Greg Miller Everyone knows what it's like to be lonely. It often happens during life's transitions: when a student leaves home for college, when an unmarried businessman takes a job in a new city, or when an elderly woman outlives her husband and friends. Bouts of loneliness are a melancholy fact of human existence. But when loneliness becomes a chronic condition, the impact can be far more serious, says John Cacioppo, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Cacioppo studies the biological effects of loneliness, and in a steady stream of recent papers, he and collaborators have identified several potentially unhealthy changes in the cardiovascular, immune, and nervous systems of chronically lonely people. Their findings could help explain why epidemiological studies have often found that socially isolated people have shorter life spans and increased risk of a host of health problems, including infections, heart disease, and depression. Their work also adds a new wrinkle, suggesting that it's the subjective experience of loneliness that's harmful, not the actual number of social contacts a person has. “Loneliness isn't at all what people thought it was, and it's a lot more important than people thought it was,” Cacioppo says. Colleagues credit him with building an impressive network of collaborations with researchers in other disciplines to pioneer a new science of loneliness. “He's placed it on the scientific map,” says one collaborator, Dorret Boomsma, a behavioral geneticist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. “He's doing very creative work,” says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “He's created a new way of thinking about the biology of interpersonal relationships.” © 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 14875 - Posted: 01.15.2011

By Laura Beil Mice aren’t known for their skill with complicated memory tricks, but they can usually recall their last meal. Once they happen upon food in a laboratory maze, they are pretty good at remembering the location from one trial to the next. In one recent study, though, half the mice got too confused to find their snacks. All the mice in two groups tested could remember the location of a new reward stashed in a vastly different place from an earlier one. But one group had trouble when the payoff lay just slightly off from a previous spot. Those mice had a good excuse, though: Their brains were incapable of creating new nerve cells, or neurons, in a region important for memory. In the late ’90s, scientists stunned the research world with the discovery that human adults aren’t stuck with only the neurons they’re born with — an idea long entrenched in neuroscience dogma. In fact, adult brains are getting fresh batches of nerve cells every day. Since that revelation, researchers have been trying to answer a nagging question: What are the new neurons good for? While it’s now widely accepted that new cells are appearing in a part of the brain that codes and packages memories, the precise function of these newborn brain cells remains unclear. Many researchers are now convinced that new cells are indeed vital for recording memories, but not all forms of memory — just those that tend to get jumbled with other similar ones (such as what you had for lunch yesterday or where you parked your car). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 14874 - Posted: 01.15.2011

by Debora MacKenzie You catch flu by inhaling germs – now it seems you can catch prion diseases that way too. Prions are misshapen proteins that cause brain degeneration in conditions such as mad cow disease and scrapie in animals, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans. They can get into you if you eat infected meat or receive infected blood, but it was thought they couldn't spread through air. Now Adriano Aguzzi of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports that mice exposed for 10 minutes to aerosols containing as little as 2.5 per cent brain tissue from mice with scrapie all developed the disease within months. The prions didn't need processing by the immune system first, as some other research has suggested, but entered the brain directly through nasal nerves. "We were amazed at how efficiently they spread," says Aguzzi. He warns that this doesn't mean animals or people with prion diseases actually transmit them through the air: there have been no unexplained cases of disease transmission which suggested this. But workers in mills that process potentially infected carcasses may need more respiratory protection. Labs that test for prions routinely make 10 per cent suspensions of brain tissue, and any handling – pipetting, for example – creates aerosols. Prion labs are not required to use safety equipment that protects workers from aerosols. Aguzzi, who tested his aerosols at the highest level of protection, thinks those labs may now need to rethink safety measures. Journal reference: PLoS Pathogens, DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1001257 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14873 - Posted: 01.15.2011

by Wendy Zukerman Female crickets prefer the serenades of younger males. The findings defy a well-established theory that females prefer older males because their longevity shows they have good genes. This idea was largely unproven, says Luke Verburgt of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. And once he put it to the test using field crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus), he found it isn't accurate. Instead, female crickets prefer the higher-pitched and louder songs sung by younger males, he says. Verburgt and colleagues recorded the mating songs of the same 25 male field crickets when they were young (10 to 12 days old) and older (48 to 50 days old). He analysed the songs' traits, including the number of single sounds – or syllables – per song, the length of the syllables and the song's frequency. Youthful vigour Nearly all the traits changed with age. For instance, as crickets became older they sang lower, more staccato songs. The young male song was louder and on average 80 hertz higher than the older male songs. Verburgt believes the muscles needed to produce songs become weaker with age, and so older crickets may not be able to sustain the force required to produce longer syllables. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14872 - Posted: 01.15.2011

By JOSHUA SPARROW, M.D. Several readers wrote about their children with autism spectrum disorders and their children’s difficulties both with handling the sensory overload that comes with this time of year and with understanding the deeper meanings of the holidays. The challenges of children with autism spectrum disorders and the behaviors that result can be baffling for those who have had little experience with them. It can likewise be baffling for those who are familiar with autism, including parents and other family members, as well as the children themselves. Most of these behaviors arise from differences in the ways that these children experience, understand and interact with the world. Some children with autism spectrum disorders do not speak at all, while others develop the ability to speak later than typically developing children. Most find it hard to understand the social and emotional meanings of language and nonverbal behavior, including words about emotions, or facial expressions and tones of voice that convey emotions. They also have a harder time understanding their own feelings, and those of others, than children without autism. However, these differences in understanding and expressing their feelings often lead others to underestimate their potential for empathy, compassion and other emotions. Still, abstract ideas and symbols — like Christmas trees, a baby in a manger and everlasting lights — are also often difficult for them to comprehend. Many children with autism spectrum disorders are easily overwhelmed by sights, sounds and touch, and even by smells and tastes. To protect themselves, these children shut out sensory information by withdrawing or absorbing themselves in repetitive behaviors or idiosyncratic interests, which can interfere with learning about their surroundings and connecting with the people who care most about them, including their parents. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14871 - Posted: 01.15.2011

The inner ear helps you hear, and keep your balance, but a new study in mice suggests that it may do much more, helping with breathing. The upcoming finding in the journal Neuroscience, may as well have implications for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in infants, suggests the study's senior author, Daniel Rubens of Seattle Children's Hospital. "We have basically shown that inner ear damage leads to a loss of response to increased carbon dioxide levels," says Rubens. Rubens led a a 2007 study in the Human Development journal that found higher odds of SIDS in infants who scored poorly on early hearing tests. The new study examines examines a possible involvement of the inner ear in the mechanism of SIDS. SIDS kills about 2,200 infants nationwide yearly, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The researchers compared 40 infant mice with inner ear damage from 'gentamicin' antibiotic injections to 20 other control mice (10 with salt water injections but not antibiotic, 5 with antibiotic administered system-wide but not into the ear, and 5 exposed only to the anesthetic without injections). The gentamicin antibiotic damages specialized hair cells in the inner ear that detect changes in both balance and hearing. Carbon dioxide levels produced in the body drives respiration in humans and other mammals. The team led by authors Rubens and Travis Allen, also of Seattle Children's Hospital, compared the response of the experiment's mice to increases in carbon dioxide levels while asleep. Within 10 seconds, the undamaged control mice's breathing increased in response to the increased carbon dioxide levels. In contrast the inner-ear damaged mice showed little, if any, response. © 2011 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Sleep; Hearing
Link ID: 14870 - Posted: 01.15.2011

by Jacqui Street, ABC Science Online There's an old joke which asks how do echidnas have sex? Very carefully. But Tasmanian researchers have discovered the spiky mammals aren't particularly careful at all. In fact, new research has found echidnas are quite promiscuous creatures. Gemma Morrow from the University of Tasmania has spent three years digging up echidnas and using ultra sound to study their mating habits. She also installed infrared cameras in their burrows and made some surprising discoveries. "They have group sex -- one female and many males -- and that's basically because there's not as many reproductively active females as males because females don't reproduce every year," says Morrow. As well as having echidna group sex, some male echidnas try to mate with females who are still hibernating. "They're getting up about a month earlier than females and then jumping on top of them," says Morrow. "(The) females are then waking up and they're actually mating when they're not at a normal body temperature." "Females are then sometimes re-entering hibernation so there's not a real clear distinction between hibernation and reproduction, which is quite unusual," she adds. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14869 - Posted: 01.13.2011

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older adults on certain epilepsy drugs have an increased risk of breaking their wrist, hip or spine, according to a new Canadian study. The drugs have been suspected of weakening bones for years, researchers say, but whether individual medications are different hadn't been clear. The Canadian team found patients on all but one of 15 common epilepsy drugs studied had higher odds of breaking a bone, with increases ranging from 25 percent to nearly 200 percent higher than people not taking the drugs. While the study didn't give absolute risks, in general about a third of women and a fifth of men over 50 suffer fractures related to bone thinning, or osteoporosis, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation. Lead researcher Dr. Nathalie Jette, of the University of Calgary in Alberta, advised that older adults on epilepsy medicine try to boost their bone health. For instance, she said, they could stop smoking, cut back on drinking, exercise more and take calcium and vitamin D supplements. Still, the researchers caution that they can't be sure exactly why people taking the drugs have weaker bones. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/fxSI93 Archives of Neurology, January 2011. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 14868 - Posted: 01.13.2011

by Michael Marshall It sounds like something a guided missile would do. Foxes seem to zero in on prey using Earth's magnetic field. They are the first animal thought to use the field to judge distance rather than just direction. Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany, noticed that the foxes he was watching in the Czech Republic almost always jumped on their prey in a north-easterly direction. Given that cows position themselves using Earth's magnetic field, he wondered if something similar was at work. Foxes jump high into the air before dropping onto prey. Burda's team found that when the foxes could see their prey they jumped from any direction but when prey were hidden, they almost always jumped north-east. Such attacks were successful 72 per cent of the time, compared with 18 per cent of attacks in other directions. All observers saw the same thing, but Burda remained baffled, until he spoke to John Phillips at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Phillips has suggested that animals might use Earth's magnetic field to measure distance. The pair think a fox hunts best if it can jump the same distance every time. Burda suggests that it sees a ring of "shadow" on its retina that is darkest towards magnetic north, and just like a normal shadow, always appears to be the same distance ahead. The fox moves forward until the shadow lines up with where the prey's sounds are coming from, at which point it is a set distance away. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Animal Migration
Link ID: 14867 - Posted: 01.13.2011

by Tracy Staedter Reports this morning about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' (D-Ariz.) condition are, so far, positive. The bullet that entered her skull did so from the back-left section of the brain and exited through the front-left section. In doing so, it missed critical brain structures and major blood vessels. During surgery, the doctors at Arizona's University Medical Center removed a large portion of Giffords' skull to allow the brain to swell without being damaged. They also used drugs to induce a coma, which slows the metabolism and blood flow in the brain, decreasing pressure. A medically induced coma is different from one that's the result of an overdose, a disease or trauma. With a medically induced coma, the doctors can generally change the drug dosage to bring the patient back into consciousness. But not so with comas, which can leave a person unconscious for hours, weeks -- even years. Thinking about this condition reminded me of a talk I heard at the PopTech conference last fall given by Adrian Owen, senior scientist and assistant director of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, U.K. Owen and his team are using brain-imaging techniques to determine the levels of consciousness in patients who are in a vegetative state. Some of these patients seem wakeful; they open their eyes, make noises and appear to look around. But, they're not awake. They do not ever look directly at objects or people, nor do they respond to people or commands. According to Owen, wakefulness and awareness are two different components of consciousness. Wakefulness can be observed and measured using an EKG machine that picks up brain wave activity. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14866 - Posted: 01.13.2011

David Cyranoski In a room full of psychiatrists in downtown Tokyo, I prepare to have my mental health assessed. No probing questions are asked. Instead, I don an odd type of swimming cap, criss-crossed with cables and studded with red and blue knobs. At the flick of a switch, the 17 red knobs send infrared light 2 to 3 centimetres into my brain, where it is absorbed or scattered by neurons. Photoreceptors in the 16 blue knobs retrieve whatever light bounces back to the surface. Buried in the signals, say the researchers operating the system, are clues that can distinguish depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and a normal state of mind. More than 1,000 people have already been subjects of the technique, called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and developed by Masato Fukuda, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Gunma University Hospital in Maebashi, and the Hitachi Medical Corporation in Tokyo. Most of those were research subjects. But since April 2009, when NIRS was approved by the health ministry as an "advanced medical technology" to assist psychiatric diagnoses, more than 300 people have paid ¥13,000 (US$160) out of their own pocket to access the technique. The University of Tokyo Hospital, one of eight leading Japanese research hospitals now offering NIRS diagnostic neuroimaging, found demand for it to be so high that the hospital stopped taking appointments twice. Gunma University Hospital is fully booked to the end of March. "We've been overwhelmed by requests," says Fukuda. The appeal of NIRS is its promise of fast, clear-cut diagnoses of psychiatric conditions which, with their messily overlapping symptoms, are frequently diagnosed wrongly or not diagnosed at all. US studies, for example, found that some 70% of bipolar patients were initially misdiagnosed1,2. As for patients, says Fukuda, "They want some kind of hard evidence," especially when they have to explain absences from work. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14865 - Posted: 01.13.2011

by Michael Marshall Some animals have all the luck. Many of us would envy a life spent flitting around the northern Mediterranean coast, with ample tasty food all year round. And if that weren't enough, if any major problems crop up you can just go to sleep for a few months. This is how large white butterflies live, or at least those that have made their homes in southern Spain. Readers with a less congenial lifestyle should feel free to despise them, as they are major agricultural pests. But they are also remarkable, because they "sleep" not just to get through bad weather and food shortages, but to avoid swarming parasites. You might think that all that sleeping leaves little time for reproducing, but large whites make rabbits look like pandas. In a warm climate with plenty of food, nine generations can be born in a year: a single life cycle takes about four weeks. Twelve years ago, Hubert Spieth of Bielefeld University in Germany noticed something strange. Caterpillars in southern Spain that went into cocoons around the end of May did not come out again when expected. Instead, they remained dormant for three months, emerging only in September. This happened only in response to longer days. Many animals that become dormant – a phenomenon called hibernation when it happens in winter and aestivation in summer – do so to avoid cold or drought, both of which make food scarce. But in southern Spain there is plenty of food all summer, so the three-month nap meant the butterflies were missing out three generations of breeding for no apparent reason. Spieth and his student Ulrich Pörschmann think they may now have an explanation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14864 - Posted: 01.13.2011

NIH-funded researchers were able to eliminate tinnitus in a group of rats by stimulating a nerve in the neck while simultaneously playing a variety of sound tones over an extended period of time, says a study published today in the advance online publication of the journal Nature. The hallmark of tinnitus is often a persistent ringing in the ears that is annoying for some, debilitating for others, and currently incurable. Similar to pressing a reset button in the brain, this new therapy was found to help retrain the part of the brain that interprets sound so that errant neurons reverted back to their original state and the ringing disappeared. The research was conducted by scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas and MicroTransponder Inc., in Dallas. "Current treatments for tinnitus generally involve masking the sound or learning to ignore it," said James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), which funded a large part of the research. "If we can find a way to turn off the noise, we’ll be able to improve life substantially for the nearly 23 million American adults who suffer from this disorder." Tinnitus is a symptom some people experience as a result of hearing loss. When sensory cells in the inner ear are damaged, such as from loud noise, the resulting hearing loss changes some of the signals sent from the ear to the brain. For reasons that are not fully understood, some people will develop tinnitus as a result. "We believe the part of the brain that processes sounds — the auditory cortex — delegates too many neurons to some frequencies, and things begin to go awry," said Michael Kilgard, Ph.D., associate professor of behavior and brain sciences at UT-Dallas, and a co-principal investigator on the study. "Because there are too many neurons processing the same frequencies, they are firing much stronger than they should be."

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 14863 - Posted: 01.13.2011

By Susan Milius SALT LAKE CITY — As summer heats up, the sight of blooming thistles may give male goldfinches a testosterone kick. Thistle flowers could signal to American goldfinches that the seeds the songbirds prize for baby food and parent food will soon be abundant, proposes Thomas Luloff of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. And in lab setups, male goldfinches housed among blooming Canadian thistles underwent physiological changes that indicate the birds got the “breed now” message from the combination of summery heat and thrilling thistles, Luloff reported January 6 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. What particularly impressed George Bentley of the University of California, Berkeley was that the birds “don’t eat the flower — they eat the seeds,” he says. Yet the precursor to food still appeared to have an effect. Biologists still have much to learn about what tips off birds that it’s time to breed, says Bentley, who was not part of the research project. Yet, he says, the need to understand those cues is growing as climate change threatens to knock signals out of sync. Many birds lose what they don’t use during the winter, letting hormone concentrations dwindle and reproductive organs shrink. When the breeding season returns, both males and females typically have to recharge and regrow. Much of the earlier work on breeding signals has focused on the broad role of day length or temperature, yet birds can react to other cues too. Species differ in what cues or mixes of cues rev up their breeding biology again. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14862 - Posted: 01.13.2011

by Amber Angelle Researchers have long known that laughter boosts the immune system, lowers cholesterol and blood pressure, and reduces stress. In a preliminary new study, psychoneuro-immunologist Lee Berk and his team at Loma Linda University in California show that the parallels between laughing and exercise go even further: Shifts in appetite hormones following a case of the giggles resemble the effects of a moderate session at the gym. Berk measured blood levels of ghrelin, a hunger-regulating hormone, before and after 14 study participants watched 20 minutes of humorous TV (selected from a menu including Saturday Night Live, Bill Cosby’s stand-up, and Seinfeld). He then compared the data with hormone levels recorded before and after the test subjects watched the distressing opening battle scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Regardless of the order in which they saw the clips, people’s ghrelin concentrations spiked after the funny session, “just like after a workout,” Berk says. Elevated levels of ghrelin signal the brain that the body is using energy and will soon need more fuel. Laugh therapy will not replace exercise for weight loss, then, but it could help people with conditions that cause appetite loss, such as depression and chronic pain. Berk is now studying whether laughter can also reduce inflammation associated with many illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Emotions; Obesity
Link ID: 14861 - Posted: 01.13.2011

By Belinda Luscombe Contrary to popular opinion, people who say they are still madly in love with their spouses after more than two decades are not crazy. At least, some of them aren't. And in answer to your next question, apparently they're not lying either. This is the proposition of a new study published in the December issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience that took brain scans of long-married people who claimed to still be besotted with their marital partner. The prevailing theory on romantic love is that it more or less serves the same purpose as the booster rocket in expeditions into outer space. The initial tingly can't-think-about-anything-else swooning launches the couple into orbit, but falls away after the spacecraft reaches a certain altitude, to be replaced by "companionate love," a more regulated, less passionate affection that binds two people together, bolted together with shared history and interests. (More on TIME.com: 5 Reasons to Get or Stay Married This Year) Companionate love gets a bit of a bad rap in some corners, since it can feel to some a little too much like orbiting outer space: cold, airless and seemingly interminable. But there are couples who claim more than this, who claim to still be knee-bucklingly in love with their partners, for whom the orbit is not dreary, but a wonderful journey with their North Star. One of the theories on these individuals is that they're kidding themselves, or fronting. Another is that they're mentally unhealthy, or generally obsessive.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14860 - Posted: 01.13.2011

Amy Maxmen By watching countless hours of hermaphroditic worm sex, Lukas Schärer and his wife Dita Vizoso, evolutionary biologists at the University of Basel in Switzerland and their colleagues, have discovered evidence for a theory that has eluded testing for nearly a century: sex shapes sperm. Their findings, including videos of the mating worms, are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Sperm are the most diverse of animal cells, variously adorned with tails, hairs, hooks, bristles and more. "But we don't know what any of those doodads do," says Scott Pitnick, an evolutionary biologist at Syracuse University in New York. Fertilization is not easy to observe, and predictions about the function of sperm design are even harder to test, so it took a group of transparent and rather kinky flatworms to unravel a piece of the puzzle. The creatures are simultaneous hermaphrodites: each has both male and female genitalia. The worms are about the size of a comma, but readily mate under a microscope. The heterosexual world of animal reproduction is populated primarily by males eager to mate and females more concerned with finding a superior partner, but simultaneous hermaphrodites face antagonistic desires at the same time. Flatworm species in the genus Macrostomum solve the conflict by allowing eager sex to come first, and selectivity to follow. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14859 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By David Biello In the case of traumatic brain injury—such as the bullet wound sustained by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Saturday's assault outside a Tucson supermarket that killed six people and wounded 13 others—doctors sometimes induce a coma. This effective shutdown of brain function naturally occurs only in cases of extreme trauma, so why would doctors seek to mimic it in patients, as they have with the congresswoman, already suffering from head wounds and other issues? The answer lies in the science behind general anesthesia, which some 60,000 patients undergo every day. A review paper in the December 30, 2010, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that such anesthesia is, essentially, a reversible coma. That is exactly what doctors are aiming for in the case of a true medically induced coma, often using the same drugs or extreme hypothermia induced by exposure to a cold environment to halt blood flow entirely and permit surgery on the aorta. Shutting down function can give the brain time to heal without the body performing radical triage by shutting off blood flow to damaged sections. To find out more about such medically induced comas and the reasons why doctors employ them, Scientific American spoke with anesthesiologist Emery Brown of Harvard Medical School, co-author of the NEJM review. What is a medically induced coma? So basically what happens with a medically induced coma is that you take a drug and administer it until you see a certain pattern in the monitor that follows the patient's brain waves, the EEG [electroencephalogram]. Patients with brain injuries who are in a coma have a similar pattern. If that pattern is there, then you feel comfortable that the patient is in a drug-induced coma. You are doing it so that you can hopefully protect the brain. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14858 - Posted: 01.11.2011

by Michael Bond Mystics will tell you that meditation transforms the mind and soothes the soul. But what does science have to say? MANY people see meditation as an exotic form of daydreaming, or a quick fix for a stressed-out mind. My advice to them is, try it. It's difficult, at least to begin with. On my first attempt, instead of concentrating on my breathing and letting go of anything that came to mind as instructed by my cheery Tibetan teacher, I got distracted by a string of troubled thoughts and then fell asleep. Apparently this is normal for first-timers. Experienced meditators will assure you that it is worth persisting, however. "Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering," says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. "The numerous and profound methods that Buddhism has developed over the centuries can be used and incorporated by anyone. What is needed is enthusiasm and perseverance." It all sounds very rewarding, but what does science have to say on the subject? Stories abound in the media about the transformative potential of meditative practice, but it is only in recent years that empirical evidence has emerged. In the past decade, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of experienced meditators such as Ricard as well as beginners, and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behaviour, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity. A real scientific picture of meditation is now coming together. It suggests that meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways. The studies are even starting to throw light on how meditation works. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Stress
Link ID: 14857 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Fever is common, but fever is complicated. It brings up science and emotion, comfort and calculation. As a pediatrician, I know fever is a signal that the immune system is working well. And as a parent, I know there is something primal and frightening about a feverish child in the night. So those middle-of-the-night calls from worried parents, so frequent in every pediatric practice, can be less than straightforward. A recent paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association pointed out one reason, and a longstanding discussion about parental perceptions reminds us of the emotional context. The JAMA study looked at over-the-counter medications for children, including those marketed for treating pain and fever: how they are labeled, and whether the droppers and cups and marked spoons in the packages properly reflect the doses recommended on the labels. The article concluded that many medications are not labeled clearly, that some provide no dosing instrument, and that the instruments, if included, are not marked consistently. (A dosing chart might recommend 1.5 milliliters, but the dropper has no “1.5 ml” mark.) “Basically, the main message of the paper is that the instructions on the boxes and bottles of over-the-counter medications are really confusing,” said the lead author, Dr. H. Shonna Yin of New York University Medical Center, who is a colleague of mine and an assistant professor of pediatrics. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14856 - Posted: 01.11.2011