US scientists have developed a gene therapy treatment which they hope could revolutionise pain relief. Pain vanished for at least three months in rats who were injected in the spine with a gene that triggers endorphins, the body's natural pain killer. The therapy did not affect the rest of the nervous system, including the brain, potentially preventing the main side-effects of current pain relief. Studies suggest drugs do not relieve cancer pain in as many as 66% of cases. The research appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Chronic pain patients often do not experience satisfactory pain relief from available treatments due to poor efficacy or intolerable side effects like extreme sleepiness, mental clouding and hallucinations," said Andreas Beutler, part of the team who conducted the study at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He said that in some circumstances, patients preferred to continue suffering some pain in order to preserve lucidity. There is also a potential risk of addiction to opiate drugs. The team used a disabled cold virus to carry the gene into the spinal fluid of the rats, which had been developed to suffer from chronic pain. By blocking the pain impulses travelling up to their brains, the rats remained pain-free for at least three months, the researchers wrote. "Although this research is at a very early stage, the concept of using gene therapy to deliver pain relief is interesting because it could potentially have fewer side effects than conventional pain relief," said Josephine Querido of Cancer Research UK. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11230 - Posted: 01.22.2008

By John Tierney Before I reveal the Figaro Factotum regimen for greater personal productivity, let me explain how it came about. Maintaining a blog while doing other things has reminded me of how bad I am at juggling different jobs. I’ve tried to excuse this as a consequence of my gender. I’ve tried consoling myself with the theories of evolutionary psychologists who say that male hunters on the savanna needed to focus intently on one job — kill or be killed — while women evolved to be better multitaskers because the survival of the species depended on their being able to keep an eye on children while doing other work. But now I fear I just have a lazy untrained brain. Some other men — musical conductors — multitask just fine, and it’s possible that this skill can be learned if you’re just diligent enough to rewire your brain, according to a study published in NeuroReport by researchers at Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to map the brains of musical conductors and non-musicians who tried to distinguish musical tones while also being shown visual images. The scans showed that non-musicians had to turn off more of their visual sense than the conductors did in order to focus on the task. One of the researchers, Dr. Hodges, director of the Music Research Institute at UNC- Greensboro, says there are two possible interpretations of the results: One is that the brains of musicians are wired this way, and that’s why they became musicians. The other is that they train their brains for rewiring. Because conductors have to be able to hear a bad note, then identify who did it, perhaps they rewire their brains to combine their visual and auditory senses. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11229 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER As the candidates have shown us in the succulent telenovela that is the 2008 presidential race, there are many ways to parry for political power. You can go tough and steely in an orange hunter’s jacket, or touchy-feely with a Kleenex packet. You can ally yourself with an alpha male like Chuck Norris, befriend an alpha female like Oprah Winfrey or split the difference and campaign with your mother. You can seek the measured endorsement of the town elders or the restless energy of the young, showily handle strange infants or furtively slam your opponents. Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung social networks. Male dolphins, for example, organize themselves into at least three nested tiers of friends and accomplices, said Richard C. Connor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, rather like the way human societies are constructed of small kin groups allied into larger tribes allied into still larger nation-states. The dolphins maintain their alliances through elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins like Blue Angel pilots blazing their acrobatic fraternity on high. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 11228 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Drake Bennett WHEN YOU READ something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern? Discuss Do you use movement to think better? more stories like thisHow you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you're reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back. The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it. The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is "embodied cognition," and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. © 2008 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 11227 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Temma Ehrenfeld Forget about mind-blowing fun. Nowadays the kids who came of age in the '60s are turning 60. And they'd rather keep their minds intact, thank you. With that wave of elder boomers looming, scientists are hard at work on ways to prevent dementia and ordinary mental decline. The research is beginning to bear fruit: it's clear that a healthy lifestyle and mental exercise can measurably improve cognitive functioning. So the next time you hear yourself refer to "what's his name" or find yourself wandering a parking lot in search of your car, resolve to start a brain-fitness program. Here are six brain-sharpening recommendations that mindful folks of any age can follow. (Why not start early?) 1. Go Aerobic More than 60 percent of seniors don't exercise, according to surveys by the Centers for Disease Control. That's a big mistake, since an impressive lineup of research suggests that exercise promotes new neurons in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for some aspects of memory, and new connections between them. Neuroscientist Arthur Kramer and colleagues at the University of Illinois found that after only six months people over 60 who exercised three times a week for an hour had the brain volumes of people three years younger. In 2006 the Annals of Internal Medicine reported a six-year project involving 1,740 people 65 and up that linked even moderate exercise to reduced risk of dementia. So get your heart pumping so it brings more blood and oxygen to your brain. 2. Be a Player Software has been used for years to help people who have suffered strokes or traumatic brain injuries regain specific mental abilities. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 11226 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Clara Moskowitz It's no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain. New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks. Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging. Previous psychology research has shown that American culture focuses on the individual and values independence, while East Asian culture is more community-focused and emphasizes seeing people and objects in context. This study provides the first neurological evidence that these cultural differences extend to brain activity patterns. "It's kind of obvious if you look at ads and movies," Gabrieli told LiveScience. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11225 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Frank Eltman, -- Now that surgeons have operated on Stacey Gayle's brain, her favorite musician no longer makes her ill. Four years after being diagnosed with epilepsy, Gayle recently underwent brain surgery at Long Island Jewish Medical Center to cure a rare condition known as musicogenic epilepsy. Gayle, a 25-year-old customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang. Eighteen months ago, she began to suspect that music by reggae and hip-hop artist Sean Paul was triggering some of her seizures. She recalled being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper's music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she heard his music. Her suspicions were confirmed on a visit to the Long Island medical center last February, when she played Paul's hit "Temperature" on her iPod for doctors. Soon after, she suffered three seizures. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Hearing
Link ID: 11224 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Matt Kaplan Talk about "gaydar." In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized. Humans are remarkably good at making snap judgments about others. In a hallmark study conducted by psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in 1994, people shown 2-second video clips of professors teaching formed opinions about the professors' teaching abilities that were uncannily similar to evaluations written by students at the end of a semester. The results led psychologists to begin questioning what else people might detect in a glance. Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results," says Ambady. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11223 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with slightly longer legs really are more attractive to the opposite sex, a study suggests. Polish research found both men and women preferred a picture of a person in which the legs had been manipulated to be 5% longer than they really were. But extremely long legs did not fare as well, the study published in the New Scientist suggests. Legs that had been stretched to be 15% longer were apparently less of a turn-on than the original, normal pair. The original pair were seen as equally attractive as a pair that had been stretched by 10%. The researchers at the University of Wroclaw distorted seven pictures of men and women, who had varying leg lengths to start with. They showed the finished products to 218 volunteers of both sexes. "Long legs signal health," said Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski, who led the research. He added that he did not think Poles would be unusual in preferring the longer limbs. There is a growing body of research which links longer legs with better health. Most recently a UK study suggested that the shorter-legged may have an increased risk of liver disease, for instance. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11222 - Posted: 01.18.2008

WASHINGTON - As many as 20 percent of U.S. combat troops who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan leave with signs they may have had a concussion, and some do not realize they need treatment, Army officials said Thursday. Concussion is a common term for mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI. While the Army has a handle on treating more severe brain injuries, it is "challenged to understand, diagnose and treat military personnel who suffer with mild TBI," said Brig. Gen. Donald Bradshaw, chairman of a task force on traumatic brain injury created by the Army surgeon general. The task force, which completed its work in May, released its findings on Thursday. It estimated that from 10 percent to 20 percent of soldiers and Marines from tactical units leaving Iraq and Afghanistan are affected by mild traumatic brain injury. The most common cause was blast from an explosion. The symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, nausea, light sensitivity, sleep problems, memory problems, confusion and irritability. With treatment, more than 80 of patients recover completely, the task force said. Less than half who suffered from a mild traumatic brain injury in combat have persistent symptoms associated with it, said Col. Robert Labutta, a neurosurgeon with the Army surgeon general's office. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 11221 - Posted: 01.18.2008

When you’re in a crowd, do you notice the smiling faces or frowning faces? Social psychologist Mark Baldwin of McGill University in Canada says the answer might influence how much stress you’re under. “If your attention is drawn during the day towards social threats like rejections and criticisms, you’re filtering the world such that you’re going to see it as more stressful, more threatening, than someone who’s able to be aware of the acceptance and warm support around them,” says Baldwin. Baldwin and Stephane D. M. Dandeneau, along with other colleagues at McGill and Douglas Hospital Research Center, conducted a multi-part study to see, first, if people’s perception of social threat could influence stress hormone levels and then, if an experimental video game could help improve their well-being. Baldwin explains that the idea of a video game came from the realization that he and his students had all experienced being riveted by a certain classic: “We were looking for a way to help people train automatic habitual patterns of thought, and my students and I were talking about this one day and we thought about computer games because if you’ve ever played the game Tetris for hours and hours and hours, you start thinking about it when you’re not trying to. You even dream about it. You start reorganizing your closet for no apparent reason. “And so we thought, okay, can we design a game to use this same kind of interactivity, these repetitive thought processes, to help people train positive, helpful thought processes?” © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11220 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Consider the remarkable strategy of a lowly parasitic worm in the tropics that seeks to spread its progeny far and wide: The tiny worm infects a tropical ant, and turns its black belly red. The ant waves its belly up high, and it looks just like a ripe, red berry. A bird gobbles up what it thinks is a berry; it flies away and its droppings fall to the ground. From those droppings come thousands of the parasite's eggs, and behold! They hatch and a new population of nematode worms emerges, ready to infect more ants that turn more ant bellies red that attract more birds to eat the red bellies, and so on and on and on. The parasite is a species of nematode also known as roundworms, the ant is called Cephalotes atratus and it lives high in the canopy of tropical rainforests from Peru to Panama, while just any old bird will do in this bizarre example of co-evolution that has brought all three - the worm, the ant and the bird - together. The birds don't normally eat the black ants because they're heavily armored and taste bad, but red ant bellies that look like berries are apparently an irresistible morsel. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 11219 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Artificially intelligent Dr. Doolittles can understand dog barks as well or better than humans do. These findings suggest computers might significantly help people comprehend animal communication. Scientists tested artificially intelligent software on more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs. Six different kinds of barks were taped: Barks for strangers were recorded when a researcher approached a dog's owner's home when the owner was away. Barks during fights were recorded at dog training schools, when a trainer encouraged dogs to bite the glove on the trainer's arms and bark aggressively. Barks for walks were recorded when owners behaved as if they were preparing to go for a walk with their dogs. Barks for balls were recorded when owners held balls in front of dogs. Barks during playtime were recorded when owners played tug-of-war or similar games with dogs. Barks made when alone were recorded when owners tied dogs to trees in a park and then walked out of sight. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11218 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found. In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications; and many researchers have questioned the reported effectiveness of antidepressants. But the new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did. The finding is likely to inflame a continuing debate about how drug trial data is reported. In 2004, after revelations that negative findings from antidepressant trials had not been published, a group of leading journals agreed to stop publishing clinical trials that were not registered in a public database. Trade groups representing the world’s largest drug makers announced that members’ companies would begin to release more data from trials more quickly, on their own database, clinicalstudyresults.org. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11217 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Ask Michael Wigler about the genetic basis of autism, and he will tell you that the standard genetic methods of tracing disease-causing mutations in families with multiple affected members are not working. Although most scientists agree that environmental influences play a role in disease onset, autism has a strong genetic component: among identical twins, if one is autistic, there is a 70 percent chance the other will show the disease, a risk factor nearly 10 times that observed in fraternal twins and regular siblings. Yet years of time and bags of money have been spent unsuccessfully looking for genes linked to the condition. To Wigler, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, the key to unlocking autism’s genetic mystery lies in spontaneous mutations—alterations in the parental germ line that are novel in offspring. Last year he proved that spontaneous events contribute to some cases of au­­tism and then formed a controversial theory for the genetics of the disorder. It suggests, among other things, that females, who develop autism with a quarter of the frequency with which males do, may carry the genetic profile for the illness, which they then pass on to their children. As Wigler sees it, conventional genetic studies have failed because they have corralled families that have more than one autistic child to search for differences in one base along the genetic code. These differences, which are presumed to affect neural connectivity, can be an addition, a deletion or a substitution of a base and are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In autism research, uncovering SNPs shared by affected people would enable scientists to determine who would have an elevated risk for acquiring the disease or passing it on. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11216 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith A drug has been found that treats chronic pain in mice, without the usual painkiller side effects of sedation, addiction or developing tolerance. Whether the compound has the same effect in people remains to be seen, but researchers are approaching the drug's target with "cautious optimism". The compound comes from a well-known class of drugs, the benzodiazepines, that are widely used for sedation or to treat anxiety. Benzodiazepines act on brain pathways involved with pain perception, but have not been very effective at relieving pain. A team led by Hanns Ulrich Zeilhofer of the University of Zurich in Switzerland wanted to know why. They first tested diazepam — commonly known as valium — by injecting it into the spines of mice. The spine is one of the body's direct pain highways, so blocking pain signals here might help avoid side effects that turn up when a drug hits the brain. In this system the researchers found that diazepam could indeed relieve pain — mice that either endured a painful injection or had a nerve squeezed to simulate chronic pain were less bothered if they received the spinal injections. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11215 - Posted: 06.24.2010

These days, it’s tough to know what to worry about. Resistant bacteria? Cancer? Global warming? As it turns out, you’re not going to get any extra help from your brain. Although the human brain is well adapted to respond to risk, it’s not so skilled at sorting out which modern risks to worry about. The current issue of Psychology Today explains why in its article “10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong.'’ “Our biases reflect the choices that kept our ancestors alive. But we have yet to evolve similarly effective responses to statistics, media coverage, and fear-mongering politicians….Though emotions are themselves critical to making rational decisions, they were designed for a world in which dangers took the form of predators, not pollutants.” Part of the problem is that our emotions have evolved to help our brains make “lightning fast” assessments about risk before we have a chance to think. Things that have been around awhile — snakes and spiders, for instance, scare us. But bigger risks, such as fast driving, don’t trigger the same instinctive response. “Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible — but may not be anymore,'’ the author, Maia Szalavitz, writes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Some elderly adults may be more susceptible to fraud because of changes in their brain that affect judgment and decision-making, researchers said on Tuesday. In a series of tests they tried to identify common traits among seniors who had difficulty making decisions and spotting anything misleading to determine what makes them vulnerable to deception. "Our research suggests that elders who fall prey to fraudulent advertising are not simply gullible, depressed, lonely or less intelligent. Rather, it is truly more of a medical or neurological problem," said Natalie Denburg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. "Our work sheds new light on this problem and perhaps may lead to a way to identify people at risk of being deceived," she added in a statement. Denburg and her colleagues studied 80 healthy seniors with no apparent neurological problems to see how they make decisions. Their findings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11213 - Posted: 01.17.2008

By JAN HOFFMAN WEST ORANGE, N.J. — In the therapy gym for the minimally functional, Jodi Levin props a patient between cushions, kneels behind him and then braces him with her arms. She directs his mother to select photos of his brother and his father. At the coaxing of Ms. Levin, an occupational therapist on the brain injury unit of Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, the mother holds one photo to the left side of the patient’s head, the other to the right. “Look at Dad’s picture,” Ms. Levin urges. “Dad’s on the left. Find Dad. You can do it!” The patient, wobbly and glazed, tries mightily to understand her command and then heed it by compelling his neck to turn. He almost makes it. Gently letting him go, catching him as he flops, Ms. Levin explains to his mother, “Now I’m working on trunk control.” The man flinches. “It’s the basis of everything,” she continues. “For getting in and out of bed, brushing teeth, getting dressed.” Eight weeks earlier, the patient, 18, wearing a helmet and protective leather gear, had been riding his motorcycle to community college. As he came over a hill, the car in front slowed abruptly; to avoid hitting it, the teenager swerved and was hit by an oncoming car. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 11212 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aggressive behaviour is very rewarding from a cognitive perspective, with the brain interpreting it as a pleasurable activity on par with sex or recreational drugs, a new mouse study suggests. "It is well known that dopamine is produced in response to rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and drugs of abuse," Maria Couppis, who conducted the study as her doctoral thesis at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said in a release. "What we have now found is that it also serves as positive reinforcement for aggression." Dopamine is a hormone-like substance that acts as neurotransmitter — translating the effects of things like drugs into sensations. The study of mice involved placing a female and male mouse in a cage, with five other mice in a separate enclosure. In the course of the experiment, the female mouse would be removed from the cage and temporarily replaced with an "intruder" mouse. The aggressiveness of the male mouse was then observed. Over time, the male mouse, trained to poke a target with its nose if it wanted the intruder to arrive again, increasingly signalled it wanted the other mouse to return and that it perceived the encounter as a reward. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11211 - Posted: 06.24.2010