Mark A. W. Andrews, professor of physiology and director of the Independent Study Pathway at the Lake Erie College of Osteo­pathic Medicine, replies: Generally speaking, heaviness of the muscles around the eyes, including the levator muscles that open the upper eyelids, is similar to fatigue of any muscle of the body. Ocular and brow muscles are especially prone to fatigue because they are active for most of our waking hours. Over the course of the day, they gradually grow leaden with extended use, as our arms and legs do. Such a feeling may be compounded by general fatigue, including a lack of sleep, or by specific muscle overuse related to long hours of focusing on, say, a computer monitor. Excess skin of the eyelid, or prolapsed fat pads underneath the eyes, makes an individual more prone to this sensation. Chronic allergies and sinus infections may also exacerbate the heaviness, and sun exposure may cause eyelid swelling and thereby increase the probability that the drooping will interfere with vision. Although heavy eyelids do not typically indicate underlying medical issues, some conditions do cause drooping eyelids, or ptosis. A stroke or a muscular disorder such as myasthenia gravis or myotonic dystrophy can damage facial muscles or their nerves and cause ptosis, as can elective facial surgery or interventions such as Botox injections to the brow. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12303 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A vast increase in brain research in recent years is giving us a much improved picture of what's going on in our white and grey matter. In case you hadn't noticed, NewScientist.com is now making the last 12 months' of articles free for everyone to read. Here we round up the top 10 in-depth articles on the brain from 2008 Is it worth going to the mind gym? Brains apart: The real difference between the sexes A unified theory of the brain? How primate porn reveals what we really want The secret life of the brain The subconscious mind: Your unsung hero Forgetfulness is key to a healthy mind Does the brain feature built-in noise? Do supercharged brains give rise to autism? The outer limits of the human brain © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12302 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Eyewitness accounts of crimes could be more untrustworthy than we thought. Describing an event straight after it occurs makes witnesses more susceptible to providing false information in subsequent retellings, a new study finds. "In a real-life situation, if you're an eyewitness, the first thing you're going to do after you witness an event is call 911," says Jason Chan, a psychologist at Iowa State University in Ames, who led the new study. This initial recollection could prime a witness' brain to accept a mistaken account, he says, be it from television, lawyers, the police, or another witness. Rather than crimes, Chan's team tested the memories of 36 university students and 60 retirees who watched an episode of the television drama 24. Immediately after seeing the episode - in which terrorists hijack a jet - half of the subjects took a quiz on what they had just seen. About 30 minutes later, everyone listened to a short description of the episode, which included details that were either lies or truths. For instance: "The terrorist knocks the flight attendant unconscious with a hypodermic needle" (true); or "The terrorist knocks the flight attendant unconscious with a chloroform rag" (false). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12301 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Peggy Curran For more than 50 years, Henry G. Molaison has been one of the most studied, famous and anonymous patients in the history of modern medicine. The 82-year-old man scientists have known only as HM died of heart failure Tuesday after decades in a Connecticut chronic care home, unaware of what he gave to science. “He never recognized me, even if I’d been with him all day” Brenda Milner, the pioneering neuropsychologist at the Montreal Neurological Institute who treated HM, said a few years ago. “He was always an extremely polite man. But I could pass him in the waiting room and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. If you ever said anything, he would just say, ‘I’m sorry, I have a bit of trouble with my memory.’ ” Milner, 90, still works at the MNI, a respected doyenne whose ground-breaking research in human memory systems began in 1956 when Dr. Wilder Penfield and her mentor Dr. Donald Hebb sent her to Hartford to meet the man now known to generations of medical students as “H.M.” A 30-year-old assembly line worker, Molaison had suffered memory loss after parts of his temporal lobe were removed during experimental surgery to relieve severe epilepsy, which was causing him to have seizures and blackouts several times a week. © 2008 Canwest Publishing Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12300 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY He knew his name. That much he could remember. H.M.’s Brain and the History of Memory (npr.org) He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s. But he could remember almost nothing after that. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories. For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time. And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped scientists understand the biology of learning, memory and physical dexterity, as well as the fragile nature of human identity. On Tuesday evening at 5:05, Henry Gustav Molaison — known worldwide only as H. M., to protect his privacy — died of respiratory failure at a nursing home in Windsor Locks, Conn. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12299 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Caroline Williams EVER had a feeling come over you that you just can't explain? Like suddenly getting all warm and fuzzy when you meet someone for the first time, while somebody else who looks just as good leaves you cold? Or experiencing a sudden pang of fear on a plane even though you're totally at ease with flying? These seemingly unrelated and illogical human reactions may have a reasonable explanation after all, although one that not everyone will be happy to hear. They may be reactions to other people's pheromones. Pheromones are something of a sensitive subject in human biology. Though they are found across the animal world from insects to mammals, research into human pheromones has been dogged by flaky experimental designs and dubious commercial endorsements, with the result that the entire field has a whiff of the disreputable about it. "It's not so much that the jury is out, but that the jury has been dismissed before the trial has begun," says Mike Meredith, a neuroscientist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who studies animal pheromones. In recent years, though, this has begun to change. Evidence that animal pheromones don't always work in they way we thought, backed up by a growing number of brain-imaging studies in humans, is convincing some researchers that we really do make and respond to pheromones. As a result some think it's time to stop asking if human pheromones exist and start investigating exactly how they affect our behaviour. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12298 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects. They apparently were getting high too. Lead author Ethan Russo told Discovery News that the marijuana "is quite similar" to what's grown today. "We know from both the chemical analysis and genetics that it could produce THC (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid synthase, the main psychoactive chemical in the plant)," he explained, adding that no one could feel its effects today, due to decomposition over the millennia. Russo served as a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany while conducting the study. He and his international team analyzed the cannabis, which was excavated at the Yanghai Tombs near Turpan, China. It was found lightly pounded in a wooden bowl in a leather basket near the head of a blue-eyed Caucasian man who died when he was about 45. © 2008 Discovery Channel

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12297 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Women might swoon over Barry White's deep bass, yet when looking for a provider, they find Justin Timberlake's falsetto sounds sexier. A new study among African hunter-gatherers found that women who were nursing a child prefer higher-pitched male voices than fertile women who had not recently given birth. The Hadza - hunter-gatherers native to northern Tanzania - have limited exposure to the mass media. Cut off from the daily bombardment of advertisements, pop songs and newscasts that's typical in much of the world, they were an ideal population in which to study innate sexual preferences, says Coren Apicella, an anthropologist at Harvard University and leader of the study. "They're also an evolutionarily relevant population - they live like we lived 200,000 years ago," she says. "Most of our psychological preferences probably evolved when we were hunter-gatherers." For her dissertation, Apicella spent six months studying vocal preferences among Hadza men and women. In a previous study, she and colleagues found that deep-voiced men sire more childrenSpeaker than tenors. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 12296 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Erica Westly In the 1960s, the heyday of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists often saw their patients five days a week. But the number of psychiatrists today who focus on talk therapy is dwindling, according to a recent study that analyzed trends in psychiatry offices across the U.S. The study’s authors determined that between 1996 and 2005 the percentage of psychiatry office visits involving psychotherapy decreased from about 44.4 percent—already a significant decline from the 1980s—to 28.9 percent. One of the main causes for this 35 percent reduction in psychotherapy, the study’s authors say, is the increasing availability of psychiatric medications with few adverse effects. As patient demand for these medications has increased over the years, they argue, many psychiatrists have had their hands full managing patients’ prescriptions, leaving the talk therapy—if it happens at all—to nonmedical therapists, such as psychologists and social workers. The authors suggest that insurance companies may encourage this arrangement by reimbursing less for psychotherapy sessions and more for medication management sessions, which tend to be shorter. All these changes, the authors point out, have left psychiatrists wondering what their place is in the mental health field. “I think what these data show is a profession in transition,” says Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at Columbia University and co-author of the study. “The role of the psychiatrist is changing, and the impact of that on patient outcomes is really an open question.” © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lindsey Tanner -- Unique brain wave patterns, spotted for the first time in autistic children, may help explain why they have so much trouble communicating. Using an imaging helmet that resembles a big salon hair dryer, researchers discovered what they believe are "signatures of autism" that show a delay in processing individual sounds. That delay is only a fraction of a second, but when it's for every sound, the lag time can cascade into a major obstacle in speaking and understanding people, the researchers said. Imagine if it took a tiny bit longer than normal to understand each syllable. By the end of a whole sentence, you'd be pretty confused. The study authors believe that's what happens with autistic children, based on the brain wave patterns detected in school-age children in their study. The preliminary results need to be confirmed in younger children, but the researchers hope this technique could be used to help diagnose autism in children as young as age 1. That's at least a year earlier than usual, and it could mean behavior treatment much sooner. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12294 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz To get a drug to market, pharmaceutical companies have to show that it works better than a placebo. But sometimes the placebo is just as powerful as the real thing. Just why our bodies respond so strongly to fake medicine has long been a mystery, but researchers are a step closer to solving that riddle, having picked out a particular gene that may be responsible for one type of placebo effect. The placebo effect works because patients believe they are actually receiving treatment. Expecting treatment is similar to anticipating reward, studies have shown, and reward anticipation triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain, which can help alleviate symptoms of chronic pain and depression. But what about placebo effects for other conditions? Tomas Furmark, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, suspected that a different neurotransmitter plays a role in placebo responses to social anxiety disorder (SAD)--an abnormal fear of being judged by others. Brain imaging studies have shown that the amygdala, an area of the brain that regulates the fear response, is unusually active in patients with SAD. What's more, healthy people with certain variations of two genes that regulate the neurotransmitter serotonin have more active amygdalas. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 12293 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BERKELEY, Calif. (KCBS) -- Researchers at UC Berkeley have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of kids from high-income families. In a study published by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity. Electrodes on the scalp and held in place by a cap to measure underlying brain activity were used to measure brain function on electroencephalograph , said cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, one of the researchers. "This is a wake-up call," Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology said. "It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums." © MMVIII CBS Radio Stations Inc.,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Attention
Link ID: 12292 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed If you’re tired of hearing about memory loss, there’s some encouraging research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://web.mit.edu/ about how good people’s visual memory really is. Psychologist Aude Oliva and graduate student Timothy Brady found inspiration for their study in Lionel Standing’s famous research conducted in the early 1970s. Standing’s study demonstrated that after viewing 10,000 images, people could look at pairs of images and remember which one they had seen with 83-percent accuracy. While it proved that people could recall large numbers of images, the study did not test how much detail within the pictures people could retain. That’s what Oliva wanted to test. Her team asked volunteers, aged 18 to 35, to participate in a grueling memory test. Over the course of five hours, each volunteer watched a monitor as approximately 3,000 images of common objects–like corkscrews, donuts, and cell phones–appeared for just three seconds each. The researchers told volunteers to try to remember as many details as they could. After a 20-minute break, they were shown pairs of images and had to determine if they had seen them before. However there was more to it than in Standing’s study. Volunteers had to remember very specific details of the images to get the answer correct. For example they had to determine not only whether they had seen a cell phone, but also whether it was open or closed. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12291 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO - Older people who are depressed are much more likely to develop a dangerous type of internal body fat — the kind that can lead to diabetes and heart disease — than people who are not depressed, a disturbing new study found. The connection goes beyond obesity and suggests some biological link between a person's mental state and fat that collects around the internal organs, scientists said. "For the depressed public, it should be another reason to take one's symptoms seriously and look for treatment," said study co-author Stephen Kritchevsky, director of the Sticht Center on Aging at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. People with depression were twice as likely as others to gain visceral fat — the kind that surrounds internal organs and often shows up as belly fat. It raises the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Previous research has linked depression with those same health problems. Some researchers believe depression triggers high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which promotes visceral fat. The cortisol connection may explain the findings, Kritchevsky said. © 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12290 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new cure for jet lag could be on the market in the next few years after trials show a pill can reset the body's natural sleep rhythms. Tasimelteon works by shifting the natural ebb and flow of the body's sleep hormone melatonin. In trials, published in The Lancet, the drug helped troubled sleepers nod off quicker and stay asleep for longer. Experts said the drug would be a welcome alternative to addictive sedatives like benzodiazepines. Commenting on the work, Dr Daniel Cardinali from the University of Buenos Aires said the findings would be welcomed by millions of people - "shift-workers, airline crew, tourists, football teams, and many others." The hope is that if you have shifted your body clock and you've slept well, then you should perform well the next day, said lead researcher Dr Elizabeth Klerman at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston. In trials on 450 people kept awake for five hours longer than normal to replicate crossing into a different time zone, those who took the drug enjoyed between 30 minutes and nearly two hours more sleep than volunteers who received a dummy pill. Natural melatonin - the darkness hormone which peaks at night - is a popular treatment for patients with body clock-related sleep disorders. (C)BBC

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 12289 - Posted: 12.02.2008

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR In an age of high-definition television and vivid cinematography, it might seem peculiar to think that anyone would experience colorless dreams. For many people, the dream state can be the most turbulent, emotionally intense part of the day. Falling, flying, failing exams and being chased are among the most frequently reported themes when people are asked in studies to describe their dreams. And yet for a small segment of the population, drifting off at night means reverting to a world of monochromatic hues. Childhood exposure to black-and-white television seems to be the common denominator. A study published this year, for example, found that people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time. Over all, 12 percent of people dream entirely in black and white. Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12288 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Dr. Patrick J. Kelly, the head of neurosurgery at New York University, folded his arms hard against his chest, radiating skepticism. “I have a neurological problem that I’ve never told anyone about — not a soul,” he recalls saying to his colleague Dr. Rodolfo Llinás before an auditorium packed with neurosurgeons. “You listen to my brain and tell me what it is. If you do, I will believe you.” So it was that Dr. Kelly allowed his brain to be scanned in a MEG machine, a device that measures tiny magnetic signals reflecting changes in brain rhythms. After analyzing his colleague’s brain activity, Dr. Llinás announced: “You have tinnitus. Right brain. The phantom sound ringing in your ears must be very loud. It is low frequency, a rumbling noise.” Dr. Kelly was stunned, he said later. He had been hearing that noise ever since he served at a station hospital in Danang during the Vietnam War. The roar of helicopters dropping off casualties had permanently warped his hearing. Dr. Llinás, the chairman of neuroscience and physiology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, believes that abnormal brain rhythms help account for a variety of serious disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, tinnitus and depression. His theory may explain why the technique called deep brain stimulation — implanting electrodes into particular regions of the brain — often alleviates the symptoms of movement disorders like Parkinson’s. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 12287 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY From the outside, psychotherapy can look like an exercise in self-absorption. In fact, though, therapists often work to pull people out of themselves: to see their behavior from the perspective of a loved one, for example, or to observe their own thinking habits from a neutral distance. Marriage counselors have couples role-play, each one taking the other spouse’s part. Psychologists have rapists and other criminals describe their crime from the point of view of the victim. Like novelists or moviemakers, their purpose is to transport people, mentally, into the mind of another. Now, neuroscientists have shown that they can make this experience physical, creating a “body swapping” illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own. “You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa,” said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who with his colleague Valeria Petkova described the work to other scientists at the meeting. Their full study is to appear online this week in the journal PLoS One. . Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Devin Powell, Washington DC REMEMBER your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical "caps" on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories. To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery. Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation - the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA. Many genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this "cellular memory" is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is - a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons, methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories. They started by looking at short-term memories. When caged mice are given a small electric shock, they normally freeze in fear when returned to the cage. However, then injecting them with a drug to inhibit methylation seemed to erase any memory of the shock. The researchers also showed that in untreated mice, gene methylation changed rapidly in the hippocampus region of the brain for an hour following the shock. But a day later, it had returned to normal, suggesting that methylation was involved in creating short-term memories in the hippocampus (Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12285 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Communication problems associated with autism may be explained by the discovery that the brains of autistic children are a fraction of a second slower to react to sounds than those of normal children. According to Timothy Roberts of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, speaking on Monday at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, the finding "provides strong supporting evidence for the emerging theory that autism is a problem of connectivity in the brain". Roberts and his colleagues played a battery of sounds and syllables to 30 autistic children aged 6 to 15, while the team monitored the magnetic fields produced by electrical impulses from the children's brains. The test employed a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), in which a helmet-like device is used to detect and locate brain activity. MEG has previously been used to show how the brain can filter out background chat at parties in order to focus on a single thread of conversationSpeaker. In comparison to normal children in the study, whose response time was around one-tenth of a second, the autistic children had a response time anywhere from 20% to 50% longer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism; Hearing
Link ID: 12284 - Posted: 06.24.2010