Obesity rates in the US have surged over the last year, a report shows. The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found adult obesity rates rose in 23 of the 50 states, but fell in none. In addition, the percentage of obese and overweight children is at or above 30% in 30 states. The report warns widespread obesity is fuelling rates of chronic disease, and is responsible for a large, and growing chunk of domestic healthcare costs. Obesity is linked to a range of health problems, including heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. Dr Jeff Levi, TFAH executive director, said: "Our health care costs have grown along with our waist lines. The obesity epidemic is a big contributor to the skyrocketing health care costs in the US. How are we going to compete with the rest of the world if our economy and workforce are weighed down by bad health?" The US government has set a target of cutting obesity rates in all 50 states to 15% by next year. However, the report said this target was certain to be missed. For the fifth year in a row, Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity at 32.5%. Three other states - West Virginia, Alabama and Tennessee - also had adult obesity rates in excess of 30%. In just one state - Colorado - was the adult obesity rate below 20%. In 1991, no state had an adult obesity rate above 20%, and in 1980 the national average for adult obesity was 15%. Mississippi also had the highest rate of obese and overweight children (ages 10 to 17) at 44.4%. Minnesota and Utah had the lowest rate at 23.1%. Childhood obesity rates in the US have more than tripled since 1980. The report warns that the current economic crisis could exacerbate the obesity epidemic by driving up food prices, particularly for nutritious foods. (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13009 - Posted: 07.02.2009

By GARDINER HARRIS and DUFF WILSON WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators warned Wednesday that patients taking two popular drugs to stop smoking should be watched closely for signs of serious mental illness, as reports mount of suicides among the drugs’ users. But officials emphasized that fear should not stop patients from taking the smoking-cessation medicines, Chantix, made by Pfizer, and Zyban, made by GlaxoSmithKline, which also sells it under the brand name Wellbutrin, for depression. “Stopping smoking is a goal we should all be working towards,” said Dr. Curtis J. Rosebraugh, director of a drug evaluation office at the Food and Drug Administration. “We don’t want to scare people off from trying a medication that could help them achieve this goal. You should just be careful.” Pfizer will add a so-called black box warning — the F.D.A.’s most serious caution — to the packaging information for Chantix. The Pfizer drug, introduced in 2006, has about 90 percent of the market for prescription smoking-cessation drugs, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. Even so, Chantix sales — $846 million in 2008 — had been less than Pfizer had hoped because of previous warnings of its side effects. Glaxo will expand its existing black box warning on Wellbutrin, citing suicidal thoughts by patients who use it for depression, to include Zyban, which has had only modest sales in the smoking cessation market. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13008 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nicholas Wade The journal Nature held a big press conference in London Wednesday, at the World Conference of Science Journalists, to unveil three large studies of the genetics of schizophrenia. Press releases from five American and European institutions celebrated the findings, one using epithets like “landmark,” “major step forward,” and “real scientific breakthrough.” It was the kind of hoopla you’d expect for an actual scientific advance. It seems to me the reports represent more of a historic defeat, a Pearl Harbor of schizophrenia research. The defeat points solely to the daunting nature of the adversary, not to any failing on the part of the researchers, who were using the most advanced tools available. Still, who is helped by dressing up a severely disappointing setback as a “major step forward”? The principal news from the three studies is that schizophrenia is caused by a very large number of errant genes, not a manageable and meaningful handful. The rationale behind the long search for schizophrenia genes was entirely justifiable. Since schizophrenia is highly heritable, it must have a strong genetic component. And it has long seemed possible that the responsible genetic variants underlying most common diseases would also be common. Natural selection gives us strong protection against diseases that strike before the age of reproduction. But its power to eliminate harmful genes is thought to wane sharply thereafter. So bad versions of genes that are bad only late in life could build up in the population, explaining why the common diseases that strike later in life are so common. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13007 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race. "It's one of a string of papers that have come out in the cognitive neuroscience literature that helps us to understand some of the unfortunate ways in which racial group identity can influence our reactions to other people," says Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the new study. Previous research has shown that the amygdala, a brain area implicated in fear, responds more strongly to pictures of people whose ethnicity is different from the viewer's. But these responses aren't uniform; other research has shown that activity in other brain areas can dampen the amygdala. To determine how ethnicity also sways the brain's sense of empathy, Shihui Han and colleagues at Peking University in Beijing showed 17 Chinese and 16 Caucasians volunteers videos of a person being poked in the cheek with a Q-tip cotton bud or a hypodermic syringe, while the volunteers had their brains scanned on a functional MRI machine. The films sparked activity in a region called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which also lights up when people are in pain themselves. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13006 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders Large collections of common genetic variants, rather than the harmful actions of just a few key mutations, probably predispose people to schizophrenia, three large genetic studies suggest. The studies, all published online July 1 in Nature, sifted through mountains of genetic data from patients with schizophrenia and people without the disease looking for spelling differences in the sequence of letters that make up the genome. The studies also turned up specific chromosome regions that probably play a role in the disease. Understanding such genetic factors, estimated to account for 80 percent of the total risk of getting schizophrenia, may ultimately lead to better treatments. “This is a pretty major breakthrough for us,” said Michael O’Donovan of Cardiff University’s School of Medicine in Wales at a July 1 press briefing. O’Donovan coauthored one of the studies as part of the International Schizophrenia Consortium. He says a person with schizophrenia probably has hundreds or thousands of risk-increasing variants. Using a method called genome-wide association, each of the three studies compared several thousand DNA samples from people diagnosed with schizophrenia with samples from thousands of others, some healthy and some with other diseases. Association studies are designed to find single letter differences, called SNPs, at many points along the DNA.Such variants popping up more frequently in the schizophrenia patients’ DNA are presumed to markers of regions of the genome that contribute to the disease. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13005 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John P. Mello Jr. A protein found on brain cells, known to contribute to nicotine addiction, may also be the key to developing drugs for a wide range of diseases and medical conditions, including obesity, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In a recent study, researchers at Brown University in Providence discovered the protein, called the alpha-7 receptor, has a previously unsuspected wide-ranging influence on processes within the body. It affects dozens of cellular interactions and interacts with 55 other proteins, including a separate class of receptor that is a target for about 40 percent of all therapeutic drugs. “These [receptors] as a group are very important because they control a lot of critical functions, like heart rate,’’ said Edward Hawrot, the study’s lead author and a professor of molecular science, molecular pharmacology, physiology, and technology at Brown. “What was surprising was that we saw a connection between [the] proteins, because these two receptor families are very, very different.’’ Alpha-7 receptors have long been known, but their function was something of a mystery until the Brown researchers revealed their importance. “They’ve learned that these nicotinic receptors have a profound influence on other systems in the body,’’ said J. Donald deBethizy, chief executive of Targacept in Winston-Salem, N.C., which makes drugs that target receptors. DeBethizy said the Brown research shows “the alpha-7 receptor may be at the apex of many, many important biological responses.’’ © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13004 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Toyota-sponsored researchers in Japan unveiled a brain-machine interface system on Monday that allows a person to use thoughts to direct the motion of a wheelchair. The system processes thought patterns and translates them into actions for the wheelchair, allowing for movement left, right or forward. The delay between the thought and the wheelchair action is as little as 125 milliseconds, according to the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, which demonstrated the technology on Monday. The system measures electrical activity in the brain through five electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes placed above the areas of the brain that handle motor movement. The sensors interpret the signals they pick up and translate them into motion. The system is capable of adjusting itself to the individual user to improve accuracy, the researchers said. At its best performance, the system achieved an accuracy rate of 95 per cent. The system also incorporates some basic motor controls: a demonstration video of the systems shows a researcher puffing out a cheek to make an emergency stop. A number of other Japanese companies, including Honda and Hitachi, have begun work on brain-machine interface technologies. In April, Honda unveiled a system that sensed a researcher's thoughts and then relayed them wirelessly to the Asimo robot, which then acted out the command, lifting its right arm when the researcher thought about raising his right arm. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 13003 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katie Balestra Stan Starr, a 54-year-old financial consultant, sat in the back of the room filled with blue chairs, quietly tapping his Converse sneakers on the carpet. The 12 steps to recovery, enshrined by Alcoholics Anonymous, were printed in large black letters on a wall. But Starr was there because of a different drug -- a class of prescription medication called benzodiazepines. Five years ago, he couldn't sleep at night, his heart raced, he had wrenching stomach pains and felt as if his skin were crawling off his bones. He was in the midst of a 2 1/2 -year battle to withdraw from the drug Klonopin, which his psychiatrist had prescribed to him for anxiety. "I went through sheer living hell," he said. "I didn't know if I was going to make it." Benzodiazepines, often prescribed to manage anxiety, panic and sleep disorders, include Xanax, Ativan, Valium and Klonopin. Originally pushed as an alternative to barbiturates, their use has grown rapidly in the past 30 years. But critics say their long-term effects have gone largely unaddressed. Health professionals and consumers are increasingly recognizing that taking the drugs for more than a few weeks can lead to physical dependence, often ending with a grueling withdrawal. The benefits of the drugs have been heralded by both physicians and patients. On Askapatient.com, a Web site where consumers can rate medicines, one person wrote in April that Xanax was the "best thing that ever happened to me." Another wrote in March, "This drug saved my life." © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Emotions; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13002 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CARL ZIMMER LINCOLN, Mass. — Sara Lewis is fluent in firefly. On this night she walks through a farm field in eastern Massachusetts, watching the first fireflies of the evening rise into the air and begin to blink on and off. Dr. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University, points out six species in this meadow, each with its own pattern of flashes. Along one edge of the meadow are Photinus greeni, with double pulses separated by three seconds of darkness. Near a stream are Photinus ignitus, with a five-second delay between single pulses. And near a forest are Pyractomena angulata, which make Dr. Lewis’s favorite flash pattern. “It’s like a flickering orange rain,” she said. The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females are sitting and observing. They look for flash patterns of males of their own species, and sometimes they respond with a single flash of their own, always at a precise interval after the male’s. Dr. Lewis takes out a penlight and clicks it twice, in perfect Photinus greeni. A female Photinus greeni flashes back. “Most people don’t realize there’s this call and response going on,” Dr. Lewis said. “But it’s very, very easy to talk to fireflies.” For Dr. Lewis, this meadow is the stage for an invertebrate melodrama, full of passion and yearning, of courtship duets and competitions for affection, of cruel deception and gruesome death. For the past 16 years, Dr. Lewis has been coming to this field to decipher the evolutionary forces at play in this production, as fireflies have struggled to survive and spread their genes to the next generation. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 13001 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by David Robson HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer? Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise. Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others. In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13000 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jim Giles BOB ROHRMAN has never had much time for computer games. He was given a console a year ago, but stopped using it after a few weeks. It's not surprising: Rohrman is 67 and suffers from tremors caused by Parkinson's disease. "The only thing I knew how to play was solitaire," he says. But in January, Rohrman got gaming again, thanks to Ben Herz, an occupational therapist at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. Herz had the retired truck driver play sports games on the Nintendo Wii, a console controlled by a hand-held wand that detects movement and gestures. In tennis games, for example, players swing this "Wiimote" as they would a racket. That meant Rohrman was getting a regular workout. After playing 3 hours a week for about a month, he claimed he was a changed man. "I can move better, walk better, coordinate better," he said. After playing tennis on a Nintendo Wii 3 hours a week for about a month, he was a changed man The benefits of exercise are well known, but active console games have several advantages over traditional workouts. Video games are designed to be engaging but not too challenging - players should spend most of their time in the sweet spot between too easy and too hard. And unlike jogging or swing-ball, video games can be played in the living room, where bulging waistlines and appalling skill levels can be kept safely from public view. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stroke; Parkinsons
Link ID: 12999 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring column. It’s just one of the things that make us human. Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is. The answer is very. Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention. Psychologists have also discovered ways to increase and decrease mind wandering. Jonathan Smallwood, a colleague of Schooler’s at UC Santa Barbara, instructed subjects to tap a key every time they saw a new number appear on a computer screen but to hold off tapping if the number was three.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 12998 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Rowan Hooper Animals take to drugs just as readily as we do. Sometimes they avail themselves of natural highs, and sometimes lab animals get very fond of substances they are fed for research. So, sit back with your stimulant of choice and enjoy New Scientist's round-up of animals on drugs. 1. Wallabies on opium The marsupials of Tasmania have found a means of passing the time on Australia's island state that could also explain mysterious local crop circles. Wallabies have been munching the poppies grown for opium by the pharmaceutical industry. "We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," the attorney general was quoted in The Mercury newspaper. Sheep and deer have also been reported as being raving opium fiends. 2. Elephants on acid In 1962, the director of a zoo in Oklahoma had the bright idea of firing a syringe dart containing almost 300 milligrams of LSD – about 3000 times the normal dose a hippie would take – into one of his elephants. Sadly, the animal went crazy, then died. Elephants are regularly reported going on booze-fuelled rampages in India, but zoologists calculating the amount the animals would have to drink to get rowdy have cleared them of being under the influence. The aggressive elephants are simply defending their territories, apparently. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 12997 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Parents may praise their children's artwork as if each piece were a da Vinci or a Rembrandt – but pigeons, new research suggests, are somewhat more discerning. Several birds have successfully learned to tell the difference between well-executed and crude paintings – all created by 9 to 11-year-olds at a Tokyo elementary school. No, the city hasn't devised a plot to simultaneously rid its streets of pigeons and employ art teachers that work for peanuts – or, rather, grain. Instead, the experiments were set up to see if other animals, provided with enough training, could grasp the human concept of beauty, says Shigeru Watanabe, a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo, who led the study. Peck for a prize This isn't Watanabe's first efforts to teach art appreciation to pigeons. In 1995, he and two colleagues published a paper showing that pigeons could learn to discriminate Picasso paintings from Monets – work that earned him that year's Ig Nobel prize. New Scientist plays no role in selecting winners, but Watanabe's latest study make a strong case for another award. He trained four birds – on loan from the Japanese Society for Racing Pigeons – to appreciate children's art by linking correct assessments of paintings with food. Works deemed good (see image) had earned As in art class, while bad paintings (see image) garnered Cs or Ds. Watanabe also put the paintings to a jury of 10 adults, and pigeons viewed only works unanimously declared good or bad by the panel. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12996 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erik Vance Vincent Clark, of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, thinks he has something like a crystal ball for drug addicts. By applying traditional psychiatric evaluation and modern fMRI brain imaging to people recovering from drug addiction, he claims to be able to spot who is likely to relapse — months before the relapse actually happens. Clark puts people recovering from cocaine and methamphetamine addiction in an fMRI machine, then asks them to play a game called 'oddball task' which is common in addiction research. Participants hit a button when they see an 'X' on a screen, but not when they see a 'T'. Mixed in are a few distracting 'C's: when these appear, they trigger activity in the posterior cingulate region of the brain in some addicts. Clark later meticulously tracks the volunteers, taking hair and urine samples, to see if they have begun using drugs again. With more than 80% accuracy, Clark says, the test predicted who would relapse (those whose posterior cingulate did not light up) and who would stay straight (those whose posterior cingulate did) over the next six months. Combined with a simple test for a history of mania, it was 89% accurate, he says. Clark presented the results during the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping in San Francisco, California, on 19 June. Nature News talked to him about how he keeps such research going. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 12995 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Sweet-toothed Brits have one less excuse for taking their morning tea with several spoons of sugar. They and other Europeans are among the most sugar-sensitive people in the world, a new genetic analysis concludes. The vast majority of people in the UK, France, Italy and Russia boast a tandem of genetic variations in a sugar-sensing gene that allows them to detect trace levels of sweetness. Around the world, populations that live at northern latitudes carry these genetic variations at far higher frequencies than tropical-living peoples, says Dennis Drayna, a geneticist at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland. His team presented 144 Europeans, Asians and Africans with nine solutions containing varying amounts of table sugar – sucrose – in amounts varying from 0 to 4 per cent. "Four-per-cent sucrose is very sweet to everyone, and to me it's intensely sweet," Drayna says. "Imagine some cloyingly sweet desert." Volunteers arranged the solutions in order of their perceived sweetness numerous times, and from these, Drayna's team calculated a sucrose sensitivity score for each person. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 12994 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kelli Whitlock Burton Homing pigeons use landmarks to guide them safely home. But how do the birds track these familiar sites hundreds of meters below as they zip by at 65 kilometers per hour? Scientists are trying to answer that question with a new device that lets them record brain activity as pigeons fly. Exactly how pigeons find their way home is a mystery. While some studies suggest the birds rely on smells, the position of the sun, or Earth's magnetic field to navigate, scientists also know that pigeons use visual landmarks. To see how the pigeons' brains processed these sights, Alexei Vyssotski and colleagues at the University of Zurich in Switzerland developed the Neurologger2, a device that simultaneously tracks the birds' route while also recording brain activity as they fly over familiar sites. Neurologger2 weighs just 2 grams and uses an electroencephalogram to record brain activity. In a study published online this week in Current Biology, the scientists trained 26 pigeons to recognize a loft as their home base. Then, they implanted tiny electrodes on the birds' brains and connected them with Neurologger2. They outfitted the birds with global positioning system monitors and then released them from different points 10 to 30 kilometers away from the loft. Once the birds returned, the researchers removed the devices and compared the record of the birds' brain activity with their positions at the time. Vyssotski found that when the birds flew over landmarks, such as a familiar highway, high-frequency brain waves suddenly got more intense. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Brain imaging
Link ID: 12993 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Q. Choi For decades scientists have noted that mature humans physically resemble immature chimps—we, too, have small jaws, flat faces and sparse body hair. The retention of juvenile features, called neoteny in evolutionary biology, is especially apparent in domesticated animals—thanks to human preferences, many dog breeds have puppy features such as floppy ears, short snouts and large eyes. Now genetic evidence suggests that neoteny could help explain why humans are so radically different from chimpanzees, even though both species share most of the same genes and split apart only about six million years ago, a short time in evolutionary terms. In animals, neoteny comes about because of delays in development, points out molecular biologist Philipp Khaitovich of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For instance, humans sexually mature roughly five years after chimps do, and our teeth erupt later. “Changes in the timing of development are some of the most powerful mechanisms evolution can use to remodel organisms, with very few molecular events required,” he explains. To look for genetic evidence that neoteny played a role in the evolution of Homo sapiens, Khaitovich and his colleagues compared the expression of 7,958 genes in the brains of 39 humans, 14 chimpanzees and nine rhesus monkeys. They collected samples from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—a region linked with memory that is relatively easy to identify in the primate brain. These tissues came from deceased individuals at several stages of life, from infancy to middle age, enabling the researchers to see how genetic activity changed over time in each species. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12992 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Being overweight won’t kill you — it may even help you live longer. That’s the latest from a study that analyzed data on 11,326 Canadian adults, ages 25 and older, who were followed over a 12-year period. The report, published online last week in the journal Obesity, found that overall, people who were overweight but not obese — defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 — were actually less likely to die than people of normal weight, defined as a B.M.I. of 18.5 to 24.9. By contrast, people who were underweight, with a B.M.I. under 18.5, were more likely to die than those of average weight. Their risk of dying was 73 percent higher than that of normal weight people, while the risk of dying for those who were overweight was 17 percent lower than for people of normal weight. The finding adds to a simmering scientific controversy over the optimal weight for adults. In 2007, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reported that overweight adults were less likely than normal weight adults to die from a variety of diseases, including infections and lung disease. “Overweight may not be the problem we thought it was,” said Dr. David H. Feeny, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., and one of the authors of the study. “Overweight was protective.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12991 - Posted: 06.24.2010

How can a hypnotist paralyze your hand just with words? By making a part of your brain butt in on the process that normally makes your hand move, a study says. So the brain region that's ready to move your hand ignores its usual inputs and listens to this interloper, which says, "Don't even bother," the research concluded. It's "a kind of reconnection between different brain regions," said Yann Cojan, a researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He's an author of the study in Thursday's issue of the journal Neuron. It used brain scans to show what happened when 12 volunteers tried to move a hand that had been paralyzed by hypnosis. Results showed the right motor cortex prepared itself as usual to tell the left hand to move. But the cortex appeared to be ignoring the parts of the brain it normally communicates with in controlling movement. Instead, it acted more in sync than usual with a different brain region called the precuneus. That was a surprise, Cojan said. The precuneus is involved in mental imagery and memory about oneself. Cojan suggests it was brimming with the metaphors the participants had heard from the hypnotist: Your hand is very heavy, it is stuck on the table, etc. So, he said, it might have been telling the motor cortex, "Oh, but your hand is too heavy, you can't move your hand." It's as if the motor cortex "is connected to the idea that it cannot move (the hand) and so ... it doesn't send the message to move," Cojan said. For the research, 12 participants had their brains scanned while doing a task that required them to push a button with one hand or the other. For some sessions, they were hypnotized and told their left hands were paralyzed. For other sessions, their mental status was normal. For comparison, six other participants simply pretended their left hands were paralyzed. © 2009 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12990 - Posted: 06.24.2010