Steve Connor A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a study that analyses why religion is a universal human feature that has encompassed all cultures throughout history. Scientists searching for the neural "God spot", which is supposed to control religious belief, believe that there is not just one but several areas of the brain that form the biological foundations of religious belief. The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history. "Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures," said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington. "Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions." Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis. Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions. Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world. Religion and the belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12632 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN TIERNEY Suppose last night you had two dreams. In one, God appears and commands you to take a year off and travel the world. In the other, God commands you to take a year off to go work in a leper colony. Which of those dreams, if either, would you consider meaningful? Or suppose you had one dream in which your friend defends you against enemies, and another dream in which that same friend goes behind your back and tries to seduce your significant other? Which dream would you take seriously? Tough questions, but social scientists now have answers — and really, it’s about time. For thousands of years, dreamers have had little more to go on than the two-gate hypothesis proposed in “The Odyssey.” After Penelope dreams of the return of her lost-long husband, she’s skeptical and says that only some dreams matter. “There are two gates,” she explains, “through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them.” Her two-gate hypothesis, later endorsed by Virgil and Ovid, was elegant in theory but not terribly useful in practice. How could you tell which gate your dream came from? One woman’s ivory could be another’s horn. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12631 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Linda Geddes Alcohol may taste sweeter if you were exposed to it before birth, suggests a study in rats. The findings may shed new light on why human studies have previously linked fetal alcohol exposure to increased alcohol abuse later in life, and to a lower age at which a person first starts drinking alcohol. Alcohol's taste is a mixture of sweet and bitter components. To test whether prenatal alcohol exposure could affect the perception of these components, Steven Youngentob at the State University of New York in Syracuse and John Glendinning at Columbia University in New York measured how avidly rats consumed ethanol, sweet water or bitter water. They found that young rats whose mothers had consumed alcohol during pregnancy preferred ethanol and consumed more of the bitter water than the offspring of mothers that didn't consume alcohol. Rats that had been exposed to alcohol in the uterus also seemed to be more attracted to the smell of alcohol. Prenatal exposure seems to reduce the perceived bitterness of alcohol, making it seem sweeter, says Youngentob. Both of these differences seemed to disappear once the rats reached adulthood – but only if they hadn't tasted alcohol during their youth. If prenatally exposed rats did consume alcohol in their youth, these preferences seemed to become set for life. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12630 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Balter In 1997, at the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, a male chimpanzee named Santino began throwing stones at zoo visitors. Although Santino was clearly agitated each time, as evidenced by his forceful stomping around the compound and hair standing on end, the chimp didn't just grab the first thing he saw and launch it. Rather, observations over the past decade have shown that Santino spends the mornings before the zoo opens gathering the stones and organizing them into neat piles as a sort of ammunition store. The chimp's preparation suggests that apes can plan for future mental states--in this case anger--a cognitive talent once thought to be unique to humans. Humans take planning for the future for granted. We shop for food even when we're not hungry, for example, because we know we will be hungry later. But until recently, scientists didn't know whether other animals thought ahead the same way. In the wild, many chimps use tools for procuring food, such as employing sticks to fish termites out of trees. But the apes tend to fashion the tools shortly before they are needed rather than far in advance. In the laboratory, on the other hand, carefully contrived experiments have shown that bonobos and orangutans can learn to choose and save the right tool that will later allow them to retrieve food. Yet these lab experiments do not prove that animals can anticipate future emotional states. That's where Santino comes in. Soon after the only other male chimp in his group died and he was left alone with four females, Santino began hurling stones at zoo visitors. Sometimes he'd let fly with a "hail storm" of 10 or more projectiles per attack, according to one zookeeper. Although no one was hurt, zoo workers had to warn the crowd to keep back and usher Santino into his chimp house. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 12629 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Father knows best, but his kids might fall a bit short if he conceives them after age 50. Children of older fathers lag somewhat behind children fathered by younger men on a battery of intellectual tests, at least until age 7, according to a reanalysis of data from a large U.S. study. This cognitive disadvantage occurred regardless of mothers’ ages, says a team led by psychiatrist John McGrath of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Still, children of older fathers generally scored well within the normal range on the intelligence tests. In contrast, children with older mothers scored higher than those with younger mothers on cognitive tests, regardless of fathers’ ages, the researchers report online March 9 in PLoS MEDICINE. Increasing numbers of men are delaying fatherhood in Western nations, so scientists urgently need to explain why a link exists between fathers’ advanced ages and relatively lower cognitive scores by their children, McGrath says. He can’t yet say if or when children of older fathers catch up intellectually with children of younger fathers. “With respect to childhood intelligence, a vast array of factors is far more powerful than paternal age,” McGrath cautions. These factors include nutrition, health care and family income. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 12628 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Larry Greenemeier When vision fails, it's often the result of damage to the eye caused by an injury or degenerative disease. In an attempt to restore such vision loss, researchers for more than a decade have been working to develop an optical prosthetic that can restore sight by delivering images directly to the brain. And it appears they succeeded. The BBC reports that a 73-year-old man identified only as Ron, who received an optical implant at Moorefields Eye Center in London last summer, can see again for the first time in 30 years. The BBC hails the Argus II prosthetic—made by Second Sight Medical Products, Inc., in Sylmar, Calif.—as a "bionic eye," although it's actually a wireless communication system implanted in the damaged eye that captures images and relays them to the brain. The system works with the aid of eyeglasses, which hold a camera mounted on one of the lenses that captures images and sends the information to a video processor, also located on the glasses, according to the description of the technology on Second Sight's Web site. After the video processor converts the images to an electronic signal, a transmitter on the glasses sends that information wirelessly to a receiver attached to the surface of the eye. From there, the information is sent through a tiny cable to an electrode array implanted in the retina, stimulating it to emit electrical pulses. These pulses trigger signals in the retina that travel through the optic nerve to the brain, which perceives patterns of light and dark spots that correspond to the electrodes stimulated. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 12627 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Stephen Smith Nearly 10 percent of brain cancer patients who received radiation in combination with chemotherapy were still alive five years after diagnosis, the best long-term survival rate ever reported for a group of patients stricken with the aggressive tumor, researchers reported yesterday. The treatment regimen described in the journal Lancet Oncology parallels the approach used by cancer specialists to treat Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who was diagnosed in May with a malignant brain tumor. The researchers, based at hospitals in Europe and Canada, gave patients both radiation and a chemotherapy drug called temozolomide for six weeks; patients then continued taking the drug alone five days a month for the following six months. The combination therapy proved superior to radiation alone at every milestone measured. After three years, for example, 16 percent of the patients who had received radiation and chemo were still alive, compared with just 4.4 percent of those who had only radiation. The survival difference was even more pronounced at the five-year mark, with patients who had received the combination regime five times more likely to be alive. Cancer specialists hailed the findings as hopeful for patients with brain tumors, but cautioned that the disease remains exceptionally difficult to defeat. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12626 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John von Radowitz Disabling strokes could one day be treated by replacing damaged brain tissue with stem cells, scientists have shown. Researchers used a new technique to insert therapeutic stem cells into the brains of rats with pinpoint accuracy. Once implanted the cells began to form new brain tissue and nerve connections. The work is at an early stage and does not yet prove that stroke symptoms such as paralysis can be reversed. But it demonstrates that lost brain tissue can be replaced with stem cells targeted at sites of damage. Stem cells are immature cells with the ability to take on any of a number of specialist roles. In previous animal experiments, stem cells implanted into the brain have tended to migrate to surrounding healthy tissue rather than fill up the hole left by a stroke. Scientists from King's College London and the University of Nottingham overcame the problem by loading the cells onto biodegradable particles. These were then injected through a fine needle to the precise site of damage, located using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Once implanted, the particles disappeared leaving gaps for the growth of new tissue and nourishing blood vessels. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Stem Cells; Stroke
Link ID: 12625 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Last November, DISCOVER and the National Science Foundation launched a series of events to explore the biggest questions in science today. In the first event, “Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain,” four leading psychologists and neuroscientists discussed the hottest issues in brain research, from predicting human behavior to manipulating memory to pinpointing consciousness. Hosted by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, the panel was moderated by the award-winning author (and DISCOVER blogger and columnist) Carl Zimmer. The transcript of the event is below. Carl Zimmer: I want to start out by talking about how surprisingly bad our brains are. We assume that they perfectly record everything around us, but research shows that we can be blind to things that are staring us in the face. What does this discovery tell us? Sam Wang: We might imagine that the visual part of our brain handles information the way a camera does, or perhaps our memory works the way a computer’s hard drive does. But that’s not the case. When we process a visual scene, we are in the business of extracting salient features. We might be interested in finding a face in the scene or looking for objects. At the same time, we are in the business of throwing away information. Instead of getting all the pixels of a bottle of water I see, I might want to reduce it just to “bottle of water.” I might not be concerned about the fact that a particular bottle of water looks a little bit different from the other bottles. We toss away things that are not salient.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12624 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Melissa Lafsky While a bouncy tune chirps in the background, Sally, an animated cable car with a live-action human face, makes her way over a viaduct, beaming as a narrator explains how “very happy” she is to carry her passengers to their destination. Midway across, her cable clamp malfunctions, leaving her stuck high above a waterway running through a quiet village. Charlie, a happy-go-lucky tram with the face of a thirtysomething man, is her only hope of rescue. In careful, simple language, the narrator explains that Sally is afraid during the experience, while Charlie is happy when he succeeds in delivering her from danger. As each emotion is named, the characters grin, frown, or grimace accordingly. No, it’s not the latest Disney project or Thomas the Tank Engine rip-off. It’s a new therapy for autism. Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world’s preeminent autism experts, developed the DVD, and he says his research shows that it brings significant improvements to children with autism, a syndrome that has stubbornly resisted treatment after treatment. Called The Transporters, the DVD aims to teach kids on the higher level of the autistic spectrum a key skill that many of them find nearly impossible: how to understand emotions. The number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder is increasing at an astounding rate, rising approximately tenfold in the past two decades. While the cause of this huge increase is still being debated—is it an actual rise in cases or simply an expansion in awareness and diagnosis?—more and more resources are being directed toward treating the rising number of children with the disorder.

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 12623 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kurt Soller Last week, when a landmark nutrition study came out in The New England Journal of Medicine, many dieters were probably saying "Duh." That's because researchers finally confirmed what we all kind of knew: the way to lose weight is to eat less. No, really, it doesn't matter how you mix and match your carbohydrates, fats and proteins. The best diet, researchers found, was one that reduced calorie intake dramatically (but to no less than 1,200 calories everyday). But here's the catch. Figuring out which dieting tricks and tactics boost the kind of willpower you need to turn down those fries, Oreos or piña coladas is far more complicated than just counting calories. And, it turns out, many of the weight-loss strategies that inspire women won't work for men—and vice versa. That's because dudes diet differently. Here's why: 1. Guys can just say "No" to problem foods Earlier this year, the Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a study where they presented male and female subjects their favorite foods, then monitored their brain activity using positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Ladies, the gents beat you: they were able to suppress their hunger and their desire to eat, while brain activity among the women showed that many continued to crave their favorite foods, even after being told to think of something else. In layman's terms, we call this "emotional eating," something that trainer and American Dietetic Association spokesman Jim White says is an "uphill battle" for his female clients, but not the male ones. The guys must be too busy thinking of something else—or nothing at all? © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Obesity; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12622 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Optimists live longer, healthier lives than pessimists, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that may give pessimists one more reason to grumble. Researchers at University of Pittsburgh looked at rates of death and chronic health conditions among participants of the Women's Health Initiative study, which has followed more than 100,000 women ages 50 and over since 1994. Women who were optimistic -- those who expect good rather than bad things to happen -- were 14 percent less likely to die from any cause than pessimists and 30 percent less likely to die from heart disease after eight years of follow up in the study. Optimists also were also less likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes or smoke cigarettes. The team, led Dr. Hilary Tindle, also looked at women who were highly mistrustful of other people -- a group they called "cynically hostile" -- and compared them with women who were more trusting. Women in the cynically hostile group tended to agree with questions such as: "I've often had to take orders from someone who didn't know as much as I did" or "It's safest to trust nobody," Tindle said in a telephone interview. "These questions prove a general mistrust of people," said Tindle, who presented her study Thursday at the American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting in Chicago.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Emotions
Link ID: 12621 - Posted: 03.07.2009

Nicholas Wade In a striking instance of biologists' new prowess at manipulating human cells, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., have converted skin cells from people with Parkinson's disease into the general type of neuron that is destroyed in the disease. The new approach, though it requires much further work, would in principle allow the brain cells that are lost in Parkinson's to be replaced with cells that carried no risk of immune rejection because they would be the patients' own. The Whitehead scientists, reporting in Thursday's issue of the journal Cell, said that the method worked in five patients whose skin cells were transformed in the test tube into neurons that produce dopamine, a chemical that transmits messages between neurons in certain regions of the brain. It is the loss of dopamine-producing nerve cells that leads to the symptoms of Parkinson's. The immediate goal of the research, led by Frank Soldner and Rudolf Jaenisch, is to grow the dopamine-producing cells in the laboratory to seek the cause of the disease. The cells could be exposed to the various environmental toxins that have come under suspicion as possible contributory causes of Parkinson's. A longer-term goal is to prepare cells suitable for transplantation. The cells of a Parkinson's patient presumably have some innate predisposition to the disease. But because the disease generally does not show up for 50 years or more, an infusion of a new batch of cells may give the patient more useful years. © 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 12620 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed Scientists and physicians know some of the roles of the hormone oxytocin in people. In women, it triggers childbirth and also allows them to breast feed their babies. Research has also shown that oxytocin via nasal spray can increase people’s generosity and trust. And extensive studies in mice show that oxytocin is important in bonding between parents (including father mice) and their offspring. It also helps mice recognize each other, which is a type of “social memory.” Mice that lacked the hormone exhibited problems with social memory while other kinds of memory remained intact. It was this base of knowledge that led neuroscientist Ulrike Rimmele and colleagues at University of Zurich to study

Keyword:
Link ID: 12619 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Hazel Muir Musical training might help autistic children to interpret other people's emotions. A study has revealed brain changes involved in playing a musical instrument that seem to enhance your ability to pick up subtle emotional cues in conversation. "It seems that playing music can help you do all kinds of things better," says Nina Kraus from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Musical experience sharpens your hearing not just for music, but for other sounds too." Earlier studies suggested that musicians are especially good at identifying emotions expressed in speech, such as anger or sadness. But it wasn't clear what kind of brain activity makes the difference. Trained brain To find out, Kraus and her colleagues recruited 30 musicians and non-musicians, aged 19 to 35. Entertained by watching a subtitled nature film, they repeatedly heard a baby crying through earphones (hear an example). Using scalp electrodes, the team measured the electrical response to the sounds in each volunteer's brainstem, which links the auditory nerve to the cerebral cortex. In the musicians, the response to complex parts of the sound, in which the frequency rapidly changes, was especially high. But the musicians had lower responses than non-musicians to simpler sections of the baby's sound. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 12618 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charlene Sadler, CBC News A chair that allows the hearing-impaired to experience music in a new way will be featured at a concert in Toronto designed for deaf people. The Emoti-Chair is a three-year venture developed at Ryerson University's centre for learning technologies in conjunction with the science of music, auditory research and technology (SMART) lab. The idea is to treat the skin as a hearing membrane, said Carmen Branje, one of the Ryerson researchers. Branje, 26, who has a bachelor's degree in computing science and a master's in management science, also plays drums in the Toronto punk rock band Hollywood Swank, one of the groups that will be performing at the concert on Thursday. David Fourney, a PhD candidate with Ryerson's mechanical engineering program, had the chance to use the Emoti-Chair. CBC News : I'm fascinated with the idea that the skin can be used to detect sound. Fourney : "The skin is the body's largest organ. One of its main properties is that is designed for touch. As a hard-of-hearing person, I can tell you that for me, hearing sound is like another form of touch. "Have you ever felt a sound that literally tickled your ear? Did you know that sound can actually move the hairs in your ear canal? I know, because I have experienced it. I have actually felt it. Sound can actually be ticklish. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Hearing; Robotics
Link ID: 12617 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain adapts to find new visual information when a person gets eye disease causing blindness, according to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers found that when people lose their sight because of macular degeneration, the affected neurons simply start seeking visual input from other, non-affected parts of the eye. Their findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience. "This study shows us one way that the brain changes when its inputs change. Neurons seem to 'want' to receive input: when their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing," wrote lead researcher Nancy Kanwisher of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. It appears the long-term change in visual behaviour is not driving the brain's remapping; rather, it's the brain's relatively passive response to visual deprivation. Macular degeneration is the most common form of adult blindness. It affects 800,000 people in Canada. Those suffering from it progressively lose vision in the central visual field of their retina, or their fovea. That means the corresponding part of the visual cortex in the brain also loses input. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12616 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Matthias Gamer A young man steals across the hallway, slips through a door and scans the room. He opens a drawer, snatches a wristwatch inside and puts it in his pocket. Then he hurries out the door. Sixty more people perform the same drill, half of them filching a watch and the others, a ring. Psychiatrist F. Andrew Kozel, now at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and his colleagues promised to give a bonus payment to anyone who could conceal the deed from the scientists, who planned to look into their brains for signs of a cover-up. Kozel and his co-workers scanned the volunteers’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which provides a measure of neural activity in different brain areas. During the scans, the subjects answered questions about the theft such as “Did you steal a watch?” or “Did you steal a ring?” The researchers also asked neutral yes/no queries as well as questions about minor wrongful acts. Each participant could truthfully deny stealing one of the objects but had to lie about the other to conceal the deed. (The volunteers were supposed to answer the unrelated questions truthfully.) Kozel and his team initially identified typical neural activity patterns for true and false statements. Then, in the first use of fMRI to detect deception in individuals, the researchers used the patterns they identified to correctly determine whether each of the subjects had taken a watch or a ring 90 percent of the time. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Stress; Brain imaging
Link ID: 12615 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Emily Sohn -- Around the world, increasing numbers of male fish are developing female traits -- growing new sexual organs and sometimes even producing eggs. The phenomenon has been blamed mostly on chemicals that get into the water and mimic the female hormone estrogen. But a new study puts some of the blame on an entirely different class of chemicals -- ones that block the action of male hormones called androgens. It isn't the first study to suggest that anti-androgens might be contributing to the feminization of fish. But the new research found that there are far more of these chemicals in our lakes and streams than anyone realized. And anti-androgenic chemicals in the water might affect human health as well. "They are going to be some potent players," said Charles Tyler, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Exeter in England. "It is possible that there are going to be many more chemicals that are anti-androgenic than are estrogenic." Tyler, along with Susan Jobling at Brunel University in London and other colleagues, looked at chemical run-off in 51 rivers throughout the United Kingdom. By combining concentrated water samples with cultures of yeast genetically engineered to have androgen receptors, the scientists were able to measure the amount of anti-androgen activity in each sample. The researchers' results, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, revealed a significant amount of anti-androgenic activity in nearly all of the samples tested. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12614 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- "New and improved" could describe a brush-tipped probe invented by wild chimpanzees in Africa that found it did a better job than previous versions of the tool at gathering termites for consumption, according to a new study. The discovery adds to the growing body of evidence that technological advancements are not limited to human populations. New Caledonian crows fall under the higher tech heading as well, since they too improved upon an old gadget by adding a hook that, like a fishing lure, can retrieve food from narrow spaces. The recently identified chimpanzee brush tool, described in the latest Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, requires even more effort to construct. Co-author Josep Call told Discovery News that chimps first uproot the stem of a plant "or use their teeth to clip the stem at the base and then remove the large leaf from the distal end by clipping it with their teeth before transporting the stem to the termite nest." At the termite site, "they complete tool manufacture by modifying the end into a 'paint brush' tip by pulling the stem through their teeth, splitting the probe lengthwise by pulling off strands of fiber, or separating the fibers by biting them," added Call, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. space station © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12613 - Posted: 06.24.2010