Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer Can Googling delay the onset of dementia? A new UCLA study, part of the growing research into the effects of technology on the brain, shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile - it's like taking your brain for a walk. It's too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer's disease, but "our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively," said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center. The new study, which will be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer's cases will quadruple by 2050. In response to such projections, "brain-gyms" and memory-building computer programs have proliferated. The subjects in Small's nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels. They were assigned two tasks: to read book-like text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Intelligence
Link ID: 12283 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LONDON - Four genetic variations appear to determine the speed at which people burn up food, researchers say, a finding that could one day see doctors offer their patients more individual care. Differences in metabolism can make some people more susceptible to diseases such as diabetes and explain why response to diet, exercise and drugs to treat certain conditions varies from person to person. Knowing right away how a person's body will break down molecules in the blood that build up muscle and cells and provide energy could lead to better care, said Karsten Suhre, a researcher at the Helmholtz Center in Munich. The researchers scanned the genes of 284 people and found four — FADS1, LIPC, SCAD and MCAD — linked to determining metabolic rates. "These genes appear to be involved or play a key role in metabolism," Suhre said in a telephone interview. This potentially paves the way for more personalized health care in which doctors could use knowledge of a patient's metabolism gleaned from their genetic make-up to determine treatment, he said. This could prove particularly useful for treating conditions strongly linked to metabolism such as coronary artery disease and obesity, he added. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12282 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Chris Rollins What color is the number 7? How does a symphony taste? What temperature is a muted television? A synesthete could tell you, with great certainty and consistency, the answers to the above questions, and describe many more sensory associations that seem irrelevant to most people. Approximately 1 in 1000 people experience synesthesia - the elicitation of a sensory response independent of the stimulus itself. For instance, viewing a number or hearing a phonetic sound may elicit a colored response in the visual field, or a certain visual stimulus may elicit an auditory response. "I realized that to make an 'R', all I had to do was first write a 'P' and draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line," reports Patricia Duffy in her book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, which describes many such experiences. Duffy has the most common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia -- where individual letters or numbers are shaded specific colors. © 2008 ION Publications LLC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12281 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Hamm When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn't it be great to have a machine that could "listen" to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain. Microchips designed by Audience, the Silicon Valley company Watts launched, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to improve dramatically the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing right by someone using the technology won't be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. "We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain," declares Watts. The 47-year-old neuroscientist is on the leading edge of what some believe will be a fundamental shift in the way certain types of computers are designed. Today's computers are essentially really fast abacuses. They're good at math but can't process complex streams of information in real time, as humans do. Now, thanks to advances in our understanding of biology, scientists believe they can model a new generation of computers on how the brain actually works—the microscopic chemical interactions and electrical impulses that translate sensations into knowledge and knowledge into decisions and actions. It's a successor to the old ideas about artificial intelligence, and a handful of companies have initiatives under way, among them IBM (IBM) and Numenta, a Silicon Valley startup. Copyright 2000-2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Keyword: Robotics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12280 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PARIS: Scientists have found a way to unlock the pain-relieving potential of one of the same proteins in the body activated by marijuana, says a new study. The complex human cannabinoid system is thought to hold great potential for the control of chronic pain, and could also prove useful in the treatment of anxiety, depression and even obesity (see, Marijuana: What science has to say). In experiments on mice, U.S. researchers have now found a chemical that prevents a naturally occurring enzyme from blocking a pain relieving cannabinoid receptor, called 2-arachidonoylgylcerol (2-AG). Once the enzyme, known as MAGL, is deactivated, the protein is more effective in dampening pain, say the team, led by Benjamin Cravatt of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Their research is published in the current issue of the British journal Nature Chemical Biology. In earlier research, Cravatt and colleagues decoded the chain of chemical reactions that acted on another cannabinoid receptor, AEA, paving the way for the development of pain-relieving medications. ©2007 Luna Media Pty Ltd,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12279 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Brain scans of older people in a noisy lab machine give biological backing to the idea that distraction hampers memory with aging, researchers reported Wednesday. The finding bolsters a theory about one reason why memory weakens with age: older people have more trouble remembering some things because they’re more easily distracted when they try to learn them. The memory exercise reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience dealt with recognizing faces, but the findings apply to the more general task of trying to remember something a person sees or hears, said lead author Dale Stevens. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Stevens, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, did the work while at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto. Older people who have to learn something should do all they can to focus on that task and eliminate potential distractions, he advised. The study compared 10 healthy people in their 60s and 70s to a dozen younger volunteers, ages 22 to 36. Their brains were scanned while they looked at photographs of people they did not know. As each photograph was displayed for one second, the volunteers were asked if they’d seen it before in the study. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 12278 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brains of people with a chronic pain condition look like an inept cable worker rewired areas related to emotion, pain perception and skin temperature, a brain imaging study suggests. In Wednesday's issue of the journal Neuron, researchers reported using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look for the differences in the brains of 22 normal subjects and 22 subjects with a chronic pain condition called complex region pain syndrome. The brains of chronic pain patients showed changes in the brain's white matter, the cable-like network of fibres that deliver messages between neurons. "This is the first evidence of brain abnormality in these patients," said the study's lead investigator, Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "People didn't believe these patients. This is the first proof that there is a biological underpinning for the condition." The syndrome often begins with significant damage to a hand or foot. In five per cent of patients, the pain continues to rage long after the injury has healed. The cause is unknown. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12277 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARCUS WOHLSEN CLAREMONT, Calif. -- Until last year, Alan Felzer was an energetic engineering professor who took the stairs to his classes two steps at a time. Now the 64-year-old grandfather sits strapped to a wheelchair, able to move little but his left hand, his voice a near-whisper. Felzer suffers from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The fatal neurological disorder steals the body's ability to move, speak and ultimately to breathe. But rather than succumb to despair along with his illness, Felzer turned to the Web to become his own medical researcher _ and his own guinea pig. Dozens of ALS patients are testing treatments on their own without waiting on the slow pace of medical research. They are part of an emerging group of patients willing to share intimate health details on the Web in hopes of making their own medical discoveries. Some doctors caution that such patient-led research lacks rigor and may lead to unreliable results, false hopes and harm to patients. "The Internet is a wonderful tool, but you know, it's buyer beware," said Dr. Edward Langston, immediate past chairman of the American Medical Association's board. In Felzer's case, the experiment's results illustrate the obstacles that stand between patients and self-discovered breakthroughs. The drug he tried did no good. But he and his family felt they had little time and little to lose in trying. © Copyright 1996-2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 12276 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press NEW YORK — One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything — the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed — was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie The Truman Show. Researchers have begun documenting what they dub the "Truman syndrome," a delusion afflicting people who are convinced that their lives are secretly playing out on a reality TV show. Scientists say the disorder underscores the influence pop culture can have on mental conditions. "The question is really: Is this just a new twist on an old paranoid or grandiose delusion ... or is there sort of a perfect storm of the culture we're in, in which fame holds such high value?" said Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist affiliated with New York's Bellevue Hospital. Over a two-year period, Gold encountered five patients with delusions related to reality TV. Several of them specifically mentioned "The Truman Show." Copyright 2008 USA TODAY

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 12275 - Posted: 06.24.2010

* Paul Kelbie Brain exercises, such as those taught to thousands of schoolchildren or advertised on television to adults as a way to prevent dementia, are a waste of time and money, a neuroscientist has claimed. An award-winning Scottish professor says measures such as breathing through the left nostril, drinking water to increase oxygen supply to the brain, drinking red wine to fend off dementia or listening to classical music to boost performance are little more than myths. Sergio Della Sala has done more than 20 years' research on the brain. The Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh will next month attempt to expose many of the most common myths in a speech at the university's inaugural Christmas Lecture, when he will become the first recipient of the Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science. 'There are all kinds of myths that surround the brain. Some are passed on in good faith, some are funny and have been made up by pranksters, while others are designed with commercial reasons in mind - these are the most dangerous,' said Della Sala. He is especially critical of exercises taught to children, which he claims have no bearing on how the brain works and won't improve students' performance. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12274 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By P. Murali Doraiswamy and Benson Hoffmann In the U.S. some five million people have Alzheimer’s disease and 10 million boomers will be at risk for memory problems over their lifetime. Worldwide, more than 100 million people may have Alzheimer’s by the year 2050. As clinicians, we have learned to recognize that jokes about “old-timer’s disease” and “Teflon brain” are often calls for help from seniors worried about their memory lapses. Living longer is obviously no fun if you cannot remember your home address or drive a car. Although we have made tremendous progress in understanding brain changes that accompany aging and dementia, no medications have proven effective for preventing Alzheimer’s to date. In recent years, however, more evidence is pointing to a non-medical way to bolster brain health as we age: exercise. Scientists are excited about the prospects of physical activity and exercise as anti-Alzheimer strategies for many reasons. Exercise training has been shown to reduce risk factors for dementia such as blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and depression. Studies in animal models of aging show that exercise can increase blood flow, stimulate nerve cell growth in regions associated with memory and reduce the pathologic changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s. Studies of exercise and memory in humans have been promising but not yet definitive. For example, some, but not all, observational studies of older adults time found that those who were more physically active (for example, in such activities as swimming, walking, ballroom dancing) or who exercised at least three times a week had a lower risk for dementia. Likewise some short-term clinical trials found that aerobic exercise improved certain cognitive abilities. The inconsistency across studies has hampered firm conclusions about the relevance of these findings, however. What was needed to move the field forward was a clinical trial testing whether regular exercise could produce sustained long-term improvements in older adults with memory problems. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12273 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa The long-standing connection between depression and heart problems might be traceable to the fact that depressed people are less physically active than others, a new study of heart patients shows. A greater tendency in depressed people to smoke and to fail to take medications regularly may also play a role, researchers report in the Nov. 26 Journal of the American Medical Association. Previous studies have suggested that depression seems to increase the risk of heart problems in people with no history of them, and that depression often coincides with worsening health in people who have an existing heart condition. Yet the medical reason for this association is unknown, and it’s not even clear whether depression leads to heart problems or vice versa. Scientists have investigated possible side effects from antidepressant drugs, chemical imbalances in the brain, stress, diet, chronic inflammation, smoking and a lack of exercise as reasons for the link between depression and heart problems. To sort out these possibilities, researchers began a study in 2000, identifying people visiting clinics in the San Francisco Bay area who had chronic but stable coronary heart disease. Of the 1,017 patients enrolled, tests showed that one-fifth, average age 63, had symptoms of depression at the start of the study. The other four-fifths were age 68 on average and weren’t depressed. Researchers monitored the health of all the volunteers using lab tests, checkups, interviews, death records. Follow-up averaged five years, and researchers logged the final data entries in early 2008. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12272 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway People often compare sexual attraction to a jolt of electricity, but in some animals a charged atmosphere is very literal. Male elephant nose fish are known to lure females with the help of an electric field. Now lab experiments suggest that females fancy the electric aura of males of their own kind over the spark of closely related species. Such electric attraction could maintain genetic differences between the nearly identical fish species, says Philine Feulner, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, who led the study. Classified as weakly electric fish because they can't muster more than 1 volt - electric eels deliver 500-volt zaps - elephant nose fish generate an electric current with an organ in their tail made from specialised muscle cells. Irresistible charge The field produced helps the long-nosed nocturnal fish to find food and navigate the murky waters of the lower Congo River, Feulner says. Among several closely related species all living in the same vicinity, the jolts differ enough in their length, size, and frequency, that Feulner and her colleagues could measure the difference with an electrode inside the fish's aquarium. They could even mimic electric pulses of different species using a simple set-up. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 12271 - Posted: 06.24.2010

THE surprising discovery that the deadly neurological disease Huntington's improves ability at some cognitive tests is helping us to understand the illness. Christian Beste from the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors in Dortmund, Germany, and his colleagues asked 13 people with Huntington's and 25 apparently healthy controls, half of whom had a gene for Huntington's but no symptoms, to judge whether tones played in a series were long or short. Huntington's worsens ability at most cognitive tests, but in this one the people with Huntington's performed better: they had an average reaction time of 0.5 seconds, compared with 0.64 seconds for the controls. They also made fewer errors (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2659-08.2008). Beste has an idea why this is so. How Huntington's damages the brain is a mystery, but one explanation is that neurons become abnormally sensitive to the neurotransmitter glutamate, and eventually die off as a result. As glutamate is vital for sensory discrimination, Beste says this extra sensitivity could explain the improvements his team found. He says the finding strengthens the glutamate theory and suggests the cognitive task be used as a test for drugs that block the glutamate response. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 12270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE When pediatricians diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, they often ask their patients whether they know anybody else with the problem. These days, children are likely to reply with a household name: Michael Phelps, the Olympic superstar, who is emerging as an inspirational role model among parents and children whose lives are affected by attention problems. “There is a tremendous, tremendous amount of pride — I got the impression sometimes that some of the kids felt like they owned Michael,” said Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, director of the Child Study Center at New York University Langone Medical Center. “There is a special feeling when someone belongs to your club and the whole world is adoring him.” But the emergence of a major celebrity with attention deficit has revealed a schism in the community of patients, parents, doctors and educators who deal with the disorder. For years, these people have debated whether it means a lifetime of limitations or whether it can sometimes be a good thing. Children with the disorder typically have trouble sitting still and paying attention. But they may also have boundless energy and a laserlike focus on favorite things — qualities that could be very helpful in, say, an Olympic athlete. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 12269 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey WASHINGTON — Sleep not only refreshes the body, it may also push the reset button on the brain, helping the brain stay flexible and ready to learn, new research shows. Whether it is slow-wave sleep or rapid eye movement (REM), sleep changes the biochemistry of the brain, and the change is necessary to continue learning new things, suggests research presented November 18 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Hundreds of genes behave differently when an animal is asleep rather than awake, says Chiara Cirelli of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Cirelli and her colleagues are trying to settle a long-standing debate about why sleep is necessary. One theory is that sleep helps solidify memories by replaying information learned during the day. Another idea holds that sleep is for energy restoration. Cirelli and other researchers presented evidence at the neuroscience meeting suggesting that sleep may perform both functions. In a study in rats, Cirelli and her colleagues discovered that a molecule that works with the brain chemical glutamate becomes more and more abundant the longer rats are awake. The molecule, the glutamate receptor GluR1, helps forge connections, called synapses, between neurons. When rats are awake, the amount of GluR1 in the brain may climb up to 40 percent higher than levels found when the animal has been asleep for a few hours. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12268 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Shermer Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition. A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern—call it “apat­ternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Lauren Cahoon Are you nuts for all things newfangled? Or do you stick with the tried and true? New research hints at how such personality traits may be wired into our brains. Scientists have known for some time that the white matter in our brains--the strands of nerve fibers that connect nerve cell bodies, or gray matter--serve as the wires through which neural information flows. However, figuring out exactly which parts of the brain connect to each other, and how strong these connections are, has only been possible recently in living humans thanks to a technique called diffusion tensor imaging. A type of magnetic resonance imaging, the method traces the web of white matter by following the diffusion of fluid through the nerve fibers. Neurologists have used this technology in clinical studies to evaluate brain damage. Neurologist Bernd Weber of the University of Bonn in Germany, former Bonn psychologist Michael Cohen, and colleagues decided to take the tool in a new direction: "No one had really investigated [white matter's] connection to personality," says Weber. To do this, the team asked a group of 20 volunteers to complete a survey to assess whether they were novelty seekers or comfort seekers. The volunteers answered true-or-false questions such as, "I like to try new things just for fun," or "I'd rather stay home than go out." The team then analyzed the volunteers' brains using diffusion tensor imaging, which revealed striking differences between the two groups: Novelty seekers sported a robust bundle of white matter linking the hippocampus, which forms memories and distinguishes between new and old experiences, to a region of the brain known as the ventral striatum, a major planning and reward center. In comfort seekers, on the other hand, the ventral striatum was more strongly connected to the frontal lobe, which plays a role in following social norms (among many other functions), the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12266 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A faulty immune reaction may be responsible for the development of epilepsy, research suggests. Studies in mice by US and Italian researchers linked seizures to brain changes which made immune cells stick inside its blood vessels. This, in turn, the journal Nature Medicine reported, helped break down a vital filter which protects the brain from harmful chemicals. "Unsticking" these cells helped prevent the development of epilepsy in mice. Recent research has focused on problems with the "blood brain barrier" as a possible key to epilepsy, which, if poorly controlled, can mean regular and potentially damaging seizures. Many molecules circulating in the bloodstream could cause damage if they reach the brain, and the role of the barrier is to keep them away. The loss of the barrier is known to be connected to the "excitability" of neurons which may be the trigger for epileptic seizures, but the root cause of why the barrier could be breached remains mysterious. The latest research may have found how an initial, non-epileptic, seizure could lead to a lifetime of epilepsy. It looked at the behaviour of white blood cells - leukocytes - whose job it is to defend the body from threats such as bacteria and viruses. The scientists found that, in mice at least, the initial seizure caused the release of a body chemical within the blood vessels which increased the "adhesion" of leukocytes, keeping them in the vessels for longer. Normally, the mice would then go on to develop full epilepsy, but when this "stickiness" chemical was blocked using antibodies or by genetically changing the mice, the frequency of subsequent seizures was markedly reduced. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12265 - Posted: 11.24.2008

By RONI CARYN RABIN Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds. That’s what unhappy people do. Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research. While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants. “We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12264 - Posted: 06.24.2010