By JOHN BRANCH THROUGH THE NIGHT and into the next day, as the scrolls across the bottom of television screens spread the news of Derek Boogaard’s death last May, the calls of condolences came, one after another. Among them was a call from a stranger, first to Joanne Boogaard in Regina, Saskatchewan, then to Len Boogaard in Ottawa. It was a researcher asking for the brain of their son. An examination of the brain could unlock answers to Boogaard’s life and death. It could save other lives. But there was not much time to make a decision. Boogaard, the N.H.L.’s fiercest fighter, dead of a drug and alcohol overdose at 28, was going to be cremated. There was little discussion. The brain was carved out of his skull by a coroner in Minneapolis. It was placed in a plastic bucket and inside a series of plastic bags, then put in a cooler filled with a slurry of icy water. It was driven to the airport and placed in the cargo hold of a plane to Boston. When it arrived at a laboratory at the Bedford V.A. Medical Center in Bedford, Mass., the brain was vibrantly pink and weighed 1,580 grams, or about 3 ½ pounds. On a stainless-steel table in the basement morgue, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half was sliced into sheets about the width of sandwich bread. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Aggression
Link ID: 16116 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Scientists at Stanford and UCSF are recruiting patients for two clinical trials to test the use of ultrasound waves, as an alternative to traditional radiation therapy, to ease pain in people whose cancer has spread to their bones. Earlier studies of the ultrasound treatment have been promising, and a study recently completed at Stanford and 16 other U.S. research sites found that most patients saw substantial improvement in pain control after radiation therapy had failed to work. The treatment is still considered experimental and is not available outside of clinical trials. It is being studied only as a treatment for the pain associated with metastatic bone cancer, and not for treating the cancer itself. "Radiation is very effective for most patients. But there is still a significant percentage that it doesn't work for," said Dr. Pejman Ghanouni, a Stanford radiologist who is leading ultrasound clinical trials there. "I don't view ultrasound as something that would replace radiation. It's another tool in the toolbox." Doctors have had such success in treating cancer that people are now living years longer after a diagnosis than they did decades ago, Ghanouni said. But as survival rates have increased, so have rates of metastatic disease, which occurs when the cancer has spread beyond the initial site, commonly into the bones. © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16115 - Posted: 12.06.2011

by Catherine de Lange Chimpanzee brains may be hard-wired to evolve language even though they can't talk. That is the suggestion of a study which found chimps link sounds and levels of brightness, something akin to synaesthesia in people. Such an association could help explain how our early ancestors took the first vital step from ape-like grunts to a proper vocabulary. Synaesthetes make unusual connections between different senses – they might sense certain tastes when they hear music, or "see" numbers as colours. This is less unusual than you might think: "The synaesthetic experience is a continuum," explains Roi Cohen Kadosh of University College London. "Most people have it at an implicit level, and some people have a stronger connection." Now, Vera Ludwig from the Charite University of Medicine in Berlin, Germany, and colleagues have shown for the first time that chimpanzees also make cross-sensory associations, suggesting they evolved early on. The team repeatedly flashed either black or white squares for 200 milliseconds at a time on screens in front of six chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 33 humans. The subjects had to indicate whether the square was black or white by touching a button of the right colour. A high or low-pitched sound was randomly played in the background during each test. Chimps and humans were better at identifying white squares when they heard a high-pitched sound, and more likely to correctly identify dark squares when played a low-pitched sound. But performance was poor when the sounds were swapped: humans were slower to identify a white square paired with a low-pitched noise, or a black square with a high-pitched noise, and the chimps' responses became significantly less accurate. © Copyright Reed Bus

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16114 - Posted: 12.06.2011

“Aging is not a mild form of dementia,” says cellular neurobiologist John Morrison, who specializes in aging. Until recently, many scientists thought brain cells died as we aged, shrinking our brains and shedding bits of information that were gone forever. Newer findings indicate that cells in disease-free brains stay put; it’s the connections between them that break. With this new perspective has come an explosion of research into how we can keep those connections, and our brain function, intact for longer. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 16113 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Female Ecstasy users show long-lasting signs of toxicity in their brains, an imaging study shows. The neurotransmitter serotonin, a critical signaling molecule, has roles in regulating mood, appetite, sleep, learning and memory. In Monday's issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, U.S. researchers used PET scans to look at levels of certain serotonin receptors in different regions of the brain in 15 women who had used Ecstasy compared with 10 who never taken it. The study is important, said study author Dr. Ronald Cowan, a psychiatry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, because the drug is now being tested as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety associated with cancer. "Our studies suggest that if you use Ecstasy recreationally, the more you use, the more brain changes you get,” Cowan said. Investigators will need to know the dose at which Ecstasy becomes toxic before it is used as a treatment, the study’s authors cautioned. In the study, they found Ecstasy use produces chronic serotonin neurotoxicity in humans. Since previous studies suggest that the use of birth control, estrogen level and age affect serotonin receptors, the researchers took those factors were taken into consideration in the analysis. But the authors acknowledged they may not have fully accounted for those variables. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16112 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By Brian Alexander “Laughing seizures” have long been one of the mysteries surrounding epilepsy. During an event, an epileptic suffering a laughing seizure can guffaw, sometimes hysterically, but certainly not because he or she finds anything funny. Now a new study published in the journal Brain, from a team led by Josef Parvizi of Stanford University, has helped clear up some of the mystery. Earlier research traced these events, more formally called gelastic seizures, to abnormal clumps of neurons in the hypothalamus called hamartomas. “The hamartomas start firing on their own and cause the seizures,” Parvizi explained. But exactly where in the hypothalamus are gelastic seizure-related hamartomas located? That answer’s important because the hypothalamus has several regions, or nuclei, that manage input and create output related to a variety of body functions like temperature regulation, sexual behavior and hormone release. Parvizi likens it to a college campus. “Just like a campus, you have different buildings and every department has its own students and own connections,” he said. In looking at 100 cases of children with gelastic seizures who’ve had their brains imaged, Parvizi and his colleagues were able to show that in every case the hamartoma lesions were located in a region known as the mammillary bodies. (They don’t have anything to do with breasts. They just sort of look like breasts and the neuroscientists who first described them were men, so there you go.) © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Epilepsy; Emotions
Link ID: 16111 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By ALVA NOë What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. “Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals. Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything. Leif Parsons What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 16110 - Posted: 12.06.2011

People who like a lie-in may now have an excuse - it is at least partly down to their genes, according to experts. Experts, who studied more than 10,000 people across Europe, found those with the gene ABCC9 need around 30 minutes more sleep per night than those without the gene. The gene is carried by one in five Europeans, they say in their study, published in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers said the finding could help explain "sleep behaviour". Over 10,000 people took part, each reporting how long they slept and providing a blood sample for DNA analysis. People's sleep needs can differ significantly. At the extreme, Margaret Thatcher managed on four hours of sleep a night while Albert Einstein needed 11. People from the Orkney Isles, Croatia, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and Germany took part in the study. All were asked about their sleep patterns on "free" days, when people did not need to get up for work the next day, take sleeping pills or work shifts. When the researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich compared these figures with the results of the genetic analysis, they found those with a variation of a gene known as ABCC9 needed more sleep than the eight-hour average. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16109 - Posted: 12.06.2011

By Tim Wall A review of 142 studies on the effects of the herbicide atrazine had bad news for testes. "Essentially, atrazine chemically castrates animals. When you look at a male exposed to atrazine, the testes are missing sperm," Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley told Discovery News. The effects of atrazine on male development are consistent across all examined animals, found a study published by a team of 22 researchers from more than 60 nations in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Mammals, reptiles, and fish were all affected, but amphibians caught the worst of it. In a study by Hayes, male African clawed frogs turned into females after exposure to atrazine, which kills weeds around the world in everything from corn fields to orchards. "And this is not at extremely high concentrations" said co-author of the review Val Beasley of the University of Illinois in a press release. "These are at concentrations that are found in the environment." Humans aren't spared the effects of atrazine, the world's second most common herbicide after glyphosate, Hayes said. Hayes pointed to studies correlating atrazine exposure to low sperm quality, birth defects, miscarriage, and breast cancer © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 16108 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Nearly everybody knows that Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, the house in Pennsylvania that sits above and appears to cascade into a waterfall. I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris is similarly famous. And Frank Gehry is widely known for the curvi­linear shining steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But most people couldn’t name the contractors and subcontractors responsible for translating those great architects’ blueprints into solid structures. Geneticists have the same problem. Details for erecting an organism’s structure are encoded within DNA, written in chemical subunits designated by the letters A, T, C and G. But it has been hard to say exactly who takes those details and oversees the construction of the organism from proteins and other molecular materials. Only now have scientists begun identifying the previously invisible contractors who make sure that materials get where they are supposed to be and in the right order to build a human being or any other creature. Some of these little-known workers belong to a class of molecules called long intergenic noncoding RNAs. Scientists used to think that these “linc­RNAs” were worthless. As their name suggests, these molecules — at least 200 chemical letters long — do not encode information that the body’s manufacturing machinery can use to cobble together proteins. And the lincRNAs originate in what scientists used to view as barren wastelands between protein-coding genes. But new research is showing that these formerly underappreciated workers have important roles in projects both large and microscopic. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 16107 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Devin Powell Science fiction fans know what a 3-D display ought to look like. The film Forbidden Planet showed them more than half a century ago. On a distant world once inhabited by an advanced alien civilization, human scientist Dr. Morbius discovers a table that can create holographic videos. He calls up a ghostly projection of his daughter that’s smaller than but other­wise identical to the girl herself. “Aladdin’s lamp in a physics laboratory,” says an awed spacefarer peering over Morbius’ shoulder. Compared with this Krell technology, the magic of today’s 3-D televisions and movie screens are a bit lacking. Just ask moviegoers whose eyes felt strained as they watched Avatar from behind a pair of goofy glasses. Or move your head side to side while playing Nintendo’s latest portable gaming device, the 3DS: You will see that Mario’s world just doesn’t rotate like the real world would. But a handful of research teams are hoping to create a 3-D experience that’s glasses-free, comfortable and as in-your-face as watching the Super Bowl from the front row at the stadium. By combining existing techniques with a few new tricks, the researchers are finding better ways to fool the brain into thinking the action is right there in the room. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16106 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Ferris Jabr Losing weight is not always about anticipating swimsuit season or squeezing into skinny jeans—for the clinically obese, losing weight is about fighting serious illness and reclaiming health. But the primal part of the brain that regulates appetite will not place a moratorium on hunger just because someone and their doctor acknowledge the need to lose weight. Researchers at Syracuse University are working toward a unique solution: a stick of chewing gum that suppresses appetite. There are many appetite-suppressing drugs on the market, a large number of which are based on stimulating amphetamines that carry the risk of serious side effects such as high blood pressure and heart failure. Syracuse Chemist Robert Doyle's research focuses on a hormone called human peptide YY (hPYY), which is released from cells that line the intestine whenever you eat and exercise. The more calories consumed, the more hPYY travels from intestinal cells into the bloodstream, eventually reaching the hypothalamus—an almond-size, evolutionarily ancient part of the brain that helps to regulate hunger, thirst, body temperature and sleep cycles. Previous studies have shown that injections of hPYY suppress appetite in rodents, monkeys and people. In one study, both obese and lean people consumed about 30 percent fewer calories than usual at a buffet lunch only two hours after receiving a dose of hPYY. Doyle wanted to know if hPYY still works when taken orally because pills and tablets are easy and painless compared with injections. The problem is that if you ingest pure hPYY, the caustic soup of acids and digestive enzymes in your stomach and intestine will destroy the hormone before it reaches your blood. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 16105 - Posted: 12.03.2011

by Gregory Mone In June 2006 pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis began selling a new weight-loss drug called rimonabant in Europe. Rimonabant worked in part by reducing appetite, and the company claimed it could also treat addiction, harmful cholesterol, and diabetes. Lab tests even suggested the drug produced healthier sperm. But within six months, the company had received more than 900 reports of nausea, depression, and other side effects. By the following summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had rejected rimonabant, noting that relative to a placebo, patients taking it were twice as likely to contemplate, plan, or attempt suicide. The European Medicines Agency soon asked Sanofi-Aventis to address the safety concerns, and on December 5, 2008, the company pulled the drug off the European market. Rimonabant was a spectacular flop, and yet its lure today is stronger than ever. Researchers worldwide are pursuing novel drugs aimed at the exact same target: the endocannabinoid system, an elaborate network of receptors and proteins that operate within the brain, heart, gut, liver, and throughout the central nervous system. For drug designers, the system’s powerful role in regulating cravings, mood, pain, and memory makes it a tantalizing target. The challenge now is finding sharper, more refined ways to manipulate it without causing the sort of debilitating side effects that derailed rimonabant. “The system is very, very widespread and very effective at a variety of levels,” says neuroscientist Keith Sharkey, who studies the role of endocannabinoids in the gut at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. “It seems to be very important in the body, which is a concern when you develop drugs for it because you will get a range of effects.” © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16104 - Posted: 12.03.2011

Alla Katsnelson Some people say they never forget a face, and they aren't alone — the golden paper wasp can also recognize the faces of other members of its species. In humans, this cognitive feat is thought to rely on specialized brain areas evolved specifically for the task, and work published today in Science1 suggests that the same may be true for these wasps. “Fifteen years ago, if people had claimed [face recognition] existed in insects, others would have thought they were mad,” says Lars Chittka, a behavioural and sensory ecologist at Queen Mary University of London who was not involved in the study. But in 2002, Elizabeth Tibbetts, then a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, demonstrated that the golden paper wasp, Polistes fuscatus, can recognize individuals of the same species from their facial markings2. However, scientists have long debated whether mental abilities such as face recognition are evolutionary adaptations or simply skills learned over an organism’s lifetime. So Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in Tibbetts' lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, explored this question by comparing two species of wasp. The faces of P. fuscatus have clearly variable features, and the organism’s social structure depends on individuals being able to tell one another apart. Often several queens form a nest together, and then establish a strict social hierarchy; individuals must be able to recognize each others’ status to avoid fights. Sheehan and Tibbetts compared this wasp’s face-recognition abilities with those of a closely related species, Polistes metricus. P. metricus wasps have much less recognizable facial markings and live a less socially complex lifestyle, with just one queen ruling a nest of underlings and no need to differentiate between one another. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16103 - Posted: 12.03.2011

Caitlin Stier, video intern Think hard: you can transform a circle into a hexagon using the power of your mind. New animations created by Hiroyuki Ito from Kyushu University show how staring at coloured shapes can produce an afterimage that varies in form as well as hue. "This is the first study to show systematic shape changes in after-images involving shape processing mechanisms in the brain," says Ito. The first version of the illusion uses solid, stationary shapes. After focusing on yellow circles, blue hexagons typically appear and vice versa. The same effect also occurs with outlines of the shapes. In another variation, hexagons and circles rotate. Although the movement paints circular shapes on the retina, the animations produce the same shape-changing effect as the static illusions. After-images are thought to occur when three types of retinal cells are overstimulated. Due to signals lingering on the retina, a blurred version in complimentary colours typically arises after the image disappears. But in this case, the additional shape change could be caused by tiring out areas in the cortex that detect corners and curves. Ito now plans to investigate the neural mechanism involved and explore the influence of colour and brightness on after-images. He became fascinated by the phenomenon after staring at his circular ceiling light and noticing a ghostly image shaped like a polygon afterwards. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16102 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By Sandra Upson If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking. The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause. When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable. But clear exceptions challenge that general rule. Two weeks ago, thousands of computer game enthusiasts descended on a convention center in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, to observe some of these exceptions in action. They were attending the championships of one of the world’s hottest computer games, StarCraft 2. Hands fluttered over keyboards like hummingbirds mid-hover at about fifty computers set up in a dimly lit open hall. Players, many of whom flew in from South Korea to compete, vied to advance through their brackets to the finals. This game is no joke, with the prize money to prove it—$50,000 went to the winner, a 16-year-old Korean who goes by the name Leenock. The agility on display in Providence —as seen in the players’ multitasking, their nonstop decision-making, and the stunning speed of their fingers—has not gone unnoticed by cognitive scientists. For decades, a different game, chess, has held the exalted position of “the drosophila of cognitive science”—the model organism that scientists could poke and prod to learn what makes experts better than the rest of us. StarCraft 2, however, might be emerging as the rhesus macaque: its added complexity may confound researchers initially, but the answers could ultimately be more telling. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 16101 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By JENEEN INTERLANDI The moment she saw him, Judy Cox knew her son was dead. It was an October morning in 2008, and she had just stepped out the door to run an errand when she found him lying faceup in the driveway, ghost white, covered in purple splotches. He wasn’t breathing, and when she couldn’t revive him, she ran screaming into the house where her husband, Wayne, was still asleep. “Chris is dead,” she cried. “Call 911!” Wayne jumped out of bed and raced down to the driveway, where he knelt over his son’s limp frame and tried frantically to elicit a breath or a heartbeat. As he pumped Chris’s chest and scooped out the vomit that had collected in his mouth, Judy ran to the kitchen and steadied herself long enough to call for an ambulance. Chris was 26. He had not been well. An A.T.V. accident the previous August left him with debilitating back pain that physical therapy did nothing to alleviate. His doctor had recently prescribed Oxycontin. His parents learned later that he had taken too much. By the time the ambulance arrived, Chris’s heart had been still for at least 15 minutes. It took the paramedics another 15 to get it pumping again; even then, doctors had little hope he would survive. Brain cells begin dying off just five minutes after blood stops delivering oxygen. After 30 minutes, there is likely to be more dead tissue than living. Nonetheless, the emergency-room staff members at the local hospital did their best. They hooked Chris up to a tangle of tubes and machines and injected him with drugs to stabilize his heart rate. Wayne and Judy watched helplessly from the hallway. After four hours, a doctor finally summoned them to a secluded corridor. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Sleep
Link ID: 16100 - Posted: 12.03.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS To learn more about how exercise affects the brain, scientists in Ireland recently asked a group of sedentary male college students to take part in a memory test followed by strenuous exercise. First, the young men watched a rapid-fire lineup of photos with the faces and names of strangers. After a break, they tried to recall the names they had just seen as the photos again zipped across a computer screen. Afterward, half of the students rode a stationary bicycle, at an increasingly strenuous pace, until they were exhausted. The others sat quietly for 30 minutes. Then both groups took the brain-teaser test again. Notably, the exercised volunteers performed significantly better on the memory test than they had on their first try, while the volunteers who had rested did not improve. Meanwhile, blood samples taken throughout the experiment offered a biological explanation for the boost in memory among the exercisers. Immediately after the strenuous activity, the cyclists had significantly higher levels of a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is known to promote the health of nerve cells. The men who had sat quietly showed no comparable change in BDNF levels. For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Trophic Factors
Link ID: 16099 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Charles Q. Choi Ravens use their beaks and wings much like humans rely on our hands to make gestures, such as for pointing to an object, scientists now find. This is the first time researchers have seen gestures used in this way in the wild by animals other than primates. From the age of 9 to 12 months, human infants often use gestures to direct the attention of adults to objects, or to hold up items so that others can take them. These gestures, produced before children speak their first words, are seen as milestones in the development of human speech. Dogs and other animals are known to point out items using gestures, but humans trained these animals, and scientists had suggested the natural development of these gestures was normally confined only to primates, said researcher Simone Pika, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. Even then, comparable gestures are rarely seen in the wild in our closest living relatives, the great apes—for instance, chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda employ so-called directed scratches to indicate distinct spots on their bodies they want groomed. Still, ravens and their relatives such as crows and magpies have been found to be remarkably intelligent over the years, surpassing most other birds in terms of smarts and even rivaling great apes on some tests. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16098 - Posted: 12.01.2011

By Rose Eveleth When I was in fifth grade, my brother Alex started correcting my homework. This would not have been weird, except that he was in kindergarten—and autistic. His disorder, characterized by repetitive behaviors and difficulty with social interactions and communication, made it hard for him to listen to his teachers. He was often kicked out of class for not being able to sit for more than a few seconds at a time. Even now, almost 15 years later, he can still barely scratch out his name. But he could look at my page of neatly written words or math problems and pick out which ones were wrong. Many researchers are starting to rethink how much we really know about autistic people and their abilities. These researchers are coming to the conclusion that we might be underestimating what they are capable of contributing to society. Autism is a spectrum disease with two very different ends. At one extreme are “high functioning” people who often hold jobs and keep friends and can get along well in the world. At the other, "low functioning" side are people who cannot operate on their own. Many of them are diagnosed with mental retardation and have to be kept under constant care. But these diagnoses focus on what autistic people cannot do. Now a growing number of scientists are turning that around to look at what autistic people are good at. Researchers have long considered the majority of those affected by autism to be mentally retarded. Although the numbers cited vary, they generally fall between 70 to 80 percent of the affected population. But when Meredyth Edelson, a researcher at Willamette University, went looking for the source of those statistics, she was surprised that she could not find anything conclusive. Many of the conclusions were based on intelligence tests that tend to overestimate disability in autistic people. "Our knowledge is based on pretty bad data," she says. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 16097 - Posted: 12.01.2011