by Belle Dumé IT MAY sound like a strange brew, but green tea and red light could provide a novel treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Together, the two can destroy the rogue "plaques" that crowd the brains of people with the disease. The light makes it easier for the green-tea extract to get to work on the plaques. Andrei Sommer at the University of Ulm in Germany, and colleagues, have previously used red light with a wavelength of 670 nanometres to transport cancer drugs into cells. The laser light pushes water out of the cells and when the laser is switched off, the cells "suck in" water and any other molecules, including drugs, from their surroundings. Now, Sommer's team have found that the same technique can be used to destroy the beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's. These plaques consist of abnormally folded peptides, and are thought to disrupt communication between nerve cells, leading to loss of memory and other symptoms. The team bathed brain cells containing beta-amyloid in epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) - a green-tea extract known to have beta-amyloid inhibiting properties - at the same time as stimulating the cells with red light. Beta-amyloid in the cells reduced by around 60 per cent. Shining the laser light alone onto cells reduced beta-amyloid by around 20 per cent (Photomedicine and Laser Surgery, DOI: 10.1089/pho.2011.3073). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15995 - Posted: 11.08.2011

A new film looks at the work of a Canadian doctor and author who travelled to the Amazon to learn about a psychotropic medicine that may help drug addicts to recover. Vancouver's Dr. Gabor Maté learned about ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant concoction used at a clinic in Peru. At the clinic, the cure rates for addicts is many times the average found in North America and Europe. CBC's The Nature of Things joined Maté in South America and traced his efforts to treat addicts in Vancouver with ayahuasca, which occupies a grey area of the law in Canada. Maté is determined to apply to what he's learned to his patients, but he knows it will be a challenge.Dr. Gabor Maté knows it will be a challenge to try ayahuasca with his patients.Dr. Gabor Maté knows it will be a challenge to try ayahuasca with his patients. The Nature of Things "Personally, I can see that it works and I can also see why it works, but proving it to colleagues that's another question entirely," Maté said in the documentary. Psychedelic researcher Dr. Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine, and his colleagues interviewed members of the Brazilian ayahuasca religion. They found several had histories of serious drug addiction and alcoholism that seemed to remit once they used the drug ceremonially twice a month. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15994 - Posted: 11.08.2011

Megan Erickson The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within. But our inability to grasp the immaterial means we’re stuck making inferences, free-associating, if we want any insight into the unknown. Which is why we talk obscurely and metaphorically about "pinning down" perception and “hunting for dark matter” (possibly a sort of primordial black hole). The existence of black holes was first hypothesized a decade after Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork for them in the theory of relativity, and the phrase "black hole" was not coined until 1968. Likewise, consciousness is still such an elusive concept that, in spite of the recent invention of functional imaging - which has allowed scientists to visualize the different areas of the brain - we may not understand it any better now than we ever have before. “We approach [consciousness] now perhaps differently than we have in the past with our new tools," says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch. "The questions [we ask] have become a little bit more sophisticated and we’ve become more sophisticated in how we ask the question," she adds - but we're still far from being able to explain how the regions of the brain interact to produce thought, dreams, and self-awareness. “In terms of understanding, the awareness that comes from binding remote activities of the brain together, still remains what philosophers call, ‘The hard problem.'"

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15993 - Posted: 11.08.2011

By Jonah Lehrer Email Author Inequality is inevitable; life is a bell curve. Such are the brute facts of biology, which can only evolve because some living things are better at reproducing than others. But not all inequality is created equal. In recent years, it’s become clear that many kinds of wealth disparity are perfectly acceptable — capitalism could not exist otherwise — while alternate forms make us unhappy and angry. The bad news is that American society seems to be developing the wrong kind of inequality. There is, for instance, this recent study published in Psychological Science, which found that, since the 1970s, the kind of inequality experienced by most Americans has undermined perceptions of fairness and trust, which in turn reduced self-reports of life satisfaction: Using the General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2008, we found that Americans were on average happier in the years with less income inequality than in the years with more income inequality. We further demonstrated that the inverse relation between income inequality and happiness was explained by perceived fairness and general trust. That is, Americans trusted others less and perceived others to be less fair in the years with more income inequality than in the years with less income inequality. Americans are happier when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly. It’s now possible to glimpse the neural mechanisms underlying this inequality aversion, which appears to be a deeply rooted social instinct. Last year a team of scientists at Caltech published a fascinating paper in Nature. The study began with 40 subjects blindly picking ping-pong balls from a hat. Half of the balls were labeled “rich,” while the other half were labeled “poor.” The rich subjects were immediately given $50, while the poor got nothing. Life isn’t fair. Wired.com © 2010 Condé Nast Digital.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15992 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Laura Sanders The contents of a person’s dream have been revealed by brain scan for the first time, scientists report in the Nov. 8 Current Biology. By monitoring the brain of a man who has unusual control over his dreaming, the accomplishment brings researchers closer to understanding how the brain spins its nightly yarns. “It’s really exciting that people have done this,” says sleep researcher Edward Pace-Schott at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And it also brings back lucid dreaming as a very powerful scientific tool.” Lucid dreaming is the rare ability to direct behaviors while in a deep sleep. By all objective measures, the person is dead to the world: Most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes are doing the quick jitters that characterize REM, the main dreaming phase of sleep. But at the same time, the lucid dreamer knows that he is dreaming and can control the scenes, says study coauthor Michael Czisch of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. “The world is open to do everything.” Czisch and his team set out to catch a lucid dreamer’s brain activity with an fMRI machine. Instead of creating complex fantasias of flying over the Alps, scaling buildings or slaying dragons, six experienced lucid dreamers were asked to squeeze their left hands and then their right hands repeatedly in a dream. “It’s a rather easy thing to do,” Czisch says. “If it’s a random dream, things would be much more complicated.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15991 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Bruce Bower Talk is cheap, but scientific value lurks in all that gab. Words cascading out of countless flapping gums contain secrets about the evolution of language that a new breed of researchers plan to expose with statistical tools borrowed from genetics. For more than a century, traditional linguists have spent much of their time doing fieldwork — listening to native speakers to pick up on words with similar sounds, such as mother in English and madre in Spanish, and comparing how various tongues arrange subjects, verbs, objects and other grammatical elements into sentences. Such information has allowed investigators to group related languages into families and reconstruct ancestral forms of talk. But linguists generally agree that their methods can revive languages from no more than 10,000 years ago. Borrowing of words and grammar by speakers of neighboring languages, the researchers say, erases evolutionary signals from before that time. Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data. These data analyzers assume that words and other language units change systematically as they are passed from one generation to the next, much the way genes do. Charles Darwin similarly argued in 1871 that languages, like biological species, have evolved into a series of related forms. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 15990 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg One whiff of a plant known as the headache tree can spur intense, excruciating pain — and now scientists know why. An ingredient in the tree sets off a chain of events that eventually amps up blood flow to the brain’s outer membrane. Other headache triggers, such as chlorine, cigarette smoke and formaldehyde, interact with some of the same cellular machinery, suggesting they all work via the same pain-inducing mechanism. In the new study, an international group of researchers extracted the plant compound umbellulone from dried bay laurel leaves and then exposed various mouse and rat cells to the compound. Umbellulone tickles the same cellular detector that responds to painfully cold stimuli and the sinus-clearing scent of wasabi and mustard oil, the researchers report online October 27 in Brain. Stimulating this chemical detector ultimately triggers the release of a particular protein implicated in migraine headaches, the researchers found. This protein prompts blood vessels to swell, and scientists think this swelling puts pressure on the skull and nerves, causing pain. The new research is solid, says neuroscientist Peter Goadsby, director of the headache center at the University of California, San Francisco. Other irritants linked to headaches interact with the same chemical detector, and it may be a good target for therapy, Goadsby says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15989 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Caitlin Stier, Focus on the dot in the centre of this video as a pattern flashes around it. After about 30 seconds, a word appears on the screen. But take a look at the image again: chances are, you didn't see some of the letters. The illusion, created by Isamu Motoyoshi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and his team, occurs due to a phenomenon called adaptation-induced blindness where prolonged exposure to a high-contrast dynamic pattern affects the brightness of an image viewed afterwards. In this new version of the illusion, the team was able to make the after-image completely invisible by gradually fading in the pattern. The image that appears in your peripheral vision is also of lower contrast. If the pattern was shown quickly at full contrast, your eyes would be able to detect it. In this animation, solid letters are used, but the illusion also works with patterns. A pulsing gradient, for example, can induce blindness when a static version is presented afterwards, as long as the pattern and colours are introduced gradually. You can experiment with other variations of adaptation-induced blindness by exploring Motoyoshi's online demonstrations. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15988 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Duet-singing birds in South America's Andes mountains are helping scientists understand how the brain co-ordinates itself to co-operate with other individuals. The plain-tailed wren, a small brown and grey bird that lives in bamboo thickets in cloud forests mainly in Ecuador, has impressed scientists ever since they realized that the bird's rapid-fire tweeting song is actually a duet, where the male and female alternate notes. "It was absolutely amazing to us the first time we heard it," said Eric Fortune, a behavioural neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who wanted to uncover how the birds managed the feat. Fortune and his colleagues flew to Ecuador and trekked more than two hours to the Antisana Volcano to find the plain-tailed wrens and record their songs. "They are extremely loud singers," he told CBC's Quirks & Quarks in an interview set to air Saturday. "If you're near them, it's almost an unpleasant experience." Eric Fortune sits in front of a system designed to record signals from the brains of plain-tailed wrens at the Yanayacu Biological Research Station and Center for Creative Studies in Ecuador as it was being built. Eric Fortune sits in front of a system designed to record signals from the brains of plain-tailed wrens at the Yanayacu Biological Research Station and Center for Creative Studies in Ecuador as it was being built. Courtesy of Eric Fortune and Melissa Coleman Fortune played a recording of the duet, which initially sounds like a single bird twittering. Then he played the songs of the female alone, a sparser series of notes that leaves gaps for her male partner to insert his part. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15987 - Posted: 11.05.2011

by Helen Fields Hopping around in the Peruvian jungle, near the border with Brazil, is a menagerie of tiny poison dart frogs. Their wealth of colors and patterns—some have golden heads atop white-swirled bodies, others wear full-torso tattoos of black and neon-yellow stripes—act as the world's worst advertisement to predators: Don't eat me, I'm toxic. But why have so many designs evolved when a single one might do? Evolutionary biologist Mathieu Chouteau of the University of Montreal in Canada ventured into the rainforest to find out. He was on the trail of Ranitomeya imitator, a single species of poison dart frog that comes in about 10 different patterns. That variability should be confusing for predators, he says, because the warnings are supposed to be a message to them, and it would make more sense to give them only one design to keep track of. To figure out what was going on, Chouteau enlisted his girlfriend's help to make 3600 models of frogs, each 18 millimeters long. "It was, like, at least a month of working full-time," he says. They pressed black clay into frog-shaped molds and painted each one in one of two patterns: yellow striped or reticulated, like a giraffe, with green lines. They also made brown frogs as a nontoxic-looking control. Then Chouteau packed the frogs in his carryon baggage and flew to Peru. The models represent the frogs that live in two different sites: one in the Amazonian lowland and one in a valley at about 500 meters above sea level. The two sites are separated by a high ridge. In one very long day at each site, Chouteau set out 900 of the frogs on leaves along narrow trails used by locals to hunt in the forest. For the next 3 days, he went back and checked them to see whether the soft clay recorded evidence of attacks by birds. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 15986 - Posted: 11.05.2011

By Gary Stix A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook. This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers: "Mom, I'm not just on Facebook; I'm doing my temporal lobe calisthenics." There was a problem, though. The study, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was unable to resolve the question of whether "friending" plumps up the brain areas or whether people with a type of robustness in brain physiology are just natural social butterflies. "Our own previous study on Facebook could only show correlation between social network size and the brain, but we could not determine the direction of causation between social brain regions and social network size," notes Ryota Kanai of University College London, one of the researchers on the study. To resolve that question would have required locking varying size groups of college students in separate rooms for a year or more to see whether larger groups altered brain structure in some way. Such a proposal would never come within a 100-mile radius of the institutional review boards that examine ethical issues related to research studies. But with the help of a few monkeys in England, teenagers everywhere may now have more ammunition to use against parents. A study published in the November 4 issue of Science studied 23 macaques assigned to live either alone, with a friend or in a groups of from three to seven fellow primates. The upshot: the monkeys in the larger groups had more gray matter in brain areas linked to processing social information (the middle superior temporal sulcus, amygdala and rostral prefrontal cortex, two of which overlap with those reported on in the Proceedings B study). © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 15985 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Sharon Begley Like many colleges, Washington University in St. Louis offers children of its faculty free tuition. So Leonard Green, a professor of psychology there, did all he could to persuade his daughter to choose the school. He extolled its academic offerings, praised its social atmosphere, talked up its extracurricular activities—and promised that if Hannah chose Washington he would give her $20,000 each undergraduate year, plus $20,000 at graduation, for a nest egg totaling $100,000. She went to New York University. To many, this might seem like a simple case of shortsightedness, a decision based on today’s wants (an exciting city, independence) versus tomorrow’s needs (money, shelter). Indeed, the choice to spend rather than save reflects a very human—and, some would say, American—quirk: a preference for immediate gratification over future gains. In other words, we get far more joy from buying a new pair of shoes today, or a Caribbean vacation, or an iPhone 4S, than from imagining a comfortable life tomorrow. Throw in an instant-access culture—in which we can get answers on the Internet within seconds, have a coffeepot delivered to our door overnight, and watch movies on demand—and we’re not exactly training the next generation to delay gratification. “Pleasure now is worth more to us than pleasure later,” says economist William Dickens of Northeastern University. “We much prefer current consumption to future consumption. It may even be wired into us.” © 2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

Keyword: Attention; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15984 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Regardless of high or low overall scores on an IQ test, children with dyslexia show similar patterns of brain activity, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results call into question the discrepancy model — the practice of classifying a child as dyslexic on the basis of a lag between reading ability and overall IQ scores. In many school systems, the discrepancy model is the criterion for determining whether a child will be provided with specialized reading instruction. With the discrepancy model, children with dyslexia and lower-than-average IQ scores may not be classified as learning disabled and so may not be eligible for special educational services to help them learn to read. "The study results indicate that the discrepancy model is not a valid basis for allocating special educational services in reading," said Brett Miller, Ph.D. The study findings were published online in Psychological Science. The study was conducted by Fumiko Hoeft, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University. Originally, the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act required the use of the discrepancy model to identify those students who needed assistance for a learning disability. In the 1990s, studies showed that children who had difficulty learning to read had difficulty with phonological awareness — matching printed letters of the alphabet to the speech sounds that those letters represented. Based on these findings, the reauthorization of the Act dropped the requirement that school systems use the discrepancy model. Many school systems, however, retained the discrepancy model as a means to classify students needing special educational services in reading.

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 15983 - Posted: 11.05.2011

Sarah C P Williams Most laboratory mice, when meeting new cagemates, will sniff the strangers thoroughly. But the mice in Matthew Anderson's lab instead sit alone, licking their paws repetitively. They ignore other mice, avoid new toys and rarely make noise. Taken together, the abnormalities closely resemble the behavioral symptoms seen in people with autism, a disorder that has been proven difficult to accurately recapitulate in animal models—until recently. “When I first started working on this, I really wondered whether we'd be able to study autism in a mouse,” says Anderson, a neuroscientist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “But these mice act just like you would expect with autism. I was pleasantly surprised.” Mouse models for autism first started to emerge around ten years ago. And as researchers have discovered more genes linked to the disease, they have continued to generate more mouse models that are collectively providing the field with a window into the brain structure, neuron function and cellular pathways associated with autism, as well as a platform for testing new drugs. But as more models emerge, it has become increasingly clear that the field needs standardized behavioral assays to compare the effects of the different genetic mutations more clearly. “All these mice have been tested in different labs using different paradigms,” says Daniel Geschwind, a neurogeneticist at the University of California–Los Angeles. “People bandy about repetitive behavior, for example, but what some folks call repetitive behavior is different than what others call repetitive behavior.” © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15982 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Hannah Waters This past spring, Christian Schaaf sat back and watched seven-year-old Lily play in his office at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She looked just like any other girl her age, he recalls, but she didn't seek interaction or even eye contact in the way a child normally would. Instead, she communed with a corner of the room, excitably hopping and flapping her arms as if that spot held a treat too great to bear. Without peering into the file in front of him, Schaaf knew what afflicted Lily. “I've seen enough children that when I see someone with autism, I have a high suspicion for it,” he says. Lily (not her real name) and her mother didn't come to Schaaf's office that day for a diagnosis; a psychiatrist had already detected autism after her fourth birthday. They visited Schaaf, a clinical geneticist, to search her genome using a chromosomal microarray. The technology can find duplications or deletions of small segments of DNA, known as copy-number variants (CNVs), to pinpoint the genetic aberration that might have caused the disorder. Lily's parents hoped that a genetic diagnosis would help them better understand and treat her specific form of autism—and, ultimately, help her get the services she needs to have the best chance at adult independence. Such genetic tests for autism have only become available in the last few years. But, owing to high demand, autism testing has expanded from research centers to private companies. In the US, six companies now offer laboratory-developed tests to doctors that specifically target the developmental disorder, searching the genome for either irregular CNVs or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that could explain the symptoms. And these tests aren't cheap: a microarray costs, on average, $1,500, and that's without the bells and whistles such as doctor visits and additional gene sequencing. Although the tests themselves aren't therapeutic, they represent the leading edge of a deeper genetic understanding of autism that could lead to targeted therapies—a market that UK-based research publisher Global Data expects to top $5 billion in the US in 2018, according to an October report. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15981 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Meredith Wadman The e-mail that ended one career for Alison Singer, but started another, arrived as she was cooking dinner for her daughters one evening in January 2009. Singer was preoccupied. At a committee meeting she was due to attend in Washington DC the next day, she and others were set to vote on a plan that would direct much of the United States' spending on autism research for the next year. Singer, who had her laptop perched on the kitchen counter, immediately noticed the e-mail from another committee member — a mother who was convinced that vaccines had caused her son's autism. The message proposed last-minute language for inclusion in the plan, endorsing more research into whether vaccines can trigger the disorder of communication and movement. Singer knew immediately that this would cause her serious difficulties. Having read the literature and talked to numerous scientists, she was convinced that no studies supported a link between autism and vaccines. But she was also the top communications executive at Autism Speaks in New York, autism's most prominent research and advocacy group. The organization supports vaccine-related research, and Singer knew that her bosses would expect her to vote for more studies of vaccines as a possible cause of the condition. nature.com/autism At 11:10 p.m., Singer hit 'send' on an e-mail of her own, to Bob and Suzanne Wright, the co-founders of Autism Speaks. "I've concluded that as a matter of personal conscience, I cannot vote in favor of dedicating more funds to vaccine research that has already been undertaken and which I and many others find conclusive," her message read. "I feel compelled to offer my resignation." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15980 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Lizzie Buchen In the opening scene of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg portrays a cold Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend, who is exasperated by the future Facebook founder's socially oblivious and obsessive personality. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek — brilliant with technology, pathologically bereft of social graces. Or, in the parlance of the Valley: 'on the spectrum'. Few scientists think that the leaders of the tech world actually have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can range from the profound social, language and behavioural problems that are characteristic of autistic disorder, to the milder Asperger's syndrome. But according to an idea that is creeping into the popular psyche, they and many others in professions such as science and engineering may display some of the characteristics of autism, and have an increased risk of having children with the full-blown disorder. nature.com/autism The roots of this idea can largely be traced to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, UK. According to a theory he has been building over the past 15 years, the parents of autistic children, and the children themselves, have an aptitude for understanding and analysing predictable, rule-based systems — think machines, mathematics or computer programs. And the genes that endow parents with minds suited to technical tasks, he hypothesizes, could lead to autism when passed on to their children, especially when combined with a dose of similar genes from a like-minded mate1. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15979 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Karen Weintraub When Leo Kanner first described autism in 1943, he based his observations on 11 children with severe communication problems, repetitive behaviours such as rocking and an acute lack of social interaction. The physician and psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, predicted that there were probably many more cases than he or anyone else had noticed1. "These characteristics form a unique 'syndrome', not heretofore reported," he wrote, "which seems to be rare enough, yet is probably more frequent than is indicated by the paucity of observed cases." Kanner's prophecy has been more than fulfilled. An early study2, in 1966, examined eight- to ten-year-old schoolchildren in Middlesex, UK, and estimated a prevalence of 4.5 cases per 10,000 children. By 1992, 19 in every 10,000 six-year-old Americans were being diagnosed as autistic3. Numbers skyrocketed in the first decade of the twenty-first century, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. Surveying what is now known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the CDC found that by 2006, more than 90 in 10,000 eight-year-olds in the United States had autism4. Put another way, autism was now affecting 1 in every 110 children — a figure that strengthened public fears that an 'epidemic' was afoot (see 'Diagnosis: rising'). © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15978 - Posted: 11.03.2011

Until recently, there was very little awareness of autism in the Middle East, and very few, if any, data about the prevalence of the condition. This is now beginning to change. Bolstered by international collaborations, the past decade has seen a number of autism research centers and non-profit organizations established across the Middle East. These institutions conduct research and provide educational services and training for children with autism and their relatives. Recent research has also shown that large Middle Eastern families can provide autism researchers with new opportunities to understand the genetic causes of the condition. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised primarily by impaired social interactions and communication and by repetitive, stereotyped behaviours. In parts of the Middle East, autism, along with other psychiatric conditions, were traditionally thought to be the work of black magic or the "evil eye," in the past, and children with autism were kept out of mainstream society, with little or no access to education. "There is not enough awareness about autism in Egypt or other countries in the region," says Ranwa Yehia, whose four-year-old son Nadeem has the condition. "Like everything else, people fear what they do not understand and inadvertently discriminate against it because they don't know otherwise." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15977 - Posted: 11.03.2011

By Rachael Rettner People with autism have advantages, in some ways, over people without the condition, and scientists need to stop viewing the traits of autism as flaws that need to be corrected, one autism researcher argues. By seeing autism's differences as defects, researchers may fail to fully understand the condition, said Dr. Laurent Mottron, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal. "Recent data and my own personal experience suggest it's time to start thinking of autism as an advantage in some spheres, not a cross to bear," Mottron wrote in a commentary published Wednesday in the journal Nature. For instance, when researchers see activation in regions of autistic people's brains that differ from others' brains, they report these differences as deficits, "rather than evidence simply of their alternative, yet sometimes successful, brain organization," Mottron said. By emphasizing the strengths of people with autism, deciphering how people with autism learn and avoiding language that frames autism as a defect, researchers can shape the discussion of autism in society, Mottron said. Mottron said he does not want to minimize the challenges of autism. "One out of 10 autistics cannot speak, nine out of 10 have no regular job and four out of five autistic adults are still dependent on their parents," Mottron said. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 15976 - Posted: 11.03.2011