By DENISE GRADY Dr. Howard Riina threaded a slender tube through a maze of arteries in Dennis Sugrue’s brain, watching X-ray images on a monitor to track his progress. At the site where a previous operation had removed a malignant tumor, he infused a drug called mannitol and unleashed a flood of the cancer drug Avastin. Doctors and nurses watched intently, worried that the Avastin could cause brain swelling, a hemorrhage or a seizure. But Mr. Sugrue emerged unscathed. A half hour after the procedure, he woke up from anesthesia mumbling, “More is better,” and wishing aloud that he could have had a bigger dose. It was an experiment. Mr. Sugrue, 50, who works for a hedge fund and has two teenage children, was in a study for people with glioblastoma — the same type of brain tumor that killed Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in August — and was only the second person ever to have Avastin sprayed directly into his brain. Getting drugs into the brain has always been a major challenge in treating tumors and other neurological diseases, because the blood-brain barrier, a natural defense system, keeps many drugs out. The study that Mr. Sugrue is in, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, combines old technologies in a new way to open the barrier and deliver extraordinarily high doses of Avastin straight to these deadly tumors — without soaking the rest of the brain in the drug and exposing it to side effects. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13476 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Sohn Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics. According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces -- all with brains the size of pinheads. Despite many attempts to link the volume of an animal's brain with the depth of its intelligence, scientists now propose that it's the complexity of connections between brain cells that matters most. Studying those connections -- a more manageable task in a little brain than in a big one -- could help researchers understand how bigger brains, including those of humans, work. Figuring out how a relatively small number of cells work together to process complex concepts could also lead to "smarter" computers that do some of the same tasks. "The question is: If these insects can do these things with such little brains, what does anything need a big brain for?" said Lars Chittka, who presented his arguments along with colleague Jeremy Niven in the journal Current Biology. "Bigger isn't necessarily better, and in some cases it could be quite the opposite." Because we are intelligent animals with big brains, people have long assumed that big brains are smarter brains. Yet, scientists have found scant evidence to support that view, Chittka said. Studies that have made those connections are fraught with problems. "If you try many measurements," he said, "Eventually you will find one that shows a correlation." © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 13475 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY Steve Ballou, an ex-smoker for more than a decade, started slipping back into his old ways with cigars. He'd have one when he was out with the guys, then when he was driving home from work, then one after dinner. This went on for several years, but he thought of himself as a cigar aficionado, not a relapsed smoker, since cigarettes were never on the menu. Until he vacationed in the City of Lights. Ballou will forever associate Paris' nickname with the act of lighting a cigarette. Over lunch one day, he realized he'd forgotten to buy a cigar to savor after the meal. So he bummed a cigarette from his wife, an occasional smoker. "I smoked half her pack that afternoon, and from that point on, I was a smoker," says Ballou, 54, a Sherborn, Mass., resident who works in financial services. He had a smoker's typical love/hate relationship with cigarettes. "I really did want to quit, but I was a nicotine addict. I needed something to help me get over this." That something was a nicotine vaccine. Researchers are investigating whether the same approach used to prevent infectious diseases could treat addictions to such drugs as nicotine and cocaine. None is yet on the market, but in late September, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released a $10 million stimulus grant to Nabi Pharmaceuticals to help pay for the first Phase III trial – a large study designed to confirm effectiveness and monitor side effects – of a smoking-cessation vaccine. Company spokesman Greg Fries says Nabi, based in Rockville, Md., expects to begin enrolling patients in the NicVax study by year's end. Copyright 2009 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13474 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Hypnosis has a "very real" effect that can be picked up on brain scans, say Hull University researchers. An imaging study of hypnotised participants showed decreased activity in the parts of the brain linked with daydreaming or letting the mind wander. The same brain patterns were absent in people who had the tests but who were not susceptible to being hypnotised. One psychologist said the study backed the theory that hypnosis "primes" the brain to be open to suggestion. Hypnosis is increasingly being used to help people stop smoking or lose weight and advisers recently recommended its use on the NHS to treat irritable bowel syndrome. It is not the first time researchers have tried to use imaging studies to monitor brain activity in people under hypnosis. But the Hull team said these had been done while people had been asked to carry out tasks, so it was not clear whether the changes in the brain were due to the act of doing the task or an effect of hypnosis. In the latest study, the team first tested how people responded to hypnosis and selected 10 individuals who were "highly suggestible" and seven people who did not really respond to the technique other than becoming more relaxed. The participants were asked to do a task under hypnosis, such as listening to non-existent music, but unknown to them the brain activity was being monitored in the rest periods in between tasks, the team reported in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. In the "highly suggestible" group there was decreased activity in the part of the brain involved in daydreaming or letting the mind wander - also known as the "default mode" network. BBC © MMIX

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13473 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Chemicals in plastics alter the brains of baby boys making them "more feminine", say US researchers. Males exposed to high doses in the womb went on to be less likely to play with boys' toys like cars or to join in rough and tumble games, they found. The University of Rochester team's latest work adds to concerns about the safety of phthalates, found in vinyl flooring and PVC shower curtains. The findings are reported in the International Journal of Andrology. Phthalates have the ability to disrupt hormones, and have been banned in toys in the EU for some years. However, they are still widely used in many different household items, including plastic furniture and packaging. There are many different types and some mimic the female hormone oestrogen. The same researchers have already shown that this can mean boys are born with genital abnormalities. Now they say certain phthalates also impact on the developing brain, by knocking out the action of the male hormone testosterone. Dr Shanna Swan and her team tested urine samples from mothers over midway through pregnancy for traces of phthalates. The women, who gave birth to 74 boys and 71 girls, were followed up when their children were aged four to seven and asked about the toys the youngsters played with and the games they enjoyed. They found that two phthalates DEHP and DBP can affect play behaviour. BBC © MMIX

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 13472 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lizzie Buchen A once-mysterious neural pathway may have a crucial role in making injured areas overly sensitive to touch, a study in mice suggests. When a person has any kind of injury — a broken shin, for example, or a sunburn — the pain system becomes hypersensitized, firing up in response to normally painless sensations induced by, for instance, walking or a gentle massage. Normally, this tenderness protects the vulnerable tissue as it heals. But occasionally the pain can overstay its usefulness, becoming chronic in conditions such as arthritis. Now, neuroscientists Robert Edwards and Allan Basbaum from the University of California, San Francisco, and their colleagues have found that a small subset of nerve fibres, the function of which remained a puzzle since their discovery decades ago1, could be routing innocuous touch sensations to the pain pathway when there's an injury. "Surprise would be an understatement," says Basbaum, referring to the findings. "No one knew anything about what these fibres were doing." The team's findings are published by Nature2. The researchers found that the fibres, called unmyelinated low-threshold mechanoreceptors (C-LTMRs), are easily stimulated, unlike classic pain fibres, which respond only when the sensation is intense. But C-LTMRs aren't usually used to detect light touch — this falls to another another major group of sensory neurons — so their role was unclear. The small population of cells have remained enigmatic because they have been difficult to target specifically. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13471 - Posted: 06.24.2010

HONG KONG - People of Japanese and European descent who have mutant versions of five genes may be at higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease, two large teams of researchers have found. The two independent studies, published in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, involved more than 25,000 participants in total and are the largest studies to date to try to uncover genetic associations behind Parkinson's disease. A study in Japan looked only at ethnic Japanese while a second study, in the United States, focused only on people of European heritage. In the first study, Tatsushi Toda of Japan's Kobe University and colleagues sequenced the genes of 2,011 participants with the disease and 18,381 others without the disease. They found that those with the disease had variants of the genes PARK16, BST1, SNCA and LRRK2. In the second study, researchers led by Andrew Singleton at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) laboratory of neurogenetics in the United States analyzed the genes of more than 5,000 patients of European ancestry who suffer from the disease and detected strong links between Parkinson's and variants of the genes SNCA and MAPT. The two teams later compared their data and found that variants of PARK16, SNCA and LRRK2 carry risk of Parkinson's in both Japanese and European populations, while variants of BST1 and MAPT were population-specific. Copyright 2009 Reuters.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13470 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Unlike most Western guys and gals looking for love, Africa’s Hadza foragers pair up without regard to each other’s size and strength, a new study finds. And that stature-may-care approach underscores the often unappreciated variety of human mating strategies, the researchers say. Hadza marriages don’t tend to consist of individuals with similar heights, weights, body mass indexes, body-fat percentages or grip strengths, say behavioral ecologist Rebecca Sear of the London School of Economics and anthropologist Frank Marlowe of Florida State University in Tallahassee. Neither do Hadza couples feature a disproportionate percentage of husbands taller than their wives, as has been documented in some Western nations, the researchers report in the Oct. 23 Biology Letters. Almost no Hadza individuals mention height or size when asked to explain what makes for an attractive mate, Sear and Marlowe add. People everywhere seek healthy, fertile marriage partners, Sear proposes. “But I suspect there may not be a preference for one particular signal of health in mates across every population,” she says. Among the roughly 1,000 Hadza scraping out a living in rural Tanzania, knowledge of a potential mate’s health history may render that person’s height and weight irrelevant, the researchers suggest. Also, any health benefits of being big may get nullified by the difficulty of maintaining a large body during periodic food shortages endured by the Hadza. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 13469 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kay Lazar The word teasers flashing on his computer screen seemed tuned to his personal abilities. And the accompanying voice track prodded or consoled - “it actually congratulates you,’’ he said - based on his answers. Now, the 92-year-old former management executive, an engineer by training and crossword puzzler by hobby, is scheduling computer time for fellow residents at the Fox Hill Village retirement community in Westwood. The facility just purchased a couple of these newfangled brain games and residents are lining up for 20-minute sessions. The products are spreading like kudzu through retirement communities and senior centers, as older Americans search for ways to stay mentally sharp. Researchers, however, have yet to determine whether these brain games, targeted to seniors and now an $80 million-a-year market, deliver what they promise. “The jury is still very much out,’’ said Peter Snyder, a brain researcher at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, who analyzed 10 studies on the issue and came away unimpressed by the quality and quantity of research. In an article published earlier this year in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Snyder concluded there was no evidence the products, typically computer software costing several hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, stave off dementia in healthy elders. Snyder did not delve into the effect of brain exercises on adults who already have cognitive impairments. © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13468 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nick Triggle Needless use of anti-psychotic drugs is widespread in dementia care and contributes to the death of many patients, an official review suggests. About 180,000 patients a year are given the drugs in care homes, hospitals and their own homes to manage aggression. But the expert review - commissioned by ministers - said the treatment was unnecessary in nearly 150,000 cases and was linked to 1,800 deaths. The government in England has agreed to take steps to reduce use of the drugs. The review - and the government pledge to take action - comes after long-running concerns about the use of anti-psychotic drugs. Over the past 30 years, the NHS has increasingly turned to the treatment, which was originally aimed at people with schizophrenia, as it has struggled to cope with the rise in people with dementia. There are currently 700,000 people in the UK with the condition, but this is expected to rise to one million in the next 10 years because of the ageing population. The review, led by King's College London expert Professor Sube Banerjee, accepted that for some people anti-psychotic drugs would be necessary. But it said they should be used only for a maximum of three months and when the person represented a risk to themselves or others. Professor Banerjee estimated that of the 180,000 people given the drugs each year, only 36,000 benefited. He said health and social care services needed to develop a "different mindset". (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 13467 - Posted: 11.14.2009

Patients complaining of grinding their teeth in their sleep are being given mild electric shock treatment. A chain of private dental practices in Hull is trialling a device which delivers a tiny electrical impulse when it detects grinding is about to begin. Teeth grinding - or bruxism - is a common and usually harmless habit induced by stress. It can, however, cause headaches and stiff necks, as well as irritating a sleeping partner. Traditional treatments involve wearing a plastic device at night which prevents the top and bottom teeth from meeting. With this new device, Grindcare , developed in Denmark, a small electrode is placed on the temple which then monitors the movement of facial muscles. When it detects tension mounting, it delivers a tiny electrical impulse - or biofeedback. This is not consciously detected by the sleeping patient but still serves to relax the muscles. The device is said to reduce grinding by as much as 80% within two months. Other ways of tackling bruxism include counselling and relaxation therapies to resolve the initial source of stress and tension. But Dr David Vivian, the dentist trialling the device, said that grinding could worsen existing anxieties. "The broken sleep pattern caused by grinding can exacerbate any stresses or worries already being felt by the patient, and add an extra layer of anxiety to their lives. They may also be resorting to over-the-counter painkillers to treat side effects, such as headaches, and finding that they are having to increase the dosage all the time. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13466 - Posted: 11.14.2009

By RONI CARYN RABIN There are probably better ways to start the day, but a new study suggests that early morning is an ideal time to schedule a colonoscopy. Physicians detected 20 percent more polyps during the first procedures of the day than they did during procedures performed later in the morning and the early afternoon, the study found. “Hour by hour, there were fewer polyps found as the day progressed,” said Dr. Brennan M. R. Spiegel, an assistant professor of medicine at U.C.L.A. and an author of the study, which appears in the November issue of the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. “It’s a small effect, very small, but very measurable and definitely there.” A study done at the Cleveland Clinic and published this year found similar results, noting that 29.3 percent of morning procedures resulted in detection of at least one polyp, compared with 25.3 percent of the afternoon procedures. The new study looked at the results from colonoscopies performed on 477 patients at the West Los Angeles Veterans Medical Center in 2006 and 2007. Most of the procedures were performed by a physician training in gastroenterology who was supervised by a faculty member. Procedures were performed between 7:45 a.m. and 1 p.m., and though they were done only in the early hours of the day, the analysis found that 20 percent more polyps were detected during the earliest colonoscopies. The researchers tried to control for other factors that might have affected the results, including the fact that patients usually came in with better bowel preparation for morning procedures. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Attention
Link ID: 13465 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating. Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution. "We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years. "When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure — Europe, China, South Africa, Australia — that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That's roughly 10 percent," Hawks said. "As to why is it shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much," he added. © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower For chimpanzees living in a forest surrounding the village of Bossou in Guinea, cracking nuts is a serious task with important steps. They are: First, lug large rocks to a spot near a nut-bearing tree, such as an oil palm. Next, gather the nuts and place them on the rocks. Then, obtain a smaller, graspable rock. Finally, smash the armored treats and let the shells fly. As clutches of apes pound away with devastating precision, these nut bashers create an unholy din akin to a human rock band. In fact, these West African chimps rock out in a surprising way. In this corner of the jungle, chimps appear to think more carefully about implements and how to assemble them than many scientists had assumed. A team led by anthropologist Susana Carvalho set up a nut-cracking lab in the forest near Bossou by placing seven piles of nuts and several dozen stones of various sizes, shapes and types inside a clearing. Over five field seasons, 14 of 17 chimps that regularly visited the clearing consistently reused the same pairs of stones, the scientists report in a special October issue of Animal Cognition. Most chimps, Carvalho says, used the stones together as one tool, a nutcracker. Carvalho suspects that watching the Bossou chimps at work will provide clues to the origins of the Stone Age, the 2.6 million years during which members of the human evolutionary family are known to have used and made stone tools of increasing complexity. She is one researcher participating in a scientific movement to merge strains of archaeology, anthropology, primatology and psychology into a hybrid field dubbed primate archaeology: the study of current and past material culture among apes and perhaps other nonhuman animals. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 13463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Many strokes cannot be explained by known risk factors like high blood pressure and smoking, and scientists have speculated that infection could play a role. Now a new study is linking cumulative exposure to five common pathogens with an increased risk for stroke. The infections in order of significance are Chlamydia pneumoniae, Helicobacter pylori, cytomegalovirus and herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2, according to the study, published online on Nov. 9 in The Archives of Neurology. The report will appear in the print edition of the journal in January. “Each of these common pathogens may persist after an acute infection and contribute to perpetuating a state of chronic low-level infection,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Mitchell S. V. Elkind, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. Dr. Elkind said the low-level infection and inflammation in the vessel walls might be leading to disease. The researchers followed an ethnically diverse group of 1,625 residents from northern Manhattan whose average age was 68 and who had been stroke-free at the beginning of the study. After almost 8 years, 67 of the participants had suffered strokes. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stroke; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13462 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Old memories may get the boot from new brain cells. A new rodent study shows that newborn neurons destabilize established connections among existing brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Clearing old memories from the hippocampus makes way for new learning, researchers from Japan suggest in the Nov. 13 Cell. Other researchers had proposed the idea that neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, could disrupt existing memories, but the Cell paper is the first to show evidence supporting the idea, says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Scientists have known that memories first form in the hippocampus and are later transferred to long-term storage in other parts of the brain. For some amount of time the memory resides both in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain. What’s not been known is how, after a few months or years, the memory is gradually cleared from the hippocampus. Researchers have also debated the role of neurogenesis in learning and memory. The hippocampus is one of only two places in the adult brain where scientists know that new neurons form. On the basis of previous studies, many researchers think new neurons stabilize memory circuits or are somehow otherwise necessary to form new memories. The new study suggests the opposite: Newborn neurons weaken or disrupt connections that encode old memories in the hippocampus. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 13461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jesse Bering My mother used to say, “there’s somebody out there for everybody.” It sounds sweet, I know, but when you realize she would say this only in jaw-dropping astonishment at seeing a loving couple out in public in which both partners were, shall we say, aesthetically shortchanged in some eye-catching way, my dearly departed mother somehow doesn’t sound like such a Polyanna anymore. But she got it basically right. When two people are in love, the world whittles away to them alone, and as new research findings suggest, a mere reminder of that other person can make everything seem a little more manageable—even, as it turns out, physical pain. In a study published this month in Psychological Science, psychology graduate student Sarah Master of the University of California, Los Angeles, and fellow researchers invited 25 couples into their laboratory for a study on pain perception. The females—in this study, anyway—got to be the recipients of the experimentally induced pain stimuli. While the male partner was away in another room having his photographs taken for later use in the study, the woman was instructed to place her arm through an opaque curtain. An experimenter on the other side of the curtain first assessed each woman’s “pain threshold” for thermal stimulation, which produces a sharp, acute, prickling pain sensation within about a tenth of a second. Once the investigators determined each woman’s subjective pain threshold for moderate discomfort—operationalized as a score of “10” on a pain-rating scale of 0 to 20—they proceeded to the experiment, in which the women were subjected to 84 further pain trials. Ouch! Unbeknownst to the female participants, half of these thermal stimulations were administered at the women’s individually predetermined pain threshold levels, and half were set at 1° C above these moderate discomfort levels. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13460 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes, reporter A gene therapy that appears to bulk up muscle mass and strength in monkeys - reported today in Science Translational Medicine - will undoubtedly raise fresh concerns about the potential for gene doping in sport. We already know that some athletes use drugs like erythropoietin to increase the amount of oxygen their blood delivers, and steroids to bulk up muscle mass. The big advantage with gene doping is that it should be harder to detect. That's because it's difficult to test for a protein that the body already produces, especially when its levels naturally vary between individuals - which might explain why some people are inherently better at sports than others. In the new study, Janaiah Kota and colleagues at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, used gene therapy to add extra copies of the follistatin gene into the leg muscles of monkeys. Follistatin has been previously shown in mice to block myostatin, a protein that decreases muscle mass, resulting in bulked up "mighty mice". Monkeys injected with the gene also seemed to bulk up, and when Kota's team analyzed their leg muscles with a device that measures force, they found that the muscles injected with the follistatin gene were also stronger than normal muscles. They hope the approach could eventually be used to treat the severe muscle weakness associated with neuromuscular disorders like muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Aria Pearson If you struggle to follow the conversation at noisy parties, music lessons might help. Nina Kraus and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have previously shown that playing an instrument seems to enhance our ability to pick up emotional cues in conversationSpeaker. Now her team has found differences in brain activity that they say make musicians better at picking out speech from background noise. After establishing that musicians are better at repeating a sentence heard in the presence of background noise, the researchers asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity. Slow reactions Background noise delayed the brain's response, but this delay was much shorter in the musicians. What's more, in the noisy environment, the musicians' brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians. The difference could be partly genetic, but Kraus says training is likely to help. "Musicians spend a lot of time extracting particular sounds from a soundscape." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Attention
Link ID: 13458 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes. It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals. "It's very exciting work," says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. "The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new." Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness . Consistent signals So far, efforts to find a brain signature of consciousness have focused on the intensity of neural activity, how long it lasts, and whether signals tend to be synchronised across different regions of the brain. "We were looking for something other than the intensity and duration of the neural activity that characterises conscious neural processing," says Aaron Schurger of Princeton University in New Jersey, who led the new work. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 13457 - Posted: 06.24.2010