Amber Dance Consciousness is not all or nothing: some people languish for months or years in a middling state. A person could have some sense of and interaction with the world, or could be completely unconscious of their surroundings. But today in Science, researchers report a test that can distinguish between states of consciousness using a simple electroencephalogram (EEG) and some mathematics1. The test suggests that the key difference between minimally conscious and totally unconscious non-coma states is communication between the frontal cortex — the planning, thinking part of the brain — and the temporal cortex, where sounds and words are processed. The researchers say that the technique could help doctors to make accurate diagnoses about consciousness, and better predict how a patient will recover. Having this extra information might help families to make difficult decisions about a loved one's care or end of life in cases such as that of Terri Schiavo, who was removed from life support in 2005 after several years in a vegetative state. A person in a vegetative state will open their eyes spontaneously and make reflexive movements, but has no cognitive function and likely does not feel pain. Recovery is possible, but the chances of improvement are greatly diminished after a year. Someone in a minimally conscious state, by contrast, has intentional, non-reflexive but inconsistent responses to stimuli. They might speak a few words or track their image in a mirror, and they feel pain. The category has only been an official diagnosis since 2002, so the likelihood of recovery is not established, but again it decreases after one year in the state. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15326 - Posted: 05.14.2011

By Daniel Strain Talk between the brain’s decision-making center, or frontal cortex, and other brain regions might distinguish aware individuals from those stripped of conscious thought. Identifying such signaling malfunctions could speed the diagnosis of vegetative states and give scientists insight into such devastating disorders, an international team of researchers reports May 12 in Science. Today, diagnosing a vegetative brain is an uncertain enterprise, says John Whyte, director of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Elkins Park, Pa. Patients classified as vegetative can’t act in any purposeful way under any observable circumstances. Patients deemed minimally conscious, however, show some capacity to understand and interact with the world — for instance, by moving a finger on command. Distinguishing between the two can take weeks of behavioral testing, and misdiagnoses are common. With better diagnostics in mind, Mélanie Boly of the University of Liège in Belgium and colleagues monitored the brain responses of 22 healthy volunteers, 13 patients previously diagnosed as minimally conscious and eight diagnosed as vegetative to fluctuating blips of sound. Minimally conscious and healthy subjects responded to a surprising change in the pitch of the sounds with bursts of brain activity about 170 milliseconds long. Responses from vegetative patients lasted less than 100 milliseconds. Using statistical tools, the researchers filtered through a number of possible causes of such shortened brain activity before determining the most likely culprit. The team concluded that damage to communication paths within the brain, not just to individual regions like the frontal cortex, seemed to typify the vegetative state. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15325 - Posted: 05.14.2011

By John Roach "Blueberry!" I tell my 15-month-old son as I hand him one, hoping that he makes the connection between the piece of fruit and its name as I daydream about the glorious day when he says, "Please, Dad, can I have another blueberry?" For now, he points at the bowl full of tasty morsels and babbles something incomprehensible. His pediatrician, family and friends all assure me that he's on the right track. Before I know it, he'll be rattling off the request for another blueberry and much, much more. This pointing and babbling is all a part of the language learning process, they say, even though the process itself remains largely a mystery. One prominent, though controversial, hypothesis is that some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. "There's some knowledge that the learner has that actually makes this process easier," Jennifer Culbertson, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester, explained to me today. This hypothesis was originally proposed 50 years ago by philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Culbertson recently confirmed it with an experiment featuring a virtual green blob for a teacher named Glermi who speaks a nonsensical language called Verblog. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15324 - Posted: 05.14.2011

By Daniel Bates The key to being intelligent could be a thick ‘insulation’ on the brain’s wires, scientists have discovered. A fatty layer covering the neural wires helps brain signals travel faster and makes the brain work more quickly. Just as a thick coating on an electrical wire stops current leaking out, a good layer of insulation helps the brain’s ‘circuits’ function more efficiently. A magnified portion of the brain created using diffusion imaging. The bright red areas show the thick fibre tract - the corpus callosum - which transfers information between the left and right sides of the brain A magnified portion of the brain created using diffusion imaging. The bright red areas show the thick fibre tract - the corpus callosum - which transfers information between the left and right sides of the brain The research is among the first to link ‘neural architecture’ to the health of individuals. It also suggests that this characteristic is something we are born with, indicating that intelligence is something we inherit. The researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles studied images of brain scans from 92 sets of identical twins to determine the amount of myelin - a fatty layer - around the brain’s neural wires. © Associated Newspapers Ltd

Keyword: Intelligence; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15323 - Posted: 05.14.2011

By CELIA WATSON SEUPEL “Why are we in this tunnel?” my mother asks sharply from the back seat. Jolted from my reverie, I turn down the audiobook, lean forward over the steering wheel and look out into the night. The sky is black, brushed with a few pale stars but no moon. Darkness presses on the car windows as we barrel down the highway. The only lights are headlights from oncoming cars, plus the dim glow of the dashboard illuminating my son’s knees. He’s asleep beside me, out cold. Overtired, I repress a wave of irritated giggles. “We’re not in a tunnel, Ma,” I say. I encouraged Mom to stay home while I took this exhausting, daylong round trip to pick up my son, Spencer, from college, but she insisted on coming. Mom loves riding in the car, and she’s always bragging to her friends about what a great driver I am. I hear her rustle as she turns in the back seat, looking out the windows. I know she doesn’t believe me. “Well, where are we?” she demands. “We’re in the car,” I say. I grab my emergency Hershey’s chocolate almond bar and rip off the wrapper with my teeth. “I can see we’re in the car, Celia,” she says scornfully. I picture my mother sitting bolt upright behind me, straightening her glasses on her nose, clutching her puffy winter coat more tightly. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15322 - Posted: 05.12.2011

Analysis by Nic Halverson "A mental breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation." Sound like what your brain feels like after an Angry Birds marathon or an 8-hour binge of searching for the end of the Internet? Maybe. But this is actually the definition of schizophrenia. Ubiquitous computing might send schizophrenic ripples through your frontal lobes whenever you log on, but researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are taking that a step further by actually using computers to simulate the mental disorder. One theory about the cause of schizophrenia suggests that an afflicted brain remembers too many irrelevant things, due to an excessive release of dopamine. Overwhelmed by vast caches of facts, thoughts and memories all junk-piled in their heads, schizophrenics start processing them into delusional conclusions not based in reality. Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the University of Texas' Department of Computer Science, used a synthetic neural network to simulate these delusions, often called hyperlearning hypothesis. Designed by his adviser, professor Risto Miikkulainen, Graseman used the network, dubbed DISCERN,to mimic the effects that different neurological dysfunction have on human language function. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Robotics
Link ID: 15321 - Posted: 05.12.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Women with lower levels of the hormone oxytocin in their blood during late stages of pregnancy are more likely to develop postpartum depression, new research suggests. The finding, published online May 11 in Neuropsychopharmacology, may be a first step toward identifying pregnant women who are at risk of becoming depressed after the birth of their babies. While the link is intriguing, “there’s a lot of steps to go between a correlation and using it as a biomarker,” says Ziad Nahas, a psychiatrist and mood disorders researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston who was not involved in the study. Oxytocin helps stimulate contractions and lactation in pregnant women. The hormone has also been implicated in facilitating emotional bonds between people, including mothers and children. Some earlier studies have linked oxytocin to depression, but not to postpartum depression. Of 73 women who volunteered blood samples for the study, 14 later developed postpartum depression. Oxytocin concentrations in the women’s blood varied widely, from 14.4 to 245.7 picograms per milliliter. Although the researchers found a great deal of overlap in oxytocin levels between the two groups, women who got depressed tended to have lower levels. The link is too preliminary for doctors to use oxytocin levels to predict which patients are likely to develop postpartum depression, says Gunther Meinlschmidt, a psychobiologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who led the study. Even if a woman has low levels of the hormone, there’s no guarantee she will get depressed. “This is not a yes, no, one-or-zero factor. It’s one of several factors” that determine a woman’s risk for the condition, he says. It’s also unclear whether treating women with oxytocin would have any effect on depression. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15320 - Posted: 05.12.2011

by Andy Coghlan A STRANGE property marks out the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's: they have a glut of cells with more than the standard two sets of chromosomes. Furthermore, these turn out to be the cells most likely to perish in the late stages of the disease. The twin discoveries could drive research into one of the modern world's most devastating neurological conditions in an entirely new direction. No one can agree on the cause of Alzheimer's disease. While much of the focus has been on the plaques that clog up the brains of sufferers, treatments that clear these plaques have no effect on the symptoms of the disease. And treatments that block the beta-amyloid proteins that make up the plaques, or the tau proteins that develop within neurons. Perhaps that's because the disease is triggered by something completely different. Last year, Thomas Arendt's team at the University of Leipzig in Germany examined tissue taken from healthy brains and from the brains of those who had Alzheimer's at the time of death, or who showed signs of being about to develop the disease. They found that about 10 per cent of neurons in the brains of healthy people contained more than two sets of chromosomes, a condition known as hyperploidy. The finding is astonishing because all cells in the human body - other than sperm and eggs - are supposed to contain just two sets of chromosomes. More importantly, in the period just before Alzheimer's develops and in the early stages of the disease, Arendt and colleagues found that hyperploid cells double in number. Then, in the final stage of Alzheimer's, most of these unusual cells disappear altogether - of the brain cells lost, 90 per cent are hyperploid (see diagram) (American Journal of Pathology, DOI: 10.2353/ajpath.2010.090955). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15319 - Posted: 05.12.2011

by Elizabeth Norton Lasley The waters of the North Sea are among the murkiest on the planet, so dark and silty that a seal sometimes can’t see its own whiskers. Even so, the harbor seals there can hunt and catch fish. Marine biologists have known for several years that a seal relies on its whiskers to follow the wake a fish leaves behind. But according to a new study, whiskers supply detailed information that the seal may use to decide which fish are most worthwhile to hunt. To find out just what a seal’s whiskers can tell it, biologist Wolf Hanke of the University of Rostock in Germany and colleagues enlisted the aid of a harbor seal named Henry, a veteran research participant who has been at the University of Rostock’s Marine Science Center since 2008. “When he starts working, he can’t be stopped,” Hanke says. The researchers presented Henry with different types of wakes using a test box of still water about 2 meters wide that sat at the bottom of a pool about 1 meter deep. Above the box hung a motorized arm with a series of paddles of different shapes and widths. While each paddle moved through the water, Henry waited outside the test box wearing headphones to block out the motor noise. He also wore a blindfold to ensure that he’d be using only his whiskers. Once the paddle had come to rest, Henry left his station and dunked his body halfway into the test box. With the water swirling around his whiskers, Henry made his decision, then left the box and pressed one of two buttons with his nose, indicating whether the wake had been made by one of three paddle sizes he’d already been trained to recognize or by an unfamiliar one. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15318 - Posted: 05.12.2011

by Kayt Sukel Our intrepid reporter performs an intimate act in an fMRI scanner to explore the pathways of pleasure and pain WITH a click and a whirr, I am pulled into the scanner. My head is strapped down and I have been draped with a blanket so that I may touch my nether regions - my clitoris in particular - with a certain degree of modesty. I am here neither for a medical procedure nor an adult movie. Rather, I am about to stimulate myself to orgasm while an fMRI scanner tracks the blood flow in my brain. My actions are helping Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and colleagues to tease apart the mechanisms underlying sexual arousal. In doing so, not only have they discovered that there is more than one route to orgasm, but they may also have revealed a novel type of consciousness - an understanding of which could lead to new treatments for pain (see Top-down pain relief). Despite orgasm being a near-universal human phenomenon, we still don't know all that much about it. "The amount of speculation versus actual data on both the function and value of orgasm is remarkable," says Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana. It is estimated that one in four women in the US has had difficulty achieving orgasm in the past year, while between 5 and 10 per cent of women are anorgasmic - unable to achieve orgasm at all. But without precise data to explain what happens during this experience, there are few treatment options available for women who might want help. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 15317 - Posted: 05.12.2011

Ewen Callaway The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived. The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. The implication, says Higham's team, is that Neanderthals and humans might never have met in Europe. However, the Neanderthal genome, decoded last year2, hints that the ancestors of all humans, except those from Africa, interbred with Neanderthals somewhere. Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East. "DNA results show that there was admixture probably at some stage in our human ancestry, but it more than likely happened quite a long time before humans arrived in Europe," says Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland, who is lead author of the latest study. "I don't believe there were regions where Neanderthals were living next to modern humans. I just don't find it very feasible," he adds. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15316 - Posted: 05.10.2011

By GARDINER HARRIS Nearly one in seven elderly nursing home residents, nearly all of them with dementia, are given powerful atypical antipsychotic drugs even though the medicines increase the risks of death and are not approved for such treatments, a government audit found. More than half of the antipsychotics paid for by the federal Medicare program in the first half of 2007 were “erroneous,” the audit found, costing the program $116 million for those six months. “Government, taxpayers, nursing home residents as well as their families and caregivers should be outraged and seek solutions,” Daniel R. Levinson, inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in announcing the audit results. Mr. Levinson noted that such drugs — which include Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Abilify and Geodon — are “potentially lethal” to many of the patients getting them and that some drug manufacturers illegally marketed their medicines for these uses “putting profits before safety.” The audit is an unusual assessment by the government of whether doctors are treating Medicare patients appropriately in nursing homes. Mr. Levinson suggested that the government should collect information on the diagnoses given Medicare patients so that the government can assess whether the drugs prescribed to them are appropriate. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 15315 - Posted: 05.10.2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. The mother had brought in a note from her son’s elementary school teacher: Dear doctor, I think this child needs to be tested for attention deficit disorder. “She’s worried about how he can’t sit still in school and do his work,” the mother said. “He’s always getting into trouble.” But then she brightened. “But he can’t have attention deficit, I know that.” Why? Her son could sit for hours concentrating on video games, it turned out, so she was certain there was nothing wrong with his attention span. It’s an assertion I’ve heard many times when a child has attention problems. Sometimes parents make the same point about television: My child can sit and watch for hours — he can’t have A.D.H.D. In fact, a child’s ability to stay focused on a screen, though not anywhere else, is actually characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are complex behavioral and neurological connections linking screens and attention, and many experts believe that these children do spend more time playing video games and watching television than their peers. But is a child’s fascination with the screen a cause or an effect of attention problems — or both? It’s a complicated question that researchers are still struggling to tease out. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 15314 - Posted: 05.10.2011

By ALASTAIR GEE OXFORD, England — The task given to participants in an Oxford University depression study sounds straightforward. After investigators read them a cue word, they have 30 seconds to recount a single specific memory, meaning an event that lasted less than one day. Cues may be positive (“loved”), negative (“heartless”) or neutral (“green”). For “rejected,” one participant answered, “A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with my boss, and my ideas were rejected.” Another said, “My brothers are always talking about going on holiday without me.” The second answer was wrong — it is not specific, and it refers to something that took place on several occasions. But in studies under way at Oxford and elsewhere, scientists are looking to such failures to gain new insights into the diagnosis and treatment of depression. They are focusing not on what people remember, but how. The phenomenon is called overgeneral memory, a tendency to recall past events in a broad, vague manner. “It’s an unsung vulnerability factor for unhelpful reactions when things go wrong in life,” said Mark Williams, the clinical psychologist who has been leading the Oxford studies. Some forgetting is essential for healthy functioning — “If you’re trying to remember where you parked the car at the supermarket, it would be disastrous if all other times you parked the car at the supermarket came to mind,” said Martin Conway, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Leeds in England. But, a chronic tendency to obliterate details has been linked to longer and more intense episodes of depression. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15313 - Posted: 05.10.2011

by Catherine de Lange You might think that being able to distinguish between a noise associated with danger and a similar but innocuous one would be a useful skill. Yet people find it hard to tell similar sounds apart if one is linked to a bad experience. The finding could help explain how people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may become hypersensitive to certain types of sound. Rony Paz and colleagues from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, repeatedly played one of two tones to volunteers. One group heard a tone followed by an unpleasant smell, the other a tone followed by a pleasant, melon-like odour. The team then tested how well each person could distinguish between the tones they had heard and similar sounds. On average, those who had heard the sound that was followed by an unpleasant smell performed worse at this task. The effect persisted 24 hours later. Evolutionary sense This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, says Paz. "If you hear a lion and you see a zebra get eaten, that should be enough for you to know that a lion is bad and to avoid it." If you subsequently hear a different lion, you want your system to respond quickly to the threat rather than try to distinguish between the two lions. Paz thinks this conditioning may involve rewiring of the amygdala, the part of the brain which controls the fear response. Understanding this mechanism could lead to better treatments for PTSD, he says. Journal reference: Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2802 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 15312 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor AS ANIMAL behaviourist Jonathan Balcombe sees it, too often the animal kingdom is portrayed solely as a realm of dire and perpetual struggle for survival. He argues that observations of playfulness or expressions of pleasure by non-human creatures of all stripes, feathers and fins are depicted as nothing more than evolutionary adaptation. The Exultant Ark, his pictorial exploration of pleasure among creatures from primate to porpoise, challenges this idea. It intersperses glorious images of animals preening, grooming and gallivanting with snippets of studies suggesting such behaviours belie an overly utilitarian interpretation. Sleepy, full-bellied kittens snuggling up to their mothers, dozing sea otters drifting on their backs with linked paws, frolicking alpine ibex - Balcombe revels in images that convey intimacy, comfort and even love, terms usually reserved for humans. A key point for Balcombe, though, is that we must go beyond anthropomorphism to get to the root of what non-human animals feel. Balcombe laments the fact that scientific understanding of animal pleasure remains in its infancy, but cobbles together anecdotes and preliminary research to raise questions about animals' experience. For instance, in highlighting the relationship between hippos and the fish that scrounge between their toes and teeth, he explores its potential interpretation as a mutually enjoyable experience. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 15311 - Posted: 05.10.2011

• Kat Arney Last month US clothing retailer J Crew released photos showing the company's president, Jenna Lyons, painting her 5-year-old child's toenails their favourite shade of hot pink. No big deal, you might think, until you notice the child is a boy. The ensuing media kerfuffle highlights what anyone from a toddler to Dame Barbara Cartland could have told you. Pink is a girl's colour, and is certainly not fit for a boy's toenails. Take a trip to a toy store and you'll see this gender divide writ large in the aisles. On one side, the boys' toys – Lego and other construction kits, pirate costumes, toy guns, racing cars and so on – boxed in blue and other "manly" colours and illustrated with pictures of boys. Turn a corner, and you're assaulted by a wall of pink built from Barbie dolls, multi-packs of miniature high heels, princess outfits and tea sets. The message is clear: these are boys' toys, and those are girls' toys. And in this particular battle of the sexes, there's very little neutral territory. Many people – such as the Pink Stinks campaign – are fighting against the power of pink. In response to complaints about the pink/blue divide in their wares, toy retailer the Early Learning Centre points vaguely to research showing that "gender is a major factor in determining children's colour preferences, with most boys typically preferring blue and girls preferring pink from infancy." But is this really true? And does it even matter? Together with radio producer Jolyon Jenkins, I've been searching for the scientific truth behind the rampant pinkification of toys for girls. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 15310 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Jeanne Nollman was a later bloomer. She waited and waited for puberty to hit, and when she was 17 and still nothing had happened, she got tested - and found out she had a rare condition called Swyer syndrome and would need supplemental hormones. What no one told her until eight years later, when she demanded more information about her condition, was that she had the male X-Y chromosome pattern. "That was typical back then, in the '70s," said Nollman, who is now 51 and lives in San Leandro with her husband and two adopted teenage children. "I guess they thought I might go jump off a roof and commit suicide with this information. But I must be an odd duck because I was just relieved." Now she's trying to help other children - and their parents - learn about and even embrace their "disorder of sex differentiation," or DSD, which is the medical term for hermaphrodite, a word that is no longer used by doctors and patients. The Bay Area is getting its first DSD parent support group next week, with a meeting Thursday at UCSF. Organizers, including Nollman, hope the group will become a resource for families to talk openly about the unique problems that come with raising kids who have sex development disorders. Such disorders, which may occur in as many as 1 in 3,000 births, include a wide variety of conditions, from something that's not obvious at birth, like Swyer syndrome, to babies born with ambiguous genitalia who cannot immediately be labeled male or female. © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15309 - Posted: 05.10.2011

Jeff Warren “If you get into any trouble, try concentrating on your breath. Sometimes the breath is all you have.” Brian looked concerned, though he also looked weirdly elongated, ­so it was hard to tell what was actually happening. I was on drugs, you see, and not just any drug. Thirty minutes earlier I had gulped back a cupful of ayahuasca, a plant-based hallucinogen that William Burroughs—no slouch when it came to chemical experimentation—once described as the most powerful he had ever experienced. This was my third trip in six days, and I’d taken half again as much as anyone else in the group. Now nobody would look me in the eye. This was several years ago, during a perspective-altering ten-day workshop in South America. Today, most armchair adventurers will have heard of ayahuasca, which first escaped from the Amazon jungle in the 1930s and has recently leapt from underground curiosity to zeitgeist sensation. Following in the footsteps of celebrities such as Sting and Oliver Stone, every year thousands of people fly to countries like Peru, Brazil and Ecuador, where ayahuasca can be sampled in the company of professional shamans—some respectable, some not. Having had their fill of physical travel, Westerners now want to sail right out of their minds. Others quaff more locally. British Columbia’s Pender Island, Toronto’s beaches and Montreal’s suburbs host gatherings of the curious (supervised by imported boutique shamans) and congregations of the two fastest-growing syncretic churches that use ayahuasca as a sacrament: the Santo Daime and the União do Vegetal. Both churches—part animist, part Christian—have outposts across Latin America, Europe and North America; none other than Jeffrey Bronfman, third-generation member of the famous Montreal whisky family, heads the Santa Fe chapter of the União do Vegetal. Ayahuasca’s precise legal status in the US and Canada is ambiguous. But, if you’re determined, getting your hands on the stuff isn’t hard. © 2010 Maisonneuve Magazine

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15308 - Posted: 05.10.2011

By ALAN SCHWARZ When the N.F.L. veteran Andre Waters killed himself in late 2006, the subsequent discovery of damage in his brain shocked the football community into asking how many other retired players might have an incurable disease. After the recent suicide of Dave Duerson, however, and last Monday’s announcement that he also had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain damage formerly associated with boxers, the finding shocked no one. Duerson became the 14th retired N.F.L. player — of 15 examined by Boston University researchers — to test positive for the condition. Waters and Duerson bookend a remarkable shift in the understanding of football brain trauma: four years after a few positive tests begged explanation, questions mainly surround the absence of negatives. “It makes you worry as a player — I would imagine all of us have it,” said Chidi Ahanotu, 40, who played defensive lineman mostly for Tampa Bay from 1993 to 2004. “To what degree, I don’t know. But I don’t know how you can’t think that.” So far, though, each successive case of C.T.E. has said more about the existence of the disease than the true breadth of it. The set of 15 players tested by B.U. researchers to this point is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees that could represent the wider population. Many of the players died under conditions that could be related to C.T.E.: Waters and Duerson by suicide, John Grimsley from a gun accident, Tom McHale from a drug overdose. Their families then donated the brains largely to seek an explanation for their behavior. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15307 - Posted: 05.09.2011