By John Horgan Of all scientific fields, neuroscience has the greatest potential for revolutionary advances, philosophical and practical. Someday, brain researchers may figure out how precisely the brain encodes thoughts like the ones I’m thinking now. Cracking the neural code could help solve the mind-body problem, ending millennia of pointless metaphysical chitchat. We may finally understand how brains work and why sometimes they don’t. We might even discover truly effective treatments for depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and dementia and chuck our current quasi-therapies. It is because I have such high hopes for neuroscience that I’m so upset by two trends in financing of the field. One involves neuroscience’s growing dependence on the Pentagon, which is seeking new ways to help our soldiers and harm our enemies. For a still-timely overview of neuroweapons research, check out the 2006 book Mind Wars by bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania. (PR disclosure: I brought Moreno to my school to give a talk on March 10.) Potential neuroweapons include drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulators and implanted brain chips that soup up the sensory capacities and memories of soldiers, as well as brain-scanners and electromagnetic beams that read, control or scramble the thoughts of bad guys. When Moreno was writing his book, neuroscientists were reluctant to talk about their affair with the Pentagon and seemed embarrassed by it. No longer. Last year the National Academy of Sciences published a 136-page report, Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, that makes an unabashed pitch for militarizing brain research. The authors include the neuroluminaries Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and editor-in-chief of Science; and Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both are members of the U.S. Council on Bioethics.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13906 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy "I THINK therefore I am," said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: "I act, therefore I think." Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences. "Advocates of traditional accounts of cognition would be surprised," says Tobias Loetscher at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia. "They generally consider human reasoning to involve abstract cognitive processes devoid of any connection to body or space." Until recently, the assumption has been that our bodies contribute only to our most basic interactions with the environment, namely sensory and motor processes. The new results suggest that our bodies are also exploited to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly inconsequential activities have the power to influence our thinking. Clues that our bodies may play a role in thought can be found in the metaphors we use to describe situations, such as "I was given the cold shoulder" or "she has an excellent grasp of relativity". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13905 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Dave Munger The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated, and how should that possibility influence decisions on the animal’s future treatment? Orcas, like their close relatives, dolphins, certainly seem smart, though researchers debate just how intelligent these cetaceans are and how similar their cognition is to humans. Should we ever treat such creatures like people? For centuries it seemed obvious to most people what separated them from other animals: Humans have language, they use tools, they plan for the future, and do any number of things that other animals don’t seem to do. But gradually the line between “animal” and “human” has blurred. Some animals do use tools; others solve complicated problems. Some can even be taught to communicate using sign language or other systems. Could it be that there isn’t a clear difference separating humans from other life forms? Last week, Brian Switek, a science writer who blogs about biology and paleontology, found a study demonstrating that tool use in chimpanzees isn’t a new phenomenon. For decades, scientists have been observing chimps using sticks and other objects as tools. They have even seen chimps modifying these tools and transporting them for anticipated use in the future. But until recently, there had been no evidence that tool use among chimps had a very long history. Wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park in Côte d’Ivoire have been observed using stones as hammers and anvils for cracking large nuts. A team led by archaeologist Julio Mercador found evidence that these tools were being used as long as 4300 years ago: Ancient stones shaped similarly to those being used today as tools. Their research was published in PNAS in 2007. ©2005-2009 Seed Media Group LLC

Keyword: Animal Rights; Aggression
Link ID: 13904 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Claudia Wallis Up until 20 years ago, scientists believed that the human brain was largely mature by puberty. Apparently, they had failed to notice the irrational behavior and flaky thinking of teenagers. Now, of course, we know that the human brain continues to undergo serious restructuring well into the 20s. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.) Sophisticated brain-scan studies by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown dramatic changes throughout the teenage years as excess gray matter is pruned from the prefrontal cortex — the seat of higher-order thinking and making judgments (like not smoking weed right before your chemistry exam). Meanwhile, behavioral studies have shown what every parent already knows: teens have poor control over impulses and a tendency toward risk taking. Still, relatively little is known about how such changes affect learning or what happens at a biochemical level in the brain as teens go through their addled adolescence. A fascinating study published in the current issue of Science helps fill in a bit of the picture, drawing evidence from that research-friendly fellow mammal, the mouse. The authors, a team from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, wanted to look at whether the ability to learn is affected by changes in brain chemistry that occur at puberty. They devised a task that was relatively complex (at least for a mouse) and required learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivered a very mild shock. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.) "This is higher-order learning, and it takes multiple trials to learn," explains Sheryl Smith, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Downstate. Prepubescent mice mastered the task quickly. Postpubescent mice also did quite well. But mice in the throes of puberty, which occurs at age 5 weeks, couldn't seem to get it through their furry little heads. © 2010 Time Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13903 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind. The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read. Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. Worried, MX paid a visit to Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. Zeman was so intrigued by the case that he teamed up with Sergio Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh who specializes in how the brain handles visual information. Neither Zeman nor Della Sala could offer MX a cure for his condition, unfortunately, but they recognized a rare chance to study how the mind’s eye works. Della Sala proposed running a series of exams. MX gave his consent.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 13902 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Ultraviolet radiation from sunshine seems to thwart multiple sclerosis, but perhaps not the way most researchers had assumed, a new study in mice suggests. If validated in further research, the finding could add a twist to a hypothesis that has gained credence in recent decades. The report appears online March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have hypothesized that MS is rare in the tropics because people synthesize ample vitamin D from exposure to the UV radiation in equatorial sunlight. What’s more, MS is more common in the high latitudes of northern parts of Europe and North America than in regions farther south. That pattern has led to the assumption that higher levels of vitamin D might prevent people from developing MS, what became known as the latitude hypothesis. But a direct cause-and-effect relationship between vitamin D deficiency and MS has never been established. In past experiments, giving vitamin D supplements to mice with an MS-like disease required giving the animals harmful amounts of the nutrient, notes Hector DeLuca, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It just didn’t add up,” he says. “We decided to go back and see if maybe UV light by itself was doing something.” In MS, the fatty myelin sheaths that insulate nerves in the central nervous system are damaged by attacks by the immune system. In a series of experiments in mice, DeLuca and his team induced a condition comparable to human MS by injecting the animals with proteins that instigate similar myelin damage. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13901 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JONAH LEHRER When I can’t sleep, I think about what I’m missing. I glance over at my wife and watch her eyelids flutter. I listen to the steady rhythm of her breath. I wonder if she’s dreaming and, if so, what story she’s telling to herself to pass the time. (The mind is like a shark — it can’t ever stop swimming in thought.) And then my eyes return to the ceiling and I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep. Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our dreams are meaningless narratives, a series of bad B-movies invented by the mind. I find solace in the theory that all those inexplicable plot twists are just random noise from the brain stem, an arbitrary montage of images and characters and anxieties. This suggests that I’m not missing anything when I lie awake at night — there are no insights to be wrung from our R.E.M. reveries. While we’re fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget. Unfortunately for me, there’s increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible — why was I running through the airport in my underwear? — are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13900 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON - Under intense pressure from patients, some U.S. doctors are cautiously testing a provocative theory that abnormal blood drainage from the brain may play a role in multiple sclerosis — and that a surgical vein fix might help. If it pans out, the approach suggested by a researcher in Italy could mark a vast change for MS, a disabling neurological disease long blamed on an immune system gone awry. But many patients frustrated by today’s limited therapies say they don’t have time to await the carefully controlled studies needed to prove if it really works and are searching out vein-opening treatment now — undeterred by one report of a dangerous complication. “This made sense and I was hell-bent on doing it,” says Nicole Kane Gurland of Bethesda, Md., the first to receive the experimental treatment at Washington’s Georgetown University Hospital, which is set to closely track how a small number of patients fare before and after using a balloon to widen blocked veins. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here In Buffalo, N.Y., more than 1,000 people applied for 30 slots in a soon-to-start study of that same angioplasty procedure. When the Buffalo General Hospital team started a larger study a few months ago just to compare if bad veins are more common in MS patients than in healthy people — not to treat them — more than 13,000 patients applied. The demand worries Georgetown neurologist Dr. Carlo Tornatore, who teamed with vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Neville in hopes of getting some evidence to guide his own patients’ care. © 2010 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13899 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Schools have banned cupcakes, issued obesity report cards and cleared space in cafeterias for salad bars. Just last month, Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood obesity promised to get young people moving more and revamp school lunch, and beverage makers said they had cut the sheer number of liquid calories shipped to schools by almost 90 percent in the past five years. But new research suggests that interventions aimed at school-aged children may be, if not too little, too late. More and more evidence points to pivotal events very early in life — during the toddler years, infancy and even before birth, in the womb — that can set young children on an obesity trajectory that is hard to alter by the time they’re in kindergarten. The evidence is not ironclad, but it suggests that prevention efforts should start very early. Among the findings are these: ¶The chubby cherub-like baby who is growing so nicely may be growing too much for his or her own good, research suggests. ¶Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies are usually small at birth. ¶Babies who sleep less than 12 hours are at increased risk for obesity later. If they don’t sleep enough and also watch two hours or more of TV a day, they are at even greater risk. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13898 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Daniel Lametti “Memory”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the diary that we all carry about with us”. Perhaps, but if memory is like a diary, it’s one filled with torn-out pages and fabricated passages. In January, a group of New York University neuroscientists led by Daniela Schiller reported in the journal Nature that they had created fearful memories in people and then erased them. Besides being rather cool, the result provides new insight into how to treat traumatic memories in people. The research was based on the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, a coauthor on the paper. Ten years ago, while experimenting with rats, Ledoux made a discovery that changed the way neuroscientists view memory from that of Wilde’s tidy diary to something more along the lines of a James Frey memoir. In that experiment, Ledoux conditioned rats to fear a bell by ringing it in time with an electric shock until the rats froze in fear at the mere sound of the bell. Then, at the moment when the fear memory was being recalled, he injected the rats with anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections. Remarkably, the next time he rang the bell the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory, it seemed, had vanished. Poof! Ledoux concluded that the neural connections in which memories are stored have to be rebuilt each time a memory is recalled. And during rebuilding—or reconsolidation, as he termed it—memories can be altered or even erased. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 13897 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Gill Monkeys pay more attention to females than to males, according to research. Scientists studying wild vervet monkeys in South Africa found that the animals were better able to learn a task when it was demonstrated by a female. The team compared animals' responses to demonstrations of a simple box-opening task, which was demonstrated either by a dominant male or female monkey. Their findings are described in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biologist Erica van de Waal, from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, and her team, studied six neighbouring groups of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa's Loskop Dam Nature Reserve. They gave the monkeys boxes containing fruit, which had doors on each differently coloured end. During an initial demonstration, the researchers blocked one of the doors, so there was only one correct way to solve the box-opening puzzle and access the fruit reward. For three of the groups, a dominant male monkey was selected as a "model" to demonstrate the task and for the other three a dominant female was chosen. "The models learned by trial and error how to open the box," explained Ms van de Waal. "Once they understood how to pull or slide the door open we let them perform 25 demonstrations." After this "demonstration phase", the other monkeys were far more likely to try - and to succeed in - opening the fruit box if their demonstrator was a female. "We found that bystanders paid significantly more attention to female than male models," said Ms van de Waal. "[This] seemed to be the only factor influencing this social learning." (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 13896 - Posted: 03.22.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy STEVEN LAUREYS will always remember the 21-year-old woman who had had a stroke. She had been taken to a hospital in Liège, Belgium, where her condition worsened rapidly. She soon lost all motor movement, even the ability to open her eyes. Her prognosis looked bleak, so her doctors turned to Laureys, a neurologist, for a final opinion before turning off her ventilator. By recording her brain activity as she was asked to respond to simple tasks, such as counting the number of times her name was spoken in a random string of first names, Laureys confirmed that the woman was aware of her surroundings, and so she remained on life support (Neurocase, vol 15, p 271). Clearly that was the right decision: a year later she had recovered enough to be discharged from hospital. "It was only technology that permitted us to show that she was conscious," says Laureys of the University of Liège. There had, however, been another clue to the patient's active mental state - too tentative to hold any weight in the diagnosis, but nevertheless significant. Laureys had observed a signature of coordinated neural activity, present in the resting patient, which seems to appear in the brain of anyone who is conscious. While such readings may one day provide a better diagnosis of coma patients, their ultimate implications may be even more profound, providing evidence for a 30-year-old theory that claims to explain consciousness itself. Consciousness is one of neuroscience's long-standing mysteries. At its most basic, it is the simple question of why we become aware of some thoughts or feelings, while others lurk unnoticed below conscious perception. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13895 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Justin Nobel Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity. "The suicide was what turned me around," says O'Barry. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide." (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.) Animal suicide may seem absurd, yet the concept is as old as philosophy. Aristotle told a story about a stallion that leaped into an abyss after realizing it was duped into mating with its mother, and the topic was discussed by early Christian theologians and Victorian academics. "The questioning of animal suicide is essentially people looking at what it means to be human," says Duncan Wilson, a medical historian at the University of Manchester and co-author of a study in the March issue of the British journal Endeavour on the history of self-destructive animals. "The people talking about animal suicide today seem to be using it as a way to evoke sympathy for the plight of mistreated and captive animals." © 2010 Time Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Evolution
Link ID: 13894 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou Being a teenager can be a drag. As if dealing with peer pressure and raging hormones weren't hard enough, your ability to learn new things is also reduced. Now the brain molecules behind this learning deficit have been identified in mice - and blocked. When children hit puberty, their ability to learn a second language drops, they find it harder to learn their way around a new location and they are worse at detecting errors in cognitive tests. Why is this? Sheryl Smith and her colleagues at the State University of New York now reckon that all of these behavioural changes could be due to a temporary increase in a chemical receptor that inhibits brain activity in an area responsible for learning. In 2007, Smith's team discovered that the number of these receptors soared in mice when they hit puberty, before falling back in adulthood. In their latest study, Smith's team set about finding out if these receptor changes in mice might lead to impaired learning abilities, rather like those seen in pubescent humans. Shocking memory The group examined the hippocampus – a region known to be involved in learning – in mouse brains. Sure enough, pubertal mice had seven times as many of the receptors as infant mice. In adulthood, the number of these receptors fell back to an intermediate level. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13893 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Wendy Zukerman IN THE YouTube age it is easy to forget that artists rely on clever tricks to create a sense of motion in still images. Now brain scans show why one method of creating "implicit motion", used by an 18th-century Japanese artist, works so well. While admiring line drawings by Hokusai Katsushika, psychophysicist Naoyuki Osaka of Kyoto University, Japan, was struck by the vivid motion they convey. Instead of using blur to suggest movement, as much modern art has done since the advent of photography, Katsushika created motion by drawing bodies in highly unstable positions (see picture). This is thought to work because the brain "fills in" the effects of gravity pulling the bodies down. Previous research has shown that blurred photographs stimulate the same regions of the visual cortex as real-life motion, including the extrastriate visual cortex. To find out whether sketches of unstable bodies would also activate these regions, Osaka showed Japanese students Katsushika's drawings while scanning their brains with functional MRI. The scans revealed that drawings depicting motion did indeed prompt activity in the extrastriate visual cortex, unlike those of people or objects in static positions. Osaka concludes that there is a "common neural pathway" for interpreting implicit motion in art that is similar to the pathway used for perceiving real-life motion (NeuroReport, DOI: 10.1097/wnr.0b013e328335b371). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 13892 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Nic Fleming The "legal high" mephedrone – also known as M-Cat, plant food, and miaow miaow – is getting a lot of attention because a series of deaths have been linked to the drug. Most recently, two teenaged men in the UK died after taking it on Sunday night, although the results of medical tests to determine the causes of their deaths will not be known for several weeks. It has become the fourth most popular drug in the UK behind cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine over the past year. The British government's official drug advisers are expected to recommend that it be banned, but some drugs policy experts say criminalisation could do more harm than good. Now New Scientist cuts through the hype. The leaves of the khat plant, Catha edulis, are chewed for the stimulant, amphetamine-like properties of its active ingredients cathinone and cathine, mostly in east Africa and in migrant groups elsewhere. Mephedrone – more properly 4-methylmethcathinone – is the best known of a family of synthetic or substituted cathinones. It is commonly sold as a white powder or in capsules and is usually snorted or swallowed. The vast majority is produced by Chinese chemical companies, which sell it for around £4,000 a kilogram, mostly to European dealers who sell it online for £10 to £15 per gram or less for larger quantities. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13891 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARC BEKOFF and Jessica Pierce Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality. Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 13890 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Wray Herbert When Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. He later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and what follows is an excerpt: “Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts, through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut, on Route 44A. It was very pretty, and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew, it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again, but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.” Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What’s more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: “See me!” As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play (Doubleday, 2009), such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: “I had noticed the wrong things.” The subtitle of Page’s memoir is Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, and indeed Page didn’t learn until age 45 that he suffers from what is called autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome (in which symptoms are milder) also tend to fixate on and remember seemingly irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry, or to use Page’s words, they notice the wrong things. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism; Attention
Link ID: 13889 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Deep brain stimulation is a promising therapy for epilepsy, US researchers from Stanford University have said. In a clinical trial, 110 people had electrodes implanted in their brains and their seizures were monitored. Forty-one per cent of patients showed a reduction in seizures after 13 months while 56% experienced a reduction after two years. The patients all suffered from regular epileptic seizures and had failed to respond to drug treatment. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a surgical treatment involving the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain. In the group of patients who received brain stimulation, researchers noted a 41% reduction in seizures compared to a 14.5% decline in seizures in a control group. This group did not receive stimulation. Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder which is characterised by recurrent seizures. These seizures can cause temporary loss of consciousness, convulsions, confusion or disturbances in sensations. According to the World Health Organization, epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide. Previous studies indicate that one third of those with epilepsy do not respond to anti-epileptic drugs. Dr Robert Fisher, director of the Epilepsy Centre at Stanford University and lead author of the study, said electrical deep brain stimulation does reduce seizure frequency in patients. But he cautioned: "DBS therapy is invasive and serious complications can occur. Additional clinical knowledge would help to determine the best candidates for DBS therapy." (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 13888 - Posted: 03.18.2010

By Doreen Walton In the battle for our money and loyalty, companies wanting to sell us products have turned their attention to something right under our noses. Or behind our noses. The brain is now being called the ultimate business frontier and technology is letting firms take a look inside our heads. In this neurological market research participants wear a cap fitted with brain sensors as they watch adverts. Emotional response, attentiveness and memory function are all measured. An electroencephalogram or EEG, a painless brain scan, allows researchers to track the electrical impulses across the surface of the brain. I volunteered as a guinea pig to see how it works. EEG's have been around for roughly ninety years and are regularly used in medical applications for diagnosing epilepsy. In the last two decades the technology has moved on. Activity used to be recorded using pens on moving paper, now it can be digitised instantaneously into graphs. The equipment has also recently become a lot smaller and more portable so the marketing experts now believe it can be used more widely as a tool for studying the reactions of potential consumers. In the demonstration of the technique, I was fitted with something that looked a bit like a swimming cap full of holes. Sensors which capture brainwave activity 2,000 times a second were plugged into the holes. A gel was squeezed into the holes to allow my brain's electrical signals to be picked up. As the sensors were fastened in place in the cap and two put by my eye to monitor blinking, Darren Bridger, director of lab operations at Neurofocus Europe, explained the basics. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13887 - Posted: 03.18.2010