A University of Northern B.C. professor who is studying the impact of the clinician-patient relationship on how health professionals rate pain suggests it decreases if the clinician doesn't like the patient. Pain sufferers often take issue with their treatment, which is why the research is so important, said psychology professor and pain expert Ken Prkachin. "A specific complaint being 'Nobody believes me, no one is taking me seriously,"' Prkachin described in an interview. "You really get that sense when you talk to patients, maybe people are being downgraded because they're also disliked." It means people with invisible pain — such as bad backs, as opposed to broken legs — may not get adequate treatment for the problem if the doctor disregards their feelings, he said. "A good case can be made … that is going to demoralize patients and contribute to very testy patient-professional relationships," Prkachin said. Study participants consistently rated the pain of patients associated with the negative traits, such as egotism and hostility, lower than the likeable patients. "What we're trying to do is understand what's going on there and how to change that." © CBC 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15907 - Posted: 10.13.2011

By Piercarlo Valdesolo Recent reports of a mountain lion or cougar stalking the campus of the University of Iowa prompted campus jokesters to tweet their surprise that Michelle Bachman​ was in town. A cougar, colloquially, is an attractive older woman who seeks out trysts with younger men, and to some, it seems that Bachmann fits the bill. This emphasis on appearance is nothing new for high-profile women who are anything but homely, and feminist scholars are quick to point out its potential detrimental effects on perceptions of female competence. Of course, we don’t need to consider reactions to political candidates to understand this idea. There is a well-known tension between seeing someone as, and appreciating them for, a body as opposed to a mind. At least, that’s what parents tell their daughters when their school clothes veer too far towards the revealing. Science has backed parents up on this. A recent study found that showing men pictures of sexualized women evokes less activity in areas of the brain responsible for mental state attribution—that is, the area of the brain that becomes active when we think we are looking at an entity capable of thought and planned action. Other studies have found similar results. When men see body shots of women as compared with face shots, they judge women to be less intelligent, likeable, ambitious and competent. A new study by Kurt Gray and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, however, suggests that this kind of objectification might not cause perceivers to see women as mindless bodies but instead cause a transformation in the kind of minds that they perceive. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 15906 - Posted: 10.13.2011

By Rachael Rettner How fast a baby's brain grows, rather than how large it is, predicts the child's mental abilities later in life, a new study of preterm infants suggests. The faster the brain's cerebral cortex grew during the first months of life, the higher the children scored at age 6 on intelligence tests designed to measure their abilities to think, speak, plan and pay attention, the researchers found. The cerebral cortex is an outer layer of the brain that is critical for language, memory, attention and thought. The study found no relationship between the size of a baby's brain and the child's later test scores. While it's not clear whether the results would also apply to babies born full-term, researchers said the findings are helping them understand what might go wrong in the brains of preterm babies that causes many of those infants to experience cognitive problems later in life. "It points us to the fact that the period before normal birth is a critical time for brain growth," said study researcher David Edwards, a professor of neonatal medicine at Imperial College in London. Anything that disrupts this growth, including preterm birth or certain illnesses, may reduces cognitive abilities, Edwards said. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 15905 - Posted: 10.13.2011

by Virginia Morell It's a scene that occurs daily among nesting colonies of Nazca boobies: A young adult bird struts over to a neighbor's chick and begins biting and pecking it, sometimes causing injuries that lead to the nestling's death. But if the chick survives, it's likely to become just like its tormentor, attacking other nestlings when it reaches maturity and perpetuating this "cycle of violence," researchers report. It's one of the first times that the cycle, which is normally used to explain child abuse in humans, has been discovered in a population of wild animals. The study appears in the October issue of The Auk. It's well known that children who suffer attacks by adults often grow up to abuse their own kids. But it's been difficult to study this cycle outside of humans or captive species, such as rhesus monkeys, that may exhibit some similar behaviors—because it is apparently rare, or at least seldom witnessed. On Española Island in the Galápagos, however, adult Nazca boobies attack chicks at an alarming rate, and the researchers say the birds' behavior offers a somewhat parallel model to that of humans. The birds are indifferent to human observers, so it's easy to spot and record the entire sequence of events, the researchers say. The sea birds' chick abuse is "one of the first things you notice; it's that obvious and disturbing," says David Anderson, an evolutionary ecologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and one of the study's co-authors, who has been observing the boobies since 1984. The behavior is also surprising. "You don't expect to see animals wasting time, bothering with a neighbor's chick, when it could be doing something that benefits its fitness, like finding a mate." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 15904 - Posted: 10.13.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Scientific discoveries can be serendipitous, and so it was when Jay L. Alberts, then a Parkinson’s disease researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, mounted a tandem bike with Cathy Frazier, a Parkinson’s patient. The two were riding the 2003 RAGBRAI bicycle tour across Iowa, hoping to raise awareness of the neurodegenerative disease and “show people with Parkinson’s that you don’t have to sit back and let the disease take over your life,” Dr. Alberts says. But something unexpected happened after the first day’s riding. One of Ms. Frazier’s symptoms was myographia, a condition in which her handwriting, legible at first, would quickly become smaller, more spidery and unreadable as she continued to write. After a day of pedaling, though, she signed a birthday card with no difficulty, her signature “beautifully written,” Dr. Alberts says. She also told him that she felt as if she didn’t have Parkinson’s. Impressed, Dr. Alberts, who now holds an endowed research chair at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, embarked on a series of experiments in which he had people with Parkinson’s disease ride tandem bicycles. The preliminary results are raising fascinating questions not only about whether exercise can help to combat the disease but also — and of broader import — whether intense, essentially forced workouts affect brains differently than gentler activity, even in those of us who are healthy. Scientists have known for some time that, in lab animals, forced and voluntary exercise can lead to different outcomes. Generally, mice and rats enjoy running, so if you put a running wheel in a rodent’s cage, it will hop aboard and run. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 15903 - Posted: 10.13.2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15902 - Posted: 10.11.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR The stress of living in a neonatal intensive care unit results in decreased brain size and abnormal neurological findings for very preterm babies, a small study suggests, and the more the stress, the greater the effect. Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis studied 44 infants born before 30 weeks of gestation. The researchers recorded the number of stressors the babies underwent, using a list of 36 procedures of varying invasiveness, from diaper changes to the insertion of intravenous lines. When the babies reached term-equivalent age, 36 to 44 weeks, they underwent M.R.I.’s and behavioral tests. The study was published online last week in The Annals of Neurology. After controlling for immaturity at birth and severity of illness, a higher score on the stress scale was associated with reduced brain size and poorer results on the examinations. There was no relation between number of stressors and brain injury. “We have to move away from a focus on just pain medications and acute medical interventions toward a more developmental approach,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Terrie Inder, a professor of pediatrics. These babies, she added, “need the opportunity to rest, recover, be nurtured and be able to grow.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15901 - Posted: 10.11.2011

By RITCHIE S. KING A group of Japanese neuroscientists is trying to peer into the mind — literally. They have devised a way to turn the brain’s opaque gray matter into a glassy, see-through substance. The group, based at the government-financed Riken Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan, has created an inexpensive chemical cocktail that transforms dead biological tissue from a colored mass into what looks like translucent jelly. Soaking brain tissue in the solution makes it easier for neuroscientists to see what’s inside, a step they hope will uncover the physical basis of personality traits, memories and even consciousness. “I’m very excited about the potential,” said Dr. Atsushi Miyawaki, a researcher on the team, which published its discovery in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The chemical solution — patented under the name Scale, a phonetic approximation of the Japanese word for “transparent” — could help neuroscientists map the brain’s underlying architecture, though that goal is still a distant one. At the moment, researchers are working to build such a map, called a “connectome,” of mouse brains, which are far less complex than human ones. Ultimately, this mapping could be conducted on brains of different ages, Dr. Miyawaki said, providing a glimpse into how the organ develops and even how genetic differences might affect that development. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15900 - Posted: 10.11.2011

by Linda Geddes MONKSEATON High School in Tyneside, UK, has seen some amazing improvements in the past year. Absenteeism is down, punctuality is up and exam results have gone through the roof. Head teacher Paul Kelley cannot attribute these successes to better teaching or stricter discipline. Instead, he simply started opening the school at 10 am instead of 9 am. The change was designed to synchronise the school day with pupils' body clocks. Teenagers are notoriously owlish, preferring to stay up into the small hours and sleep in till lunchtime. This isn't entirely their own fault: natural delays in secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin causes their body clocks to be shifted several hours backwards (New Scientist, 2 September 2006, p 40). By aligning the school day with these biological rhythms, Monkseaton school avoids teaching teenagers when their brains are still half asleep. In the modern world our lives are largely dictated by time. But even in the absence of clocks, schedules and calendars, our bodies still march to the beat of internal timekeepers called circadian rhythms. Over each 24-hour period we experience cycles of physical and mental changes that are thought to prepare our brains and bodies for the tasks we're likely to encounter at certain times of the day. The most obvious is the sleep-wake cycle, but there are many others. Circadian rhythms affect everything from how we perform on physical and mental tasks to when drugs are more likely to be effective. "We're not the same organism at midday and midnight," says Russell Foster, who researches circadian rhythms at the University of Oxford. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15899 - Posted: 10.11.2011

by Linda Geddes The life-saving treatment of therapeutic hypothermia is calling into question the guidelines doctors use to determine brain death IT'S a nightmarish scenario: a 55-year-old man, pronounced dead after a cardiac arrest, is minutes away from organ donation when he begins to show signs of life. "On being moved to the operating room table, the anaesthetist noticed that he was coughing," says neurologist Adam Webb of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who initially pronounced the man brain dead. It transpired that the man had also regained corneal reflexes and was breathing - both signs of a functioning brainstem. Although the man later died, his case has reignited a debate about whether clearer guidelines are needed to determine brain death (Critical Care Medicine, DOI: 10.1097/CCM.0b013e3182186687). At issue is a treatment called therapeutic hypothermia, which Webb's patient had. It involves cooling the body to about 33 °C to minimise damage to tissues and brain cells caused by oxygen deprivation after a cardiac arrest. Since the publication of two landmark papers in 2002 in The New England Journal of Medicine, increasing numbers of hospitals are using therapeutic hypothermia. It saves lives, but the technique muddies the waters when it comes to determining brain death. It is also making it harder to predict who is likely to recover from a coma. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 15898 - Posted: 10.11.2011

By Linda Searing, THE QUESTION:Does Vitamin B12, known for its aid in making red blood cells and DNA, play a role in memory and cognition skills in older people? THIS STUDY: Analyzed data on 112 men and women 65 and older (average age, 79) who were given a battery of 17 tests of their memory and other cognitive skills; had blood drawn and were tested for five markers that reflect the presence of Vitamin B12; and were given an MRI scan to assess their brain volume, or size. Those whose blood indicated a Vitamin B12 deficiency, based on high levels of four of the five markers, also had lower scores on the memory and cognitive tests and smaller brain volumes. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Older people, who sometimes become deficient in Vitamin B12 because their stomachs can no longer absorb the nutrient as it occurs naturally in foods. To counter this, health experts suggest that they eat fortified foods (such as cereals) or take a dietary supplement because the stomach generally can still absorb the vitamin in those forms. Most people younger than 50 get plenty of B12 from their diets. It’s present in meat, fish, poultry, eggs and dairy products; beef liver and clams are considered the best sources of Vitamin B12. CAVEATS: The study involved a fairly small number of people. It did not test whether increasing Vitamin B12 levels would improve people’s memory and cognitive ability. FIND THIS STUDY: Sept. 27 issue of Neurology (www.neurology.org). © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15897 - Posted: 10.11.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News One reason optimists retain a positive outlook even in the face of evidence to the contrary has been discovered, say researchers. A study, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests the brain is very good at processing good news about the future. However, in some people, anything negative is practically ignored - with them retaining a positive world view. The authors said optimism did have important health benefits. Scientists at University College London said about 80% of people were optimists, even if they would not label themselves as such. They rated 14 people for their level of optimism and tested them in a brain scanner. Each was asked how likely 80 different "bad events" - including a divorce or having cancer - were to happen. They were then told how likely this was in reality. At the end of the session, the participants were asked to rate the probabilities again. There was a marked difference in the updated scores of optimists depending on whether the reality was good or bad news. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15896 - Posted: 10.10.2011

By Richard Ridderinkhof How much can the brain recover from years of excessive alcohol consumption? —Paul Howlen, London Evidence shows that heavy alcohol use modifies the structure and physiology of the brain, although the extent of recovery after years of abstinence is unclear. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed that chronic alcoholism can damage the cerebellum, which plays an important role in regulating motor control, attention and language. It can also cause the prefrontal cortex to shrink and degrade, potentially impairing decision-making skills and social behavior. Studies have also found damage in the white matter of the brain, which connects these regions. The question remains, however, whether such extensive damage can be reversed after abstaining from alcohol. Researchers have studied the effects of abstinence on the brains of alcohol-dependent individuals by comparing subjects recovering from years of alcohol abuse with those who do not drink or drink minimally. Scientists have also investigated changes in brain volume in initial versus sustained abstinence in one set of subjects. Several of these studies have shown that years of abstaining from booze can allow brain regions to return to their original volume and can repair neural connections across different regions. Much of this restoration occurs in the system most adversely affected by chronic alcoholism—the frontocerebellar circuitry, which regulates decision making, reasoning and problem solving. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15895 - Posted: 10.10.2011

By JANE ROSETT “WANT a piece of gum, Jane?” asked my friend Andrée. “What?” I asked her. “Gum!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. “It’s Trident.” It was delicious. That evening, I told my friend David about my day’s big discovery. “It’s called gum and you chew it and it’s fun and there’s this one kind that will let me blow bubbles!” “Yes, it’s called bubble gum, Jane,” he told me, patiently. Fifty-nine months ago, I was wearing my seat belt and my car was stopped when another vehicle hit me, causing my head to fracture the windshield. That damaged my right temporal lobe, one of my neurologists explained when he told me I had a traumatic brain injury. I lost my long-term memory, and have been a brain injury patient within Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals ever since. At 45, I was jolted into an entirely new existence. Memories that connected different parts of my life fragmented and vanished. It took 26 months before I was able to thread my way back unattended to the house I had lived in for 17 years. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15894 - Posted: 10.10.2011

By ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ and AMMON SHEA SHAKESPEARE may have written “O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes,” but he apparently never met many psychologists, a good number of whom have been attempting to do exactly this for some time. Psychology and its social-science cousin, behavioral economics, seem to have a lock on “happiness studies,” tackling vexing questions about our positive and negative moods and our feelings of satisfaction and well-being. Recently, we wondered what other approaches were being taken to this venerable subject. Here are a few recent findings from less expected sources — bee and sheep scientists, linguists and artificial intelligence experts. In describing nonhuman animal populations, scientists are disinclined to use the word “happiness” (or especially “unhappiness”) to describe their charges. But there have been a few papers testing a related disposition: an animal’s “pessimism” or “optimism.” Consider “Release from Restraint Generates a Positive Judgment Bias in Sheep” (Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2010). In this study, 20 young merino ewes were trained to distinguish between two buckets, one of which led to food and another to the appearance of a dog — a highly unpleasant sight for a young ewe. Half of the animals were then bound at their legs and isolated from the other animals for six hours, three days in a row. On release from their imprisonment, this experimental group was shown a new, “ambiguous” bucket, which did not clearly lead to either food or dog. The previously imprisoned animals, despite their elevated stress levels, were much more likely to approach the ambiguous bucket than were a control group of ewes. Against all odds, they were, in a word, optimistic that the bucket might lead to something good. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 15893 - Posted: 10.10.2011

Female katydids get macho and may duke it out over an eligible male if they expect him to provide a particularly sumptuous dinner on their subsequent "date," scientists have found. Typically, females of the cricket-like green insects, like most other females in the animal kingdom, are less willing than males to exert a substantial amount of energy in the hunt for a mate. Darryl Gwynne, an ecology and evolutionary biology researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga, was interested in exploring what factors caused the sex roles to reverse in some species. He and his collaborators, led by Jay McCartney at Massey University in New Zealand, predicted that it had to do with the size of an edible gift presented by the male katydids to females after mating. "It looks for all the world like a big blob of mozzarella cheese on a pizza," Gwynne said of the gift squeezed out by the male from a special gland in his abdomen. The size of the gift varies from four per cent of the male's body mass to a whopping 40 per cent. "It's enormous and takes her sometimes several hours to eat her way through it," he told CBC's Quirks & Quarks in an interview set to air Saturday. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15892 - Posted: 10.08.2011

Caitlin Stier, video intern These spinning silhouettes confound the brain with many possible interpretations. Developed by psychophysiologist Marcel de Heer, the women appear to twirl full circle at times either clockwise or counter-clockwise. At second view, they could be turning in 180 degree increments from side to side. A variant of the spinning dancer illusion, this quartet encourages many ways of seeing. What changes when you view the women in pairs or individually? Does changing your focus from the head to the feet or hands cause your perception to shift? De Heer suggests the addition of several figures allows the viewer to see many possible rotations without diverting his eyes. The ambiguity arises because this shape-shifting two-dimensional shadow is interpreted by the brain as a 3D image. Because the silhouettes lack depth information, the brain at first sees the figure turning one way then another. As psychologist Simone Gori of the University of Padua explains, the primary visual cortex analyses the 2D figure as if it is moving through small viewing windows. The higher visual cortex combines this information about the flat 2D motion with 3D structure information to create the sense of ambiguous 3D motion. The degree of control you have over the image may be an illusion itself. A shift in focus may reverse the motion in your mind as de Heer contends, but you may find yourself quickly losing control. Stuart Anstis, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, likens the brain to a judge compelled by two opposed but equally convincing witnesses. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15891 - Posted: 10.08.2011

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature The courtship trill of a male fruitfly is an exciting sound for a female; it literally heightens her senses as she prepares to mate. But a study has revealed that the sound also has an unexpected effect on the female's immune system. Researchers have discovered that, for a female fly, preparation for mating involves the "rather unromantic" anticipation of potential infection. The findings are reported in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B. Elina Immonen and Mike Ritchie from the University of St Andrews, UK, carried out the study. They wanted to understand what genes were "switched on" when a fly prepares to mate. The genetic snapshot of an amorous female helps build a picture of the basic biological building blocks that make a creature want to reproduce. And fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are the perfect creatures for such a study; the function of almost every one of their genes has been documented. "Basically, we wanted to know what [genetic] changes take place in the female when she's being stimulated by a sexy guy," said Prof Ritchie. To investigate this, the team played female fruit flies a recording of the "song" that males produce by vibrating their wings. They then produced a read-out of the flies' active genes. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 15890 - Posted: 10.08.2011

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR The medical literature is rife with explanations for yawning, but one has gained substantial ground in recent years: This mysterious habit may help regulate brain temperature. The brain operates best within a narrow range of temperatures, and like a car engine, it sometimes needs a way to cool down. To lower the brain’s thermostat, researchers say, the body takes in cooler air from its surroundings — prompting deep inhalation. Yawning is contagious. Simply watching someone do it is enough to induce the behavior. But when scientists had people watch yawning videos in a 2007 study, they found that applying cold packs to the subjects’ heads practically eliminated contagious yawning. Nasal breathing, which also promotes brain cooling, had a similar effect. In a study of 160 people published last month in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, yawning was found to vary by season. People were shown to be more likely to yawn in winter than summer, perhaps because an overheated brain gets little relief from taking in air that is warmer than body temperature. The researchers, who controlled for factors like humidity and the amount of sleep subjects got the night before, also found that the more time a person spent outside in warm temperatures, the less likely they were to yawn. The findings may explain why people yawn when tired: Sleep deprivation raises brain temperature. As for why yawning is contagious, it may have evolved as a way to signal to others in a group to stay alert and ready in case of outside attacks, scientists say. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15889 - Posted: 10.08.2011

by Gretchen Cuda Kroen It's something we all take for granted: our ability to look at an object, near or far, and bring it instantly into focus. The eyes of humans and many animals do this almost instantaneously and with stunning accuracy. Now researchers say they are one step closer to understanding how the brain accomplishes this feat. Wilson Geisler and Johannes Burge, psychologists at the Center for Perceptual Systems at the University of Texas, Austin, have developed a simple algorithm for quickly and accurately estimating the focus error from a single blurry image-something they say is key to understanding how biological visual systems avoid the repetitive guess-and-check method employed by digital cameras. The discovery may advance our understanding of how nearsightedness develops in humans or help engineers improve digital cameras, the researchers say. In order to see an object clearly, an accurate estimate of blur is important. Humans and animals instinctively extract key features from a blurry image, use that information to determine their distance from an object, then instantly focus the eye to the precise desired focal length, Geisler explains. "In some animals, that's the primary way they sense distance," he says. For example, the chameleon relies on this method to pinpoint the location of a flying insect and snap its tongue to that exact spot. Altering the amount of blur by placing a lens in front of its eye causes the chameleon to misjudge the distance in a predictable way. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15888 - Posted: 10.08.2011