By NATALIE ANGIER In his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him. Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats are what Mr. Monson describes as the “bad kid calls,” like the one from a mother who had put her 18-month-old son down in his crib right next to a window with a Venetian blind and its old-fashioned cord. “The kid had grabbed the cord and gotten it twisted around his neck, and the mother came in and found him hanging there,” said Mr. Monson. “I’m the first one in the door, she’s in a panic, and she shoves the kid into my arms, crying, ‘Please save him, please save him!’ ” The child’s body was blue, but Mr. Monson and his fellows met parental despair with professional focus and did everything they could. “We worked on him for over an hour,” said Mr. Monson. “It’s like a state of calm. You’re so tuned in to what you’re doing, you’re not thinking about the reality of the situation.” Their best was not enough, however, and later, at the hospital, the terrible sadness settled in. As Mr. Monson filled out his report, the mother sat in the trauma room’s designated “bereavement rocking chair,” rocking her dead son, saying her goodbyes, while family members filed in and wailed at the sight. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14835 - Posted: 01.04.2011

This would be a whole lot easier—this quest for ways to improve our brain—if scientists understood the mechanisms of intelligence even half as well as they do the mechanisms of, say, muscular strength. If we had the neuronal version of how lifting weights increases strength (chemical and electrical signals increase the number of filament bundles inside muscle cells), we’d be good to go. For starters, we could dismiss claims for the brain versions of eight-second abs—claims that if we use this brain-training website or practice that form of meditation or eat blueberries or chew gum or have lots of friends, we will be smarter and more creative, able to figure out whether to do a Roth conversion, remember who gave us that fruitcake (the better to retaliate next year), and actually understand the NFL’s wild-card tiebreaker system. But what neuroscientists don’t know about the mechanisms of cognition—about what is physically different between a dumb brain and a smart one and how to make the first more like the second—could fill volumes. Actually, it does. Whether you go neuro-slumming (Googling “brain training”) or keep to the high road (searching PubMed, the database of biomedical journals, for “cognitive enhancement”), you will find no dearth of advice. But it is rife with problems. Many of the suggestions come from observational studies, which take people who do X and ask, are they smarter (by some measure) than people who do not do X? Just because the answer is yes doesn’t mean X makes you smart. People who use their gym locker tend to be fitter than those who don’t, but it is not using a gym locker that raises your aerobic capacity. Knowing the mechanisms of exercise physiology averts that error. Not knowing the mechanism of cognitive enhancement makes us sitting ducks for dubious claims, since few studies claiming that X makes people smarter invoke any plausible mechanism by which that might happen. “There are lots of quick and dirty studies of cognitive enhancement that make the news, but the number of rigorous, well-designed studies that will stand the test of time is much smaller,” says neuroscientist Peter Snyder of Brown University Medical School. “We’re sort of in the Wild West.” © 2011 Harman Newsweek LLC

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14834 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Emily Sohn Signs of impending obesity are showing up in babies as young as nine months, found one of the first studies to look at weight concerns in the first two years of life. About a third of barely crawling infants are overweight or at risk for being obese, according to the study. And weighing too much at nine months increases the chances of weighing too much in the child's early years. While no one is suggesting that parents put their infants on diets to get rid of those adorable rolls, the findings might help researchers identify kids at risk for obesity as early in life as possible. "I don't think anyone is willing to say that if your kids are overweight at nine months, they're doomed to be obese adults," said Brian Moss, a sociologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. "One of the things we're looking at is whether there are maybe life circumstances between nine months and two years that can influence the odds of a child becoming an undesirable weight." "It could be the time when people introduce table foods, the quality or quantity of table foods, or the types of things they're exposed to," he said. "It could be the type of childcare or changes in their parents' employment status. Maybe certain types of foods are more expensive. Or there might be cultural differences that we didn't look into. It's pretty complex." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14833 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Randy Dotinga -- Doctors can learn more about anesthesia, sleep and coma by paying attention to what the three have in common, a new report suggests. "This is an effort to try to create a common discussion across the fields," said review co-author Dr. Emery N. Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relationship between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce new sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?" The researchers, who compared the physical signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, report their findings in the Dec. 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. They acknowledged that anesthesia, sleep and coma are very different states in many ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of sleep resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but lapse into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, general anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians prefer to tell patients that they're "going to sleep." "They say 'sleep' because they don't want to scare patients by using the word 'coma,'" Brown said. But even anesthesiologists use the term without understanding that it's not quite accurate, he said. "On one level, we truly don't have it clear in our minds from a neurological standpoint what we're doing." © 2010 HealthDay.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14832 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Steven E. Hyman It can fairly be said that modern psychiatric diagnosis was “born” in a 1970 paper on schizophrenia. The authors, Washington University psychiatry professors Eli Robins and Samuel B. Guze, rejected the murky psychoanalytic diagnostic formulations of their time. Instead, they embraced a medical model inspired by the careful 19th-century observational work of Emil Kraepelin, long overlooked during the mid-20th-century dominance of Freudian theory. Mental disorders were now to be seen as distinct categories, much as different bacterial and viral infections produce characteristic diseases that can be seen as distinct “natural kinds.” Disorders, Robins and Guze argued, should be defined based on phenomenology: clinical descriptions validated by long-term follow-up to demonstrate the stability of the diagnosis over time. With scientific progress, they expected fuller validation of mental disorders to derive from laboratory findings and studies of familial transmission. This descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis -- based on lists of symptoms, their timing of onset, and the duration of illness -- undergirded the American Psychiatric Association’s widely disseminated and highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1980. Since then, the original “DSM-III” has yielded two relatively conservative revisions, and right now, the DSM-5 is under construction. Sadly, it is clear that the optimistic predictions of Robins and Guze have not been realized. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14831 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By Joe Churcher, Neuroscientists are examining whether political allegiances are hard-wired into people after finding evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of left-wingers. Scans of 90 students' brains at University College London (UCL) uncovered a "strong correlation" between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual's views. Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates. The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was "very surprised" by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year. It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view. Professor Rees said that although it was not precise enough to be able to predict someone's stance simply from a scan, there was "a strong correlation that reaches all our scientific tests of significance". ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14830 - Posted: 12.29.2010

A multinational research team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health has found that a genetic variant of a brain receptor molecule may contribute to violently impulsive behavior when people who carry it are under the influence of alcohol. A report of the findings, which include human genetic analyses and gene knockout studies in animals, appears in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature. "Impulsivity, or action without foresight, is a factor in many pathological behaviors including suicide, aggression, and addiction," explains senior author David Goldman, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). "But it is also a trait that can be of value if a quick decision must be made or in situations where risk-taking is favored." In collaboration with researchers in Finland and France, Dr. Goldman and colleagues studied a sample of violent criminal offenders in Finland. The hallmark of the violent crimes committed by individuals in the study sample was that they were spontaneous and purposeless. "We conducted this study in Finland because of its unique population history and medical genetics," says Dr. Goldman. "Modern Finns are descended from a relatively small number of original settlers, which has reduced the genetic complexity of diseases in that country. Studying the genetics of violent criminal offenders within Finland increased our chances of finding genes that influence impulsive behavior."

Keyword: ADHD; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14829 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Tim Wall When someone starts getting a little too sloshed at a New Year's Eve party, you can tell them to stop acting like an animal, literally. Many animals seem to enjoy getting a good buzz on just as much as humans. In fact, some animals may have introduced humans to a number of drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms, alcohol, caffeine, and cocaine. Even the legend behind Santa's flying reindeer may have its roots in a psychedelic experience. Reindeer are known to feed on the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), then stumble about, twitching and making strange noises. The mushrooms contain the hallucinogen muscimol. It is unknown whether the reindeer also enjoy listening to eight hours of Grateful Dead recordings while playing with glow-in-the-dark objects. Humans can trip on fly agaric mushrooms as well, but the fungi can also be poisonous. Long ago, people noticed that the reindeer's bodies filter out the toxins, leaving only the hallucinogen. So reindeer herders in the far north learned to collect the urine from mushroom-munching reindeer. The llamas of Peru may have introduced the people of South America to the use of coca leaves about 7000 years ago. Legend holds that the llamas ate coca leaves when their normal foods were unavailable, wrote Haynes. The llama herder, like Khaldi the goatherd, noticed the friskiness of his animals after they partook. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 14828 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By ASHLEE VANCE CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Dr. Jeff Lichtman likes his brains sliced thin — very, very thin. Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind. The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored. They want to find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person. “You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.” The task is arduous and years from fruition, and even the biggest zealots acknowledge that their work may not pay off. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14827 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland Love is celebrated as a many-splendored thing, while lust is commonly regarded as downright primitive. Leave it to a Frenchwoman to discover that sexual desire is actually quite brainy. Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, uses brain scans to examine the divine madness of love and the blinding imperative of lust. Her goal: illuminating how these two forms of attraction work by mapping out which brain regions are active when we experience them. Her findings counter the assumption that desire is a simple animal urge motivated primarily by biochemistry and evolutionary directives. Working with her frequent collaborator, psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, Ortigue has found that lust involves complicated cognitive processing. Love, too, is not quite what we thought. Both romance and desire, she says, may be expressions of a “top-down” process in which intellect rules over instinct, not the other way around. Love may even make you smarter, by helping your brain process information more quickly. Why do you study the neuroscience of love and sex? I’ve always been interested in the big questions of science, and love is one of the biggest questions in the world. Everyone feels it, knows what it is, but we can’t really define it. I like challenges, and I like to bring some rationality to things that seem irrational. Also, I’ve always been interested in the unconscious and consciousness and how the two interact in our daily life. We’ve found that a lot of unconscious processes are involved in love and desire. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14826 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Carl Zimmer When Charles Darwin listened to music, he asked himself, what is it for? Philosophers had pondered the mathematical beauty of music for thousands of years, but Darwin wondered about its connection to biology. Humans make music just as beavers build dams and peacocks show off their tail feathers, he reasoned, so music must have evolved. What drove its evolution was hard for him to divine, however. “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed,” Darwin wrote in 1871. Today a number of scientists are trying to solve that mystery by looking at music right where we experience it: in the brain. They are scanning the activity that music triggers in our neurons and observing how music alters our biochemistry. But far from settling on a single answer, the researchers are in a pitched debate over music. Some argue that it evolved in our ancestors because it allowed them to have more children. Others see it as merely a fortunate accident of a complex brain. In many ways music appears to be hardwired in us. Anthropologists have yet to discover a single human culture without its own form of music. Children don’t need any formal training to learn how to sing and dance. And music existed long before modern civilization. In 2008 archaeologists in Germany discovered the remains of a 35,000-year-old flute. Music, in other words, is universal, easily learned, and ancient. That’s what you would expect of an instinct that evolved in our distant ancestors. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 14825 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Paul Raeburn Lithium is as puzzling as it is potent. It was the first drug used to treat mental illness, and more than 50 years later, it is still one of the most widely used psychiatric medications. But the doctors who prescribe lithium to their patients still do not know how it works or even why it works. “It is the most mysterious drug in psychiatry,” says De-Maw Chuang, a biologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. “It’s so small, but it is so powerful.” Unlike other psychoactive chemicals—large, complex molecules like Prozac (fluoxetine) or Abilify (aripiprazole)—lithium is extremely simple. It is an element, the lightest of the metals, and its chemical properties are similar to those of the sodium in table salt. Nonetheless, researchers have recently found that lithium could be something close to a psychiatric wonder drug. It has two remarkable powers in the brains of mentally ill patients: protecting neurons from damage and death and alleviating existing damage by spurring new nerve cell growth. Far beyond its current application as a mood stabilizer, lithium could be helpful in treating or preventing Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, stroke, glaucoma, Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and Huntington’s disease—an impressive tally that earned it the nickname “the aspirin of the brain” in the journal Nature. The mood-stabilizing powers of lithium were discovered by accident in the 1940s by John F. J. Cade, a lone psychiatrist working in Melbourne, Australia. Cade had noticed that some substance in the urine of patients with mania was particularly toxic and was investigating uric acid as the potential culprit. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14824 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By Stephen Smith You could resolve to exercise more (although that home treadmill makes such a lovely clothes rack). You could resolve to eat less (right after polishing off that piping-hot sticky bun). Or, with the bright promise of a new year aborning, you could . . . curl up in bed and sleep your way to a healthier you — although that might require abandoning those Calvinist impulses that sleep is the refuge of the slothful. “Making a resolution to sleep more is almost antithetical to what New Year’s resolutions are about,’’ said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Many people don’t realize that by sleeping more, they can achieve so many of those things, and it’s actually pleasant.’’ But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. Many Americans’ lives read like the “Legend of Hollow Sleep.’’ An annual survey, conducted by a polling agency for the National Sleep Foundation and evaluated by university-affiliated specialists, found that most people feel well-rested only a few times a week and that many of us trudge along with fewer than seven hours of sleep, less than what’s considered optimal for most adults. Sometimes, fitful sleep is evidence of a serious medical condition such as sleep apnea, a disruptive disorder tied to erratic or shallow breathing while slumbering. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14823 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Nic Fleming Breastfeeding improves later academic performance in boys but appears to have no such effect in girls. Wendy Oddy at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Subiaco, Western Australia, and colleagues, examined whether having been breastfed affected the test scores of over 1000 10-year-olds. Studies have suggested that children who were breastfed have higher IQs than those who were not, but few separated out boys and girls. Mothers who breastfeed are on average wealthier and more educated, so Oddy's team accounted for these factors. Boys who were mainly breastfed for at least six months scored 9 per cent higher in mathematics and writing tests, 7 per cent higher in spelling and 6 per cent higher in reading, compared with boys fed with formula milk or breastfed for shorter periods. There were no significant differences in results for girls. "We know that breast milk contains the optimal nutrients for development of the brain and central nervous system," says Oddy, but the gender differences were surprising. Oddy points out that other studies have suggested boys are more vulnerable to stress and adversity during critical periods of brain development. She speculates this could be because girls seem to be protected by higher levels of oestrogen during childhood. She says the improved academic performance of boys could be explained by oestrogen in breast milk having similar neuro-protective effects. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14822 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Rachael Rettner Too much fried fish may contribute to the high rate of stroke in America's "stroke belt," according to a new study. The results showed that people living in the stroke belt — including residents of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana — were about 30 percent more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish every week than those living in the rest of the country, the researchers said. And blacks who are known to have an increased risk of stroke regardless of where they live, were more than 3.5 times more likely to eat two or more servings of fried fish per week than whites. Inhabitants of the stroke belt are 20 percent more likely to die from stroke than those living in the rest of the country. And those in the stroke "buckle" — an area of the stroke belt that includes the coastal plains of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — are 40 percent more likely to die from stroke, said study researcher Fadi Nahab of Emory University in Atlanta. Fried fish, Nahab said, may be contributing to these racial and geographic disparities. MyHealthNewsDaily Copyright © 2010.

Keyword: Stroke; Obesity
Link ID: 14821 - Posted: 12.27.2010

Janelle Weaver How many friends do you have? A rough answer can be predicted by the size of a small, almond-shaped brain structure that is present in a wide range of vertebrates, scientists report today in Nature Neuroscience. The researchers studied the amygdala, which is involved in inter-personal functions such as interpreting emotional facial expressions, reacting to visual threats and trusting strangers. Inter-species comparisons in non-human primates have previously shown that amygdala volume is associated with troop size, suggesting that the brain region supports skills necessary for a complex social life1. On the basis of these past findings, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, wondered whether a larger amygdala size allows some humans to build a richer social world. Barrett's team measured the amygdala volume in 58 healthy adults using brain images gathered during magnetic resonance imaging sessions. To construct social networks, the researchers asked the volunteers how many people they kept in regular contact with, and how many groups those individuals belonged to. They found that participants who had bigger and more complex social networks had larger amygdala volumes. This effect did not depend on the age of the volunteers or their own perceived social support or life satisfaction, suggesting that happiness is not the underlying causal factor that links the size of this brain structure in an individual to their number of friends2. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14820 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Martin Enserink Confronted with a patient suffering from pain or a chronic disease for which no drugs are effective, doctors sometimes prescribe a sugar pill or vitamin. Although these "medications" have no active ingredients, patients often feel better. It's called the "placebo effect," and most scientists would say that it works only if the patient doesn't know the pill is fake. But a new clinical trial shows that patients can get better on a placebo even if they know the truth. "It's a fascinating, innovative, and important study," says Klaus Linde, who studies complementary and alternative medicine at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. Lead author Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School in Boston says he set up the trial in part because doctors seem to be struggling with the placebo problem. In a survey among 1200 internists and rheumatologists that Kaptchuk and others published in 2008, roughly half of participants admitted having prescribed placebos. Sometimes, these were truly inactive pills, but very often, they were "impure placebos": vitamins, over-the-counter pain killers, antibiotics, or even sedatives that the physicians believed had no specific action on the disease but might provide a placebo benefit. Few were upfront with the patients about this, the study showed: Many described the treatment as "a medicine not typically used for your condition that might benefit you,” or words to that effect. That kind of mild deception is widely considered unethical, says Kaptchuk. It also may be unnecessary, according to the new study. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Depression
Link ID: 14819 - Posted: 12.27.2010

by Allison Bohac Most people know how hard it can be to stick to a diet. But for children with epilepsy, maintaining a restrictive high-fat, low-carbohydrate regimen known as the ketogenic diet is far more difficult than any weight-loss plan. Someday, however, they may be able to control seizures with a simple supplement instead, if a new finding in mice holds up in humans. Almost a third of epilepsy patients, many of them children, don't respond to antiseizure drugs. For reasons that are not well understood, the ketogenic diet can prevent seizures for some of these children. But it's by no means an easy fix. Patients need to eat 80% to 90% of their daily calories as fat, usually in the form of vegetable oil or butter. Only some versions of the diet allow any carbohydrates at all, and sugary desserts are off-limits. "Eating a cookie can break the effect of the diet, resulting in a seizure," explains Karin Borges, a neurobiologist at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in Australia. Hoping to design a more palatable alternative to the ketogenic diet, Borges and her colleagues began experimenting with a synthetic oil often found in antiwrinkle creams and other cosmetics. The compound, called triheptanoin, is already used to treat certain metabolic disorders; researchers believe it works because it replenishes specific molecules needed to produce the energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Borges reasoned that these metabolites, which are also the building blocks for certain chemical messengers in the brain, might be depleted by the flurry of brain activity that occurs during a seizure. Lower ATP levels in the brain can destabilize neurons, triggering more seizures. Borges hoped that a diet supplemented with triheptanoin would replenish the brain's supply of metabolites and boost ATP production, helping to control epileptic bursts. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 14818 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Nathan Seppa Epilepsy that strikes in childhood and lingers into adulthood triples an individual’s risk of dying, researchers find. But children who “outgrow” epilepsy and see their seizures fade as adults don’t have this added mortality risk, researchers report in the Dec. 23 New England Journal of Medicine. The findings, from a 40-year study in Finland, provide a long-term look that doctors can use as they puzzle over whether to recommend surgery for patients or continue with medication, says neurologist David Ficker of the University of Cincinnati, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We probably should be treating epilepsy aggressively in people who aren’t seizure-free,” he says. Doctors tracked the fate of 245 children diagnosed with epilepsy in the early 1960s. Half of the patients had epilepsy stemming from no clear cause and were neurologically normal, apart from having seizures. The other half had a clear epilepsy trigger, such as severe head trauma, brain injury from meningitis or encephalitis, or other brain damage that was identifiable on scans such as magnetic resonance imaging. All the patients got checkups every five years until 2002. By then, 60 had died, a rate three times the average for people in Finland of comparable age, ranging up to 54 years. Of those 60 deaths, 51 occurred in the 107 patients who were still having seizures. Only five occurred in the 35 who had been in remission for five years or more with the help of medication, and four deaths occurred in the 103 people whose seizures had been in remission for that long without medication. Overall, 33 deaths were tied to epilepsy. The other deaths were mainly due to pneumonia and heart disease. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14817 - Posted: 12.27.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg Even if your baby is very smart, he probably can’t read your mind — he might not even know you have one. New research suggests that infants as young as 7 months are sensitive to the perspectives of others. But more work is needed to demonstrate whether babies fully grasp that others have their own beliefs. The new study, published December 24 in Science, adds to a large body of research exploring when humans first develop the capacity to infer the intentions and perspectives of others, a cognitive ability termed “theory of mind.” Scientists have long debated whether this is an innate ability or one that is arrived at as a young brain gathers information and experience. Previous research suggested that kids can’t distinguish between what other people believe is going on from what is actually going on until the age of 4 or 5. This developmental milestone was explored in classic experiments where children see a boy, Maxie, put chocolate into a kitchen drawer. Maxie then leaves, and someone else comes in and moves the chocolate to a cupboard. Then Maxie comes back inside and wants his chocolate. The children are asked where Maxie will go: the drawer, where he thinks the chocolate is, or the cupboard, where it really is. Young 3-year-olds say Maxie will go to the drawer, says cognitive development specialist Josef Perner of the University of Salzburg, who conducted the Maxie experiments in the early 1980s. “It’s only around 4 or 5 that children realize he doesn’t act according to how the world is, but acts according to his inner world.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14816 - Posted: 12.27.2010