by Michael Marshall A NEURAL circuit has been identified that allows people to predict whether someone is going to lie to them. The finding could help to explain why some people become paranoid. Humans have "theory of mind" - the ability to imagine what others are thinking and learn from their social habits. "We're trying to find a specific circuit that performs social learning," says Matthew Rushworth at the University of Oxford, who presented his work at a Cell Press LabLinks conference in London on 3 December. Rushworth's team scanned volunteers' brains while they chose one of two boxes to win points. They were sent advice on which box to choose from a second player who was sometimes dishonest. When the volunteers suspected they were being lied to, activity levels rose in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DPFC), an area near the front of the brain. If the volunteer thought the player was telling the truth the activity remained low. If their suspicions were proved wrong, the activity changed "suggesting the volunteers needed to rethink their opinion of the second player", says Rushworth. In effect, the activity was predicting how trustworthy the advice would be, then reacting to the results of that prediction (Nature, vol 456, p 245). In effect, the brain activity predicted how trustworthy the incoming advice was going to be Failures of this system could explain why those with schizophrenia are often paranoid, says Chris Frith of University College London, who was not involved in the study. "People with schizophrenia show false prediction errors: they keep thinking their predictions are wrong," he says. This leads to distrust and paranoia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 14784 - Posted: 12.16.2010

By Hank Greely Neuroscientists have been using brain scans to learn how to read minds. This research is increasing our basic understanding of the human brain and offering hope for medical breakthroughs. We should all applaud this work. Commercial firms, however, are beginning to apply this research to lie detection, selling their services. The technology is tempting, but before we accept it, we need to think hard about it—and go slow. The trouble is not with the pace of research. Neuroscientists have been publishing articles about detecting lies with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for nearly 10 years. About 25 published studies have found correlations between when experimental subjects were telling a lie and the pattern of blood flow in their brains. The trouble is that different studies, using different methods, have drawn conclusions based on the activity of different brain regions. And all the studies so far have taken place in the artificial environment of the laboratory, using people who knew they were taking part in an experiment and who were following instructions to lie. None of the studies examined lie detection in real-world situations. No government agency has found that this method works; no independent bodies have tested the approach. Yet people are buying lie-detection reports, wrapped in the glamour of science, to try to prove their honesty. In May two separate cases wound up in the courts. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Stress; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14783 - Posted: 12.16.2010

This project is supported by Award Number RC2GM092708 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14782 - Posted: 12.14.2010

John Roach For many of us, the wonders of cell biology came alive when we peered through a microscope at an amoeba in science class. Today, a new online image library of cells brings that same sense of wonder and magic to anyone with an Internet connection. The library contains more than 1,000 images, videos, and animations of cells from a variety of organisms — from the Chinese hamster (Cricetulus griseus) to humans (Homo sapiens). The database aims to advance research on cellular activity with the ultimate goal of improving human health, according to the American Society for Cell Biology, which has created the database in partnership with Glencoe Software and the Open Microscopy Environment. "In our research of disease, one of the key features is to understand the mechanism of disease — and that is going to happen, in many cases, at the cellular level," David Orloff, manager of The Cell image library, told me. For example, the library will make it possible for scientists to compare different cell types online and understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes, both normal and abnormal. This may lead to new discoveries about diseases, as well as new targets for drug development. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14781 - Posted: 12.14.2010

Dr Yan Wong Illusions are fascinating because of what they reveal about how our brain works. This particular one, demonstrated to a Women's Institute meeting for Bang Goes The Theory, involves your perception of rotated pictures - usually faces. Most people can still recognise an image of a face that's been rotated upside-down, and they still do even when altered in rather major ways. In particular, a distortion known as 'Thatcherization' [1] often goes unnoticed - that's where the face is upside-down but the eyes and the mouth are changed to remain the right way up [2]. If the image is then rotated into the normal position, you're in for a shock as the face suddenly looks grotesque. Try rotating the line-up of suspects below - I’m particularly happy with how awful my own Thatcherized face suddenly becomes! With photo manipulation programs, you can easily do the same to your own digital photos, but I've found some faces and expressions aren't so good. Below are the other presenters, along with a face that definitely doesn't Thatcherize well. I suspect this is because the smile takes up a good portion of the lower part of the face, approaching the edges of her cheeks. BBC © MMX

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 14780 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. As recently as 2002, an international group of leading neuroscientists found it necessary to publish a statement arguing passionately that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was a real condition. In the face of “overwhelming” scientific evidence, they complained, A.D.H.D. was regularly portrayed in the media as “myth, fraud or benign condition” — an artifact of too-strict teachers, perhaps, or too much television. In recent years, it has been rarer to hear serious doubt that the disorder really exists, and the evidence explaining its neurocircuitry and genetics has become more convincing and more complex. Even so, I’ve lately read a number of articles and essays that use attention (or its lack) as a marker and a metaphor for something larger in society — for the multitasking, the electronic distractions, the sense that the nature of concentration may be changing, that people feel nibbled at, overscheduled, distracted, irritable. But A.D.H.D. is not a metaphor. It is not the restlessness and rambunctiousness that happen when grade-schoolers are deprived of recess, or the distraction of socially minded teenagers in the smartphone era. Nor is it the reason your colleagues check their e-mail in meetings and even (spare me!) conversations. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 14779 - Posted: 12.14.2010

Joseph Milton We all struggle to communicate after a sleepless night, let alone pull off our best dance moves, and it seems that honeybees are no different. Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing — the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality and location of nectar supplies to the hive — according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Like all animals, European honeybees (Apis mellifera) rely on a sleep-like state of inactivity to survive — but sleep in insects and the effects of sleep deprivation on their behaviour are poorly understood. Barrett Klein, who led the study as a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, says that sleep deprivation could conceivably affect bees when hives are invaded by predators or parasites, when apiculturists transport colonies over long distances, or as an everyday consequence of the busy nature of hives. "Bees bustle around, frequently bumping into each other," he says. "It's also possible that sleep deprivation could exacerbate colony collapse disorder," he adds, referring to recent alarming declines in bee populations worldwide, "although this hasn't been tested." © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sleep
Link ID: 14778 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By Garrison Keillor People keep asking about my stroke. I am okay, really--not staggering around with one arm hanging limp, or glassy-eyed or slurring my speech, flecks of spittle on my lips. And yet people still say, "How are you doing?" in that special way that means, "Tell us the painful truth and feel free to cry." Really, it was only a minor stroke, but I will tell about it one last time and then let's move on to something interesting--such as sex or sweet corn or the Rapture--and I will never discuss this again. Thank you for your patience. It happened on Labor Day, 2009, in Minneapolis, at a massage studio (the kind with the Japanese prints and the Peruvian flute music and the careful placement of the towel of modesty). I lay on my belly under the hands of the powerful Jamaican masseuse, Angelica, who was working on my neck and shoulders and telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ and let Him make all the decisions. "Including what to eat?" I asked. Yes, she said. I started to say something witty about honey and locusts and whoa my mouth was numb, my speech slurred. My brain was melting. I heisted up on my elbows. I took a deep breath. She said, "Are you okay?" I said (as I was brought up to say), "I am just fine." ©2010 Rodale Inc.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 14777 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Everyone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age. Most vertebrate species, even birds and fishes, yawn too, or at least do something that looks very much like it. But its physiological mechanisms, its purpose and what survival value it might have remain a mystery. There is no shortage of theories — a recent article in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews outlines many — but a dearth of experimental proof that any of them is correct. “The lack of experimental evidence is sometimes accompanied by passionate discussion,” said Dr. Adrian G. Guggisberg, the lead author. Hippocrates proposed in the fourth century B.C. that yawning got rid of “bad air,” and increased “good air” in the brain. The widely held modern view of this theory is that yawning helps increase blood oxygen levels and decrease carbon dioxide. If this were true, Dr. Guggisberg writes, then people would yawn more when they exercise. And people with lung or heart disease, who often suffer from a lack of oxygen, yawn no more than anyone else. Researchers have exposed healthy subjects to gas mixtures with high levels of carbon dioxide and found that it does not lead to increased yawning. In fact, there is no study that shows that oxygen levels in the brain are changed one way or the other by yawning. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Aggression
Link ID: 14776 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By GINA KOLATA Alzheimer’s researchers are obsessed with a small, sticky protein fragment, beta amyloid, that clumps into barnaclelike balls in the brains of patients with this degenerative neurological disease. It is a normal protein. Everyone’s brain makes it. But the problem in Alzheimer’s is that it starts to accumulate into balls — plaques. The first sign the disease is developing — before there are any symptoms — is a buildup of amyloid. And for years, it seemed, the problem in Alzheimer’s was that brain cells were making too much of it. But now, a surprising new study has found that that view appears to be wrong. It turns out that most people with Alzheimer’s seem to make perfectly normal amounts of amyloid. They just can’t get rid of it. It’s like an overflowing sink caused by a clogged drain instead of a faucet that does not turn off. That discovery is part of a wave of unexpected findings that are enriching scientists’ views of the genesis of Alzheimer’s disease. In some cases, like the story of amyloid disposal, the work points to new ways to understand and attack the disease. If researchers could find a way to speed up disposal, perhaps they could slow down or halt the disease. Researchers have also found that amyloid, in its normal small amounts, seems to have a purpose in the brain — it may be acting like a circuit breaker to prevent nerve firing from getting out of control. But too much amyloid can shut down nerves, eventually leading to cell death. That means that if amyloid levels were reduced early in the disease, when excess amyloid is stunning nerve cells but has not yet killed them, the damage might be reversed. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14775 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Taiwanese researchers have managed to bar code some 16,000 of the 100,000 neurons in a fruit fly’s brain and to reconstruct the brain’s wiring map. In terms similar to those that define computers, the team describes the general architecture of the fly’s brain as composed of 41 local processing units, 58 tracts that link the units to other parts of the brain, and six hubs. Biologists see this atlas of the fly brain as a first step toward understanding the human brain. Six of the chemicals that transmit messages between neurons are the same in both species. And the general structure — two hemispheres with copious cross-links — is also similar. “I think this is the beginning of a new world,” said Ralph Greenspan, a neurobiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Biologists should now be able to match the fruit fly’s well-studied behaviors to the brain circuits established by the new atlas, he said. The atlas is maintained on a supercomputer in Taiwan which fly biologists around the world can query. They can also add to the atlas by uploading their own images of fruit fly neurons. “So I think this will really accelerate progress,” said Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The Taiwan team is led by Ann-Shyn Chiang, who has been working on the project for the last decade. He has assembled a group of 40 people, who include computer programmers and engineers, working on a budget of about $1 million a year. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14774 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By Kirsten Traynor Intelligent people live longer—the correlation is as strong as that between smoking and premature death. But the reason is not fully understood. Beyond simply making wiser choices in life, these people also may have biology working in their favor. Now research in honeybees offers evidence that learning ability is indeed linked with a general capacity to withstand one of the rigors of aging—namely, oxidative stress. Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, has proposed the term “system integrity” for the possible biological link between intelligence and long life: in his conception, a well-wired system not only performs better on mental tests but is less susceptible to environmental onslaughts. Gro Amdam of Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences was intrigued by the idea and last year devised a way to test it in bees. Honeybees are frequently used as a neurobiological model for learning—they can be trained, using positive or negative reinforcement, to retain information. In Amdam’s experiment, individual bees were strapped into a straw, where they learned to associate an odor with a food reward in a classic Pavlovian conditioning scenario. After only one or two trials, many bees learned to stick out their tonguelike proboscis in anticipation of a sugary droplet. Some bees took a little longer—as in humans, there are quick learners and slower ones. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14773 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By R. Douglas Fields SAN DIEGO—Books fly from the shelf as Superman fans the pages in a blur devouring the information at blinding speed. Superhuman mental powers, including his extraordinary sense of hearing and blazing speed-reading, are as vital to Superman as his bullet-beating velocity and steel-bending strength. But it seems Superman isn't the only being with the gift of quickness. Neuroscientists reported in November at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego that they have found an interesting group of real individuals with such superhuman mental abilities—blind people. Moreover, functional brain imaging now reveals how they achieve their extraordinary cerebral feats. A popular notion is that blind people sharpen their remaining senses to compensate for lost vision. Blind musicians, such as Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, may excel in music because of their highly developed sense of hearing. Researchers from the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen in Germany have found scientific support for this belief. Blind people can easily comprehend speech that is sped up far beyond the maximum rate that sighted people can understand. When we speak rapidly we are verbalizing at about six syllables per second. That hyperactive radio announcer spewing fine print at the end of a commercial jabbers at 10 syllables per second, the absolute limit of comprehension for sighted people. Blind people, however, can comprehend speech sped up to 25 syllables per second. Human beings cannot talk this fast. The scientists had to use a computerized synthesizer to generate speech at this speed. "It sounds like noise," Ingo Hertrich, one of the scientists involved in the research told me. "I can't understand anything…maybe it sounds like some strange foreign language spoken very rapidly." © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Vision; Language
Link ID: 14772 - Posted: 12.14.2010

By Emily Sohn Pregnant and nursing mothers have new reason to eat well, suggests a new study. Flavors in a mom's diet shape her baby's brain, the study found, and that may alter her child's lifelong likes and dislikes for certain foods. The findings could help mothers start as early as possible to turn their children into healthy eaters. "It's clear in humans that the more varied nutrition of the mom, the more open the baby is going to be to different things," said Diego Restrepo, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Denver. "What's new here is that what a mother eats changes the brain of her baby." Scientists have long known that, for humans and other mammals, what a mother eats influences the flavor of her amniotic fluid and later her breast milk, said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Research has also shown that the flavors babies are exposed to -- both in the womb and in the months after birth -- influence what they later choose to eat. In one of Mennella's studies, for example, mothers who drank carrot juice during pregnancy or while nursing had babies who, by about six months of age, chose to eat larger amounts of carrot-flavored cereal compared to babies whose mothers had drunk only water during pregnancy. The carrot-exposed babies also made fewer negative faces while eating the flavored cereal. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Obesity
Link ID: 14771 - Posted: 12.14.2010

by Irving Kirsch PLACEBO comes from the Latin for "I shall please". And for people suffering from conditions such as Parkinson's disease, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis and depression, placebos are very pleasing. After all, wouldn't everyone want a treatment - be it sugar pill "drug" or sham acupuncture - that made them feel better without producing the side effects associated with active medications? Some side effects in patient information leaflets are scary indeed. Placebos are, however, less good news for clinical researchers, drug developers and the like, who need to be able to disentangle the physical actions of "real" interventions from the effects produced by the power of suggestion. One of the biggest disease groups caught up in the complexities of the placebo is mental illness. This affects nearly 20 per cent of us at some stage in our lives and fuels a $19-billion drugs industry. I have spent the past few years making waves with papers and books about placebos and their role in the development and action of psychiatric drugs. After extracting reams of unpublished drug trial data from the major pharmaceutical companies (via the US Food and Drug Administration, and freedom of information legislation), I have come up with a bold-sounding theory: the placebo effect may account for all of the benefits of antidepressants. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14770 - Posted: 12.14.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou No one works well when tired, and insects are no exception. Just like us, sleepy bees make shoddy dancers and poor communicators. Forager honeybees (Apis mellifera), like humans, normally get around eight hours of sleep a night. To find out whether a good night's sleep is important for the bees' communicative waggle dance, Barrett Klein at the University of Texas in Austin and his colleagues kept half of a group of 50 bees awake overnight. To do this, Klein stuck a small piece of either steel or non-magnetic copper onto each of the bees. During the night, from dusk until dawn, he passed a magnet back and forth over the hive, jostling and waking the 25 bees with a steel spot three times a minute. When the team watched videos of the bees filmed the following day, they found that the sleep-deprived bees performed less precise waggle dances. The tired insects had more variation in the angle of their dances, and as a result gave other bees poor directions to a food source. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009439108 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sleep
Link ID: 14769 - Posted: 12.14.2010

THAT it is possible to have a phone conversation with someone who is deaf shows just how far cochlear implants have come. Today’s devices, which are routinely implanted, can stimulate the auditory nerve across a broad range of frequencies. This allows users to hear and understand speech in noisy environments, without needing to lip-read, and even to hear and appreciate music in many cases. But the earliest cochlear implants could do none of this; instead they merely provided some basic sounds to assist with lip-reading. Nevertheless, when they first received clinical approval, 26 years ago, they were hailed as a medical miracle. Now retinal implants are at a similar point, as the first such device is about to be granted clinical approval in Europe and will then go on sale. The device, called the Argus II, is by no means a cure for blindness, says Robert Greenberg, the chief executive and co-founder of Second Sight, the company in Sylmar, California, that developed it. It is intended for use by people who have lost their sight as a result of retina-wasting diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, and like the earliest cochlear implants it is designed to provide only some basic sensory assistance. But despite its limitations all 30 of the people who have received the Argus II as part of clinical trials can, at the very least, now see changes in light levels and detect objects. This means that they can navigate around obstacles, find doorways, see parked or moving cars and look at someone’s head when talking to them. A handful of them can even read large print. For the researchers who have spent many years developing these devices, and for the hundreds of thousands of blind people who stand to gain from them, the approval of the Argus II will mark an important turning-point. Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 14768 - Posted: 12.13.2010

PHILADELPHIA - Sperm-forming stem cells in the testes can be converted to insulin-producing cells that could replace diseased ones in the pancreas, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., reported December 12 at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. The new technique is edging closer to producing the amount of insulin needed to cure diabetes in humans. Ian Gallicano, a developmental biologist at Georgetown, and his colleagues isolated sperm-producing stem cells from the testes of organ donors. These cells could easily revert to an embryonic state, capable of making nearly any cell in the body. The Georgetown researchers treated the cells with chemicals to coax them into mimicking beta-islet cells from the pancreas, the same kind of cells that are compromised in diabetes. Reprogrammed sperm-producing cells cured diabetes in mice for about a week before their insulin levels dropped again. “If you’re a mouse and you have diabetes, you’re in good shape these days,” Gallicano says. But cells need to make much more insulin in order to cure diabetes in humans. In islet cells in the human pancreas, insulin accounts for about 10 percent of the proteins secreted by the cell. No stem cell from the testes or anywhere else has come close to making that amount of insulin, Gallicano says. He and his colleagues have developed a new way of programming insulin-producing cells and are getting closer to the goal of creating islet-like cells in which insulin accounts for 1 to 10 percent of the proteins in the cells. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14767 - Posted: 12.13.2010

By Kay Lazar If you’ve been worried about forgetting names or misplacing car keys, you’re not Researchers from Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General hospitals are studying how aging affects the brain. They aim to pinpoint changes that occur during normal aging, versus ones that may signal a risk for Alzheimer’s years down the road. The researchers are also interested in the relationship between lifestyle activities and healthy brain aging, so study participants will be given pedometers to see how much they are walking in one week, and also be asked questions about their leisure activities now and 20 years ago. The researchers are seeking participants, ages 65 to 90, from Greater Boston who are generally healthy, but who have not had a previous stroke and do not have metal in their bodies, such as a pacemaker. Family doctors say their baby boomer patients often worry that such forgetfulness portends a dementia-filled future. The collective angst has proven fertile territory for hawkers of supplements and other products that, manufacturers promise, will clear the fog from aging brains. From 1999 through 2009, US sales of herbs and supplements marketed for mental acuity grew 49 percent, to $458 million last year, according to Nutrition Business Journal. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14766 - Posted: 12.13.2010

By KELLI KENNEDY COCONUT CREEK, Fla. — Hilary Waller remembers begging her mother to let her fast on Yom Kippur. At 10 years old she was a bit too young, but embracing the rigid discipline seemed desperately important. "It felt like I was practicing not eating. It was something that was reassuring and gave me strength and a sense of pride," said Waller, a 28-year-old teacher at a religious school in Blue Bell, Pa. It was the same rush she got years later in college each time she saw the scale tip downward. Waller, who suffered from anorexia, starved herself until she stopped menstruating, lost some of her hair and was exercising several times a day. Health experts say eating disorders are a serious, underreported disease among Orthodox Jewish women and to a lesser extent others in the Jewish community, as many families are reluctant to acknowledge the illness at all and often seek help only when a girl is on the verge of hospitalization. Several studies indicate a rise in the problem, and those who treat eating disorders say they are seeing more Jewish patients. A new documentary, books and facilities have cropped up to help. Waller's family, which belongs to the Conservative branch of Judaism, fasted only on Yom Kippur, but she began fasting on other holidays. "And not for religious reasons," said Waller, who checked into residential treatment after college — more than a decade after she began struggling with the illness. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14765 - Posted: 12.11.2010