By David B. Caruso NEW YORK - When Peter Braunstein was put on trial last year for a twisted Halloween torture attack, his lawyers used a visual aid to suggest that his actions were the product of mental illness. It was a scan of the defendant's brain. A doctor testified that the patterns it revealed indicated that Braunstein, accused of donning a firefighter's costume and imprisoning a woman for 13 hours, suffered from schizophrenia. The New York trial was one of a growing number of instances in which cutting-edge neuroscience has found its way into U.S. courts. Brain scans have emerged as potentially powerful tools in battles over defendants' sanity. More defense attorneys are seeking scans showing brain damage or abnormalities that might have made it difficult for their clients to control violent impulses. And experts say there is much more to come — including a few things that seem the stuff of science fiction. Within years, brain scans might be capable of serving as reliable lie detectors. Similar tests could potentially show whether a plaintiff in a personal injury case is really in pain, or faking it for sympathy, and brain images might even help jurors assess the reliability of a witness's memory. However, some question whether the legal community might be moving too fast to embrace unproven technology. © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Brain imaging; Aggression
Link ID: 11364 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY When it comes to understanding, preventing and treating chronic diseases, multiple sclerosis ranks among the most challenging. The word “multiple” is apt in more ways than one. Various suggested causes include early-life exposure to certain viruses or toxic agents, geographic and dietary influences, inherent immunological defects and underlying genetic susceptibilities. MS is highly unpredictable. Rarely are any two patients alike in the presentation, duration and progression of symptoms; even the underlying cause of disability in MS is being reconsidered. And rarely do any two patients respond in the same way to a given therapy, be it medically established or alternative. Trial and error is the name of the game, experts say, because it is often not possible to know in advance what will work best for individual patients. These are the frequent underpinnings of confusion and distrust among those afflicted and their families. They sometimes give rise to claims that the organizations raising large amounts of money to support research and patient services and the scientists studying the disease have no intention of finding a cure, lest it put them out of business. It is a ridiculous notion on its face, since many of those involved in fund-raising and research have watched loved ones suffer and succumb to diseases like MS. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 11363 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith Babies and adults use opposite sides of their brains to process colours. And the switch is due to the influence of language, a study suggests. It is well known that in adults, perception of colour is processed predominantly by the left hemisphere, which is also where most people process language. Studies have shown that the language one speaks can have an impact on the colour one sees. Paul Kay at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues wanted to know if this left-side bias was carved out by the development of language in the left hemisphere, or whether it was present even before language is acquired. So they tested two age groups — adults and 4–6-month-old babies — with the same colour-perception task. A coloured target is shown at a randomly chosen location on a different coloured background, and the researchers watch to see how long it takes the participant to shift their attention to the target's location. Adults reacted more quickly if the target was presented in the right side of the visual field, which is processed by the left hemisphere of the brain. For babies, the pattern reversed: they were quicker if the target was in the left visual field, which is processed by the right hemisphere. The results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Vision; Language
Link ID: 11362 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it’s the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors’ face planting outside bars or on beaches. Or perhaps it’s a simple a case of seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Not SAD at all, but anticipation of warmth and eagerness for a little disorder. Either way, researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior. Until recently, their definition of binge drinking — five drinks or more in 24 hours — was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars. And investigators who ventured into the field, into the spray of warm backwash and press of wet T-shirts, often returned with findings like this one from a 2006 study: “Spring break trips are a risk factor for escalated alcohol use.” Or this, from a 1998 analysis: “The men’s reported levels of alcohol consumption, binge drinking and intoxication were significantly higher than the women’s.” In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 11361 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rachel Courtland Wandering albatrosses seem to have a keen sense of smell: so keen that they can follow their nose to food some 20 kilometres away from their starting point. Following scent trails on the open ocean is not easy, even for an albatross on the prowl for dead fish or squid. Although pungent odours at sea are known to be carried downwind, air turbulence chops up the trail, resulting in intermittent patches of scent. Researchers have long suspected that a sense of smell plays a role in albatross foraging, but the extent to which they used it was surprising. “We expected more birds to circle around and around” using their eyes to find food, says Gabrielle Nevitt of the University of California, Davis. Instead, Nevitt estimates, smell contributes to almost half of in-flight food finds. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1. To study foraging behaviour, the team tagged 19 wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) during brief nesting periods on Possession Island in the southwestern Indian Ocean. The researchers outfitted the birds with small global positioning system (GPS) sensors and fed them small capsules to measure stomach temperature changes that correspond with feeding events. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11360 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CARL ZIMMER For the past two decades, Kay E. Holekamp has been chronicling the lives of spotted hyenas on the savannas of southern Kenya. She has watched cubs emerge from their dens and take their place in the hyena hierarchy; she has seen alliances form and collapse. She has observed clan wars, in which dozens of hyenas have joined together to defend their hunting grounds against invaders. “It’s like following a soap opera,” said Dr. Holekamp, a professor at Michigan State University. Throughout her career, Dr. Holekamp has remained vigilant against anthropocentrism. She does not think of the hyenas as long-eared people running around on all fours. But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain. Scientists have long puzzled over the enormous size of the human brain. It is seven times larger than one would predict for an average mammal of our size. Many of our extra neurons are in a region called the frontal cortex, where much of the most sophisticated thought takes place. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11359 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Art Glenberg It has become commonplace in neuroscience - and even in everyday conversation - to compare human cognition to that of computers. We know that computers work by using rules to manipulate symbols composed of zeros and ones. According to this metaphor, people also use rules to manipulate abstract and arbitrary symbols. The brain, in other words, was a computer that processed data largely independently of the body. A newer theory that is gaining ground among neuroscientists, embodied cognition, departs from the "computer-as-mind" metaphor. Instead, the body is seen as playing an important role in cognitive processes. Cognition evolved to guide real bodies in the real world, argue the researchers in favor of this idea. Our thoughts are constrained and influenced by the details of our flesh. How you move your arm or leg actually shapes the way you perceive, think and remember. The latest research in embodied cognition demonstrates just how entangled the body and brain are. Holt and Beilock's research plays the embodiment card in two ways. First, they show that when trying to understand written language, people invoke perceptual and action experiences. The words we use when reading (and perhaps also when listening) point to particular shared bodily experiences, and these experiences, in turn, are used by the reader to understand sentences. In the second important advance, Holt and Beilock also show that when people have had different personal experiences they will understand the same sentences differently. © 1995-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11358 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO - Defects in working memory — the brain's temporary storage bin — may explain why one child cannot read her history book and another gets lost in algebra, new research suggests. As many as 10 percent of school age children may suffer from poor working memory, British researchers said in a report last week, yet the problem remains rarely identified. "You can think of working memory as a pure measure of your child's potential," Dr. Tracey Alloway of Britain's Durham University said in a telephone interview. "Some psychologists consider working memory to be the new IQ because we find that working memory is the single most important predictor of learning," Alloway said. Many children with poor working memory are considered lazy or dim. But Alloway said with early identification and memory training, many of these underachievers can improve. Working memory allows people to hold and manipulate a few items in their minds, such as a telephone number. Alloway compares working memory to a box. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11357 - Posted: 06.24.2010

If the safety hazards of talking on the phone while driving weren't bad enough, researchers have now shown that motor mouths also cost other commuters significant time, money and health risks from pollution exposure. In a study presented to the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, psychologist David Strayer and his colleagues at the University of Utah used driving simulators to approximate the experience of driving in various levels of traffic. The simulators, which are the same kind used to train police officers, create a realistic depiction of driving in city and highway environments. Using a computer connected to the simulator, researchers can measure a number of simulated variables, including crash risk, following distance, and even a driver's ability to stay in one lane. As Strayer explains, "what we have is a fairly sophisticated replication of what you'd see in a car, but we can take very good measures of how people are driving." In his past research, Strayer has used simulators like this to observe a number of different driving behaviors. But for this latest study, he was interested in one overarching question: does cell phone use while driving affect the flow of traffic? © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 11356 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Stephen L. Macknik The source of many of the world's woes might be tracked to a specific brain area responsible for identifying people that are not of our ilk. If so, a study on the neural bases of prejudice and its modulation (read abstract or download the pdf), by Jason Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji, of Harvard University, and C Neil Macrae, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, published in Neuron in May 2006, could be as important to the burgeoning field of social cognitive neuroscience as Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech was to the American civil rights movement. How does the brain differentiate those who are similar to us from those who are different? Does it analyze differences in skin color, language, religion, height, eye color, foot size? Does it discriminate cat versus dog lovers, Pepsi versus Coke drinkers, Shiite versus Sunni, Crips versus Bloods? In a way, the brain does all this and more by simply distinguishing those who don't meet various definitions of who we are. Specifically, a forebrain area called the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) appears to predict the behavior of members of outgroups by employing prejudices about their presumed background -- assumptions we make, in other words, based on what groups their various traits and contexts seem to put them in or out of. In this sense, outsiders, or those in outgroups, include humans of dissimilar cultural or ethnic identities or any other perceived stereotyped dissimilarity from your own self-identified groups, as well as non-human agents such as cartoons and animals and even inanimate moving objects. We distinguish otherness by all sorts of indicators, from the seemingly obviously, like sex or race, to the more obviously cultural, such as whether a person is wearing, say, a Yankees cap, a Dodgers cap, or a tee-shirt that says Baseball Sucks. © 1995-2007 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11355 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A small striped fish is helping scientists understand what makes people susceptible to a common form of hearing loss, although, in this case, it's not the fish's ears that are of interest. In a study published in the Feb. 29 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics, researchers at the University of Washington have developed a research method that relies on a zebrafish's lateral line — the faint line running down each side of a fish that enables it to sense its surroundings — to quickly screen for genes and chemical compounds that protect against hearing loss from some medications. The study was funded in part by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health. "The fish's lateral line contains sensory cells that are functionally similar to those found in the inner ear, except these are on the surface of the fish's body, making them more easily accessible," said James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. "This means that scientists can very efficiently analyze the sensory structures under different conditions to find out what is likely to cause damage to these structures and, conversely, what can protect them from damage." When people are exposed to some antibiotics and chemotherapy agents, the sensory structures in the inner ear, called hair cells, can be irreversibly damaged, resulting in hearing loss and balance problems. Such medications are called ototoxic. People vary widely in their susceptibility to these agents as well as to damage caused by other chemical agents, loud sounds and aging.

Keyword: Hearing; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11354 - Posted: 06.24.2010

After seeing 27-year-old Amanda Baggs, featured in this month’s Wired magazine, you may rethink your views of the so-called “normal” world. Ms. Baggs, who lives in Burlington, Vt., is autistic and doesn’t speak. But she has become an Internet sensation as a result of an unusual video she created called “In My Language.'’ For the first three minutes of the video, she rocks, flaps her hands, waves a piece of paper, buries her face in a book and runs her fingers repeatedly across a computer keyboard, all while humming a haunting two-note tune. Then, the words “A Translation” appear on the screen. Although Ms. Baggs doesn’t speak, she types 120 words a minute. Using a synthesized voice generated by a software application, Ms. Baggs types out what is going on inside her head. The movement, the noise, the repetitive behaviors are all part of Ms. Baggs’ own “native” language, she says via her computerized voice. It’s a language that allows her to have a “constant conversation” with her surroundings. My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings. Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me….The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all. But it is a way of thinking in its own right. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Language
Link ID: 11353 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sarah E. Richards Deep brain stimulation might help severely depressed patients Doctors long have struggled over what to do with severely depressed patients who don't respond to treatment. Give them more medications that haven't worked so far? Recommend more talk therapy or another round of shock treatment? Here's a new idea: open up a depressed head, find the brain parts that aren't working, and fix them with electricity. It's not all that far-fetched. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration gave a medical device manufacturer the green light to recruit patients for a large-scale clinical trial of an electrode implanted deep inside the brain to alleviate severe depression. As invasive and Frankenstein-ish as it may seem, deep brain stimulation, as the method is called, may offer real hope for the 20 percent of depressed Americans whom Prozac can't help. Anti-depressant drugs carpet-bomb the entire body. Electroconvulsive therapy jolts the whole brain. Deep brain stimulation aims to pinpoint the malady. Neurosurgeons drill through a patient's skull, place the DBS electrode's eight contact points directly on the trouble spots and connect them to an electrical current from a pacemaker embedded in the chest. This allows doctors to rev up sluggish areas or calm overactive regions. 2008 Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11352 - Posted: 02.29.2008

The brains of women who suffer from anorexia nervosa may actually respond to taste differently, according to research published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. The report suggests that women with anorexia might not experience the rewards from eating that non-anorexics do. Psychiatrist Walter Kaye, who led the study, says the findings may explain how people with anorexia are able to starve themselves, sometimes to the point of death. "Food may not be as rewarding as it is to people without an eating disorder,” Kaye says. “And this may very well explain why they're able to not eat, and lose so much weight." He says the brains of anorexics may not be producing “a very robust signal driving eating behavior,” even when the body needs food. Karen Pearlman, a sports journalist who struggled with anorexia during her teenage years, recalls “not really caring about” she ate. “Just the least amount possible,” she says. One winter, Pearlman dropped from 120 to 85 pounds. In the spring, when warmer weather meant shorts and t-shirts, Pearlman’s parents saw how thin their daughter had become, and they took her to get help. Now 41 years old, Pearlman reports a full recovery, but she says it took time—she was still dealing with body image issues into her twenties. “It becomes so, like part of who you are. It’s very hard to let that go,” she explains. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11351 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Anorexic from a young age, 31-year old Erin Kennedy still struggles to convince herself that her own body image is often distorted. "When I hear I'm healthy, to me that means I'm fat," she says. "But, you know, healthy is good. I have to remember healthy is good." Such self-monitoring is an essential part of Kennedy's challenging recovery process, but she says, "It's not always easy, and it's not something I always do." Kennedy has not been hospitalized for more than four years, the longest stretch of time she's been on her own since her first hospitalization in high school. In the hospital, Kennedy had to report to the nurse's station six times daily to drink Ensure. "People passing by wanted one, and I used to try to sneak it to them," she remembers. Even now, despite years of treatment, Kennedy says that anxiety about weight remains "a constant" in her life. Recovery from anorexia often takes years, and new brain scan research shows that even fully recovered anorexics are distinct from the general population in the way their brains process reward. According to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, women who never had anorexia showed highs and lows in brain activity that corresponded with winning or losing. But former anorexics showed no difference in their brains' reward centers. "People with anorexia had a hard time distinguishing win or loss," says Walter Kaye, a psychiatrist and coauthor of the new study. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 11350 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Devin Powell Even with the entire human genome in hand, scientists can still have trouble rooting out the genes behind a disease. Consider amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. One ALS-related gene mutation was found in 1993, but it affects only 1% of all ALS patients. Now, after a long dry spell, researchers have finally hit on a second. It's just as rare as the first, but it seems to be more closely related to aspects of ALS pathology found in all patients. ALS typically appears in middle age, slowly destroying the motor neurons used to control muscles and usually killing a patient within 5 years of diagnosis. Five percent of all adult-onset ALS cases are known to have a strong genetic component, affecting multiple family members. But the rest seem to appear spontaneously in people with no prior family history. Scientists know little about what causes these sporadic cases. And the one known ALS gene in inherited ALS, called SOD1, doesn't seem to lead to neuronal death--the primary characteristic of ALS--so the link between this gene and the disease is still unclear. Christopher Shaw, a neurologist at King's College London, started hunting for other ALS genes by recruiting patients who have the inherited form of the disease but not the SOD1 mutation. While screening 154 people with familial ALS, Shaw and his colleagues found four individuals in one family who shared the same mutation: a single changed base on chromosome 1. The base was located in the TDPB gene, which encodes a protein called TDP-43 whose function isn't clear. In 2006, scientists reported that in both inherited and sporadic ALS, this protein disappears from the nucleus and clumps up in the cytoplasm of brain and motor neurons. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11349 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Priya Shetty A key part of the brain used by humans when communicating is also used by chimps, say scientists at one of the world's largest primate research centres. The discovery reveals that chimpanzee communication is far more complex than most scientists had thought, says Jared Taglialatela at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre, Atlanta, Georgia, US. The new work is overturning the view that animal communication involves little more than simple emotional expressions – such as pleasure at being given food – rather than deliberate attempts at language. Taglialatela focused on a part of the human frontal lobe called Broca's area, which is known to be involved in language processing. It tends to be active, not only while we think about what we want to say and while we speak, but also while we listen to and understand what other people say. Taglialatela and colleagues non-invasively scanned the brains of three chimpanzees to determine which parts were active during communication tasks, such as gesturing and calling to a person for food that was out of their reach. The team discovered that during these tasks, the active region in chimpanzee brains corresponds to Broca's area in human brains. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 11348 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Neurofeedback may help improve brain connectivity problems that afflict autistic patients, allowing them to become more functional, a new study suggests. Neurofeedback is a way of changing the brain's functioning through feedback about brain wave activity. It can help regulate the transmission of messages in different parts of the brain. Autistic patients have abnormal neural connectivity pathways, with areas of very high connectivity and areas of very poor connectivity, according to the study. These have been identified through neuroimaging, such as MRI and positron emission tomography, which show that certain areas of the brain "converse" too much while others fail to make very many connections at all. In addition to connectivity issues, children with autism often also have a significant reduction in total grey matter volume in the brain and less white matter in areas like the cerebellum. These brain changes mean many have problems with eye gaze, speech, facial expressions or social gestures. Following a determination of an autistic child's connectivity problems, researchers performed neurofeedback experiments. They attached electrodes at various sites to redirect electrical signals in the brain. This treatment led to a 40 per cent decrease in autistic symptoms, an improvement in neuropsychological functions and a reduction in hyperconnectivity. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 11347 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeanna Bryner Like a finely tuned harp, the whiskers on a rat's snout pick up particular frequencies and send these teensy signals to the brain. Now scientists have caught the whisker signals on video. With poor eyesight, rats must rely on their whiskers to navigate dark, dismal sewers and other underground haunts. Past research has shown that like harp strings, the shorter whiskers positioned at the front of rats' snouts are tuned to vibrate at higher frequencies and the longer ones at lower frequencies. These signals get sent to rodents' brains, where a large portion of their brain cells are devoted to decoding incoming whisker signals, making rats the super-sensors of the slum world. "They can sense the tiniest speck on a wall with their whiskers," said Christopher Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Past studies have relied on plucked whiskers or anesthetized rats. The new study, detailed in the Feb. 28 issue of the journal Neuron, relies on high-speed video of whiskers on lively rats and associated computer analysis. The results reveal the first glimpse of the so-called micromotions that each whisker transmits to the rat's brain. "We knew from watching rats' behavior that there must be whisker micromotions that were too rapid to measure using available recording techniques," said lead researcher Jason Ritt, a postdoctoral scientist in Moore's lab at MIT. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11346 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Charles Barber I am thinking of the Medicated Americans, those 11 percent of women and 5 percent of men who are taking antidepressants. It is Sunday night. The Medicated American—let’s call her Julie, and let’s place her in Winterset, Iowa—is getting ready for bed. Monday morning and its attendant pressures—the rush to get out of the house, the long commute, the bustle of the office—loom. She opens the cabinet of the bathroom vanity, removes a medicine bottle and taps a pill into her palm. She fills a glass of water, places the colorful pill in her mouth and swallows. The little pill could be any one of 30 available drugs used as antidepressants—such as Prozac or Zoloft or Paxil or Celexa or Lexapro or Luvox or Buspar or Nardil or Elavil or Sinequan or Pamelor or Serzone or Desyrel or Norpramin or Tofranil or Adapin or Vivactil or Ludiomil or Endep or Parnate or Remeron. The pill makes a slight flutter as it passes down her throat. Julie examines her face in the mirror and sighs. She hopes that by some Monday morning in the future—if not tomorrow morning, then some mythical, brilliant and shimmering Monday morning a month from now, or two months from now, or three—the pills will have worked some kind of inexorable magic. Corrected a chemical imbalance, or something, as the Zoloft commercial had said. “Zoloft, a prescription medicine, can help. It works to correct chemical imbalances in the brain,” the voiceover on the ad had intoned. Julie didn’t know she had a chemical imbalance, nor does she actually know what one is, and it had never really occurred to her that she could have a mental illness (could she?). But she does hope, fervently, that her life will become a little easier, a little less stressed—soon. She hopes, desperately, that the pills will make her feel better—that the little white powder hidden in the green capsule will dissolve in her stomach, enter her bloodstream, travel to her brain and do something. Brushing her teeth, she hopes that one day she will simply feel better. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11345 - Posted: 06.24.2010