By Alan Boyle Nothing focuses your attention on the future like a forecast, especially when it comes to the technologies that will be changing daily life in the years to come. Five years, to be exact. That's why forecasts like IBM's annual "Five in Five" are so thought-provoking, even if they're occasionally wrong. Actually, IBM's record is pretty good: This month marks the five-year anniversary of IBM's first list of five technologies that were expected to make the most impact in five years' time. The company nailed 2006's predictions on the rise of telemedicine, location-aware mobile devices, real-time speech translation and nanotechnology. But the fifth prediction, which focused on the rise of virtual 3-D environments, hasn't worked out the way IBM expected. Sure, Second Life is still around — in fact, I'll be hosting my next "Virtually Speaking Science" show in Second Life on Jan. 4. But such virtual worlds haven't become the principal vehicle for real-world commerce ... yet. "It's not perfect," admitted Bernie Meyerson, IBM's vice president of innovation. Sometimes the company's researchers latch onto a idea whose time has not yet come, and perhaps never will. But for the most part, "this stuff has actually panned out a lot," Meyerson said. Is technological progress always a good thing? Not necessarily, if you're talking about key-logging software on mobile devices, or government-supported spyware. The latest predictions from IBM, issued today, have lots of potential for a dreams-vs.-nightmares debate. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 16169 - Posted: 12.20.2011

By Gary Stix What was up with a world leader who thought he could control the weather while engaging in his passion for Elizabeth Taylor movies? No one knows for sure, but a few years ago, two psychologists took a crack at a long-distance analysis. In the September 2009 edition of Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression (Editor’s note: nice journal name), Frederick L. Coolidge and Daniel L. Segal tried to develop a psychological profile of the “Dear Leader” (in 1992 changed to “Dear Father”). Coolidge had developed a means of psychological evaluation using “informants,” people who knew or had historical or other expertise about a person. This test had been used previously to assess Hitler and Saddam Hussein and had been found to have a high-level of statistical reliability. The two psychologists used the test with a South Korean psychiatrist who was an expert on Kim Jong-il. The results showed that Kim Jong-il had an identical overall statistical measure with Hitler and Saddam on 14 personality disorders (r=7.6). (The top six of the 14 are: sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal.). Additional analysis showed that Dear Father was more like Saddam than Der Fuhrer. All three also showed evidence of psychotic thinking. Coolidge and Segal make recommendations about how to engage in diplomatic talks with someone with this type of personality. “In negotiations with Kim Jong-il over nuclear weapons, he might trust higher-level government officials more than lower ones,” they write. “Perhaps, more reflective of Kim Jong-il’s narcissistic traits, he initially balked over six-country negotiations, demanding to meet with the United States only. It would be predicted that secondary or lower level emissaries might have immediately been at a disadvantage.” © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Aggression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16168 - Posted: 12.20.2011

By Scicurious Hi. In a few minutes I’d like you to stand up and give a short public speech to a judgmental group of people. The speech will be about the current national and international effects of Marbury v Madison, with particular focus on violations of interstate commerce. You have 15 minutes to prepare and the speech will have to be 15 minutes long. I hope you’ve done your research. Nervous yet? If you are, you’re not alone. Fear of public speaking (glossophobia, or just stage fright) is one of the most common fears in the Western world. But it’s ok. We’re going to have you sit with your loved one, who will be able to give you encouragement as you prepare. Do you feel a little bit better? I bet you do. But do you really, actually feel better? Does your body react to stress differently when you’ve got a loved one with you to help you out? It turns out that it might. At least, if you’ve got a specific kind of oxytocin receptor gene. Oxytocin gets a lot of press. And well it should. Recent findings on oxytocin have shown effects on trust, on generosity, on behaviors in austistic children even. Not to mention all the effects that oxytocin has on parental bonding and on your sex life. While many of these studies have looked at levels of circulating oxytocin, or the effects of giving oxytocin (usually as a nasal spray) on behavior, people have recently started to look at the other side of oxytocin: the oxytocin receptor. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 16167 - Posted: 12.20.2011

By Sora Song The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals is warning people against the improper use of neti pots, following the deaths of two people who were infected with Naegleria fowleri — the so-called “brain-eating amoeba” — after using tap water to irrigate their sinuses. A 53-year-old woman from De Soto Parish and a 20-year-old man from St. Bernard Parish both died after using contaminated water in their neti pots, a popular home remedy that looks like a genie’s lamp and is used for flushing out mucus from the nose and sinuses. “If you are irrigating, flushing or rinsing your sinuses, for example, by using a neti pot, use distilled, sterile or previously boiled water to make up the irrigation solution,” said Louisiana State Epidemiologist, Dr. Raoult Ratard. Tap water is safe for drinking, but not for irrigating your nose, Ratard said. It’s also important to rinse the neti pot after each use and leave it open to air dry. Typically, Naegleria fowleri infection occurs when people go swimming or diving in warm freshwater lakes and rivers, particularly in summer in the southern U.S. Last summer, at least three other people died from Naegleria fowleri infection in Florida, Virginia and Kansas. The amoeba enters through the nose, travels to the brain and starts eating neurons. It sounds scary — and it is — but it’s also exceedingly rare. In the 10 years from 2001 to 2010, only 32 infections were reported in the U.S., despite millions of people swimming in lakes and rivers. Of those infected, 30 people were infected by recreational water sources, and two were infected by water from hot springs. © 2011 Time Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16166 - Posted: 12.19.2011

By JoNel Aleccia After nearly 10 months, the nationwide shortage of ADHD drugs has taken a toll on Kate Skinn. The 32-year-old Ohio woman had to take a medical leave from college because she can’t focus on her reading. She’s lost income from her job as a waitress because she’s distracted at work. And she’s had to struggle even harder than usual juggling the needs of her boyfriend and their four children, all because she can’t reliably get the Adderall that helps her cope. “It’s impossible to manage all the facets of my life and do my schoolwork,” said Skinn, of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, who was diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder three years ago. “When I can’t take my medicine, I can’t concentrate. I’ll start everything I need to do, but never complete any of it.” She’s among millions of Americans struggling to deal with the worst drug shortage in United States history. ADHD drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin, first reported as scarce last spring, are only a fraction of the 251 medications in short supply so far this year, up from 211 in 2010, according to University of Utah Drug Information Service. The issue drew renewed attention Thursday, when the White House issued an interim rule that requires drugmakers that are the only producers of certain critical medications to report to the Food and Drug Administration all manufacturing interruptions that could disrupt supplies. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16165 - Posted: 12.19.2011

Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer The standard approach to feeding patients hospitalized with anorexia nervosa - starting with a low number of calories and increasing them very gradually - is being challenged by new research from UCSF. This approach to bringing malnourished patients back to health was based on the long-held notion that pushing food on them too quickly can result in potentially fatal metabolic imbalance, but researchers now say it fails to produce significant and necessary weight gain in the first week of hospitalization and results in longer hospital stays. The UCSF study, published in next month's issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, suggests that most patients can start at higher calorie levels, tolerate more food and be able to be released from the hospital more quickly. The research is considered the first to test the traditional recommendations against a higher-calorie diet. "The truth is, this is another one of those cases where you have clinical guidelines that are consensus based, but they really aren't based on the evidence," said study lead author Andrea Garber, associate professor of pediatrics in UCSF's adolescent medicine division. The American Psychiatric Association, the American Dietetic Association and other groups recommend the current guidelines, which have been in place since 2000 and stem from studies of prisoners of war in the 1950s. The approach starts with a foundation of about 1,200 calories a day and adds 200 calories every other day. © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 16164 - Posted: 12.19.2011

By Gary Stix Lawyers and philosophers have already begun debating the ethical implications of an incipient future in which a memory is simply overwritten as if it were a digital file destined for the trash icon on your desktop. Biologists who still work with mice and other living things that don’t function like four-legged flash drives are often left to simply roll their eyes. On Friday, SUNY Downstate’s Symposium on Neuroethics of Memory illustrated the lingering disparity between the two cultures, as C.P. Snow might have phrased it. David Wasserman, the director of research at the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University, raised the issue of when it might be appropriate to implant a “prosthetic” memory to enhance the verisimilitude in recalling a grandparent whose memory had faded into near oblivion. After hearing this, David Glanzman, a researcher at UCLA who works on testing whether old memories can be damped down in sea slugs, pointed out a couple of oft-cited figures: the human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which typically extends 10,000 connections to other neurons. Identifying the location of a specific memory to delete would be an overwhelming challenge. Integrating a new memory of grandma into this dense web of neural wiring would be a graduate project for the year 2250 or beyond. “It’s hard for me to understand how you’d add specific memories,” Glanzman commented. “That seems to me impossibly hard.” Downstate had good reason to consider organizing such a conference, however. One researcher there, Todd Sacktor, has done pioneering studies of a biomolecule known as PKMzeta, which serves as a kind of memory preservative. Once a memory is formed, PKMzeta ensures that it persists without degradation over the long haul. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16163 - Posted: 12.19.2011

by Elizabeth Norton We've all seen those color-coded air-quality charts on the news—warnings about smog, ozone, and pollen. Now it may be time to add a new alert to the list: illegal drugs. Researchers have found that regions with greater cocaine and marijuana use have higher levels of these drugs in the surrounding atmosphere. A few studies since the mid-1990s have shown that illicit drugs make their way into the atmosphere. In 2007, for example, analytical chemist Angelo Cecinato and colleagues at the Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research in Rome, detected small amounts of cocaine in the air of Rome and the city of Taranto on the coast of southern Italy. "We considered it a curiosity," Cecinato says. But further research revealed that atmospheric concentrations of certain drugs were higher wherever drug use was presumed to be more prevalent—leading Cecinato and co-workers to wonder if they had found a better way to estimate the extent of drug abuse in a given area. Currently, authorities must rely on indirect information, such as communitywide surveys or questionnaires and police records. These methods can be time-consuming and expensive, Cecinato explains. Measuring the amount of drugs in the air, his group suspected, might be accurate, fast, and cheap. To find out, Cecinato and colleagues analyzed the air in 20 spots in eight regions of Italy in winter and 39 sites in 14 regions in summer. The investigators collected air samples, extracted the contaminants, and analyzed the results, checking for cocaine and cannabinoids (the active ingredients in marijuana). To rule out false positives caused by other compounds, the team also tested for common pollutants including hydrocarbons, ozone, and nitric oxide. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16162 - Posted: 12.17.2011

Caitlin Stier, video intern Stare at the ellipses in this video and you'll start to experience trippy effects. The illusion, developed by vision researchers Gideon Caplovitz and Kyle Killebrew of the University of Nevada in Reno, features curved shapes spinning at a constant rate where changes in contrast, width and colour alter your perception. At first, a single thin ellipse multiplies. If you fix your eyes on the centre of the screen, dark smudges may appear to blot out the center of the ellipses as your eyes are quickly exposed to stimuli with highly contrasting colours. Next, the shapes gradually become plumper, a transformation that makes the objects seem to slow down and rotate more fluidly. The animation then appears in different colours which seems to enhance the effect. Focussing on the colourful ellipses while the colours fade can also make them turn into polygons, a change that seems to occur at different times from person to person. According to Caplovitz, the apparent change in speed is caused by how we sample information around us to detect movement. As the ellipses become chubbier, their shape weakens the sense of motion and they appear to move more slowly compared to their elongated counterparts. When colour is added into the mix, it also distracts from picking up movement. As the shapes become nearly circular, they seem to roll like jelly due to ambiguous information about their rotation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16161 - Posted: 12.17.2011

by Carl Zimmer I don’t usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the 
inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago. 
While I was catching an old episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the actors’ voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement 
of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didn’t care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they 
were about to find a body. I didn’t care that the show’s trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then I’d switch to listening to them, and then I’d watch them speak again. I just couldn’t meld the two streams of information in my head. Thanks to Netflix, I was confronted with one of the most crucial tricks that the human brain uses to make sense of the world: combining input from all five senses into a single, coherent experience, updated many times a second in virtually real time. Because the techniques our brains use to meld the senses are far from perfect, it turns out, we can fall prey to a variety of illusions—and to maddening confusion when Netflix delivers audio and video out of sync. Neuroscientists have come a long way since the mid-1900s, when they launched their first efforts to map out the brain’s sensory pathways. They identified regions of the brain that became active when people saw things, other regions that became active when they heard sounds, and so on through the list of senses. The implications seemed straightforward enough. Separate systems of neurons handled information from different senses. Only after each system had produced a sophisticated representation of the world did the brain combine their perceptions into one experience of reality, like a film editor adding a soundtrack to a movie. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 16160 - Posted: 12.17.2011

By Bruce Bower A brain-damaged man who can’t remember faces has nosed into a scientific debate about how people learn to recognize other complex objects. Deaf users of sign language also have a hand in this dispute. The brain-damaged man’s facial failures are one symptom of a general inability to perceive configurations of object parts, suggests a new investigation led by psychologist Cindy Bukach of the University of Richmond in Virginia. The man thus stumbles at identifying not only people’s faces but also computer-generated, three-part objects called Greebles, even after extensive training, Bukach’s team reports online December 8 in Neuropsychologia. Bukach and her colleagues studied LR, a man who fails to recognize his daughter when shown a picture of her but remembers distinctive facial features, such as Elvis’ sideburns. Damage in a car accident to a brain area just under the right temple caused this condition, called prosopagnosia. “There are many ways in which face recognition can be disrupted, but our evidence shows that LR’s type of prosopagnosia impairs recognition of objects with multiple parts, with faces as the most obvious example,” Bukach says. Relative positions of the eyes, nose and mouth, as well their shapes, contribute to perceiving a face as a single entity. In a 2006 report, her team designed a collection of eight faces using different combinations of two sets of eyes, noses and mouths. After briefly viewing a face, LR correctly selected it from all eight faces 25 percent of the time — about what would be expected if he based choices on a single facial feature, Bukach says. Further testing showed that LR homed in on the mouth. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 16159 - Posted: 12.17.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey When life gives naked mole rats lemons, the wrinkled, buck-toothed rodents probably don’t care. They are impervious to the sting of acid. But scientists in Berlin are onto the secret of the social rodents’ acid insensitivity. Naked mole rats’ acid sensors work just fine, but a protein responsible for relaying messages about acid’s presence to the nervous system is easily blocked by the same positively charged hydrogen ions that lend substances acidity, researchers report in the Dec. 16 Science. The discovery may give researchers clues about where to target drugs that could relieve pain associated with inflammation. “I’ve been trying to figure out this question in mole rats for a number of years, and the answer has been elusive,” says Thomas Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. It was Park who first got Gary Lewin of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin interested in studying naked mole rats. Lewin and Ewan St. John Smith, a postdoctoral researcher in Lewin’s lab, led the new research. Mole rats live in large social groups in burrows underground. The crowded, confined conditions cause carbon dioxide levels to rise to as high as 8 to 10 percent of the air — a concentration that would cause a person to pass out within five to 10 minutes. High carbon dioxide and low oxygen levels make body tissues acidic, something that is very painful for nearly all mammals. (Inflammation also raises acidity in tissues, producing pain.) If mole rats had not evolved a way to ignore acid the little rodents would be in constant agony, Lewin says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 16158 - Posted: 12.17.2011

By Ingrid Wickelgren Peter West makes his living working with explosives, but for a long time he did his job despite a terrifying handicap: tremors. His hands would twitch and shake, his head would bob, his speech would become garbled. Sometimes he could barely pour milk from a pitcher—the milk slopping over the side of the glass. “At that time, I was mixing high explosives,” West says. “I knew it was a matter of time before I dropped one.” Luckily the most significant thing West, 54, dropped was his golf ball. In 2003, while on the links, a doctor in West’s party noticed he was having trouble balancing the ball on the T. One thing led to another, and West was diagnosed with essential tremor, a neurological disorder characterized by shaking of the hands and other body parts. The main treatment option was drugs that would make him sleepy—a hazardous side effect in his line of work. West, however, hooked up with doctors at Rhode Island Hospital who performed deep brain stimulation. In 2004, they opened West’s skull and implanted an electrode in his thalamus, a structure in the center of the brain just above the brainstem. They ran a wire to another device, inserted under the skin of his collarbone, that generated pulses of electrical current. The treatment reduced West’s tremors to manageable levels, and allowed him to continue his work. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16157 - Posted: 12.17.2011

by Helen Shen SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Underwater earthquake recordings could help track the endangered and poorly understood fin whale, according to research presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Most quake researchers cull the whale's booming calls from their seafloor recordings. But one group of seismologists has flipped things around to harvest an extensive repertoire of fin whale songs. The second-largest among whales, fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) live in many of the world's oceans. Yet, relatively little is known about their social habits, breeding grounds, and seasonal migration paths. The animals stick mostly to deep waters far offshore, so following them by visual surveys and radio tagging can be difficult and costly. Seismologist William Wilcock of the University of Washington, Seattle, wondered if there was a better way. From 2003 to 2006, his group had measured undersea earthquakes that occur as new sea floor forms. Implanted in the ocean floor, their seismic detectors also picked up fin whale calls, which—at 17 to 35 hertz—overlap in frequency with Earth's rumblings. To extract earthquake information efficiently, the group developed computer programs to detect and filter out whale songs. Using a similar strategy to weed out seismic vibrations brought the singing whales to center stage. "We just turned the code around," says Dax Soule, a graduate student in Wilcock's lab. In 3 years, the researchers recorded about 300,000 fin whale calls near the Endeavour hydrothermal vents on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, near Vancouver Island in Canada. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 16156 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Can a cup of coffee motivate you to relish your trips to the gym this winter? That question is at the heart of a notable study of caffeine and exercise, one of several new experiments suggesting that, whatever your sport, caffeine may allow you to perform better and enjoy yourself more. Scientists and many athletes have known for years, of course, that a cup of coffee before a workout jolts athletic performance, especially in endurance sports like distance running and cycling. Caffeine has been proven to increase the number of fatty acids circulating in the bloodstream, which enables people to run or pedal longer (since their muscles can absorb and burn that fat for fuel and save the body’s limited stores of carbohydrates until later in the workout). As a result, caffeine, which is legal under International Olympic Committee rules, is the most popular drug in sports. More than two-thirds of about 20,680 Olympic athletes studied for a recent report had caffeine in their urine, with use highest among triathletes, cyclists and rowers. But whether and how caffeine affects other, less-aerobic activities, like weight training or playing a stop-and-go team sport like soccer or basketball, has been less clear. So researchers at Coventry University in England recently recruited 13 fit young men and asked them to repeat a standard weight-training gym regimen on several occasions. An hour before one workout, the men consumed a sugar-free energy drink containing caffeine. An hour before another, they drank the same beverage, minus the caffeine. Then the men lifted, pressed and squatted, performing each exercise until they were exhausted. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 16155 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By Charles B. Brenner and Jeffrey M. Zacks The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup. So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.” Gabriel Radvansky, Sabine Krawietz and Andrea Tamplin seated participants in front of a computer screen running a video game in which they could move around using the arrow keys. In the game, they would walk up to a table with a colored geometric solid sitting on it. Their task was to pick up the object and take it to another table, where they would put the object down and pick up a new one. Whichever object they were currently carrying was invisible to them, as if it were in a virtual backpack. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16154 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By Christof Koch Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see. The first experiment is a collaboration among Filip Van Opstal of Ghent University in Belgium, Floris P. de Lange of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France in Paris. Dehaene, director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, is best known for his investigations of the brain mechanisms underlying counting and numbers. Here he explored the extent to which a simple sum or an average can be computed outside the pale of consciousness. Adding 7, 3, 5 and 8 is widely assumed to be a quintessential serial process that requires consciousness. Van Opstal and his colleagues proved the opposite in an indirect but clever and powerful way. A quartet of single-­digit Arabic numbers (1 through 9, excluding the numeral 5) are projected onto a screen. Volunteers had to indicate as quickly as possible whether or not the average of the four projected numbers exceeded 5. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16153 - Posted: 12.15.2011

By Katherine Harmon Medical school might be a long, slow slog, but once doctors have their training, they can often make diagnoses in a matter of moments. New research suggests that doctors actually identify an abnormality in less than two seconds—not much longer than it takes them to name an animal or a letter of the alphabet. Twenty-five radiologists submitted to having their brains scanned while performing visual diagnoses of chest x-rays. Mixed in with images of abnormal chest x-rays were clean ones on which the outline of an animal or consonant had been superimposed to test the speed with which doctors recognized familiar objects. The researchers, led by Marcio Melo, of the Laboratory of Medical Informatics at the University of São Paulo, found that the same regions of the brain were active when doctors correctly identified any of the three objects. The findings were published online Wednesday in PLoS ONE. “Diagnostic hypotheses in medical practice are often made by physicians in the first moments of contact with patients; sometimes even before the report of symptoms,” Melo and the team wrote in their paper. Indeed, the doctors in the study—who had been prepared to see the variety of images—named the type of abnormality—such as cavitation or cardiomegaly—in an average of 1.33 seconds. Animals got named in 1.23 seconds. The well-trained brains still had to work a little harder to come up with the medical terms for the conditions than for the more common visual clues, according to the study. The fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans showed that although the diagnoses called on the same collection of areas around the brain as did animals and letters, they also put a much higher demand on the left inferior frontal sulcus and posterior cingulate cortex, which are areas of higher cognitive processing. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16152 - Posted: 12.15.2011

Allen Frances, contributor "WE DON'T see things as they are, we see things as we are." This simple Talmudic saying summarises the essence of epistemology. Psychiatric disorders provide a striking example: they are not real things in nature, but labels we create to describe troubling aspects of human experience. Sometimes labels take on a life of their own. People mistakenly think that naming a psychiatric problem shapes it into a simple disease with a reductionist, biological explanation. Labelling mental disorders is useful in providing a common language and guide to treatment. But psychiatric disorders are remarkably heterogeneous and overlapping in their presentations and complex in their causation. The human brain rarely reveals its secrets in simple answers. All of which brings us to the wonderful book, American Madness, an artful analysis of the rise and fall of the label "dementia praecox" from its promising birth in 1896 to its unlamented death in 1927. Introduced by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, the term was used to describe an early onset of psychotic symptoms that presaged a tragic downhill course and poor outcome - as distinct from manic depressive illness, which has a more variable age of onset, cyclical course, and greater chance for a good outcome. The label dementia praecox spread like wildfire and was briefly the darling of psychiatry until it lost out to schizophrenia, a broader concept that included milder and earlier cases and did not necessarily imply such a bleak future or bad outcome. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 16151 - Posted: 12.15.2011

by Peter Aldhous Itsy bitsy spiders have a big problem: where to store their bulging brains. For Anapisona simoni and other arachnid lightweights, the problem is so acute that their brains have literally spilled out of their body cavities and into their legs. Tiny creatures' brains and microelectronics have something in common, it turns out: ultimately, attempts to miniaturise the circuitry will hit a wall. Once the axons that transmit neural signals get down to 0.1 micrometre in diameter, for instance, channels that move ions across cell membranes get so "noisy" that signalling becomes unreliable. What's more, nervous tissue demands a lot of energy, and if nerve cells get too small they simply don't contain enough mitochondria – organelles that act as cellular power plants – to meet their needs. As a result, animals face a trade-off as natural selection pushes them towards the minuscule: either dumb down, or lug around brains that are much bigger, proportionate to body size, than those needed by a larger creatures with similar smarts. Weaving websMovie Camera is not for dullards, so tiny spiders haven't taken the evolutionary road to stupidity. In 2007, William Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the University of Costa Rica found that the smallest spiders weave webs that are just as complex as those made by larger relatives. "There was no correlation between the size of the spider and the precision with which it built the sticky spiral in the web," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16150 - Posted: 12.15.2011