Researchers using MRI imaging have gone from studying peoples' brains to identifying specific thoughts, allowing them to tell which of 10 similar objects a person is viewing or thinking about. Functional MRI imaging has shown a lot about how our brains respond to pleasure and rewards, and has revealed brain processes and areas involved in deception. And neuroscientists have been wiring the brain's motor neurons to enable paralyzed patients to control prosthetics, computers and robots. But the new research is aimed at the biology underlying thoughts-- or, as scientists call them, "cognitive processes." Carnegie Mellon cognitive psychologist Marcel Just teamed up with machine learning expert Tom Mitchell to conduct the research. They scanned the brains of people who looked at sets images of similar objects-- like 10 types of tools, or 10 types of homes. The researchers excluded the vision area of the brain from the scans "because it's almost too easy a target," explains Just. "The visual cortex really contains a very faithful, accurate representation of a shape that your looking at-- whatever is on your retina gets translated to your visual cortex at the back of your brain. And if you look for that pattern, that's a lot easier, so we can be very accurate there." © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11271 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have found that in mice, the brain responds to aggression in the same way as other pleasures. Craig Kennedy, chairman of the Special Education Department at Vanderbilt University, says the work shows, "for mice aggression is rewarding and that dopamine's involved in that rewarding affect in the same areas of the brain that's rewarding for drugs, sex, can't say rock and roll with mice, but anything that seems to be pleasant." Whenever we do something we like, brains in both animals and people release a drug called dopamine. When it attaches to receptors in the brain, it creates a pleasure circuit, sending out a signal of good feeling. Researchers are studying the role dopamine plays in a number of activities ranging from alcohol, drugs, and gambling, to food and even exercise. As an educator interested in students with special needs, Kennedy has seen children with autism who show aggression towards other people. He's spent much of the past 25 years trying to understand what he calls the "neurobiology of aggression." He says, "that's led us to working with mice in the lab to try to ask some questions about what goes on in the brain during aggression." He notes that aggression is present in "all kinds of animals, from flies to monkeys," and adds, "Being aggressive can be very adaptive (useful) in the wild. It allows you to gain access to food, maintain territory, access to mates, protect offspring; so it's a very adaptive set of behaviors." Kennedy emphasizes, however, that when too much aggression shows up in today's humans, it sometimes presents a problem. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A species of hummingbird makes a chirping noise with its tail feathers, not its throat, a study using high-speed video has suggested. The exact source of the noise from male Anna's hummingbirds has been the subject of debate among researchers. By using specialised footage, a team of US scientists were able to show that male hummingbirds' tail feathers vibrated during high-speed dives. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal. The loud chirp sound is produced by male Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna) as the birds dive towards the ground at speeds that exceed 50mph (80km/h) during their displays for nearby females. The researchers, Chris Clarke and Teresa Feo from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in their paper that they had gathered evidence that put an end to the uncertainty surrounding the source of the sound. "Production of the sound was originally attributed to the tail, but a more recent study argued that the sound was vocal. "We use high-speed video of diving birds, experimental manipulation on wild birds and laboratory experiments on individual feathers to show that the dive sound is made by tail feathers," they explained. The pair added that while bird vocalisation had received considerable attention, non-vocal or "mechanical" sounds had been "poorly described". "A diverse array of birds apparently make mechanical sounds with their feathers. Few studies have established that these sounds are non-vocal, and the mechanics of how these sounds are produced remain poorly studied," the scientists wrote. (C)BBC

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 11269 - Posted: 02.01.2008

By Chip Walter When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses. Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria. Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks. Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11268 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GARDINER HARRIS and BENEDICT CAREY Drugs for epilepsy, bipolar illness and mood problems double the risks of suicidal thoughts and behavior, and patients taking them should be watched for sudden behavioral changes, drug regulators have said. The increased risks, while double in relative terms, are small. The Food and Drug Administration undertook a combined analysis of 199 clinical trials with 43,892 patients and found 4 suicides and 105 reports of suicidal symptoms among the 27,863 patients who were given the drugs compared to no suicides and 35 reports of suicidal symptoms among the 16,029 patients treated with placebos. Taken together, the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior was 0.43 percent for those on drug therapy and 0.22 percent for those given placebos. These medications are primarily used to help epileptics control seizures and to calm the surges in energy and mood that, along with bouts of depression, characterize bipolar disorder. The drugs, which include Depakote, Lamictal, Topamax, Keppra, Lyrica and Neurontin, are sometimes prescribed for chronic pain and headaches, as well. Doctors said Thursday that the increased risk did not outweigh the benefits of the drugs. “What’s really important to say is that bipolar disorder is very difficult to treat, the burden is enormous, and these medications help keep people free of mood and anxiety symptoms and allow them to function,” said Andrew A. Nierenberg, medical director of the bipolar clinic and research program at Massachusetts General Hospital. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy; Depression
Link ID: 11267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Douglas E. Vetter The hammer, anvil and stirrup—also known as the malleus, incus, and stapes, respectively, and collectively, as "middle ear ossicles"—are the smallest bones in the human body. Found in the middle ear, they are a part of the auditory system between the eardrum and the cochlea (the spiral-shaped conduit housing hair cells that are involved in transmitting sound to the brain). To understand the role of these bones in hearing requires an understanding of levers. This is because the middle ear ossicles are arranged and interact with each other as a lever system. All levers generate a mechanical advantage. They are used to exert a large force over a small distance at one end of the lever by applying a smaller force over a longer distance at the opposite end. The leveraging capabilities of the middle ear ossicles are needed to generate the large forces that allow us to hear. As terrestrial animals, we live in a gaseous environment. But, our inner ear is filled with fluid, and this represents a problem. As an example, most people have first hand knowledge of hearing underwater. If someone screams at you from above the water's surface, the sounds are tremendously muted, making it difficult to understand or even hear at all. That is simply because most of the sound is reflected off the water's surface. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11266 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Stephen Baker Forget focus groups. Companies that want feedback on a product are getting inside consumers' heads—literally. The latest rage in marketing involves harnessing a test subject to a narrow shelf, securing the head tightly, and introducing the body into the tube of a $3 million functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (FMRI). For about $1,000 per hour, researchers flash images for their tightly trussed subjects, play advertisements, and read promotional literature. All the while, they study the second-by-second response of the brain. This is neuromarketing. And researchers from the consulting firm of FKF Applied Research in Los Angeles to Neurosense in Oxford, Britain, are using the technique to study what happens in different regions of the brain. Activity in the almond-shaped amydala, for example, shows early alerts of fear and danger. The challenge is to use that data to determine whether, say, people are likely to watch an episode of Viacom's (VIA) South Park or buy a fuel-efficient Honda Motor hybrid car (see BusinessWeek.com, 10/08/07). If this sounds like a golden opportunity for marketers to hawk questionable conclusions from brain studies as unfiltered truth, it is. Researchers predict that neuromarketing will produce plenty of hype bordering on fantasy in the coming year or two. Despite this, many swear by the technology. Unlike information culled from traditional focus groups, the signals issuing from the brain can point to what the subjects are really thinking and feeling. Brain scans bypass the pride and shame and peer pressure that lead subjects in focus groups to edit their responses. In that sense, the scans are close cousins of lie detectors. Copyright 2000-2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc

Keyword: Brain imaging; Emotions
Link ID: 11265 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Scientists have found that a lessened supply of new nerve cells in the adult brain apparently triggers short-term memory loss typically associated with aging, setting the stage for one day developing therapies designed to maintain a steady supply of fresh neurons to keep the mind sharp. "Neurogenesis (nerve-cell production) goes down with age … it's known that with old age there's a decrease in short- term memory," says Ronald Evans, a genetics professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. "We know that if we can increase the process, we know what the consequence could be in the brain, which would be to increase short-term learning and memory." "New experiences, new memories [and] new learning [are] greatly facilitated by neurogenesis," he adds. "Neurogenesis is in fact a fundamental feature of learning and memory. … Neurogenesis goes down with age; and, it's known that with old age there's a decrease in short-term memory." Evans is co-author of a study published in Nature that shows impaired short-term memory and learning in adult mice, in which scientists blocked the process of neurogenesis. They did this by engineering mice that lacked one copy of the gene responsible for the production of Tlx, a protein that the team had previously determined was crucial to maintaining and renewing the arsenal of neural stem cells. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 11264 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Ledford US soldiers who became concussed during deployment in Iraq are more likely to report poor general health than are veterans with other injuries, a study has found. But questions remain about what causes those lingering health problems: the physical blow to the head, or the emotional trauma associated with violent experiences. A study released today, in the New England Journal of Medicine, notes that the link between concussion and poor health might have resulted from higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder in those with head injuries1. "The possibility that symptoms could be accounted for by emotional disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder is very important for us to know," says Roger Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "We have to be very careful about who we call 'brain-damaged', because of the possible adverse effects of labelling people in this way." Traumatic brain injuries are the most common physical injury seen in troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan — largely thanks to improvised explosive devices. They have been designated a 'signature' of the two conflicts. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Stress
Link ID: 11263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Feline defensive rage, the aggressive cat behavior that recently led to the death of a California zoo visitor by a tiger that felt threatened, is comparable to human rage, both in the way that it emerges and unleashes in the brain, suggests a new study. Because scientists are gaining a better understanding of the mammalian brain's recipe for rage, violent behavior in humans and other mammals may one day be quelled with improved drug therapies. For cats, such a drug could prevent the hissing, back arching, ear retraction, claw extensions and fur standing-on-end that are typical indicators of feline defensive rage. In humans, related anger reveals itself with road rage, an impulsive form of anger that involves little or no thought. "In road rage, the person never thinks about what he is doing but just acts in the way he does because he feels that he has been threatened by someone else and the impulsive behavior represents a way by which he can protect himself from such a threat," co-author Allan Siegel told Discovery News. "In reality, his actions are usually much more dangerous to him than to the person whom he perceived cut him off on the road," added Siegel, a professor in the Department of Neurology & Neurosciences at New Jersey Medical School in Newark. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 11262 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Like a skyscraper skeleton that goes up overnight--but doesn't get windows for another decade--languages evolve in fits and starts, according to a new study. The idea that languages evolve in bursts, rather than gradually, isn't new. When applied to species, it's called punctuated evolution. But the idea is controversial in both fields--and proof has been hard to come by. Now, scientists in the United Kingdom say they've mustered the power of mathematics to demonstrate the phenomenon in the evolution of languages. The researchers, headed by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson and mathematician Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, looked at related versions, or homologs, of common words in three of the world's major language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian. Like species, changes in languages can be tracked through the fate of certain words, just as mutations in key genes can tell a species' history. The words the researchers tracked are from the so-called Swadesh lists: compilations of heavily used words denoting things such as numbers or body parts that change little over time and are rarely borrowed, making them good clues about how one language relates to another. An example from the Indo-European language family is the words for "water" in English, German ("Wasser"), Hittite ("watar"), and Russian ("voda"). Despite many borrowings, English is much further from Latin languages such as French, according to the Swadesh lists. Consider, for example, the French for water--"eau." © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 11261 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Dan Jones “It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors … that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature … [and] that humans have a 'violent brain'.” These are the ringing words of the 'Seville Statement on Violence', fashioned by 20 leading natural and social scientists in 1986 as part of the United Nations International Year of Peace, and later adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It was written to counter the pessimistic view that violence and war are inevitable features of human life. The decades since have not been kind to these cherished beliefs. A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and anthropologists have accumulated evidence that understanding many aspects of antisocial behaviour, including violence and murder, requires the study of brains, genes and evolution, as well as the societies those factors have wrought. At the same time, though, historians, archaeologists and criminologists have started to argue that in most places life was more violent — and more likely to end in murder — in the past than it is today. The time span of this apparent decline in violence has been too short for appeals to natural selection to be convincing. If humans have evolved to kill, then it seems that they have also evolved to live without killing, given the right circumstances. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 11260 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Linda Carroll When her 5-year-old son showed up at the door with a black eye and a bloody cut on his head, Brooke Fike knew it was time to take on the bullies. For weeks, several boys at school had been swinging their backpacks into her son's head. One day they dumped a carton of milk over him during lunch. As Fike tried to remedy the problem, she realized that the bullies seemed to be the kids in class who couldn’t sit still and listen. They didn’t do their homework. They were almost constantly in motion. Turns out, those behaviors could have been the first clue to parents and school officials that these boys might be the ones who were going to turn into bullies. A new study shows that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are almost four times as likely as others to be bullies. And, in an intriguing corollary, the children with ADHD symptoms were almost 10 times as likely as others to have been regular targets of bullies prior to the onset of those symptoms, according to the report in the February issue of the journal Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. © 2008 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 11259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Sperm whales literally drift to sleep, but it's a snooze like no other, according to a recent study that found whales perform slow, rhythmic dives as they slumber. Because these drift dives keep the whales in constant motion as they rest, scientists now think the seafaring mammals sleep with one side of their brain at a time. The two sides alternate until both are rested. Sperm whales might even break a world record for least amount of sleep needed by a mammal. "If the only sleep sperm whales get is during these drift dives, it would be less than any mammal studied so far," lead author Patrick Miller told Discovery News. Miller, a senior research fellow at the University of St. Andrews Gatty Marine Research Institute, and his colleagues affixed suction cups with data-logging tags onto 59 sperm whales at various open-water locations worldwide. The tags allowed the scientists to monitor the whales' movements 24/7. The researchers, whose study was recently published in Current Biology, noticed the whales performed the mesmerizing drift dives 7.1 percent of the time, usually between 6 p.m. and midnight. The scientists observed two types of drift dives. The first, head-up drift dives, happen when a whale's rear end slowly sinks into the water from a horizontal posture. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 11258 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott Electrodes implanted into the brain of a patient undergoing an experimental treatment for obesity have surprisingly improved his memory skills. The startling and unexpected effects — reported in Annals of Neurology 1 — have prompted the Canadian team of neurologists to launch a new deep-brain stimulation (DBS) trial in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. Three patients have already had electrodes implanted, says neurosurgeon Andres Lozano from the University of Toronto's Toronto Western Research Institute. “The surgery seems safe and the results are promising,” he says. During DBS, a hair-thin electrode with four contact points is placed in a very precise area of the brain. Each contact can be stimulated individually with different frequencies of electric current — or switched off — by remote control. The tiny currents are intended to activate specific neural circuits in the brain that under-perform in particular disorders. The procedure is most often used to treat Parkinson’s disease but, in the past few years, neurosurgeons have been experimenting with treating psychiatric disorders including depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11257 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Andrew W. McCollough & Edward K. Vogel Anyone who has tried to find an urgent email amid masses of advertisements for dubious stock opportunities and sexual enhancement drugs understands the critical importance of being able to filter out distracting information. That important email may be in there but it is lost among irrelevant clutter. And while the capacity of our email inbox is limited only by disc space, our mental 'inbox' of working memory is much more constrained. In fact, several decades of research have indicated that our capacity to hold information “in mind” for immediate use is limited to a mere three or four items. Moreover, just as people vary in height and eye color, we also vary in the capacity of this memory inbox. Interestingly, these differences in working memory capacity are strongly predictive of a person’s ability to perform abstract reasoning, mathematics, and other forms of complex problem solving. This relationship between memory capacity and fluid intelligence has motivated many scientists to try to understand why and how people differ in this important cognitive ability. There are at least two primary explanations for this severe limitation in working memory capacity. First, it could be that working memory capacity is essentially determined by storage space, and that some people have larger "hard drives" than others do. The alternative explanation is that capacity depends not on the amount of storage space but on how efficiently that space is used. Thus high-capacity individuals might simply be better at keeping irrelevant information out of mind, whereas low capacity individuals may allow more irrelevant information to clutter up the mental inbox. High-capacity individuals may just have better spam filters. © 1995-2007 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 11256 - Posted: 06.24.2010

United States researchers suggest long-ago lead exposure can make an aging person's brain work as if it's five years older than it really is. "We're trying to offer a caution that a portion of what has been called normal aging might in fact be due to ubiquitous environmental exposures like lead," says Dr. Brian Schwartz of Johns Hopkins University, a leader in the study of lead's delayed effects. The notion of long-delayed effects is familiar; tobacco and asbestos, for example, can lead to cancer. But in recent years, scientists are coming to appreciate that exposure to other pollutants in early life also may promote disease much later on. "It's an emerging area" for research, said Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. It certainly makes sense that if a substance destroys brain cells in early life, the brain may cope by drawing on its reserve capacity until it loses still more cells with aging, he said. Only then would symptoms like forgetfulness or tremors appear. Studying delayed effects in people is difficult because they generally must be followed for a long time. Research with lead is easier because scientists can measure the amount that has accumulated in the shinbone over decades and get a read on how much lead a person has been exposed to in the past. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Alzheimers
Link ID: 11255 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Life may begin at 40, but research suggests that 44 is the age at which we are most vulnerable to depression. Data analysis on two million people from 80 countries found a remarkably consistent pattern around the world. The risk of depression was lowest in younger and older people, with the middle-aged years associated with the highest risk for both men and women. The study, by the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US, will feature in Social Science & Medicine. The only country which recorded a significant gender difference was the US, where unhappiness reached a peak around the age of 40 for women, and 50 for men. Previous research has suggested that the risk of unhappiness and depression stays relatively constant throughout life. However, the latest finding - of a peak risk in middle age - was consistent around the globe, and in all types of people. Researcher Professor Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, said: "It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children." He said the reason why middle age was a universally vulnerable time was unclear. However, he said: "One possibility is that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations. Another possibility is that a kind of comparison process is at work in which people have seen similar-aged peers die and value more their own remaining years. Perhaps people somehow learn to count their blessings." (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11253 - Posted: 01.29.2008

By JANE E. BRODY When a woman complains of genital pain so severe that it makes sexual intercourse all but impossible, her partner may jump to the conclusion that she has a phobia about sex. But what if that same woman also experiences excruciating pain when trying to insert a tampon, undergo a pelvic exam, wear a pair of jeans, ride a bicycle or go jogging? Can phobia explain all those problems? Not very likely. In fact, studies have shown that sexual phobias are rarely the explanation for a condition known as vulvodynia, a chronic discomfort of the vulva that can result in searing or shooting pain when any amount of pressure is placed on the sensitized tissues. Some women compare the feeling to acid being poured on an open wound. The problem can last months, years or a lifetime. Worse, doctors often misdiagnose it or treat it inappropriately, if at all. For decades, women suffering from vulvodynia have been told that nothing seems to be wrong with them — nothing, that is, that the examining physician can discern — or that the condition may be real but that nothing can be done. Christin Veasley of Providence, R.I., said that vulvodynia, which was diagnosed at age 18 during her freshman year at college, made it impossible for her to sit long enough to finish a midterm exam. Her doctor said there was no help for her condition. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11252 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By HENRY FOUNTAIN Researchers who study the brain know that it’s far from an immutable object. “It’s much more plastic than most people think,” said Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s changing all the time.” One area of change is the synapses, the connections between neurons, which are altered as the brain receives stimuli. “What happens when you’re awake is you produce an overall strengthening of synapses,” Dr. Tononi said. “That’s good, because that’s how you learn.” But that is unsustainable in the long run, because stronger synapses require more energy and material, and there’s a limit to how much of both is available. “It’s as if in the morning you start with a V-6 engine,” he said, “and in the evening you find yourself idling, but you’re running a V-8.” Stronger synapses are also bigger, but the brain cannot grow bigger or denser. “If you strengthen synapses because you learn, soon you’d reach a point where you can’t learn further,” he added. So Dr. Tononi and a colleague, Chiara Cirelli, have hypothesized that during sleep, the synapses weaken. The downscaling is across the board, so that the synapses’ relative strength is maintained. Those that have been used (those involved in learning) stay stronger than those that haven’t. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11251 - Posted: 06.24.2010