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

Angela Mulholland, CTVNews.ca Mark Lewis spent 15 years hooked on just about any drug you can think of: alcohol, LSD, cocaine, heroin, opium, prescription painkillers. Today, he is a neuroscientist and professor of applied psychology at the University of Toronto, who had just written a new memoir, entitled "Memoirs of an Addicted Brain." But this is no drug addict tell-all. Instead, Lewis details honestly his life as an addict, while drawing on his knowledge of neuroscience and the brain's workings to try to explain it. Lewis says he wanted to explain why brains get addicted and says it seemed only natural to use his own experience to do so. "Your moment-to-moment experience: your thoughts and your feelings are all paralleled by things happening in your brain, of course. And it seemed possible to weave the two together and that's what I was going for," he told CTV's Canada AM Wednesday. Lewis believes the roots of his addiction trace back to his adolescence, when his parents sent him away for two years to a boarding school in Massachusetts. That's where he began drinking and experimenting with getting high off cough syrup. But it was when he went away to university in Berkeley, California, that he got completely sucked in. That's when he began dabbling in psychedelic drugs and heroin. He was able to finish his degree, but returned to Toronto with a BA in music and a serious drug problem. Even after he got accepted into graduate school to study psychology, he found he couldn't break his drug problem. © 2011 CTV

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15887 - Posted: 10.08.2011

Andrew J. Lawrence One of the reasons there’s considerable polarisation whenever the subject of addiction is raised is the stereotyped associations of addicts with illegality. In reality, this is the thin end of the wedge; by far the most harm and mortality is related to alcohol and tobacco use, both of which are legal. While one can question the motivations driving people to experiment with drugs/alcohol in the first instance, addiction, once developed, can be regarded as a chronic, relapsing disorder. Most people know somebody who has repeatedly tried, but failed, to stop smoking with periods of abstinence in-between relapses – that’s addiction in a nutshell. Despite this, only a relatively small number of people who ever use a drug actually become addicted to it. Why? This is a difficult question to answer, but pieces of the puzzle are gradually coming together. Some genes have been implicated in addiction; but, unlike other disorders (Huntington’s disease, for example), there’s no single causative gene that can be labelled as an addiction gene. It’s most unlikely there ever will be. Also, many addicts are what is known as “dual diagnosis” patients with co-morbid (co-existent) psychiatric problems that add a further layer of complexity. Nevertheless, an individual with one or more alterations in specific genes may be more vulnerable to developing addiction after experimenting with drug use. © 2010–2011, The Conversation Media Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15886 - Posted: 10.08.2011

By Linda Searing THE QUESTION Do lifelong musicians face the same hearing problems that other people do as they age? THIS STUDY involved 163 adults, including 74 characterized as lifelong musicians because they started music training by age 16, had at least six years of formal lessons on a musical instrument and were continuing to practice at the time the study began. The group included both amateurs and professionals, who played a variety of instruments. All participants took a series of hearing tests that checked such things as the ability to detect sounds that grew increasingly quiet, to detect short gaps in otherwise continuous sound, to hear sound variations in a noisy environment and to distinguish words in the presence of background noise. Little difference was found between the groups in hearing diminishing sounds. But in all other auditory tests, musicians processed sound better than non-musicians, with the gap widening with age. For instance, a 70-year-old musician understood speech in a noisy environment as well as a 50-year-old non-musician. Among the musicians, the more they practiced, the better they scored on the hearing tests. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Anyone who wants to stave off hearing loss. With age, hearing tends to dim overall, and many people have trouble hearing certain sounds and following conversations in a noisy place, such as a restaurant. This affects about a third of people by age 60, and nearly half by age 75. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15885 - Posted: 10.06.2011

By Nick Bascom Scientists on the trail of treatments for Huntington’s disease may have found a way to track their success. A new study reports that patients with Huntington’s disease have higher levels of expression of a gene called H2AFY in their blood compared with healthy people. What’s more, patients treated with a drug that slows the effects of the disease had reduced levels of H2AFY activity compared with people given a placebo. The results suggest that H2AFY could serve as a tool for monitoring the progression of the disease and an indicator of whether prospective treatments are working, researchers report online October 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Biomarker identification for Huntington’s disease is critically important for clinical trials,” says Leslie Thompson, director of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. Huntington’s disease is a hereditary movement disorder marked by involuntary bodily twitches and jerks. The damage the disorder does to nerve cells also causes severe depression and impairs a patient’s ability to reason clearly. “It’s a devastating disease,” and one for which there is no cure, says neurologist Clemens Scherzer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the new study. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 15884 - Posted: 10.06.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Broken biological clocks in blood vessels may contribute to hardened arteries, even if the main timer in the brain works fine. The finding, from transplant experiments with mice, suggests that throwing off the daily rhythms of the body’s organs can have serious health consequences. A wealth of evidence shows that skimping on sleep and working against the body’s natural daily, or circadian, rhythms can raise the risk of developing illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. Scientists assumed that the diseases resulted from malfunctions in a master clock in the brain, which synchronizes sleeping, waking and other body functions with the rising and setting of the sun. But recently, scientists have discovered that the liver and other organs have their own internal clocks that may work independently of the brain clock and are set by meal times or other cues (SN: 4/10/10, p. 22). It wasn’t clear until now whether disrupting these body clocks could also contribute to disease, says Satchidananda Panda, a circadian rhythm researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. The finding may help explain why shift workers, people with sleep disorders and others who disrupt their circadian rhythms by staying up late or eating meals at the wrong time tend to be more vulnerable to heart disease.“If you want to prevent people from getting heart attacks, you have to know whether to treat the clock in the brain or the clock in the heart,” Panda says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 15883 - Posted: 10.06.2011

By Rachael Rettner and MyHealthNewsDaily Feelings of hate may be different for those with depression, a new study suggests. The results show depressed people have abnormalities in the brain's so-called "hate circuit." Normally, brain activity is synchronous across this circuit's three regions. But in depressed patients, activity in these regions is out of sync, said study researcher Jianfeng Feng, a professor in computer studies at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. These differing activity levels, which the researchers referred to as an "uncoupling" of the circuit, may explain why depressed people experience self-loathing, they said. Depressed people may not be able to deal appropriately with feelings of hate, and as a consequence, develop self-hatred and withdraw from social situations, the researchers said. However, much work is needed to conclusively show that depressed patients do indeed have problems with their hate control that are tied to this brain circuit. Patients in the study were not doing anything in particular while they had their brains scanned, so it's impossible to know what their feelings were at the time. In addition, it's not clear whether the brain abnormalities are a cause or a consequence of depression, Feng told MyHealthNewsDaily. In the study, researchers scanned the brains of 39 depressed patients and 37 healthy people using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fRMI).The researchers used the scans to create maps of networks in the brain. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Emotions
Link ID: 15882 - Posted: 10.06.2011