by Greg Miller Politics can be a touchy topic, especially when it comes to neuroscience. Researchers who've dared to tackle questions about how people's political leanings might be reflected in the brain have often earned scoffs and scoldings from their colleagues. A provocative new study is likely to be no exception. It claims to find features of brain anatomy that differ between people who identify themselves as politically conservative or politically liberal. Cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai and colleagues at University College London recruited 90 student volunteers and had them rate their political philosophy on a five-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. Then the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to get a look inside their brains. In a paper published online today in Current Biology, the team reports two main findings: political conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, a region involved in detecting threats and responding to fearful stimuli, whereas liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area that becomes active in situations involving conflict or uncertainty. There was considerable overlap though. When the researchers looked only at the brain scans, Kanai says they could predict who was liberal and who was conservative with about 75% accuracy—much better than a coin toss but probably not good enough for any high-tech campaign tactics. Kanai is at pains to make clear that the findings don't mean political views are "hard-wired" into the brain. He acknowledges that the data don't prove that these neuroanatomical differences actually cause political differences, but he suspects that they might play a role. He says psychological studies suggest that conservatives are more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and disgust, whereas liberals are more tolerant of situations involving conflict and uncertainty. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15195 - Posted: 04.09.2011

by Sara Reardon Rats can rummage through a trash heap or scamper through an underground tunnel with their eyes closed. That’s because their whiskers have evolved to give them a detailed sense of their surroundings, even more precise than in animals such as cats and dogs. A new computer model of how our twitchy-nosed friends move their whiskers could lead to a better understanding of how the brain processes the sense of touch and even speed the development of whisker-covered robots. The lack of whiskers is a uniquely human trait among mammals, one that forces us to rely on sensory input from our fingers for most of our tactile information. The problem with studying how these sensations inform the brain in humans, however, is that the hand is extremely complicated. “It has a ton of muscles and skin elasticity, and we don’t know where the sensors are,” says biological and mechanical engineer Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Whiskers, she says, are much simpler. Each one of a rat’s 60 whiskers ends in a follicle below the skin. As the whisker touches an object, the follicle recognizes how much pressure is being applied and how much the whisker has bent. It can then relay this information to the brain, which correlates input from all 60 whiskers to create an idea of the shape of the object the rat is exploring. To recreate this sensation yourself, Hartmann suggests that you close your eyes and pick up a coffee cup from your desk. Consciously or not, your fingers touch the cup one after another in a certain order and at different distances from one another, ascertaining the cup’s size and shape. All the while, your brain is combining this information and turning it into a three-dimensional (3D) perception. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15194 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Laura Sanders SAN FRANCISCO — When faced with a thorny moral dilemma, what people say they would do and what people actually do are two very different things, a new study finds. In a hypothetical scenario, most people said they would never subject another person to a painful electric shock, just to make a little bit of money. But for people given a real-world choice, the sparks flew. The results, presented April 4 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, serve as a reminder that hypothetical scenarios don’t capture the complexities of real decisions. Morality studies in the lab almost always rely on asking participants to imagine how they’d behave in a certain situation, study coauthor Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University said in her presentation. But these imagined situations are missing teeth: “Whatever you choose, it’s not going to happen,” she said. But in FeldmanHall’s study, things actually happened. “There are real shocks and real money on the table,” she said. Subjects lying in an MRI scanner were given a choice: Either administer a painful electric shock to a person in another room and make one British pound (a little over a dollar and a half), or spare the other person the shock and forgo the money. Shocks were priced in a graded manner, so that the subject would earn less money for a light shock, and earn the whole pound for a severe shock. This same choice was given 20 times, and the person in the brain scanner could see a video of either the shockee’s hand jerk or both the hand jerk and the face grimace. (Although these shocks were real, they were pre-recorded.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15193 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Maia Szalavitz Ever wonder why French fries, potato chips and Cheetos are so appealing when you're feeling stressed? A new study suggests that elevated levels of salt in the body lower stress hormones and raise levels of oxytocin, a hormone involved in love and other social connections.The research, which was conducted in rats, was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. It found that rats' response to a stressful situation — being tied down — depended on how much salt they had in their bodies. When restrained, rats with high salt levels showed less activity in their brain's stress systems, compared with rats with normal salt levels. Having high salt levels is technically called hypernatremia (geeky fact: the word suggests high levels of NA, the chemical abbreviation for the element sodium, which is an important part of salt), and rats in this state also recovered faster from being stressed. Moreover, the hypernatremic rats had elevated levels of oxytocin — a compound known as the "love hormone" for its role in helping to create social bonds, between friends, lovers or parents and children. Oxytocin is crucial to the processes that allow love and social contact to reduce stress. Not surprisingly, rats with lots of oxytocin showed less anxiety in social interactions. (The effects of oxytocin are complicated, however — it doesn't always produce love and trust — but it is a significant player in those emotions.) Bartenders often provide salty snacks to capitalize on what having hypernatremia is most likely to make you feel: thirst. And indeed, drinking behavior may provide a clue as to why salt may be stress-relieving. © 2011 Time Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15192 - Posted: 04.09.2011

By Amina Zafar, CBC News The role estrogen plays in women's brains remains murky but researchers are beginning to clarify it. The first Women's Brain Health Academic Symposium in Toronto on Wednesday brought together experts from North America leading a discussion about trying to better understand the female brain. "Seventy per cent of Alzheimer's patients are women," said Lynn Posluns, founder and chair of the Women of Baycrest, which aims to raise $5 million for a research chair devoted to women's brain health. Researchers want to uncover exactly how estrogen affects different regions of the female brain.Researchers want to uncover exactly how estrogen affects different regions of the female brain. Brian Snyder/Reuters Yet most laboratory studies today are done on male rats because female rats are considered too complex, Posluns said. "I'm saying there's a real disconnect here. It is time for scientists to better understand the female brain." At the symposium, Gillian Einstein, a professor of psychology and public health at the University of Toronto, talked about her early findings exploring the role of estrogen on brain functions such as mood and memory. "I want women to be circumspect about the effect of their hormones on their mood and cognition," said Einstein. "It may or may not be PMS that makes you grumpy. It's possible that your husband really did do something crappy, and you have a reasonable response to it. [On the other hand] I also think it's important to think they may be having an effect." © CBC 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15191 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By David Eagleman A human brain is three pounds of the most complex material in the universe. It is the mission control centre that drives the operation of your life, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armoured bunker of the skull. This pink, alien computational material, which has the consistency of jelly and is composed of miniaturised, self-configuring parts, vastly outstrips anything we’ve dreamt of building. Using those brains, humans have done something unique. As far as we know, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us. What we’ve discovered by peering into the skull ranks among the most significant intellectual developments of our species: the recognition that the innumerable facets of our behaviour, thoughts and experience are inseparably yoked to a vast chemical-electrical network called the nervous system. The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us. The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15190 - Posted: 04.07.2011

Ewen Callaway A retina made in a laboratory in Japan could pave the way for treatments for human eye diseases, including some forms of blindness. Created by coaxing mouse embryonic stem cells into a precise three-dimensional assembly, the 'retina in a dish' is by far and away the most complex biological tissue engineered yet, scientists say. "There's nothing like it," says Robin Ali, a human molecular geneticist at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London who was not involved in the study. "When I received the manuscript, I was stunned, I really was. I never though I'd see the day where you have recapitulation of development in a dish." If the technique, published today in Nature1, can be adapted to human cells and proved safe for transplantation — which will take years — it could offer an unlimited well of tissue to replace damaged retinas. More immediately, the synthetic retinal tissue could help scientists in the study of eye disease and in identifying therapies. The work may also guide the assembly of other organs and tissues, says Bruce Conklin, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, who was not involved in the work. "I think it really reveals a larger discovery that's coming upon all of us: that these cells have instructions that allow them to self-organize." © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15189 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By Wynne Parry For chimpanzees, like humans, yawning can be contagious. And new research offers evidence that for these apes picking up a yawn is a sign of social connection. The researchers showed chimpanzees a video of other chimpanzees and found they yawned more frequently after watching a chimpanzee from their own group yawn than a chimpanzee from another group — evidence that they were more influenced by others with whom they empathized. Like chimpanzees, humans show more empathy — the ability to understand and share in another's feelings — for members of their own social group. No one has studied whether or not biases like this affect contagious yawning in humans, but the researchers believe we are like our closest living relatives in this regard. "The idea is that yawns are contagious for the same reason that smiles, frowns and other facial expressions are contagious," the researchers, Matthew Campbell and Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Georgia, wrote online Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE. "The mechanism that allows someone to reflexively mimic a smile is thought to also allow for reflexive mimicry of yawns." Campbell and de Waal showed 23 chimpanzees from two groups video clips of other chimpanzees yawning or doing something else. The chimps yawned 50 percent more frequently in response to video of members of their group yawning versus video of the other group members yawning. The researchers note that the chimps paid more attention to the video of unfamiliar chimps. © 2011 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15188 - Posted: 04.07.2011

by Lauren Schenkman There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can't imagine life without coffee and those who just don't get what the fuss is about. Now researchers have found two genetic variations that may explain why never the twain shall meet. Genetic epidemiologist Marilyn Cornelis of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston knows about coffee addicts first hand—she's got one in the family. Her father drinks 10 cups a day, she says. "He actually needs a cup of coffee before he can go to bed." Twin studies have shown that genes probably have a lot to do with this, suggesting that they account for between 43% and 58% of the variability in coffee-drinking habits. But no one knew which genes were involved. So Cornelis and colleagues at six institutions scanned the entire genomes of 47,341 adult subjects from five U.S. studies which had collected data on caffeine intake, among other things. They weren't looking for any genes in particular, just for any genetic eccentricities associated with higher caffeine consumption. This technique, known as a genome-wide association study, turned up two genetic variants. Subjects with two copies drank about 40 mg more caffeine a day than subjects with zero copies—"worth an 8-ounce diet Pepsi," or about half a cup or less of brewed coffee, says co-author and cancer geneticist Neil Caporaso of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. One variant was right next to a gene called CYP1A2, a familiar face in caffeine research. CYP1A2 is expressed in the liver and "is up to 95% responsible for caffeine metabolism," Cornelis says. The other big hit was a variant near a gene called AHR, which regulates how CYP1A2 is expressed. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15187 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By Jennifer Viegas A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an "exceptionally preserved" human brain still inside of it was recently discovered in a waterlogged U.K. pit, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science study. The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors, who also believe it's one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world. "The early Iron Age skull belonged to a man, probably in his thirties," lead author Sonia O'Connor told Discovery News. "Cause of death is rarely possible to determine in archaeological remains, but in this case, damage to the neck vertebrae is consistent with a hanging." "The head was then carefully severed from the neck using a small blade, such as a knife," added O'Connor, a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Bradford. "This was used to cut through the throat and between the vertebrae and has left a cluster of fine cut marks on the bone." The brain-containing skull was found at Heslington, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. O'Connor and her team suspect the site served a ceremonial function that persisted from the Bronze Age through the early Roman period. Many pits at the site were marked with single stakes. The remains of the man were without a body, but the scientists also found the headless body of a red deer that had been deposited into a channel. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15186 - Posted: 04.07.2011

by Jessica Hamzelou BASEBALL star Barry Bonds is back in the spotlight this week, for all the wrong reasons. The sports legend is on trial in the US, accused of lying to a grand jury when he denied that he had ever knowingly taken performance-enhancing steroids. Meanwhile, psychologists are beginning to work out how these drugs can trigger aggressive behaviour and suggesting potential therapies that could be taken alongside steroids to block this unwelcome side effect. But could such a therapy encourage drug abuse? At the end of 2007, Bonds was charged with making false statements and obstruction of justice. He pleaded not guilty and his trial commenced on 21 March this year. In support of the case that Bonds took steroids, his ex-girlfriend, Kimberly Bell, gave evidence in which she claimed that he exhibited periods of aggressive behaviour. Aggression is one of the better-known side effects of steroid use and is often referred to as "roid rage". A survey in 2008 of 7000 American teenage boys found those who took anabolic steroids reported significantly higher levels of violent behaviour than boys who did not take them (American Journal of Public Health, DOI: 10.2105/ajph.2008.137018). Now, Thomas Hildebrandt's team at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York are conducting the first longitudinal study of anabolic steroid users. By monitoring participants before, during and after cycles of steroid use, the group hopes to work out how the drugs exert their effects and how long these might last. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15185 - Posted: 04.07.2011

by David Robson The oldest known memory aid is the method of loci, invented by the ancient Greeks at least 2000 years ago. These days there are any number of mnemonics, but while memory champions may swear by them, how useful are they in day-to-day life? Two psychologists, James B. Worthen and R. Reed Hunt, attempt to answer this question in their recently published book Mnemonology (Psychology Press, 2010). "We tried to cover everything that's out there," says Worthen, of Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. So what did they find? Disappointingly, many mnemonics fail to live up to their reputation. Take the keyword method, which is often taught to language students. To help remember an unfamiliar word, the student creates an elaborate image based on the sound - the Spanish word for moustache, bigote, might be visualised as a big goat with a handlebar moustache, for example. Although widely used, several studies suggest that this method is of little value to experienced language learners, and even beginners reap minimal benefits. While it slightly improves the accuracy of their memory compared to rote repetition, it also slows down the speed at which they can recall a word. The phonetic system, in which numbers are encoded as letters, fared little better. Developed in the Renaissance, it is often touted in books on memory improvement, which suggest using it to create memorable phrases from strings of numbers. While there is good evidence that it improves recall, the difficulties of applying the technique led Worthen and Hunt to conclude that it would often be impractical in everyday situations. Even more disappointingly, their analysis revealed that the rhymes and acronyms you might have been taught at school often fail, unless they are particularly witty or apt. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15184 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By Daniel Strain If a tree falls on you in the forest while you’re meditating, does it still hurt? Well, yes. But maybe not quite as much as it would if you weren’t meditating, researchers from North Carolina and Wisconsin report in the April 6 Journal of Neuroscience. Individuals who practiced mindfulness meditation, or samatha, during a pain experiment reported much less discomfort than they did in earlier, meditation-free sessions. Samatha, the team says, flipped switches on or off in diverse regions of the brain underlying attention, expectation and even the awareness of thoughts themselves. Getting hit by a tree limb will hurt, but it won’t hurt everyone in the same way, says study coauthor Robert Coghill, a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. The conscious mind, which is informed by personal experience and context, is an expert at deciding which sensations to take note of and which to ignore. “All the time we’re hanging out, our brain is being bombarded with all sorts of information,” he says. “But we let it go.” A falling tree is more jarring than the tickle of a forearm hair, but meditation may help people to similarly let “ouch!” and “yowza!” reflexes go. In the study, Coghill and his colleagues prodded 15 volunteers with a hot poker of sorts, then used MRI to watch their brains respond to the hot but humane torture. Subjects found the 49⁰ Celsius pulses, on average, 57 percent less unpleasant and 40 percent less intense while meditating as opposed to resting normally. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 15183 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey A spoonful of sugar may be a remedy for diabetes. The more glucose that insulin-producing cells in the pancreas use, the faster those cells reproduce, a new study in mice shows. The findings, published in the April 6 Cell Metabolism, may help researchers devise new treatments for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes by harnessing the mechanism that leads to sugar-fueled cell growth. Such a strategy could help restore function to the cells in the pancreas damaged in diabetes while avoiding the toxic effects of high blood sugar. Giving animals more food to eat or bathing cells with glucose — the type of sugar that cells burn for energy — can increase the amount of insulin-producing pancreatic cells known as beta cells. But exactly how the sugar increases the number of beta cells has not been clear. “It was not a simple question to unravel,” says Patricia Kilian, director for regeneration at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. “There are just so many moving parts.” In fact, many researchers doubted glucose was the factor responsible for beta cell growth because the sugar can kill cells (that’s why high blood sugar is so bad for diabetics). The new study “uncovers the black box” and is an important contribution toward learning how to restore the function of the pancreas, she says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15182 - Posted: 04.07.2011

by Andrew Moseman Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter are accustomed to making others feel the heat as they blaze through Jeopardy clue after Jeopardy clue. But tonight, the quiz show's two greatest champions will oppose a player who can't be psyched out. It's time for the world to meet Watson. IBM's Jeopardy-playing computer system appears to viewers at home as an avatar of the Earth on a black screen. In fact, it is a system years in the making, and perhaps the most impressive attempt ever to create a question-answering computer that understands the nuances of human language. Watson is not connected to the Internet, but its databases overflow with books, scripts, dictionaries, and whatever other material lead researcher David Ferrucci could pack in. Storing information is the computer's strong suit; the grand artificial intelligence challenge of Jeopardy is the subtlety of words. When the bright lights of Jeopardy go up tonight, there will be no human handler to tell Watson where inside its mighty databases to seek the answers. It must parse each clue and category title to figure out what it's being asked. It must race through its databases, find relevant search terms, and pick out the right response with a high level of confidence. It must understand the puns and geeky quirks of America's Favorite Quiz Show. It must beat two Jeopardy champions to the buzzer. And it too must voice its responses in the form of a question. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Intelligence; Robotics
Link ID: 15181 - Posted: 04.07.2011

By Jane Hughes Health correspondent, BBC News People with autism use their brains differently from other people, which may explain why some have extraordinary abilities to remember and draw objects in detail, according to new research. University of Montreal scientists say in autistic people, the brain areas that deal with visual information are highly developed. The National Autistic Society says the findings significantly increase understanding of the condition. The research, published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, pulls together 15 years of data on the way the autistic brain works. It suggests that the brains of autistic people are organised differently from those of other people; the area at the back of the brain, which processes visual information, is more highly developed. That leaves less brain capacity in areas which deal with decision-making and planning. Autistic brain Areas where autistic brains are more active That may be why people with autism can be better than others at carrying out some types of visual tasks. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15180 - Posted: 04.05.2011

By Jennifer LaRue Huget A study published online yesterday in the Archives of General Psychiatry showed that the brains of women who have symptoms of food addiction respond to the prospect of delicious food in much the same way that the brain of a drug addict responds to the prospect of drugs. Researchers at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Obesity Research and Policy set out to probe the potential parallel between food addiction and substance dependence. The former isn’t yet recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a psychiatric disorder, while the latter is defined by a set of clear criteria. Before this study, Ashley Gearhardt, a doctoral student at Yale, had devised a tool for assessing food addiction. She based her 25-point questionnaire (“I have found that I have elevated desire for or urges to consume certain foods when I cut down or stop eating them,” for instance, and “My behavior with respect to food and eating causes significant distress.”) on that used to diagnose substance dependence. According to the Yale Food Addiction Scale, as the instrument is called, some of the 39 young women included in the study showed signs of being addicted to food. While some were lean, some obese, and some in between, their weight wasn’t related to their likelihood or degree of food addiction. Gearhardt and her team used functional MRI to record brain activity as the women were shown images of yummy chocolate shakes and of a clear, taste-free solution. MRI images were also recorded while the women actually sampled those beverages. (The study explains that the clear formula was made to replicate saliva, as the taste of water actually triggers activity in some brain receptors.) © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15179 - Posted: 04.05.2011

by Duncan Graham-Rowe COCHLEAR implants have helped thousands of deaf people around the world hear for the first time. Now a tiny microphone implanted in a person's ear will provide them with continuous hearing day and night. Existing implants can't be worn all the time because only a small part of the device is actually inside the cochlea. A fragile external unit containing the power supply, processors and microphone has to be hooked onto the ear and linked magnetically to the implant beneath the skin. "Patients can't normally wear them in their sleep, in the shower, the rain or when they swim," says Herman Jenkins, chair of otolaryngology at the University of Colorado in Aurora. "A fully implanted system would get rid of all that because you could wear it round the clock," Jenkins says. But developing an internal microphone for such a system is quite a challenge. Four years ago Cochlear, a firm based in Sydney, Australia, ran trials of a prototype implant in three patients, with mixed results, says Jan Janssen, head of Cochlear's design and development. "People clearly appreciated the ability to hear 24/7," he says. But because the microphone was actually inside the ear it would pick up not just external sounds but also a wide range of bodily noises, including the sound of eating, swallowing, the rustling of hair and the beating of the heart. So Cochlear turned to Otologics, a company in Boulder, Colorado, that was developing a fully implantable hearing aid with a new microphone that incorporates two sensors. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 15178 - Posted: 04.05.2011

By Francie Diep One of the top worries for parents of kids with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the long-term consequences of this condition. "Families want to know, 'So what does this mean?'" says Alice Charach, head of the neuropsychiatry team at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Two recent, large reviews of previous studies reveal one disquieting answer: Getting an ADHD diagnosis in childhood is associated with nicotine and alcohol dependence in adulthood. The two studies' results on marijuana and other drugs, however, were more mixed. One review—a meta-analysis published in the April issue of Clinical Psychology Review by a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.) and the University of South Carolina, Columbia—concluded that children with ADHD also have a strong risk of abusing marijuana, cocaine and other unspecified drugs. In contrast, Charach's team—which published its review in the January issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry—also found an increased risk for marijuana and other drugs, but decided the results of the individual studies examined were too varied to reach a strong conclusion. Overall, however, "the similarities outweigh the differences" between the two meta-analyses, Charach says. Steve Lee, lead researcher on the U.C.L.A. review, agrees, "I think both studies are collectively persuasive." © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15177 - Posted: 04.05.2011

By Christof Koch In philosophy of mind, a “cerebroscope” is a fictitious device, a brain–computer interface in today’s language, which reads out the content of somebody’s brain. An autocerebroscope is a device applied to one’s own brain. You would be able to see your own brain in action, observing the fleeting bioelectric activity of all its nerve cells and thus of your own conscious mind. There is a strange loopiness about this idea. The mind observing its own brain gives rise to the very mind observing this brain. How will this weirdness affect the brain? Neuroscience has answered this question more quickly than many thought possible. But first, a bit of background. Epileptic seizures—hypersynchronized, self-maintained neural discharges that can sometimes engulf the entire brain—are a common neurological disorder. These recurring and episodic brain spasms are kept in check with drugs that dampen excitation and boost inhibition in the underlying circuits. Medication does not always work, however. When a localized abnormality, such as scar tissue or developmental miswiring, is suspected of triggering the seizure, neurosurgeons may remove the offending tissue. To minimize side effects, it is vital to pinpoint the location from which the seizures originate; neuropsychological testing, brain scans and EEGs aid this determination. But if no structural pathologies are apparent from the outside, doctors begin with an invasive procedure. The neurosurgeon inserts a dozen or so electrodes into the soft tissue of the brain, via small holes drilled through the skull, and leaves them in place for a week or so. During this time, the patient lives and sleeps in the hospital ward, and the signals from the wires are monitored continuously. When a seizure occurs, doctors triangulate the origin of the aberrant electrical activity. Subsequent destruction or removal of the offending chunk of tissue reduces the number of seizures—sometimes eliminating them entirely. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention; Robotics
Link ID: 15176 - Posted: 04.05.2011