Sickle cell disease may affect brain function in adults who have few or mild complications of the inherited blood disease, according to results of the first study to examine cognitive functioning in adults with sickle cell disease. The multicenter study, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, compared brain function scores and imaging tests in adult patients with few sickle cell complications with results in similar adults who did not have the blood disease. Researchers report that the brain function scores in sickle cell patients were, on average, in the normal range. However, twice as many patients as healthy adults (33 percent versus 15 percent) scored below normal levels. Those who were more likely to score lower were older and had the lowest levels of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen in the blood, compared to sickle cell participants who scored higher. Findings from brain magnetic resonance imaging scans did not explain differences in scores. Researchers at 12 sites within the NHLBI-supported Comprehensive Sickle Cell Centers conducted the study. Their results are published in the May 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. An editorial accompanies the article. "This study suggests that some adult patients who have sickle cell disease may develop cognitive problems, such as having difficulty organizing their thoughts, making decisions, or learning, even if they do not have severe complications such as stroke related to sickle cell disease," said NHLBI Acting Director Susan B. Shurin, M.D."Such challenges can tremendously affect a patient’s quality of life, and we need to address these concerns as part of an overall approach to effectively managing sickle cell disease.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14067 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michelle Roberts Brain scans could be useful as lie detectors to show if a witness lies when identifying a suspect in a crime investigation, US researchers believe. Scientists at Stanford University were able to tell when a person recognised a mug shot by reading their brain waves. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed tell-tale brain activity during the memory recall task, Proceedings journal reports. But experts warn the technology is not foolproof and can give false results. And such false positives could have serious legal consequences, say Dr Jesse Rissman and his team, who conducted the research. In their trial, they asked 16 volunteers to study hundreds of faces in an images database. Next, each was shown a series of pictures that included some of the faces they had just seen and some that were new. The researchers asked the volunteers to say which of the mug shots they recognised, while rigged up to the brain-scanning fMRI device. Using computer software to analyse the brain scan data, the researchers were able to recognise distinct patterns that appeared to reflect what the individual was thinking. Specifically, from the scans alone, they were able to tell if the volunteers recognised the faces as old or new and whether this recognition was accompanied by recollection. But the technique was not perfect. It was unable to reliably distinguish between subjects who accurately reported recognising a face and those who mistakenly claimed to recognise a previously unseen face. Lead researcher Dr Jesse Rissman explained: "It was only as good as a person's memory and their memory may or may not be accurate." (C)BBC

Keyword: Stress; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14066 - Posted: 05.11.2010

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. The 8-year-old boy already had hearing aids when I met him, back in the 1990s. He had been born before newborns were routinely screened for hearing problems, so the diagnosis had not taken place until he was a slow-to-talk toddler. An extensive trail of subspecialists had evaluated him after that first test showed severe hearing loss in both ears. A geneticist, a developmentalist, a kidney specialist — no one could find anything wrong. He was a healthy, cheerful child who couldn’t hear very well. Nowadays, 97 percent of babies born in this country have their hearing screened in the newborn nursery. (More in a minute about the clever technologies that make this possible.) That means essential follow-up testing and treatment can begin very early indeed. But the key term is “follow-up.” As many as 46 percent of children who failed the newborn screening test in 2007 did not have documented repeat testing and treatment, said Marcus Gaffney, a health scientist with the Early Hearing Detection and Intervention program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Screening a child doesn’t do a lot of good,” Mr. Gaffney told me, “if you don’t take the appropriate follow-up.” Before newborn screening changed the picture in the late 1990s, the average age for diagnosing hearing loss was about 2 ½. And the testing was usually done only because the child’s speech was slow to develop. In children with relatively mild hearing loss, or loss in only one ear, it sometimes took even longer. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14065 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Schizophrenia involves some of the same genetic variations as autism and attention deficit disorders, a new whole-genome analysis study has confirmed. Schizophrenia, which affects about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, can result in a variety of symptoms that include disrupted thinking, hallucinations, delusions and abnormal speech. The disease is thought to have genetic links but usually does not manifest itself until adolescence or early adulthood. In an effort to assess some of the common genetic variations that might underpin this fairly common but thorny mental illness, researchers sequenced DNA from 1,735 adults with schizophrenia and 3,485 healthy adults. Across the patients that had the disease, the researchers found many frequent variations related to copying or deleting genes, known as copy-number variations. And among the genes that were more likely affected by these changes in schizophrenic individuals were CACNA1B and DOC2A, which help make proteins for calcium signals that regulate neurotransmitters in the brain. Two other more common variations, in RET and RIT2, would likely impact brain development. "These genes affect synaptic function, so deletions or duplications in those genes may alter how brain circuits are formed," Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and coauthor of the new study, said in a prepared statement. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14064 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Anthes Addiction has long been considered a man’s disease. Men are far more likely to use illicit substances, and partly for that reason, research on addiction for decades included only male users. Thus, far more is known about drug dependence in men than in women, and treatment programs and centers have been based on the needs of men. But there are signs that the gender gap is closing, as drug and alcohol use have become more socially acceptable for girls and women. Indeed, drinking and alcohol dependence have grown increasingly prevalent among women in recent decades, but not among men, reported psychiatrist Richard A. Grucza of Washington University in St. Louis in a 2008 study. And in a reversal of past trends, teenage girls are now trying marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes at higher rates than boys are, according to recent results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Meanwhile the survey demonstrated that overall illegal drug use among both girls and women rose from 5.8 to 6.3 percent between 2007 and 2008 as the rate for boys and men dipped from 10.4 to 9.9 percent. What is more, a growing literature on female addicts shows that they are not much like their male counterparts. Women may be uniquely vulnerable to substance abuse and its effects, because female sex hormones affect the brain’s reward circuitry, influencing women’s response to drugs. The studies point to new drug treatments for addiction as well as practical tips for women who want to quit using. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14063 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Premature babies feel pain more acutely than healthy newborns largely due to the invasive hospital treatments they receive, experts believe. Tests at University College London suggest procedures like tube feeding, injections and blood tests make pre-term infants more sensitive to pain. The researchers say better pain relief should be given to premature babies in intensive care. Their study is published in the journal NeuroImage. The UCL team carrying out the study measured the brain activity of babies with an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they underwent routine heel lancing to draw blood samples. Stronger brain activity was seen for premature infants who had been in hospital for at least 40 days, compared to healthy babies of the same age. This suggests that the premature group are more sensitive to pain. When both groups of babies were gently touched on the heel there was no difference in brain activity, however, suggesting that the sensitisation of preterm babies is specific to pain rather than touch. This, say the researchers, implies that premature babies can benefit from a mother's touch - being held or cuddled - in the same way as normal infants. The study, which was funded by the Medical Research Council, supports previous studies that reported increased sensitivity to pain in older children who were born prematurely. Dr Rebeccah Slater, lead researcher on the study from University college London, said: "Our study shows that being born prematurely and undergoing intensive care affects pain processing in the infant brain. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14062 - Posted: 05.10.2010

Janelle Weaver Humans are not the only ones to grimace when they are in pain, scientists have found. Mice show their discomfort in the same way. Decoding animals' facial expressions may allow researchers and veterinarians to monitor spontaneous pain over long timescales. This may also aid the discovery of painkillers, because this type of pain is similar to that experienced by humans. Researchers typically detect pain in mice by eliciting specific reactions. Poking the hind paw, for example, causes a mouse to reflexively withdraw the paw; heating the tail makes it flick. But scientists are not agreed on how to measure unprovoked pain. To analyse facial expressions in mice, geneticist Jeffrey Mogil at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues have adapted a coding system used to measure pain in infants. The work is published today in Nature Methods1. Mogil teamed up with Kenneth Craig, a psychologist who studies human pain at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Expert expression-spotters from Craig's lab compared video frames of mice filmed for up to 30 minutes before and after receiving a painful injection of acetic acid. The researchers detected five signs indicative of pain in mice. Three are similar to human responses: the eyes close and the area around them tightens, and the nose and cheeks bulge. Mice also pull back their ears and move their whiskers. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Animal Rights
Link ID: 14061 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jody Bourton Bonobos have been filmed appearing to 'say no' by shaking their heads, report scientists. On a number of occasions, bonobos were filmed using side to side head movements to prevent others from doing something they did not want them to do. In one film a mother is seen shaking her head to stop her infant playing with its food. This may reflect an early precursor to head-shaking behaviour amongst humans in one of our closest relatives. The study has been published in the journal Primates. "In bonobos, our observations are the first reported use of preventive head-shaking," say Ms Christel Schneider from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. This would raise the question of whether these gestures reflect a primitive precursor of the human 'no' head-shake Ms Schneider undertook the study with Dr Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute and Dr Katja Liebal from Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. Ms Schneider recalls how the videos captured at Leipzig Zoo in Germany show a bonobo mother shaking her head in disapproval when her infant plays with some food. "Ulindi, tried to stop her infant, Luiza, from playing with a piece of leek. Since Luiza took no notice despite repeated attempts to stop her, Ulindi finally shakes her head towards the infant," she says. BBC © MMX

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 14060 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Janet Raloff When Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas recruited children for a study probing the effects of air pollution, Ana was just 7. The trim girl with an above-average IQ of 113 “was bright, very beautiful and clinically healthy,” the physician and toxicologist recalls. But now Ana (not her real name) is 11. And after putting her and 54 other children from a middle-class area of Mexico City through a new battery of medical and cognitive tests, Calderón-Garcidueñas found that something has been ravaging the youngsters’ lungs, hearts — and, especially troubling, their minds. Brain scans and screening for chemical biomarkers in the blood pointed to inflammation affecting all parts of the brain, says Calderón-Garcidueñas, of the National Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City and the University of Montana in Missoula. On MRI scans, white spots showed up in the prefrontal cortex. In the elderly, she says, such brain lesions tend to denote reduced blood flow and often show up in people who are developing dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease. In autopsies of seemingly healthy Mexico City children who had died in auto accidents or other traumatic events, Calderón-Garcidueñas uncovered brain deposits of amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein, proteins that serve as hallmarks of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Several years earlier, she had found similar abnormalities in homeless Mexico City dogs and exaggerated versions of the abnormalities in local 20- to 50-year-olds. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14059 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Dan Ferber For a father to truly bond with his children, he needs to grow some new gray matter. At least that seems to be the case in mice. A new study shows that when a mouse father nuzzles his pups, he develops new neurons that help him remember—and protect—those offspring later in life. The results suggest that in mice, and perhaps in humans, young babies and dads bond biologically in ways that can last a lifetime. A few years ago, neuroscientist Samuel Weiss of the University of Calgary in Canada discovered that female mice grow new neurons when they smell pheromones from dominant male mice. The neurons appear in two key structures of the brain: the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus, which together coordinate the memory of odors. That helps the females identify and mate with the dominant males, thereby giving their offspring better odds at survival. Weiss wondered if bonding with their pups would cause similar changes in the brains of new mouse fathers, altering their behavior toward their offspring in ways that might give the pups better odds of success in life. To find out, Weiss and one of his graduate students, Gloria Mak, let mouse couples cohabit in a cage, mate, and produce pups. They removed some of the fathers to another cage as soon as the pups were born, let others hang around for a couple of days and nuzzle with mom and baby, and let a third group hang around, watching and sniffing—but not nuzzling—from outside of a mesh tent. Then the researchers removed all of the dads and reunited them with their sons 6 weeks later when they were fully grown. (They avoided testing daughters because father mice tend to mate with them, making the study hard to interpret.) Dads who did not attack their sons and who spent a significant amount of time nuzzling them were seen as recognizing their offspring. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14058 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KIRK JOHNSON ASHBURN, Va. — For generations, the prototypical search-and-rescue case in America was Timmy in the well, with Lassie barking insistently to summon help. Lost children and adolescents — from the woods to the mall — generally outnumbered all others. Have a question about how to prevent an elderly relative from wandering away? An expert will answer some readers’ questions today. But last year for the first time, another type of search crossed into first place here in Virginia, marking a profound demographic shift that public safety officials say will increasingly define the future as the nation ages: wandering, confused dementia patients like Freda Machett. Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer’s disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door. Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory, are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once, health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer’s disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85. “It started with five words — ‘I want to go home’ — even though this is her home,” said Ms. Machett’s husband, John, a retired engineer who now cares for his wife full time near Richmond. She has gone off dozens of times in the four years since receiving her diagnosis, three times requiring a police search. “It’s a cruel disease,” he said. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14057 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PATRICIA COHEN Grab a timer and set it for one minute. Now list as many creative uses for a brick as you can imagine. Go. Images from brain research conducted by the Mind Research Network. While intelligence and skill are associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons in the brain, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that slow nerve traffic. In these images, the green tracks show the white matter being analyzed. The yellow and red spots show where creativity corresponds with slower nerve traffic. The blue areas show where “openness to experience,” associated with creativity, corresponds with slower nerve traffic. The question is part of a classic test for creativity, a quality that scientists are trying for the first time to track in the brain. They hope to figure out precisely which biochemicals, electrical impulses and regions were used when, say, Picasso painted “Guernica,” or Louise Nevelson assembled her wooden sculptures. Using M.R.I. technology, researchers are monitoring what goes on inside a person’s brain while he or she engages in a creative task. Yet the images of signals flashing across frontal lobes have pushed scientists to re-examine the very way creativity is measured in a laboratory. “Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14056 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Greg Miller Where did I leave my car keys? Did I come into this room to get something? And what was that person's name again? Getting old often means getting a little forgetful. Now researchers working with mice think they have found a new reason why. They've identified molecular changes in the brains of aging mice that prevent learning and memory genes from being switched on as they are in younger animals. If the findings translate to humans, they may one day lead to drugs that stave off dementia or even the normal cognitive declines of old age. Indeed, a certain class of drugs already in development for treating cancer might fit the bill. Previous studies had found age-related changes in gene expression in the hippocampus, a crucial memory center in the brain. Other work implicated histones—tiny protein spools that control gene expression by winding or unwinding DNA—in learning and memory. Neuroscientist André Fischer of the European Neuroscience Institute in Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues wanted to probe the histone connection further. They hypothesized that aging might change how histones function, causing alterations in gene expression that contribute to memory problems. To test the idea, Fischer and colleagues compared old and young mice. Old mice don't have car keys to lose track of, but they do struggle to remember a place where they once received a nasty shock or a hidden platform in a pool of murky water. The team found staggering differences in gene expression between juvenile 3-month-old mice and 16-month-old mice (equivalent to late middle age in humans). An hour after being trained to associate a particular chamber with an impending shock to the foot, nearly 2000 genes in the hippocampus became more active in the younger mice compared with just six genes in the older mice. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 14055 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth could never wash away the guilt of murder from her hands, but research has shown that the simple act of hand washing—or even using a wipe—can in fact help people clean their conscience of dirty deeds. A new study, published online May 6 in Science, reveals the power of hand washing to ease people's minds about even mundane decisions. Often, when people make decisions—no matter how big or small—they tend to justify them, rationalizing often beyond reason that their choice was by far the best. Resolving the sense of cognitive dissonance vastly decreased in subjects who washed their hands after having to make a simple choice. In an experiment, 40 subjects had to pick and rank 10 of 30 CDs that they would like to own as if they were completing a consumer survey. They were then given the choice of the fifth- and sixth-ranked CDs. Afterward, as part of an unrelated task, subjects took a survey about liquid soap. Half of the participants were given a soap bottle to assess, and the other half were instructed to try the soap out by washing their hands. Last, the participants were asked to rerank the 10 CDs. "People who merely examined the soap bottle dealt with their doubts about their decision by changing how they saw their CDs," Norbert Schwarz, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a co-author on the study, said in a prepared statement. "They saw the chosen CD as much more attractive than before and the rejected CD as much less attractive." Those who had washed their hands, however, appeared to have reduced cognitive dissonance and rated their chosen and rejected CDs about as they had before having to choose between them. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14054 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Only 10 years after scientists triumphantly decoded the human genome, an international research team has mapped the genes of the long-extinct Neanderthal people and report there's a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us. The remarkable finding could answer a question that has been hotly debated among anthropologists for decades: whether our human ancestors and the Neanderthals interbred some time after both species left Africa many thousands of years ago. The report, published today in the journal Science, capped more than five years of intensive work by a group of 56 international scientists led by German paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo and Richard E. Green of UC Santa Cruz. Edward M. "Eddy" Rubin, director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, called the major project "a terrific piece of work and a monumental endeavor," The project's scientists used tiny specks of powdered bone retrieved from three Neanderthal females who died in a Croatian cave more than 40,000 years ago to complete the draft of the Neanderthal genome. They then compared the genes to those of modern humans living today in five different regions of the world: France, Papua New Guinea, China, and southern and northern Africa. The scientists analyzed 4 billion units of Neanderthal DNA, called nucleotides - at least 60 percent of the Neanderthal's entire genome. While incomplete, Pääbo told reporters during a teleconference this week that 60 percent "is a very good statistical sample of the entire genome." © 2010 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14053 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Bob Holmes PEOPLE are extraordinarily skilled at spotting cheats - much better than they are at detecting rule-breaking that does not involve cheating. A study showing just how good we are at this adds weight to the theory that our exceptional brainpower arose through evolutionary pressures to acquire specific cognitive skills. The still-controversial idea that humans have specialised decision-making systems in addition to generalised reasoning ability has been around for decades. Its advocates point out that the ability to identify untrustworthy people should be favoured evolutionarily, since cheats risk undermining the social interactions in which people trade goods or services for mutual benefit. To test whether we have a special ability to reason about cheating, Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues used a standard psychological test called the Wason selection task, which tests volunteers' ability to reason about "if/then" statements. The researchers set up scenarios in which they asked undergraduate volunteers to imagine they were supervising workers sorting applications for admission to two schools: a good one in a district where school taxes are high, and a poor one in an equally wealthy, but lightly taxed district. The hypothetical workers were supposed to follow a rule that specified "if a student is admitted to the good school, they must live in the highly taxed district". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14052 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katie Moisse Oh, so close. Just one more try. It's hard to understand what keeps problem gamblers betting after a long losing streak. But a new study published May 5 in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests their brains' reward centers, part of the dopamine system (so-called because the neurons release the neurotransmitter dopamine), react the same way to a "near miss" as they would to a win. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, U.K., used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 20 gamblers with varying degrees of gambling intensities while they played a computerized slot machine. The brain reward centers were active in problem gamblers even when the slot machine icons almost lined up but didn't. So the near miss delivered the dopamine, if not the dollars. "These findings are exciting because they suggest that near-misses may elicit a dopamine response in the more severe gamblers, despite the fact that no actual reward is delivered," said study co-author Luke Clark in a prepared statement. "If these bursts of dopamine are driving addictive behavior, this may help to explain why problem gamblers find it so difficult to quit." © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14051 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A handful of Canadians with multiple sclerosis have had an experimental surgical procedure under the radar in this country, despite lack of proof of its safety or effectiveness. The surgery is based on the theory that blocked veins in the neck and chest contribute in some way to symptoms of MS. It's thought that opening up the veins using balloon angioplasty improves the condition. The procedure is officially not available in Canada. But Bill Harrison said he had the surgery in Victoria just over three weeks ago, paid for by B.C.'s health plan. Harrison, who has now moved to Toronto, was about to spend to $19,000 to travel to India for the surgery when he had the procedure at Victoria General Hospital. Dr. Mark Godley of False Creek Healthcare Centre in Vancouver arranged Harrison's surgery as a routine vascular procedure to fix a circulation problem. "The treatment was performed based on the fact that there was a disorder, a vascular disorder, and there was not the label of the association with MS," Godley said. Harrison said he couldn't have waited any longer because he was days away from being bed-ridden. "I do not understand what the obstacles are," Harrison said, sitting on a park bench in Toronto. "What I hear is, 'It takes time, it has to be tested.' I've already tested it. It works. I got my life back, yes!" © CBC 2010

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 14050 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PAUL BLOOM Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head. This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies. Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14049 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lizzie Buchen The centrifuge tube was the first that neuroscientist Philip Sabes had held in his hand for 15 years. The small, polypropylene container, no larger than a AAA battery, held a few drops of liquid at its base. It looked like water but, Sabes had been told by his collaborators, it contained a high concentration of viruses — and he had to get them into the brain of a monkey. "Honestly, I really felt like I didn't know what I was doing," says Sabes, of his work last November at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). "I basically knew nothing about molecular biology. This was way outside my area of expertise." Sabes's training was in physics, machine learning and human perception, and his lab has been working with humans and non-human primates to develop models of how the brain turns perceptions into actions; for example, seeing a fly and swatting it away. He's not alone in his molecular-biology naivety at the Keck Center — there is no cell-culture facility, no PCR machine and no bench-top centrifuge. The centre's one ice machine spits out large cubes instead of the crushed ice routinely used for chilling reagents — it was ordered by mistake, and no one has cared enough to fix the situation. Sabes and his colleagues have had no need for such apparatus. Researchers in their field of 'systems neuroscience' try to understand how networks of neurons process sensations and control behaviours such as learning and decision-making. And up to this point, much of their progress has been made using electrophysiology, stimulating and recording from the brains of animals as they perform a task or develop a new skill. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14048 - Posted: 06.24.2010