By David Jay Brown The drugs that put the “psychedelic” into the sixties are now the subject of renewed research interest because of their therapeutic potential. Psychedelics such as LSD and the compound in magic mushrooms could ease a variety of difficult-to-treat mental illnesses, such as chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and drug or alcohol dependency. Clinical trials with various substances are now under way in humans. The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs. In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine and ketamine. Much remains unclear about the precise neural mechanisms governing how these drugs produce their mind-bending results, but they often produce somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential therapeutic tools. Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 11150 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas Yoo-Hoo! -- When Elvis shook his hips, girls went wild, and so it is that the sight of a male fiddler crab waving its single giant claw can send female crabs into a sexy swoon, according to a new study. The study is one of the first to show that receiver distance affects visual signals in non-human animals: the males wave differently, depending on how close or how far away the female onlooker is. People do this all of the time, such as when someone is trying to catch the attention of a loved one at an airport and jumps up and down while waving to do so. If the intended recipient of the signal is nearby, the person jumping up and down and waving would waste energy and look rather stupid. Crabs too change their tactics, which also alters the meaning of the signals. "I think that the long-range claw-waving signal is essentially saying, 'I'm a male Uca perplexa and I'm over here!,'" said Martin How, lead author of the study. "It acts as a beacon towards which receptive females can move." How, a researcher in the Center for Visual Sciences at The Australian National University in Canberra, thinks the short-range claw waving display is different. © 2007 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11149 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Proposed electronic tagging of dementia sufferers, with their agreement, has been backed by the Alzheimer's Society. The charity said the plan could empower patients by allowing them to wander, but called for a debate on the ethics of gaining consent. Many dementia sufferers feel compelled to walk about outside - the society says 60% may wander, and 40% have got lost at some point. The government has said tagging could allow people to lead "fuller lives". Science Minister Malcolm Wicks first proposed the measure in April. He said sufferers would gain the freedom to "roam around their communities" without their families suffering the anxiety that such wandering can currently cause. The chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, Neil Hunt, agrees that the technology "could offer benefits to people with dementia and their carers". But he stressed: "There is a careful balance to strike between empowering people and restricting their movement and this technology can certainly never be used as an alternative for high quality dementia care." Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, said the scheme had potential pitfalls. He told BBC Radio 5 Live: "The problem with this is that you could see second-class care - using it as a way of making life easier for carers rather than as a way of making life safer or more pleasant for the person with Alzheimer's." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11148 - Posted: 12.27.2007

Scientists may be a step closer to uncovering the cause of certain types of debilitating migraine headaches. A French team observed activation in the hypothalamus region of the brain as sufferers had a migraine attack. The hypothalamus has long been suspected as it regulates physiological responses to factors known to trigger headaches, such as hunger. It is hoped the discovery, featured in the journal Headache, could lead to new treatments. The researchers, from Rangueil Hospital, used a technique called Positron Emission Tomography (PET), which contrasts functional activity within the brain, on seven patients with migraine without aura, the most common type of migraine. Previously, activation in the brain stem and midbrain, and a thickening in some areas of the cortex were seen in migraine sufferers. The present study may have seen a more detailed pathogenesis of the condition for two reasons. First, timing was crucial: to capture an attack as it happened, patients rushed to hospital without self-medicating, arriving on average around three hours after the onset of the migraine. Second, the observed headaches were spontaneous, and not chemically induced as in other laboratory studies. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11147 - Posted: 12.27.2007

By DENISE GRADY Researchers in the Netherlands have developed a drug that may eventually be used to treat children with a severe and fatal type of muscular dystrophy. Times Health Guide: Duchenne’s Muscular DystrophyIn its first test in humans, a safety study in just four boys, the drug enabled patients to produce an essential muscle protein that is missing in Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, a genetic disease. Not enough of the protein was produced to help the boys, but the presence of any at all was considered “proof of concept,” meaning that the approach has the potential to work and is worth pursuing. The experimental drug, called an “antisense” compound, works by canceling out the effects of certain genetic mutations. These types of drugs are being studied to treat cancer, heart disease, infections and other illnesses. “I don’t think you could ask for a better result from a preliminary study like this,” said Sharon Hesterlee, the vice president for translational research at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, which was not involved in the study but helped pay for an earlier phase of the work. Though promising, the research still has a long way to go. The four boys, ages 10 to 13, each received just one injection into a leg muscle. There were no adverse effects. But larger and longer trials with much higher doses, given systemically so that the drug reaches all muscles, are needed to test both safety and efficacy. If the treatment works, it will have to be given regularly, for life. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 11146 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by David Dobbs We did not, alas, make it to the Prague Museum, which is pictured above. But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January. Looking back requires memory, and by chance that's where we started, with a post by memory researcher James Knierim reviewing what likely will prove the most influential single discovery we covered, that of grid cells in the mouse entorhinal cortex -- a system of neurons that appear to help track location and create context for memories. That discovery, wrote James Knierim, is one of the most remarkable findings in the history of single-unit recordings of brain activity.... [When I read it,] I realized immediately that I was reading a work of historic importance in neuroscience. No one had ever reported a neural response property that was so geometrically regular, so crystalline, so perfect. How could this even be possible? Yet the data were convincing. "This changes everything," I muttered. Another memory post, concerning whether patients with amnesia have trouble imagining new experiences, produced what was perhaps the most substantive debate we had between a reviewer (Andre Fenton) and the an author of the paper reviewed (Demis Hassibis). We also covered memory with reviews of papers on memories are suppressed and how memories are lost in Alzheimer's. Remembering something means learning it in the first place, of course, and we looked at that as well, examining how humans learn through second-hand experience, which appears to be one of humankind's stronger innovations. © 1995-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11145 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new study of combat-exposed Vietnam War veterans shows that those with injuries to certain parts of the brain were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The findings, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Naval Medical Center, suggest that drugs or pacemaker-like devices aimed at dampening activity in these brain regions might be effective treatments for PTSD. PTSD involves the persistent reliving of a traumatic experience through nightmares and flashbacks that may seem real. Twenty percent to 30 percent of Vietnam vets (more than 1 million) have been diagnosed with PTSD, and a similar rate has been reported among Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Public health officials are currently tracking the disorder among soldiers returning from Iraq. Yet, while war and natural disasters tend to call the greatest attention to PTSD, it's estimated that millions of Americans suffer from it as a result of assault, rape, child abuse, car accidents, and other traumatic events. Previous studies have shown that PTSD is associated with changes in brain activity, but those studies couldn't determine whether the changes were contributing to the disorder or merely occurring because of it. "If we could show that lesions in a specific brain region eliminated PTSD, we knew we could say that the region is critical to developing the disorder," says Dr. Grafman. The results of his study appear online today in Nature Neuroscience.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11144 - Posted: 12.27.2007

Charles Lewis, National Post Whether it is a child's belief in Santa or a religious belief in the incredible miracle story, belief looms large at this time of year. Religion is the starting point, but this five-part series explores the many facets of belief, from the placebo effect to the neuroscience of belief and disbelief. Today, atheists on belief and disbelief. Sam Harris may be the best-selling author of two books on the destructiveness of religion, but he has not given up on belief. Now a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles, Mr. Harris and his colleagues have just published research that, they believe, maps for the first time where in the brain decisions are made about what we believe and do not believe. Mr. Harris said he wanted to understand the biological process that allows people to accept certain descriptions of reality as valid. Test subjects were scanned with an MRI while being asked to decide whether they believed the veracity of a particular statement. The researchers then looked for which parts of the brain "lit up." They discovered the part of the brain used for lower cognitive functions -- such as deciding whether something smells good or bad, or assessing pain -- is also used to decide whether a proposition is true or false. © 2007 CanWest Interactive

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11143 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DENISE GRADY For a perfectly healthy woman, Dianne Kerley has had quite a few medical tests in recent years: M.R.I. and PET scans of her brain, two spinal taps and hours of memory and thinking tests. Ms. Kerley, 52, has spent much of her life in the shadow of an illness that gradually destroys memory, personality and the ability to think, speak and live independently. Her mother, grandmother and a maternal great-aunt all developed Alzheimer’s disease. Her mother, 78, is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of dementia, helpless and barely responsive. “She’s in her own private purgatory,” Ms. Kerley said. Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails. “Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11142 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY A region deep in the brain called the hippocampus tracks, sorts and stores the onslaught of information pouring through the senses every waking minute. A large question in neuroscience is one a kindergartner would ask: How? How does a dollop of tissue containing a small fraction of the brain’s neurons possibly absorb and hold so much, even temporarily? A study published last week in the journal Nature provides the first step toward an answer, as well as a showcase for some of the most advanced methods available to study the brain. Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland stimulated not a single cell but a single dendritic spine, one of the hairlike growths that sprout from a cell’s branching arms. Brain cells communicate with their neighbors by sending a chemical burst from the tips of these spines, across a space called the synapse to the tip of a spine on the next cell. If the chemical bath is strong enough, the receiving spine bulges forward — strengthening the connection between the spines. This is thought to be the fundamental process underlying learning. But the researchers, Christopher D. Harvey and Karel Svoboda, found something unusual when they stimulated a single spine. Not only did the spine bulge, but it also somehow made its neighbors more sensitive to chemical signals — standing ready, in effect, to digest any spillover of information. Imagine every neighbor on the block calling up to offer a corner of his basement for storage, just in case. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11141 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Douglas LaBier You may not realize it, but a great number of people suffer from EDD. No, you're not reading a misprint of ADD or ED. The acronym stands for empathy deficit disorder. Nor will you find it listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, even though that tome has been expanding as normal variations of mood and temperament have increasingly been defined as disorders. I'm hesitant to suggest adding another one. But this one is real. Based on my 35 years of experience as a psychotherapist, business psychologist and researcher, I have come to believe that EDD is a pervasive but overlooked condition with profound consequences for the mental health of individuals and of our society. People who suffer from EDD are unable to step outside themselves and tune in to what other people experience. That makes it a source of personal conflicts, of communication failure in intimate relationships, and of the adversarial attitudes -- even hatred -- among groups of people who differ in their beliefs, traditions or ways of life. Take the man who reported to me that his wife was complaining that he didn't spend enough time with their children, that she had most of the burden despite having a career of her own. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11140 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER I am a baseball fan of the most fitful and narrow-minded sort. I love the Yankees, but really only when they’re winning, I hate the Red Sox, especially when they’re winning, and the other teams, as far as I’m concerned, can all go take a whiff. Nevertheless, I care enough about the future of America’s beloved pastime to offer players who have been accused of using anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and other disreputable performance-enhancing drugs some exciting new excuses, culled from the behavioral and pharmaceutical annals of the nonhuman community. Among them: (a) this stuff isn’t for me, it’s for my wife, and any minute now I’ll explode out the contents of my stomach to give it to her; (b) this stuff isn’t mine, it belongs to the poor slob I pretended to befriend and then killed and ate; and (c) don’t blame me — my first dope pusher was my mother. Frown though we may on steroid-style supplementation as cheating, or as competitiveness taken to unsporting and unnatural extremes, in nature such pious niceties do not apply. In nature, as the saying has it, it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s whether you win — and animals will do or ingest the most outrageous, dangerous, blechy things in their quest for victory. Egyptian vultures consume large amounts of cow and goat dung to extract traces of plant pigments that will turn the birds’ pasty faces a sexually alluring shade of mustard. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11139 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Karen Collins, R.D. Is fat the new normal? A study published in the July issue of Economic Inquiry raises that question. With roughly two-thirds of the American population overweight or obese, have our cultural ideals of what we consider “normal weight” changed? The study looked at economic and social factors affecting obesity rates. One element explored was the impact of societal norms or standards. According to the study’s authors, standards for acceptable body weight relax as the average weight of the population increases; in turn, people’s weights continue to rise in response to the lessening of social standards. Public response to the study ranges from support to outrage. While some recognize the danger of “normalizing” unhealthy weights, others are angered by the insinuation that people are unable to differentiate between “average” and “healthy.” This discussion echoes the misunderstanding that surrounded research published in 2000. One study, which was published in the journal Obesity Research, focused on body-size acceptance. In the study, subjects were presented with nine line drawings portraying various body shapes that ranged from very thin to obese. Participants were asked to identify those body sizes that “looked okay” as well as the one they “liked best.” © 2007 MSNBC Interactive

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11138 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WILTON, Conn. - When Sister Kathleen Treanor's soul ascends to heaven, her brain will go to a less ethereal realm: a medical lab in Kentucky. Two decades ago, Sister Treanor and 677 other members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame granted a young researcher's request to test them each year in order to track the progression of Alzheimer's disease and other age-related brain disorders. The 61 surviving nuns recently completed their last round of intellectual and physical tests for the Nun Study, one of the world's most comprehensive neurological research projects. One final sacrifice remains: When they die, their brains will be taken for further study, joining a collection of hundreds of other brains donated by the the nuns who died before them. Sister Treanor, a 93-year-old former school principal who is one of the last of the volunteers at a Wilton convent, looks at her participation as service, not sacrifice. "I've tried to do good while I'm alive, and I liked the idea that I could do something good after death," she said. Copyright 2007 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11137 - Posted: 12.24.2007

From the mammalian brain to the rock that makes up continents, scientists are trying to map the known world. And they are doing it in cooperative groups, turning science into a social event in a way unimagined by explorers of other eras. Mapping a Brain In 2003 Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen invested $100 million in a global project to locate all the genes behind the brain functions in a mouse, which has what is considered a typical mammalian brain. Scientists think mice have ninety percent of human genes, so the mouse brain is considered relevant for research on human well-being. The result has been the Allen Brain Atlas, completed last year and now posted on the Internet with open access to researchers. The atlas, an interactive database with pictures of brain sections, shows which of the 21,000 genes in mouse DNA are active—or "expressed"—in brain regions to produce various functions, such as sight, hearing, memory, or pain. The brain may be the most important object of all the mapping projects, according to Arthur W. Toga, a professor of neurology at the UCLA School of Medicine. "It all came from there," says Toga, a participant in the project. "It's the organ that allows us to create opera and great pieces of art and send a shuttle rocket to the moon." © 2007 Science & Spirit Magazine.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11136 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jessica Marshall Anyone who has ever stayed up too late and regretted it the next day knows just how much humans need sleep. Animals need it, too. Every animal studied so far—from whales to octopuses to fruit flies—sleeps, although animal sleep takes various forms, and even among mammals the human eight hours is not the norm. Horses, elephants, and giraffes, for instance, sleep only about two to four hours a day, while bats and opossums sleep up to 20. It is obvious to us what it means to be asleep, but how do scientists know whether an animal that looks asleep is doing the same thing that we are? In some cases, they can record the animals' brain waves and compare them to those of sleeping humans. But in others, scientists have settled on a few observable criteria: Is the animal in a characteristic sleep posture? Is it unresponsive? Immobile? If it is deprived of sleep, will it then sleep longer to make up for lost zzz's? Another behavioral criterion for sleep is that it is rapidly reversible, unlike hibernation, which takes a long time to enter and emerge from. Jerome Siegel, a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles, says that hibernation is very much like sleep: Both help animals to conserve energy, but hibernation is more extreme. In hibernation, body temperature drops—sometimes to just a few degrees above freezing—and the brain truly shuts down, except for low-level brain activity needed to maintain functions such as breathing and circadian rhythms. Less drastic than hibernation is "shallow" torpor, in which an animal's body temperature drops, but not as low and for a shorter period of time. Some animals—like hummingbirds and hamsters—can enter and emerge from torpor daily. Copyright 2007 Friends of the National Zoo

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 11135 - Posted: 06.24.2010

IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the same sex—and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to find attractive. Their CVs are equally good, and they both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, that one is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by their appearance? Perhaps not. But lesser, less-moral mortals might be. If appearance did not count, why would people dress up for such interviews—even if the job they are hoping to get is dressed down? And job interviews are turning points in life. If beauty sways interviewers, the beautiful will, by and large, have more successful careers than the ugly—even in careers for which beauty is not a necessary qualification. If you were swayed by someone's looks, however, would that be wrong? In a society that eschews prejudice, favouring the beautiful seems about as shallow as you can get. But it was not always thus. In the past, people often equated beauty with virtue and ugliness with vice. Even now, the expression “as ugly as sin” has not quite passed from the language. There is, of course, the equally famous expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, to counter it. But the subtext of that old saw, that beauty is arbitrary, is wrong. Most beholders agree what is beautiful—and modern biology suggests there is a good reason for that agreement. Biology also suggests that beauty may, indeed, be a good rule of thumb for assessing someone of either sex. Not an infallible one, and certainly no substitute for an in-depth investigation. But, nevertheless, an instinctive one, and one that is bound to redound to the advantage of the physically well endowed. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11134 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It makes sense to get joy out of giving to our loved ones, but we're also often generous to complete strangers. Now Claremon Graduate University neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that dosing people with the so-called "cuddle hormone," oxytocin, makes them more generous to strangers. "I think of oxytocin as pushing on the empathy lever in the brain," Zak says. "As we push on that lever we saw this fantastic increase in generosity of real money to a complete stranger." In the experiments, college students were given ten dollars of real money they could keep, but then played a computer game in which they were asked to share some of it with a stranger. While they couldn't see or hear the stranger, the task did force them to put themselves in the strangers' place. "We said, 'If you gave money, how much would you give.?' And, "If you received it and you have a chance to reject how much you were given because it was just too stingy, how much would you accept? What's the smallest amount you would accept?'" He wrote in the journal PLoS One that subjects who got a snort of oxytocin gave 80-percent more money than those who inhaled just a saline solution. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 11133 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Forms of a gene known to increase risk for schizophrenia may create an imbalance in brain pathways for dopamine, suggests a recent study by NIMH scientists. The findings could help explain how this key chemical messenger goes awry in the disorder, which affects about one percent of adults. It has long been known that dopamine is overactive in schizophrenia and that some antipsychotic medications work by blocking the D2 subtype of dopamine receptor on neurons. Geneticist Richard Straub, Ph.D., and colleagues in the NIMH Genes, Cognition and Psychosis Program, sought a mechanism for how a gene implicated in the illness might affect the number or sensitivity of D2 receptors. Reported online November 7, 2007 in the Journal of Neuroscience, their findings hint at a genetically-influenced imbalance between the pathways mediating D2 and D1 dopamine receptors in schizophrenia. Straub and colleagues had earlier linked to schizophrenia certain versions of a gene that results in reduced levels of a protein called dysbindin, which is involved in communications between brain cells. But how dysbindin might relate to dopamine remained a mystery. Copyright 2004-2007 eMaxHealth.com

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11132 - Posted: 12.24.2007

The Associated Press U.S. health officials say improper use of patches that emit the painkiller fentanyl is still killing people. Today's warning from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the second concerning the powerful narcotic in two years. The FDA blames some of the deaths on the patches being improperly prescribed to certain patients. Fentanyl should be used to control chronic pain in people already used to narcotics, such as some cancer patients. Yet the FDA has found cases where doctors prescribed it for headaches or post-surgical pain. Authorities said patients also are accidentally overdosing by putting on more of the patches than prescribed, replacing them too frequently or getting them too hot. The earlier warning in 2005 noted 120 deaths among users. The FDA did not say how many more deaths it has learned of since then. In 2005, Health Canada issued a warning about the pain patch Duragesic, which contains fentanyl. It recommended the patch be used only in adults for the "management of persistent, moderate to severe chronic pain that cannot be managed by lesser means." © The Canadian Press, 2007

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11131 - Posted: 06.24.2010