Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego Glowing visions of light that emanate from a person's body, often seen by those claiming to be psychic, really do exist, for some people at least. That's the tantalising conclusion of a study on a new form of emotion-colour synaesthesia which projects itself as coloured auras. Other forms of synaesthesia include numbers and letters that evoke colours, touch that evokes emotions and colours with their own fragrances. Now, Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, have identified a new type of synaesthesia in a man whose emotions give rise to colours, which can take the form of auras surrounding other people. The synaesthete in question, anonymously called RF, is a 23 year-old male who has a mild form of autism called Asperger's syndrome. At the age of 10, RF's mum told him to try to match a colour with each of his emotions in an effort to aid his previous inability to identify and communicate his emotions. Having followed her advice, RF soon reported actually seeing the colours in his mind when he felt different emotions. This evolved over a number of years until he described experiencing "auras of colour" around other people depending on the emotion he related to them. He says that everyone's aura is blue to begin with, and changes as soon as he associates a particular emotion with them. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14678 - Posted: 11.16.2010

Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego This weekend I was shown how a virtual reality piano has helped people who have had a stroke regain movement in their limbs. This game, and others like it, aid the functional reorganisation of the brain and could pave the way for faster improvements in stroke therapy. Soha Saleh, at the New Jersey Institute of Techonology, and colleagues used a robotic glove, together with various video games, to train four volunteers who had suffered stroke and lost near-total movement of their upper limbs. The four subjects were trained for 3 hours a day over 8 days. Each training session involved making finger and hand movements with the aid of a robotic glove which gave a small amount of support to volunteers' mobility, such as holding groups of fingers together so that the volunteer could concentrate on moving just one. The volunteers were instructed on what movements to perform by playing computer games involving stacking items on a shelf or playing tunes on a piano. Their movements were transmitted into the video game to provide immediate visual feedback. The subjects were tested for breadth of movement and questioned on their ability to perform everyday tasks before and after the training sessions. All four participants showed improvements in movement after the task, with an average improvement of 24 per cent in tasks such as reaching for ones nose. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke; Regeneration
Link ID: 14677 - Posted: 11.16.2010

Helen Thomson, What happens in the female brain during an orgasm? It certainly doesn't lie back and think of England, as the saying goes. In fact there's rather a lot going on, according to a study on women who volunteered to stimulate themselves to orgasm while having their brains scanned. Knowing what goes on in the brain during orgasm won't just help women who are unable to reach sexual climax: it could also have implications for depression, pain, even obesity. So says Barry Komisaruk, from Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, who's here this week at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting to present a video which shows for the first time what goes on inside a woman's brain during an orgasm. And as many men have long suspected - it's complicated. More than 30 areas of the brain are active during the event, including those involved in touch, memory, reward - and even pain. "Knowing the sequence of events from stimulation to orgasm allows us to see what parts of the brain become activated and in what order. If we can compare this to the brain activity in anorgasmic women, we can see at what point their orgasm gets blocked and work out whether it's possible to get around that block," Komisaruk says. To get his results, Komisaruk somehow persuaded nine women to stimulate themselves to orgasm while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI machine. Taking snapshots of activity throughout the event allowed Komisaruk and his colleagues to create a 3D video of the spread of activity around the brain during an orgasm. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14676 - Posted: 11.16.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO One of the keys to the keen ability of bats to process sound is that the neurons in a bat’s brain work as a team to convey the importance of certain signals — like an anger call or a distress call — while diminishing the effect of less-important sounds, researchers at the Georgetown University Medical Center reported this past weekend in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. “It’s like a basketball team,” said Bridget Queenan, a neuroscientist involved in the study. “There are neurons in the brain with these roles — like five guys on the court.” In different instances, depending on the particular signal that urgently needs to be processed, the neurons act in different ways. For example, it could be that “one neuron processes the sound, another ‘shushes’ nearby neurons, and another helps boost the first neuron’s activity,” Ms. Queenan said. She and her colleagues studied the bats by inserting electrodes into their brains and recording their neural activity after a series of tones and calls. They used this to identify how individual neurons responded to calls in various instances, like when it was noisy or quiet. “So now we start to see a little a bit how these players are working together in a specific context,” she said. “It’s as if we get snapshots of a game at different points of action.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 14675 - Posted: 11.16.2010

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Jane Goodall went to the Gombe Stream Reserve near Lake Tanganyika in East Africa when she was 26. By living among the animals and quietly recording their interactions, she was able to show that the chimp world included love, hate, fear, jealousy, tool use, brutality, even warfare. I spoke with Dr. Goodall last month at Western Connecticut State College, where she was giving a lecture, and then later by telephone. A condensed version of the conversations follows: Q. In July you celebrated the 50th anniversary of your first trip to Gombe Stream Reserve. When you arrived there in 1960, could you have imagined the life that lay ahead? A. Of course not. I was a young girl, straight from England, more or less, no degree of any sort, and Louis Leakey was giving me this amazing opportunity to live with the animal most like us. There’d been no long-term studies of great apes. The longest had been George Schaller, with mountain gorillas, and he’d stayed a year. I think Louis Leakey thought the study might last 10 years. But at 26, I thought perhaps three. And then the more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn — until I couldn’t stop. Q. So you got to Gombe, and very soon, you observed something astounding: Chimpanzees used tools to fish for ants. A. I went in July. And tool-making was toward the end of October. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14674 - Posted: 11.16.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Marijuana smoking often starts during adolescence — and the timing could not be worse, a new study suggests. Young adults who started using the drug regularly in their early teens performed significantly worse on cognitive tests assessing brain function than did subjects who were at least 16 when they started smoking, scientists reported on Monday. The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, led researchers at McLean Hospital to surmise that the developing teenage brain may be particularly vulnerable to the ill effects of marijuana. “We have to understand that the developing brain is not the same as the adult brain,” said Dr. Staci A. Gruber, the paper’s senior author and director of the cognitive and clinical neuroimaging section of the neuroimaging center at McLean, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Belmont, Mass. The study, done in conjunction with brain scans, was small, consisting of 35 chronic marijuana smokers who were 22 years old on average. Twenty had started smoking marijuana regularly before age 16, while 15 started smoking regularly at age 16 or later. All had similar levels of education and income. The subjects were asked to complete an assessment of executive function — the brain processes responsible for planning and abstract thinking, as well as understanding rules and inhibiting inappropriate actions. The test — in which participants were asked to sort cards with different shapes, numbers and colors — is a measure of cognitive flexibility, the ability to stay focused, stick to rules and control impulsive responses. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14673 - Posted: 11.16.2010

By Kay Lazar WESTMINSTER — Bruce Vincent works his way up and down the aisles of the grocery store he has owned for two decades, methodically unpacking crates of food, stocking shelves, and breaking down the empty cartons. Midway down aisle 2, Vincent hesitates, unsure where the fudge-coated peanut butter cookies go. The redesigned package throws him, so he tucks them amid crackers on the top shelf and continues down the row. On closer inspection, Vincent has left behind a trail of similar mismatches, which his 26-year-old son, Brian, now the boss, wearily but discreetly fixes. Used to be, the elder Vincent would gently correct the mistakes of his son, who started sweeping floors and stocking shelves at Vincent’s Country Store when he was 10 years old. That was before Alzheimer’s disease. At 48, with a face still wrinkle-free, Bruce Vincent is starting to forget things he has long known — how to stock shelves, how to make change at the cash register, how to read a digital clock. A casual acquaintance probably wouldn’t notice anything amiss, because he often obscures his forgetfulness with quick one-liners. But his family sees it. Just last year, Vincent was named businessman of the year in this Central Massachusetts town of about 7,000. Now his wife and three grown children are confronting uncomfortable, agonizing decisions no family should face so soon: Is it safe for Bruce to drive? Will he have to stop working at his own store? © 2010 NY Times Co

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14672 - Posted: 11.16.2010

By Joseph C. Franklin What do you do when you’re stressed out? Talk to friends? Listen to music? Have a drink, or eat some ice cream? Or maybe practice yoga? These things are all pleasant options, and they’re obvious, effective ways to deal with stress. Chances are that you would not even think about doing something like, say, cutting your arm with a knife until you draw blood. Yet inflicting pain is exactly what millions of Americans – particularly adolescents and young adults – do to themselves when they’re stressed. This is called nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), and it most commonly takes the form of cutting or burning the skin. Traditionally, many doctors, therapists, and family members have believed that people engage in NSSI primarily to manipulate others. However, recent research has found that such social factors only motivate a minority of cases and usually represent cries for help rather than coldhearted attempts to exploit caretakers. Although there are many reasons why people engage in this kind of self-injury, the most commonly reported reason is simple, if seemingly odd: to feel better. Several studies support the claim that self-inflicted pain can lead to feeling better. For example, Schmahl and colleagues scanned the brains of people with a history of NSSI during a painful experimental task designed to mimic NSSI. They found that the pain led to decreased activity in the areas of the brain associated with negative emotion. The reality of this effect provokes a perplexing question: How could self-inflicted pain possibly lead to feeling better? One possible answer to this question is that some people are simply hard-wired to like pain. Although NSSI is associated with an increased pain threshold and tolerance, people who engage in NSSI still report feeling pain and, furthermore, report that this pain is unpleasant. Moreover, if these people are hard-wired to like pain, it is unclear why they primarily engage in NSSI when stressed or why they stick to moderate self-injury (e.g., cutting the skin) rather than severe self-injury (e.g., limb amputation). © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 14671 - Posted: 11.16.2010

People who are overweight have a greater sense of smell for food, a study has found. Researchers from the University of Portsmouth say their early findings may go towards explaining why some people struggle to stay slim. Experts already know that part of the brain that processes information about odour is also connected to the feeding centres of the brain. The latest research is published in the journal Chemical Senses. In the UK, a quarter of adults are obese and doctors fear that the incidence will only rise in the future as more and more people continue to pile on excess weight. While too much food and too little exercise may be largely to blame, scientists have been searching for the underlying causes driving the obesity epidemic. To this end, Dr Lorenzo Stafford and his team set out to study if a skewed sense of smell could be partly to blame. His team asked 64 volunteers to take part in a series of experiments that tested their smelling ability. Their study found that people appear to be slightly better at smelling food odours after they have eaten rather than when they are hungry. BBC © MMX

Keyword: Obesity; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 14670 - Posted: 11.15.2010

By Joan Raymond Jean Snyder says she isn't afraid of spiders, snakes or even dentists. But she is scared of one little thing: a GPS breakdown. "When it comes to finding my way, I've become a GPS zombie," says Snyder, a 47-year-old office manager in Highland Heights, Ohio."I'm sure I'm not doing my brain any favors." Snyder might be on to something. Three studies by McGill University researchers presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on Sunday show that the way we navigate the world today may indeed affect just how well our brains function as we age — particularly the hippocampus, which is linked to memory. Generally, to find our way, we rely on one of two strategies: The first is a so-called spatial navigation strategy, in which we build cognitive maps using things like landmarks as visual cues that not only help us determine where we are at a given point in space, but also help us plan where we need to go. Or, we navigate by using a stimulus-response strategy, a kind of auto-pilot mode in which we turn left and right because, after some repetition, that's the most efficient way to get from A to B. If you have GPS, that uber-strategy of stimulus-response may seem quite familiar. © 2010 msnbc.com.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14669 - Posted: 11.15.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor The mystery of why some people stay thin without effort while others have continually to fight off the fat has come significantly closer to being solved with a study showing that a single gene can affect appetite. Scientists have found convincing evidence to support the idea that the "fat gene" affects how hungry someone feels, which has a direct effect on how much food is eaten and how much fat is accumulated in the body. The study was carried out on genetically modified mice with several copies of the fat gene added to their DNA. The scientists said the findings support the idea that the gene in humans plays a direct role in determining whether someone is likely to become obese. In Britain, about one in five people are classed as clinically obese. Women are affected more than men, with a third of women and half of men classified as overweight, which carries an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Three years ago, scientists found that variants of the FTO gene are linked with a 70 per cent increased risk of developing obesity, with people carrying two copies of one gene variant being on average 3kg (6.6lb) heavier than people carrying alternative variants of the gene. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14668 - Posted: 11.15.2010

Michael Posner Has the Western world succumbed to the disease of scientism – a misguided belief in the infallibility of science? So says philosopher Peter Hacker, emeritus research fellow at Oxford's St. John's College. In a recent interview with TPM Online, the website of The Philosophers' Magazine, Mr. Hacker – a leading authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein – says scientism “pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that, if there's a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all.” This prevailing scientism, he continues “is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience … people nattering on what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.” Mr. Hacker's remarks form part of a larger critique of how neuroscience is grappling with human consciousness, the great divide for philosophers and scientists. Consciousness, of course, is one of the great, unsolved conundrums of modern science. Where, if anywhere, does awareness reside? How, if at all, can it be explained? Is the mind separate from its body? Or does everything, ultimately, reduce to biochemistry and quantum physics, including our private, inner-most experiences of the world? © Copyright 2010 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14667 - Posted: 11.15.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Many of the mutations that cause brain disorders are not inherited, new research on the genetics of mental retardation suggests, but are rare DNA variants that pop up for the first time in affected people. A study published online November 14 in Nature Genetics highlights the importance of rare genetic variants in causing disease, and shows that disrupting even one copy of certain genes can have profound consequences for brain development and mental abilities, says James Lupski, a clinical geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In the new study, researchers led by Joris Veltman, a human geneticist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in the Netherlands, searched the genomes of 10 people with mental retardation looking for the cause of the disorder. Scientists have recently shown that during sperm production, big chunks of DNA can get lost or duplicated, leading to diseases or disorders in a man’s offspring. The problem gets worse as men age. About 15 percent of mental retardation cases are associated with these missing or repeated chunks of DNA, Veltman says. But the people in the study didn’t have any of these problems. The researchers wondered if the patients might have new mutations that change single DNA letters instead of disrupting big chunks of genetic material. To find out, the team searched the protein-producing parts of the genomes of the 10 patients and their parents. On average, the researchers found 21,755 different genetic variants in each person, with about 100 new mutations per generation, Veltman says. Then a variety of techniques helped to whittle the catalog down to just those mutations that were present in patients but not their parents, and that were likely to have functional significance. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14666 - Posted: 11.15.2010

By Laura Sanders SAN DIEGO — Presented with a choice between cocaine and food, female rats choose the drug while male rats go for the grub, a new study finds. The result may help clarify differences in addiction between men and women, scientists reported November 14 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. Kerry Kerstetter of the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues trained rats to press one lever to receive food or a separate lever to receive cocaine. Later, the rats were presented with the food lever and the cocaine lever at the same time. At the time of the choice, all of the rats were hungry, so they should have been motivated to choose the food. Male rats clearly preferred the food. But female rats chose the cocaine over the food about half of the time. “Females and males seem to be very different when it comes to the incentive value of cocaine,” Kerstetter said. When the researchers more than doubled the dose of cocaine delivered with each lever push, male rats grew more likely to choose the cocaine. But females still edged them out for cocaine craving, choosing cocaine about 75 to 80 percent of the time compared with less than 50 percent of the time for the males. “I think these comparisons with the sex differences are particularly interesting,” says neuroscientist Ralph DiLeone of the Yale University School of Medicine. “People have noticed these differences with drug addiction, and it starts to make sense to incorporate the food intake, because these drug systems evolved for feeding.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 14665 - Posted: 11.15.2010

Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego When told I was being sent to the world's biggest neuroscience conference, I knew I would meet a lot of interesting people, but a five-time Oscar nominee wasn't what I was expecting. Yet here I am in San Diego at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting listening to Glenn Close - famous for her roles as scheming aristocrat in Dangerous Liaisons and psychotic stalker in Fatal Attraction - call for science and society to work together to change the stigmas attached to mental illness. Close is well-known for having had a successful acting career. "I'm still pissed off that I had to chuck Robert Redford out of my apartment," she tells us. Yet today she defines herself not as an actress but as a series of numbers. It is her genome sequence that takes pride of place on the big screen this morning - a picture she says clearly shows she is "fabulous, sexy, and divinely complex". The real reason Close is opening this year's conference is down to her family ties to mental disease. Her sister and nephew suffer from biopolar and schizoaffective disorder respectively, which encouraged Close to launch BringChange2Mind, a not-for-profit organisation which helps to provide information about mental illness. A highlight of her speech was an interlude by nephew Calen Pick who spoke of trying to "get into the real world" while struggling with his disorder. "At my lowest point I knew I was Jesus and the psychological examinations I was taking were just a test to see if I was God or the devil," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14664 - Posted: 11.15.2010

By Laura Sanders PEEK-A-BOOA new retinal prosthetic creates an image (middle) that more accurately reconstructs a baby's face (left) than the standard approach (right).S. Nirenberg SAN DIEGO — A new type of prosthetic eye may someday allow blind people to seamlessly see the broad sweep of an ocean or the dimples in a baby’s face. The approach, presented November 13 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may benefit the estimated 25 million people worldwide who have lost sight due to retinal diseases. “This is a spectacular example of what we all hoped to be able to do,” said Jonathan Victor, a computational systems neuroscientist who was not involved in the new work. “It’s a solution to an abstract problem” that could be useful in many kinds of systems. Sheila Nirenberg and Chethan Pandarinath, both of Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, tested their new retinal prosthetic in blind mice and found that it allowed the mice to see a baby’s face. Current prosthetics are limited to reproducing simple features, such as bright spots or edges, but miss much of a scene. Many scientists are intent on boosting the retinal prosthetics’ power, so that the message from the artificial eye to the brain is stronger. But Nirenberg’s work suggests that a second, underappreciated area is also important: the pattern of cell activity in the retina, something she called “a big problem lurking in the background.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 14663 - Posted: 11.15.2010

Melissa Dahl Terrible jokes? Or a sign of a brain disorder? Actually, sometimes it's hard to tell. Witzelsucht (the Germans just have the best words for everything, don't they?) is a brain dysfunction that causes all sorts of compulsive silliness: bad jokes, corny puns, wacky behavior. It's also sometimes called the "joking disease," and as Taiwanese researchers phrased it in a 2005 report, it's a "tendency to tell inappropriate and poor jokes." We've covered all sorts of strange disorders of the mind in earlier Body Odd posts: one disorder makes you believe your loved ones are strangers, another convinces you that your hand has taken on a life of its own. Now, we give you a brain disorder that actually causes a poor sense of humor. It's a symptom of an injury to the right frontal lobe, which could be caused by brain trauma or a stroke, tumor, infection or a degenerative disease. "Patients who have disease of the left frontal lobe often are sad, anxious and depressed," explains Dr. Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. "In contrast ... patients with right-hemisphere disease often (appear) indifferent or euphoric and have inappropriate jocularity." Heilman says he sees several cases of Witzelsucht each year. "One of the most dramatic cases (that I've seen) appeared to be attracted to my reflex hammer," Heilman says. "After I checked his deep tendon reflexes and put my hammer down, he picked up the hammer and started to check my reflexes, while giggling." © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Emotions; Stroke
Link ID: 14662 - Posted: 11.13.2010

By Katherine Harmon Misapprehension of statistics and scientific process has been even more apparent in the misunderstandings surrounding vaccines and the onset of autism. Given the age at which children receive immunizations and that at which many cases of regressional autism manifest themselves (in which a seemingly normally developing child suddenly loses much of the ability to communicate as well as other acquired functions), "by chance alone" there will be a lot of children who regress at some point after getting their scheduled vaccines, Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety specialist at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said here on Tuesday. As he pointed out, however, "temporality is insufficient to show causality." But underlying—and perhaps highlighted by—this "logical fallacy," he explained, is a frequent hang-up of science communication: the devil is in the details, and the details can be complicated (and not too catchy) to explain. When former Jenny McCarthy, an advocate of the vaccine-autism link, goes on CNN's Larry King Live and says, "'Vaccines cause autism,' that's a very clear, simple message," Salmon noted. Most respected scientific bodies, however, are not prone to such blanket statements. In a 2004 report essentially dismissing the assertion that vaccines cause autism, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) was notably more measured than McCarthy, concluding that "based on this body of evidence, the committee concludes that the evidence favors a rejection of a causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism…" © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14661 - Posted: 11.13.2010

By Bruce Bower A wandering mind often stumbles downhill emotionally. People spend nearly half their waking lives thinking about stuff other than what they’re actually doing, and these imaginary rambles frequently feel bad, according to a new study that surveyed volunteers at random times via their iPhones. People’s minds wander at least 30 percent of the time during all activities except sex, say graduate student Matthew Killingsworth and psychologist Daniel Gilbert, both of Harvard University. Individuals feel considerably worse when their minds wander to unpleasant or neutral topics, as opposed to focusing on current pursuits, Killingsworth and Gilbert report in the Nov. 12 Science. These new findings jibe with philosophical and religious teachings that assert happiness is found by living in the moment and learning to resist mind wandering, Killingsworth says. Mind wandering serves useful purposes, he acknowledges, such as providing a way to reflect on past actions, plan for the future and imagine possible consequences of important decisions. “We may tend to reflect on things that went poorly or are a cause for worry,” Killingsworth proposes. “That’s not a recipe for happiness, even if it’s necessary.” In his new study, people’s minds actually wandered more often to pleasant topics than to unpleasant or neutral topics. But those reveries offered no measurable mood boost over thinking about tasks at hand, the researchers found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 14660 - Posted: 11.13.2010

by Greg Miller Written language poses a puzzle for neuroscientists. Unlocking the meaning in a string of symbols requires complex neural circuitry. Yet humans have been reading and writing for only about 5000 years—too short for major evolutionary changes. Instead, reading likely depends on circuits that originally evolved for other purposes. But which ones? To investigate, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, teamed up with colleagues in France, Belgium, Portugal, and Brazil to scan the brains of 63 volunteers, including 31 who learned to read in childhood, 22 who learned as adults, and 10 who were illiterate. Those who could read, regardless of when they learned, exhibited more vigorous responses to written words in several areas of the brain that process what we see, the group reports online today in Science. Based on previous work, Dehaene has argued that one of these areas, at the junction of the left occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, is especially important for reading. In literate, but not illiterate, people, written words also triggered brain activity in parts of the left temporal lobe that respond to spoken language. That suggests that reading utilizes brain circuits that evolved to support spoken language, a much older innovation in human communication, Dehaene says. It makes sense that reading would rely on brain regions that originally evolved to process vision and spoken language, says Dehaene. But this repurposing may have involved a tradeoff. The researchers found that in people who learned to read early in life, a smaller region of the left occipital-temporal cortex responded to images of faces than in the illiterate volunteers. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14659 - Posted: 11.13.2010