after we have corresponded or spoken on the phone with somebody for a long time, we are often relieved when we meet him or her in person and are able to put “a face to the name.” The neurons responsible for our refined “face sense” lie in a brain region called the fusiform gyrus. Trauma or lesions to this brain area result in a rare neurological condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Prosopagnostics fail to identify celebrities, close relatives and even themselves in the mirror. But even those of us with normal face-recognition skills are subject to many illusions and biases in face perception. This illusion, created by psychologist Richard Russell, won third prize in the 2009 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. The side-by-side faces are perceived as female and male. Yet both are versions of the same androgynous face (see http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2009/the-illusion-of-sex). The two images are identical, except that the contrast between the eyes and mouth and the rest of the face is higher for the face on the left than for the face on the right. This illusion shows that contrast is an important cue for determining the sex of a face, with low-contrast faces appearing male and high-contrast faces appearing female. It may also explain why females in many cultures darken their eyes and mouths with cosmetics: a made-up face looks more feminine than a fresh face. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16251 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By Laura Beil When Lewis Carroll sent Alice down the rabbit hole, she encountered a strange and twisted land with distortions of size and time. Some headache experts see something else — the possible ghosts of the author’s migraines, which can leave victims temporarily blinded, nauseated, hallucinatory, numb, unable to concentrate or seeking shelter from painful stings of light and sound. People with migraines travel between two worlds: one in which they are having a migraine and one in which they are not. “I’m very brave generally,” Tweedledum tells Alice, “only today I happen to have a headache.” But even after the headache is gone, migraine sufferers live with the dread of its return. For more than a century, researchers have been trying to step through the looking glass to find clues to the mystery of migraines, with little success. Treatments that can prevent or end migraine attacks exist only because drugs for something else were found, often by accident, to quiet the migraine’s neurological storm. “All of the major things we use were not designed for migraine at all,” says Peter Goadsby, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s not good enough that one of the commonest of medical problems has treatment developed by serendipity.” A major barrier to relief, it turns out, has been that migraines, which affect 36 million people in the United States, have no known cause. But researchers now think that they are, at least, looking for the culprits in the right places. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16250 - Posted: 01.14.2012

Arran Frood Has a cheap and effective treatment for chronic pain been lying under clinicians' noses for decades? Researchers have found that a very high dose of an opiate drug that uses the same painkilling pathways as morphine can reset the nerve signals associated with continuous pain — at least in rats. If confirmed in humans, the procedure could reduce or eliminate the months or years that millions of patients spend on pain-managing prescription drugs. The results of the study are described today in Science1. “We have discovered a new effect of opiates when they are given, not constantly at a low dose, but at a very high dose,” says Jürgen Sandkühler, a neurophysiologist at the Center for Brain Research of the Medical University of Vienna, and a co-author of the paper. Chronic pain is a nerve condition that lingers long after the immediate, or acute, pain-causing stimulus has receded. It can follow surgery or injury, and is also associated with conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. Sandkühler says that the original stimulus changes how the central nervous system deals with pain over time. In a model known as long-term potentiation, nerves carrying pain signals fire repeatedly, turning on a cellular pain amplifier that causes anything from exaggerated pain to outright agony on a long-term basis. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16249 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By Helen Briggs Health editor, BBC News website Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. Experts in China scanned the brains of 17 young web addicts and found disruption in the way their brains were wired up. They say the discovery, published in Plos One, could lead to new treatments for addictive behaviour. Internet addiction is a clinical disorder marked by out-of-control internet use. A research team led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan carried out brain scans of 35 men and women aged between 14 and 21. Seventeen of them were classed as having internet addiction disorder (IAD) on the basis of answering yes to questions such as, "Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop Internet use?" Specialised MRI brain scans showed changes in the white matter of the brain - the part that contains nerve fibres - in those classed as being web addicts, compared with non-addicts. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16248 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By Christoph W. Korn Ask a bride before walking down the aisle “How likely are you to get divorced?” and most will respond “Not a chance!” Tell her that the average divorce rate is close to 50 percent, and ask again. Would she change her mind? Unlikely. Even law students who have learned everything about the legal aspects of divorce, including its likelihood, state that their own chances of getting divorced are basically nil. How can we explain this? Psychologists have documented human optimism for decades. They have learned that people generally overestimate their likelihood of experiencing positive events, such as winning the lottery, and underestimate their likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as being involved in an accident or suffering from cancer. Informing people about their statistical likelihood of experiencing negative events, such as divorce, is surprisingly ineffective at altering their optimistic predictions, and highlighting previously unknown risk factors for diseases fails to engender realistic perceptions of medical vulnerability. How can people maintain their rose-colored views of the future in the face of reality? Which neural processes are involved in people’s optimistic predictions? To answer these questions we have investigated optimism by using a recent, burgeoning approach in neuroscience: Describing neural activity related to complex behavior with the simple concept of “prediction errors.” Prediction errors are the brain’s way of keeping track of how well it is doing at predicting what is going to happen in the future. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16247 - Posted: 01.14.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS A newly discovered hormone produced in response to exercise may be turning people’s white fat brown, a groundbreaking new study suggests, and in the process lessening their susceptibility to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. The study, published on Wednesday in Nature and led by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, provides remarkable new insights into how exercise affects the body at a cellular level. For the study, the researchers studied mouse and human muscle cells. Scientists have believed for some time that muscle cells influence biological processes elsewhere in the body, beyond the muscles themselves. In particular, they have suspected that muscle cells communicate biochemically with body fat. But how muscle cells “talk” to fat, what they tell the fat and what role exercise has in sparking or sustaining that conversation have been mysteries — until, in the new study, scientists closely examined the operations of a substance called PGC1-alpha, which is produced in abundance in muscles during and after exercise. “It seems clear that PGC1a stimulates many of the recognized health benefits of exercise,” said Bruce Spiegelman, the Stanley J. Korsmeyer professor of cell biology and medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. Mice bred to produce preternaturally large amounts of PGC1a in their muscles are typically resistant to age-related obesity and diabetes, much as people who regularly exercise are. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 16246 - Posted: 01.12.2012