By Nick Bascom Standing fully erect and balancing on only two feet gives humans a strange strut that sets them apart from all other mobile critters. Yet the basic motor commands that direct a human stride may also get other animals moving, a new study suggests. Although legged vertebrates come in many different shapes and sizes and exhibit a wide variety of walking styles, they may all employ a similar nerve system, located in the spine, to coordinate the muscle activity needed for locomotion, neurophysiologist Francesco Lacquaniti of the University of Rome Tor Vergata and colleagues report in the Nov. 18 Science. Networks of spinal nerve cells, called central pattern generators, contain all the necessary information to time the muscles for the step cycle, says neuroscientist Sten Grillner of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who was not involved in the study. The networks still need to be turned on by the brain, but once triggered, the spinal nerves handle locomotion all on their own. A message to start moving gets generated in the spinal cord and travels down the nerve pathway to specialized nerve cells that deliver the message directly to muscle fibers. The central pattern generators are so autonomous that, in some cases, cats can still walk after having their spinal cords severely damaged. It doesn’t work the same in humans, who typically suffer permanent paralysis after significant spinal shock. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16048 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By R. Douglas Fields Children breast-fed longer than six months scored a 3.8-point IQ margin over those who were bottle-fed, according to a seven-year study by researchers at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland. Medical epidemiologist Wieslaw Jedrychowski and colleagues followed 468 babies born to nonsmoking mothers. The children were tested five times at regular intervals from infancy through preschool age. The data showed that cognitive abilities of preschoolers who were breast-fed scored significantly higher than bottle-fed infants, and IQ score was directly proportional to how long the infants had been breast-fed: IQs were 2.1 points higher in children who were breast-fed for three months; 2.6 points higher when babies were breast-fed for four to six months; 3.8 points higher in children breast-fed longer than six months. The results were published in the May 2011 issue of the European Journal of Pediatrics. This research confirms observations reported 70 years ago by Carolyn Hoefer and Mattie Hardy in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as many subsequent studies. This body of research provides the scientific basis for the World Health Organization's recommendation that all infants should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life. But what is the missing ingredient that undermines the cognitive development of bottle-fed babies? Chemists searching for a specific compound in mother's milk have been overlooking the obvious difference between breast-feeding and bottle-feeding—something that could easily account for the difference in cognitive development, wrote Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and neonatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine, October 2011. (Raju was not involved in the Jedrychowski study.) © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 16047 - Posted: 11.17.2011

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazine It would not be the first psychiatric drug to run aground in a large study after sailing through early trials. But even though TC-5214 has failed to significantly relieve major depression in a phase III trial and investors are fleeing, some analysts and scientists argue that the setback need not spell the end for the drug, nor for other compounds that act on nicotinic receptors in nerve cells. On November 8, Targacept, a drug company based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, announced that TC-5214 had performed no better than placebo in one of four phase III trials. The results are a disappointment to clinicians eager for an innovative antidepressant. Because the drug exploits a previously untried mechanism, it might have helped the roughly one-third of people with depression who do not respond to current therapies. "We really need new options," says Noah Philip, a psychiatrist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "People were very eager to see what this drug would do." Results from the other trials are expected by early 2012, but some analysts are pessimistic; Targacept's stock fell by 60% after the announcement. "I was stunned by the negative outcome," says Alan Carr, an analyst for the Needham & Co investment bank in New York. "I don't have high expectations for the remaining three trials." TC-5214 is a form of mecamylamine, a blood-pressure drug introduced in the 1950s. It targets nicotinic �4�2 receptors (see `Mixed signals'), which normally receive chemical signals from the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Because excess acetylcholine has been linked to major depression, blocking these signals might relieve the condition. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 16046 - Posted: 11.17.2011

By Emily Sohn Among the devastating consequences of her brain injury from a gunshot wound 10 months ago, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords lost the ability to talk. But with help from music-based therapy, according to an ABC News segment that aired this week, Giffords has rediscovered her voice and, it seems, her spirit. The footage, which shows Giffords crying in frustration when she tries unsuccessfully to talk but looking joyful as she sings fluently, paints a dramatic picture of the power of music to help people overcome brain injuries. Giffords' story also highlights both the potential and the limitations of a fairly new field of medicine. Music brings so much pleasure to our everyday lives, and it would make sense if music also worked as a healing tool. But scientists are still awaiting solid data to prove what seems to work in case study after case study. "It used to be thought that music was a superfluous thing, and no one understood why it developed from an evolutionary standpoint," said Michael De Georgia, director of the Center for Music and Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stroke
Link ID: 16045 - Posted: 11.17.2011

By Science News Staff Cats look to the edge Cats may not seem like planners, but they do look ahead when walking. Three adult cats with magnetic devices strapped to their heads walked across slats, giving scientists the first data on where cats look when they walk. The cats looked a few rungs ahead at the edges of the slats, found Trevor Rivers, now at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. "They don't say 'I want to step right there.' They are looking at where not to be," Rivers said November 14. — Tina Hesman Saey Moms protected from stress New mothers might not believe it, but being a mom may help protect against some negative consequences of stress. Tracey Shors of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., and colleagues tested the effect of stress on female rats' ability to learn to blink when they hear a particular sound. Stress renders virgin female rats incapable of learning the task. But mothers, including virgin female foster mothers, are protected against learning deficits. And the protection lasts a lifetime, Shors said November 13. The researchers don't yet know what about motherhood is responsible for the protection. — Tina Hesman Saey Vitamin D is good for aging brain Vitamin D may keep mental gears greased during middle age. Middle-aged rats fed high, low or standard amounts of vitamin D performed similarly on memory tests in which the animals had to find a submerged platform in a water tank, Nada Porter of the University of Kentucky and colleagues found. But when the rats had to learn a new location, "the high vitamin D guys just made a beeline" for the new spot while rats in the other two groups swam aimlessly, Porter said during a presentation November 12. — Tina Hesman Saey © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16044 - Posted: 11.17.2011

by Carl Zimmer Neuroscientists these days regularly make spectacular discoveries about how the brain gets sick. They know much more today about brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other neurological disorders than they did just a few years ago. And from such discoveries come all sorts of encouraging possibilities for treating or even curing these diseases. If 
only we could break down some rogue protein or bind a drug to 
a troublesome receptor, it seems as if all would be well. There’s just one little hitch: Even if scientists invented the perfect cure, they 
probably couldn’t get it into the brain to do its work. Drugs can cross easily out of the bloodstream into most organs of the body. The brain is a glaring exception because it is protected by an intricate shield known as the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier serves a vital function: It keeps our brains free for the most part from infections or toxins that find their way into other parts of the body. Unfortunately, the brain’s barrier also gets in the way of most medicines that could help heal it. Neurologists sometimes open up the skull and inject drugs directly. That brute-force approach can work in an emergency, but it is hardly a practical solution for people who need to take drugs every day at home. There is reason for hope that the blood-brain barrier will not block medicine’s path forever, though. Some scientists are working on ways to penetrate it—either by sneaking drugs through the barrier or by temporarily opening channels through which the drugs can pass. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 16043 - Posted: 11.17.2011

When the Society for Neuroscience gets together for their annual meeting each year, a city of scientists suddenly forms for a week. This year’s meeting has drawn 31,000 people to the Washington DC Convention Center. The subjects of their presentations ranged from brain scans of memories to the molecular details of disorders such as Parkinson’s and autism. This morning, a scientist named Svante Paabo delivered a talk. Its subject might make you think that he had stumbled into the wrong conference altogether. He delivered a lecture about Neanderthals. Yet Paabo did not speak to an empty room. He stood before thousands of researchers in the main hall of the convention center. His face was projected onto a dozen giant screens, as if he were opening for the Rolling Stones. When Paabo was done, the audience released a surging crest of applause. One neuroscientist I know, who was sitting somewhere in that huge room, sent me a one-word email as Paabo finished: “Amazing.” You may well know about Paabo’s work. In August, Elizabeth Kolbert published a long profile in the New Yorker. But he’s been in the news for fifteen years. I’ve also followed his work since the mid-1990s, having written about pieces of Paabo’s work in newspapers, magazines, and books. But it was bracing to hear him bring together the scope of his research in an hour–including new experiments that Paabo’s colleagues are presenting at the meeting. He has changed the way scientists study human evolution. Along with fossils, they can now study genomes that belonged to people who died 40,000 years ago. They can do experiments to see how some of those individual genes helped to make us human. During his talk, Paabo used this new research to sketch out a sweeping vision of how our ancestors evolved uniquely human brains as they swept out across the world. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16042 - Posted: 11.17.2011

The thought of being trapped in a lifeless body, unable to communicate, is a terrifying prospect. It happened to Roy Hayim, a surveyor, who became dangerously ill after eating an airline meal. Mr Hayim contracted botulism, a rare bacterial infection. He was left paralysed and blind for several days, although he could hear everything that was happening - even a news report on the radio which said he was fighting for his life. After about 10 days Mr Hayim was able to move his thumb and for the next eight months he used this method to communicate with his wife Caroline and hospital staff. He spent nearly a year in hospital but made a full recovery. This all happened 20 years ago, but Roy remembers it vividly. Awareness "I felt trapped, afraid and terribly concerned. I didn't know whether I would survive or not," he said. I went to meet Mr Hayim to get his insight on what it is like to be unable to communicate. My visit was prompted by research in the Lancet which shows that electroencephalography - EEG - can be used to communicate with some patients who were diagnosed as vegetative. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Attention; Robotics
Link ID: 16041 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By Laura Sanders WASHINGTON — Magic tricks prey on people’s subpar powers of perception, but new work finds that the brain has tricks of its own up its sleeve: People notice more than they think. In the research, presented November 12 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Luis Martinez of CSIC- Miguel Hernandez University in Spain and colleagues amazingly “read minds” with the Princess Card Trick, invented by magician Henry Hardin in 1905. Volunteers mentally chose a playing card from a panel of six cards, which then disappeared. When a second group of cards appeared, the researchers had miraculously figured out which card a person had in mind and removed it. Few people caught the trick: All the cards in the second set were different, not just the card people had chosen. A few seconds after viewing the two panels of cards, participants were asked which of two new cards was present in the first panel. None of the volunteers could consciously recall which card was present. Despite these avowals of ignorance, when forced to choose, people got the right answer about 80 percent of the time. “People say they don’t know, but they do,” Martinez said. “The information is still there, and we can use it unconsciously if we are forced to.” To see whether this unconscious knowledge works for objects other than cards, Martinez and his colleagues performed a similar experiment with pictures of men’s faces. A similar kind of visual short-term memory helped people choose which face they had seen before, even when volunteers didn’t perceive that they knew the correct answer. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16040 - Posted: 11.15.2011

by Catherine de Lange How kind you are could be affected by a change in a single gene. What's more, others can tell if you have the gene even if you don't speak a single word. There are several variations of the gene that codes for the receptor for the hormone oxytocin. Aleksandr Kogan at the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues wanted to check whether these variations influence behaviour, since high levels of oxytocin are believed to make people more sociable. Kogan's team asked 116 volunteers to watch 23 silent videos that were 20 seconds long. Each showed a person's response to their partner telling them a story of personal suffering. The volunteers were asked to rate how kind and trustworthy the person in the video appeared to be. People with the so-called GG version of the oxytocin receptor gene were judged to be kinder than those with GA or AA versions. The difference? Those with GG variations used significantly more non-verbal empathetic gestures in their storytelling such as smiling and nodding. Kogan expects that this is what influenced the observers' judgements. Further research will be needed to identify the effect of the different genetic variations on oxytocin levels. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.111265810 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 16039 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By JAMES GORMAN NEW IBERIA, La. — In a dome-shaped outdoor cage, a dozen chimpanzees are hooting. The hair on their shoulders sticks straight up. “That’s piloerection,” a sign of emotional arousal, says Dr. Dana Hasselschwert, head of veterinary sciences at the New Iberia Research Center. She tells a visitor to keep his distance. The chimps tend to throw pebbles — or worse — when they get excited. Chimps’ similarity to humans makes them valuable for research, and at the same time inspires intense sympathy. To research scientists, they may look like the best chance to cure terrible diseases. But to many other people, they look like relatives behind bars. Biomedical research on chimps helped produce a vaccine for hepatitis B, and is aimed at one for hepatitis C, which infects 170 million people worldwide, but there has long been an outcry against the research as cruel and unnecessary. Now, because of a major push by advocacy organizations, a decision to stop such research in the United States could come within a year. As it is, the United States is one of only two countries that conduct invasive research on chimpanzees. The other is the central African nation of Gabon. “This is a very different moment than ever before,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States. “Now is the time to get these chimps out of invasive research and out of the labs.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 16038 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By RONI CARYN RABIN Jan Brehm lives in rainy Portland, Ore., and she has always dreaded this time of year, when the days get shorter, her mood plummets and all she wants to do is crawl into bed and eat cookie dough. She and her husband were considering moving to Arizona or Colorado — anywhere with more sunlight — until last year, when she purchased her first artificial light box. She keeps it on her desk, and every morning, before she starts her workday, she turns it on and basks in the bright artificial light for about 30 to 45 minutes while catching up on her reading. The boxes come in different sizes; Ms. Brehm’s is about 15 inches high and 12 inches wide, and she keeps it a foot or more from her face. “I still say to myself, ‘It’s a dark crummy day,’ when the clouds roll in,” Ms. Brehm, a 57-year-old actress and entrepreneur, said. “The difference is, I don’t feel like going back to bed.” For the millions of Americans who suffer from mild to severe winter blues — a condition called seasonal affective disorder, or S.A.D. — bright-light therapy is the treatment of choice, with response rates comparable with those of antidepressants. “Your natural clock is usually longer than 24 hours, and you need light in the morning to set it and keep it on track,” said Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and an expert on seasonal depression and light therapy. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 16037 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By EDDY NAHMIAS Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.” Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.” Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. [1] So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16036 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By Hannah Tepper These days, we seem to be living in a new golden age of choice. One moment we’re tweeting, the next we are changing our profile picture. We get a hankering for hummus and next thing we know, it’s off to Yelp the nearest falafel place. In every choice and action we make, online or off, we have the unique sense that we are in control. This is what it feels like to have free will. But many neuroscientists have maintained a long-standing opinion that what we experience as free will is no more than mechanistic patterns of neurons firing in the brain. Although we feel like free agents contemplating and choosing, they would argue that these sensations are merely an emotional remnant that brain activity leaves in its wake. If these neuroscientists are right, then free will isn’t worth much discussion. Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara, seriously disagrees. In his new book out this month, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain,“ Gazzaniga uses a lifetime of experience in neuroscientific research to argue that free will is alive and well. Instead of reducing free will to the sum of its neurological parts, he argues that it’s time for neuroscience to consider free will as a scientific fact in its own right. Through fascinating examples in chaos theory, physics, philosophy and, of course, neuroscience, Gazzaniga makes this interesting claim: Just as you cannot explain traffic patterns by studying car parts, neuroscience must abandon its tendency to reduce macro-level phenomena like free will to micro-level explanations. Along the way he provides fascinating and understandable information from brain evolution to studies involving infants and patients with severed brain hemispheres (split-brain patients). The final chapters of the book consider neuroscience as it implicates social responsibility, justice and how we treat criminal offense. © 2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 16035 - Posted: 11.15.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey WASHINGTON — For young people, snoozing means big gains in memory. But in older folks some of sleep’s memory-boosting abilities are erased, a new study finds. Sleep has been shown in a wide variety of studies to increase people’s ability to recall words and objects and to improve physical skills. But that boost may be available only to the young, Lauri Kurdziel and Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst reported November 13 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. Previously, the researchers had shown that a night of sleep improved young people’s ability to learn a series of button presses similar to playing a piano. Adults in the over-50 age group didn’t get a bump in performance from sleeping. But that difference may have been due to older folks’ slower reaction times. A new study, though, suggests that it’s sleep’s memory benefits that are reduced with age. Kurdziel and Spencer had a group of 18- to 30-year-olds and a group of 50- to 80-year-olds learn a sequence of colored doors that would lead them through 10 virtual rooms. The researchers then tested the participants’ memories 12 hours later, either in the evening of the same day or after a night of sleep. Young people who took the test after being awake all day made about 10 errors on average, but a night of sleep nearly halved the number of mistakes. In the over-50 group, a night of sleep didn’t help. The people made just as many errors after sleeping all night as they did if they took the test after being awake for 12 hours. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16034 - Posted: 11.14.2011

By Nathan Seppa ORLANDO, Fla. — Women who report having had forced sex at a young age have an elevated risk of heart disease as adults. Some of the higher cardiac risk is traceable to behavioral and lifestyle factors, but much of it goes unexplained, researchers reported October 13 at a meeting of the American Heart Association. “This tells us that the immediacy of the tragedy is being followed by risk that may have implications in later life,” says Clyde Yancy, a cardiologist at Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago who was not involved in the study. “That’s very disconcerting.” The researchers analyzed data from more than 67,000 women who were age 25 to 42 when they volunteered to participate in a large healthcare study in 1989. Questionnaire responses revealed that 11 percent answered yes when asked whether they had had “forced sexual activity” during childhood or adolescence, the years through age 17. After following the women in adulthood for 18 years and tabulating any heart problems they encountered in that time, the scientists were able to discern that women who had had at least one episode of forced sexual contact when young faced roughly a 56 percent greater risk in cardiovascular disease than did women with no history of childhood sex abuse. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 16033 - Posted: 11.14.2011

By Laura Sanders WASHINGTON — Like the fictional detective Carrie Wells on the TV show Unforgettable, some real-life people can remember every day of their lives in detail. Those superrememberers have more bulk in certain parts of their brains, possibly explaining the remarkable ability to recall minutiae from decades ago, researchers said November 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. One brain region involved in such incredible recall has been implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder, hinting that OCD and superior memory might have a common architecture in the brain. Scientists have long studied people with memory deficits, but there haven’t been many studies on people with exceptional memories. “Looking at memory from a deficit gave us a lot of insight into memory,” said study coauthor Aurora LePort of the University of California, Irvine. “Looking at memory from a superior perspective gives us a new tool. It may just broaden our knowledge and ability to know what’s going on.” In 2006, UC Irvine neuroscientist Larry Cahill and collaborators published a report on a woman who could remember detailed accounts of her life. Cahill and colleagues then began hearing from many people who claimed to have extraordinary memories. After sifting through and eliminating the impostors, the team was left with 11 people who scored off the charts for autobiographical memory. These people could effortlessly remember, for instance, what they were doing on November 2, 1989, and could also tell you that it was a Thursday. “They’re not going home and saying ‘OK, let me write down what I did today and memorize it,’ ” LePort said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16032 - Posted: 11.14.2011

By Laura Sanders WASHINGTON — Tricking people with severe arthritis into thinking their sore hand is healthy dampens their pain, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the preliminary results may offer a powerful and inexpensive way to fight persistent arthritis pain. “The results are really exciting,” said pain expert Candy McCabe of the University of Bath in England, who wasn’t involved in the study. “The whole thing is visual trickery, but the science behind it is strong.” The new technique, described November 12 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, is a type of mirror therapy, in which the illusion of a pain-free hand makes people feel better. So far, visual feedback from mirrors has been shown to reduce some kinds of chronic pain, notably the pain felt in “phantom limbs” of amputees. But it was unclear whether mirror therapy could reduce pain produced by arthritic, inflamed joints. In the new work, Laura Case, V.S. Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego recruited eight volunteers who had osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis. The volunteers saw a reflection of Case’s healthy hand in the same place where their sore hand should have been. To strengthen the sensation of the hand-swap, the researchers simultaneously touched Case’s hand and the volunteer's hand, creating a unified sensation of seeing and feeling the touch. The volunteer then mimicked a series of slow hand movements made by the researcher. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 16031 - Posted: 11.14.2011

By Neil Bowdler Health reporter, BBC News An international study has linked an industrial solvent to Parkinson's disease. Researchers found a six-fold increase in the risk of developing Parkinson's in individuals exposed in the workplace to trichloroethylene (TCE). Although many uses for TCE have been banned around the world, the chemical is still used as a degreasing agent. The research was based on analysis of 99 pairs of twins selected from US data records. Parkinson's can result in limb tremors, slowed movement and speech impairment, but the exact cause of the disease is still unknown, and there is no cure. Research to date suggests a mix of genetic and environmental factors may be responsible. A link has previously been made with pesticide use. 'Significant association' The researchers from institutes in the US, Canada, Germany and Argentina, wanted to examine the impact of solvent exposure - specifically six solvents including TCE. They looked at 99 sets of twins, one twin with Parkinson's, the other without. Because twins are similar genetically and often share certain lifestyle characteristics, twins were thought to provide a better control group, reducing the likelihood of spurious results. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 16030 - Posted: 11.14.2011

Ian Sample, science correspondent A professional cellist who lost nearly all of his memory after a virus destroyed parts of his brain has astonished doctors with his remarkable recall of music. The 71-year-old, known only as PM, had played with a major German orchestra before contracting the infection that devastated his brain's memory centres in 2005. The illness left the musician with such profound amnesia he could remember almost nothing of his past and was unable to plan for the future. The only people he recognised were his brother and a care worker. "He can hardly remember a thing. He has no memory of any personal or professional events," Carsten Finke, a neurologist at Charité university hospital in Berlin, told the Guardian. "He is living in the moment, more or less. He has lost his whole life." Doctors made their discovery when they tested PM's ability to recall musical information and found he could identify the scales, rhythms and intervals of pieces they played him. The man went on to score normally on a standard test for musical memory. But it was later tests that surprised doctors most, when the cellist showed he could learn new pieces of music, even though he failed to remember simple information, such as the layout of his flat, who his doctors were and what medicines he should take. Neighbours said the man still played the cello in his apartment, but he refused to play in front of doctors, perhaps because he felt he was no longer any good, Finke said. © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Hearing
Link ID: 16029 - Posted: 11.14.2011