Researchers have found a way to predict how successful a smoker will be at quitting by using an MRI scan to look for activity in a region of the brain associated with behavior change. The scans were performed on 28 heavy smokers who had joined an anti-smoking program, according to the study published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal Health Psychology. Participants were asked to watch a series of commercials about quitting smoking while a magnetic resonance imaging machine scanned their brains for activity. After each ad, subjects in the study "rated how it affected their intention to quit, whether it increased their confidence about quitting, and how much they related to the message," researchers explained. Those who showed activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during the ads were "significantly linked to reductions in smoking behavior" in the month that followed, regardless of how the people said they were affected by the ad. "What is exciting is that by knowing what is going on in someone's brain during the ads, we can do twice as well at predicting their future behavior, compared to if we only knew their self-reported estimate of how successful they would be or their intention to quit," said lead author Emily Falk. "It seems that our brain activity may provide information that introspection does not," added Falk, director of the Communication Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Michigan. 4 © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14944 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By Laura Sanders A year of moderate exercise doesn’t just bulk up muscles — it beefs up the brain, too, a new study finds. A memory center in the brain called the hippocampus shrinks a little bit each year with age, but older adults who walked routinely for a year actually gained hippocampus volume, researchers report in a study to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “I think it’s a very exciting contribution to see that walking at a fairly vigorous rate will actually affect a key structure of the brain,” says neuroscientist Carl Cotman of the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study. “So for healthy elderly, it’s good news and would hopefully encourage people to figure that exercise is worth it.” In the study, 60 adults aged 55 to 80 scaled up gradually until they walked for 40 minutes three times a week, enough to get their heart rates up. Sixty other participants did toning workouts that included weight training, yoga sessions and stretching for the same amount of time. After a year of toning, a part of these subjects’ brains called the anterior hippocampus lost a little over 1 percent of its volume. In contrast, a year of aerobic exercise led to about a 2 percent increase in anterior hippocampus volume. Study participants who got their heart rates up performed slightly better on a memory test and had higher levels of a brain-aiding molecule called BDNF, the researchers found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14943 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By Bruce Bower SAN ANTONIO — Oxytocin, a hormone with a rosy reputation for getting people to love, trust and generally make nice with one another, can get down and dirty, according to evidence presented on January 28 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This brain-altering substance apparently amplifies whatever social proclivities a person already possesses, whether positive or negative, says psychologist Jennifer Bartz of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Previous work has shown that a nasal blast of the hormone encourages a usually trusting person to become more trusting (SN Online: 5/21/08), but now Bartz and her colleagues find that it also makes a highly suspicious person more uncooperative and hostile than ever. “Oxytocin does not simply make everyone feel more secure, trusting and prosocial,” Bartz says. These new results raise concerns about plans by some researchers to administer oxytocin to people with autism and other psychiatric conditions that include social difficulties, she adds. Her team studied 14 people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and 13 volunteers with no psychiatric conditions. Symptoms of borderline personality disorder include severe insecurity about relationships, fears of abandonment and constant, needy reassurance-seeking from partners. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 14942 - Posted: 02.01.2011

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY Q. Does the body put on fat in actual layers, or does fat I accumulate now mix with body fat I’ve had for years? A. “Fat is deposited diffusely and not in layers,” said Louis J. Aronne, director of the comprehensive weight control center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “It is added to fat cells that already contain fat and expands them." If weight is gained rapidly, Dr. Aronne said, new fat cells may be made, but they do not accumulate in layers. “If subcutaneous fat stores cannot accept all the fat for genetic, medical or other reasons,” he said, “more of it winds up inside the abdomen, where it presents a greater metabolic risk because it is in the circulation of the liver.” A 2008 study in the journal Nature found that the number of fat cells in the body is set in childhood and early adolescence and stays constant even after significant weight loss, for both lean and obese people. “This explains why it’s so difficult to lose weight,” Dr. Aronne said. “When fat cells shrink, levels of a fat-cell hormone, leptin, drop faster than fat mass is reduced. This tricks the brain into thinking you’ve lost more weight than you actually have. It’s also interesting that fat cells don’t live forever, but the number somehow remains constant.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14941 - Posted: 02.01.2011

ANN CURRY, co-host: It sounds almost too incredible to imagine, doctors removing half of a person's brain so that they could live a better life . Well, that's exactly what they did to this two-year-old girl from Washington state to help her deal with a rare disorder. In a moment we're going to meet her and her parents, but first, NBC 's Miguel Almaguer has their story. MIGUEL ALMAGUER reporting: For two-year-old Katie Verdecchia , simple steps have meant great strides in her recovery. Katie was a beautiful baby and appeared to be healthy, but just a month after her parents, Maryalicia and Brian , brought their little girl home, they noticed something was wrong. Katie had a twitch in her arm, a shake in her leg. She was having seizures. Mr. BRIAN VERDECCHIA: She was seizing 25, 30 percent of the time, at -- any time she was awake. Ms. MARYALICIA VERDECCHIA: Sometimes as much as 10 minutes, you know, in length, each episode. ALMAGUER: The diagnosis, Aicardi syndrome , a rare disorder where the right and left sides of the brain don't connect. The seizures meant Katie 's brain couldn't develop. Ms. VERDECCHIA: When you're told that your child's going to be going downhill and possibly having, you know, a shorter life than eight years, you're going to do what you have to do for your child. © 2011 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14940 - Posted: 02.01.2011

by Elizabeth Pennisi Are you a worrier? Low on energy? You might be able to blame your state of mind on the bugs in your gut. Researchers studying behavior and gene activity in mice have found that these microbes appear to help shape brain development. If the findings translate to humans, they could lead to new ways to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. Twenty years ago, people would have laughed at the suggestion that gut microbes could influence brain function, says immunologist Sven Pettersson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. But in the past decade, researchers have come to appreciate that the bacteria living in and on our bodies—collectively called the human microbiome—play a role in how our bodies work, affecting everything from allergies to obesity. Pettersson began to suspect a mind-microbe link 5 years ago when he and genomicist Shugui Wang of the Genome Institute of Singapore found through gene-expression studies that gut microbes regulated the activity of a gene important to the production of serotonin, a key brain chemical. He recruited Karolinska Institute neurobiologist Rochellys Diaz Heijtz to assess behavioral differences between germ-free mice—which have been bred to lack any microbial partners—and mice with intact gut bacteria. The researchers also dissected out major regions of the brain and measured gene activity in each region in both types of animals. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 14939 - Posted: 02.01.2011

PEOPLE with busy lives don't necessarily live longer, but they might feel as if they do. Our brains use the world around us to keep track of time, and the more there is going on, the slower time feels. Brains were thought to measure time by using some kind of internal clock that generates events at a relatively regular rate. To test whether external stimuli might also play a role in our ability to process time, Misha Ahrens and Maneesh Sahani at University College London showed 20 subjects a video of either a randomly changing stimulus - statistically modelled on the way that things naturally change randomly in the world around us - or a static image, for a set period of time. When asked to judge how much time had passed, the volunteers who had been shown the moving stimulus were significantly more accurate. The subjects were also shown the video at two different speeds and asked to rate the duration of each clip. They thought both clips lasted the same amount of time, even though the faster version was shorter (Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.043). The results suggest that the brain exploits changes in visual information, when it's available, to judge time, says Sahani. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 14938 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Laura Sanders Amputees whose “sense of touch” was rerouted from their missing limbs view their prosthetic not as a tool, but as part of the body, a study to appear in Brain suggests. Such enhanced sense of ownership, scientists say, might lead to prosthetics that operate seamlessly in place of a missing limb. The new study was conducted with two arm amputees who had undergone a surgery called targeted reinnervation, in which the remaining nerve ends from the severed arm were rerouted to an area on the arm above the site of amputation. This patch of skin serves as a proxy — touching different parts of the area makes the amputee feel as though distinct parts of his or her missing arm were being touched. The research “tells us about the brain — that the brain can take this abnormal sensation and attribute it to the hand, to the arm,” says neuroscientist Steven Hsiao of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who wasn’t involved in the work. “These people are feeling something. They feel like they’re really touching something, presumably.” To create that feeling of limb ownership, or “embodiment,” researchers in Chicago led by Paul Marasco designed a pressure-sensing system for the prosthetics. Each time a sensor on the prosthetic hand detected a touch, it would send a signal to a small robot that would poke a targeted area of the reinnervated skin. Using the robot system, Marasco and his team had each subject sit at a table, with the prosthetic arm unattached but arranged in a natural position. As the subject watched a researcher touch the prosthetic hand, the robot would simultaneously press on the reinnervated skin. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 14937 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Katherine Harmon Although most people in developed countries get plenty of calories each day, their diets are often lacking in key nutrients that their bodies have evolved to expect. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as those found in fish and walnuts, are one category of crucial ingredients that the body cannot make on its own. Although these beneficial fatty acids are known to be good for heart health, researchers are just beginning to learn how omega-3s impact our brains—and by extension, our moods and behavior. Lipids are integral to the central nervous system, and as studies of statins and diabetes drugs have shown, dropping levels of some lipids can have deleterious cognitive effects. Omega-3 deficiencies specifically have been linked to mood disorders, such as depression, but the underlying neural mechanism has been subject to debate. New research in mice, published online January 30 in Nature Neuroscience, offers insights into just how dietary intake of these fatty acids might alter the brain's function. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) "Our results can now corroborate clinical and epidemiological studies which have revealed associations between an omega-3/omega-6 imbalance and mood disorders," scientists behind the new study commented in a prepared statement. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 14936 - Posted: 01.31.2011

Tiffany O'Callaghan Invasive biopsy is currently the only sure way to diagnose the degenerative neurological condition Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). But a highly sensitive assay could change that, providing a fast, accurate alternative for early diagnosis of this rare but deadly condition. In its most common form, known as sporadic CJD, the disease affects roughly one in a million people. Beginning in the 1990s, several cases of a variation of CJD known as vCJD were reported among people who had consumed beef from cows infected with another disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). The findings, published online in Nature Medicine1, also suggest that the assay — developed by microbiologist Ryuichiro Atarashi of Nagasaki University, Japan, and his team — could pave the way for the screening of broad sectors of the population. CJD is a prion disease, in which an isomer of a common protein known as the prion protein (PrP) takes on an abnormal shape and becomes an infectious variant called PrPSc. This variant is thought to trigger the subsequent malformation of other PrP proteins. Unlike their normal counterparts, PrPSc prions cannot be broken down, and instead accumulate — often clustering in brain tissue. The pockets of abnormal tissue that result cause brain tissue to develop a sponge-like appearance, and because prion conditions can be spread by affected humans or animals, the diseases are often referred to as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Humans can be affected by several such conditions, while in addition to BSE in cows, there are several other such disorders among animals, including a condition called scrapie in sheep and hamsters. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 14935 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By KATHRYN J. ZERBE, M.D. Reading is an inestimable resource in just about any undertaking, especially so when one discovers a work that performs a real service and is written with passion, accuracy and pragmatism. Such is the case with two unflinching personal narratives on eating disorders, Portia de Rossi’s “Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain” and the 25th anniversary edition of “Bulimia: A Guide to Recovery,” by Lindsey Hall and Leigh Cohn. Both works address a question that often comes up from patients with eating disorders, as well as family members, in my own office practice: “Are there any especially helpful books or resources that can assist in recovery?” Today, when the Internet is full of sites that offer more facts about how to stay obsessed with food or weight than what might be done to recover, it’s a question that’s not always easy to answer. Ms. de Rossi’s “Unbearable Lightness” (Simon & Schuster, 2010) is a mesmerizing account of the devastating psychological and physical effects of self-starvation, excessive exercise and purging. Many readers who know about the range of life-threatening medical consequences of anorexia will still be shaken by seeing the photographs — and reading the wrenching captions — of the actress when, weighing a mere 78 pounds, she collapsed and nearly died. The agony of being scrutinized daily, if not hourly, by others in one’s profession may not be the issue that resonates most deeply for those outside of the worlds of acting or dance. But every patient I have treated in practice will recognize something in the descriptions of harsh self-criticism, denial and pretense that Ms. de Rossi poignantly but realistically makes explicit in her memoir. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14934 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho — Teenagers who thought about or attempted suicide were more likely to have suffered sleep disorders in earlier years, researchers say. Idaho State University psychology professor Maria Wong, who worked on the study, said the finding should aid parents, educators and others in identifying teens at risk of harming themselves. She said adolescents are more willing to talk about sleep problems than suicidal thoughts or attempts, giving adults an opening to discuss and monitor problems that may be more serious than simply a teen's trouble falling asleep. "It's easier to broach the topic of sleep with patients, since it's easier to talk about a physical problem," said Wong, who worked with colleagues from the University of Michigan on the study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. "It's easier for them to answer questions like, 'Did you sleep well last night?' and get into why they are not sleeping well and how they are feeling lately," Wong said. The study tracked 280 boys and 112 girls from Michigan, beginning when they were ages 12 to 14 and ending when they were between 15 and 17. Participants responded to such questions as whether they had nightmares, felt tired or otherwise had trouble sleeping. They also were asked about whether they had cut or otherwise hurt themselves. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 14933 - Posted: 01.31.2011

By Jesse Bering Author’s note: The following excerpt is the Introduction to my new book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life. God came from an egg. At least, that’s how He came to me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very fancy egg. More specifically, it was an ersatz Fabergé egg decorated with colorful scenes from the Orient. Now about two dozen years before the episode I’m about to describe, somewhere in continental Europe, this particular egg was shunted through the vent of an irritable hen, pierced with a needle and drained of its yolk, and held in the palm of a nimble artist who, for hours upon hours, painstakingly hand-painted it with elaborate images of a stereotypical Asian society. The artist, who specialized in such kitsch materials, then sold the egg along with similar wares to a local vendor, who placed it carefully in the front window of a side-street souvenir shop. Here it eventually caught the eye of a young German girl, who coveted it, purchased it, and after some time admiring it in her apartment against the backdrop of the Black Forest, wrapped it in layers of tissue paper, placed it in her purse, said a prayer for its safe transport, and took it on a transatlantic journey to a middle-class American neighborhood where she was to live with her new military husband. There, in the family room of her modest new home, on a bookshelf crammed with romance novels and knickknacks from her earlier life, she found a cozy little nook for the egg and propped it up on a miniature display stand. A year or so later she bore a son, Peter, who later befriended the boy across the street, who suffered me as a tagalong little brother, the boy who, one aimless summer afternoon, would enter the German woman’s family room, see the egg, become transfixed by this curiosity, and crush it accidentally in his seven-year-old hand. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14932 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO For some genes, either the father’s version or the mother’s version is active, but not both. Which version of the gene works is determined before conception, as the sperm and egg are developing, in a process called imprinting. By mimicking that process in the lab, and turning off a gene in mice, scientists have produced a change in social dominance behavior. In laboratory tests, mice with the paternal version of the gene known as Grb10 inactivated were more aggressive in their behavior, according to new research in the journal Nature. The researchers had two methods of measuring social dominance. They found that mice with the inactive gene engaged in more social grooming, and nibbled off more fur and whiskers of other mice. Also, when two mice were placed in a tube and approached each other, mice with the inactive gene were less likely to back down and turn away. “Both males and females with the paternal gene off are adopting this socially dominant behavior,” said Andrew Ward, a geneticist with the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Bath in Britain. In natural reproduction, the paternal version of the gene is generally active, Dr. Ward said, but some mice may have a greater number of active versions than others. “We’ve shown the extreme,” he said. “But you might have a more subtle variation in how much this behavior is expressed.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14931 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic. He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life. I’ll admit I’m a skeptic. But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14930 - Posted: 01.29.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Children who sleep less than their peers may be at greater risk for abnormal blood glucose levels and other metabolic problems. Researchers studied the sleep patterns of 308 children ages 4 to 10, half of them overweight or obese. They used wrist monitors to measure their sleep time over seven days, and did blood tests for cardiovascular risk indicators like glucose, lipids, insulin and C-reactive protein. The study, published in the February issue of Pediatrics, found that obesity and abnormal blood tests were four times as common in children who slept the least, and three times as common in those who used the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during school days. “We can’t rule out that obese children first became obese and then started sleeping less,” said Dr. David Gozal, the senior author. “But it’s unlikely.” Among all children, obese or not, shorter sleep and greater variability in sleep patterns were more likely to be associated with abnormal blood tests. The researchers conclude that irregular sleep by itself may be a risk factor for metabolic problems. “We sacrifice sleep to whatever else we do,” said Dr. Gozal, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago. “But as parents we should be very attentive to preserving the treasure that is sleep — it means health for children’s brains and their bodies, their happiness and their well-being.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 14929 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Mini-strokes are thought to be fairly fleeting, often lasting a few minutes, but experiments conducted at a neuroscience lab in British Columbia paint a picture of a more lasting effect. Symptoms of mini-strokes are gone within 24 hours and no apparent lingering effects although they do heighten a person's risk of full-blown stroke in the future. They're transient, as one might infer from their formal name, transient ischemic attack. They've come and gone. Now researchers have used transcranial magnetic stimulation to examine patterns of brain activity in 13 patients who had experienced TIAs 14 to 30 days earlier, and compared them to the brain activity of 13 healthy people. Lara Boyd, a neuroscientist with the Brain Research Centre at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and the University of British Columbia, said magnetic resonance imaging might or might not reveal a little damaged area or lesion in the brain after a TIA. "But we wondered if we could maybe detect something with neurophysiology, with electro-physiology, that has previously gone unnoticed," she said in an interview. The non-invasive method involves putting a pulse of electrical current into the brain; for example, it allows scientists to measure how much current is needed to cause a motor response, such as a muscle twitch. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 14928 - Posted: 01.29.2011

by Sara Reardon Next time you have a cold, be glad you're not a messenger pigeon carrying important orders over a battlefield. Breathing through both nostrils, especially the right one, is essential to these birds' famed ability to fly away home, scientists report today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The researchers saddled a group of homing pigeons with GPS tracking devices, placed a rubber plug in either their right or left nostrils, and released them 25 miles outside of their home in Pisa, Italy. Pigeons with their left nostrils blocked had a little more trouble navigating than clear-nosed pigeons, but eventually made it home. Birds with their right nostrils blocked made it back, too, but they stopped more often and took an even more circular route than the others. The researchers believe that the birds needed time to gather more smells and construct a map based on odors in the wind. And the finding that the right nostril is the better sniffer suggests that the right and left hemispheres of bird brains have different functions. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14927 - Posted: 01.29.2011

IF TROUT in the St Lawrence seaway around Montreal, Canada, look less stressed than usual, it could be that they're chilling out on Prozac. For three months, Sébastien Sauvé at the University of Montreal exposed groups of 50 native brook trout to sewage from the city's sewage works, mixed with clean water from the St Lawrence (Chemosphere, DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere. 2010.12.026). After screening their liver, brain and muscle, they found several well-known antidepressants, including fluoxetine, better known as Prozac, and paroxetine, aka Paxil or Seroxat. Although the amounts were small - typically less than a nanogram of drug per gram of fish tissue - Sauvé warns that over time, the drugs could impact their behaviour and ecology. He and his team showed that the brain cells of fish exposed to the effluent in a Petri dish were less active than normal cells. Sauvé has not yet monitored the fish for changes in courtship or other behaviours, but says the study raises enough questions to dig further. He adds that levels of the drugs in the fish muscle were so tiny they would pose no risk to consumers. The bigger worry is whether fish health and ecology is being affected by effluent from a city where some 500 million antidepressant pills are purchased each year - a level Sauvé says is likely to be comparable with other big cities. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14926 - Posted: 01.29.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter Take a look at the short video above. See the outer ring of bubbles move up and down as it changes colour? Well, that might be what you think is happening, but take a closer look and you'll see that nothing is actually moving at all. So what's happening? This visual illusion, created by Dario Deefrag, pulls off the opposite trick to this one, which uses motion to trick our brain into seeing colours differently. But we don't know exactly why this one works. If you think you know, we'd love to hear your ideas - just post a comment below. We'll consult an illusion specialist to choose the best answer, which will receive a copy of our latest book, Why Can't Elephants Jump?. Next week, we'll (hopefully!) explain all - and bring you another cool optical illusion. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14925 - Posted: 01.29.2011