By CAROL W. BERMAN, M.D. My patient, a 37-year-old homemaker, gazed at the man in the red plaid shirt as he sat on the couch in her living room. “Who are you?” she asked. There was something familiar about him. He wore her husband’s boots, but the shirt made him look like a truck driver. “Yeah, and who are you?” the man replied with a laugh. “Come here and give me a kiss.” She gave the man a peck on the cheek, but she felt guilty, fearing that her husband would arrive at any moment and admonish her. Not only did the man want a kiss — he also wanted sex! Discouraging him, she sat down to talk. The man spoke just like her husband and knew personal facts about her. It occurred to her that her husband had been mysteriously replaced by this fellow. How it happened she had no idea; she knew only that it had. My patient had a history of schizoaffective disorder, similar to schizophrenia, but with more emotional range. And when she told me of this incident at her weekly visit the next day, I worried that her psychosis was recurring. “Have you been taking your medicine?” I asked. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10714 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird. But last week Alex, an African gray parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of his life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31. Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising. But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 10713 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELISSA ELY, M.D. BOSTON — The patient’s decline was ruthless. He became forgetful in his early 50s. By the time he saw a neurologist a few years later, he could not recall how to write in cursive, and confused pictures of a cookie and a whistle, a bed and a sandbox. A few years after that, he could no longer dress himself or speak fluently, and had developed muscle jerks that required medication to control. Diagnostically, he showed symptoms of several types of dementia, but no hallmarks that would narrow the cause to only one. He died in his early 60s. On a Friday morning a week later, Dr. Jeffrey T. Joseph, a pathologist, was gazing at the patient’s brain, waiting for neurology residents to arrive and gaze with him. He pondered whether to begin the dissection with a traditional vertical slice down the height of the brain. “I might cut coronally, might cut horizontally,” he said, thoughtfully. “I haven’t decided yet.” From a distance, brain autopsies seem an afterthought on life. Insurance does not cover them. They serve no lucrative purpose, so hospitals have a financial disincentive to do them. As a result, the field of neuropathology is shrinking, and its atrophy may diminish the entire field of neurology. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10712 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erin Allday, A word of warning: This article might be a little irritating. It'll start with a small itch on your nose, perhaps. Then the itch might move to the top of your foot, behind your knee or in that unreachable spot in the middle of your back. The power of suggestion is a funny thing when it comes to itch. Like a yawn, sometimes just looking at someone else scratching - or thinking about an itch - can make us itchy all over. But itch can be a lot more than a pesky annoyance. It can be a symptom of major illness, and it can become so debilitating that it nearly ruins lives. Several hundred experts in itch from all over the world are meeting in San Francisco this week to talk about everything from that little itch on your back to chronic itchiness that leaves sufferers unable to sleep. "We want to help people realize that itching can be really severe and a terrible problem, almost as bad as chronic pain," said Earl Carstens, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis who is organizing the Fourth International Workshop for the Study of Itch, which began Sunday at the Hilton San Francisco. "It's not usually life threatening, but it can be. I've read about cases of people who have such severe chronic itching that it drives them to suicide." © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10711 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JEFFREY KLUGER It's harder than you think to say hello to your mother--at least in terms of the work your brain has to do. A glimpse of Mom must first register on your occipital lobes as a pattern of light and shadow. From there it is relayed to your memory center, where it is identified by comparison with every other face you've ever seen. You must then summon the speech centers in your frontal lobes, which recruit your breath and muscles and at last allow you to utter the words Hi, Mom. The fact that recognizing and acknowledging a familiar person is such a complex thing made it all the more remarkable in early August when scientists announced that a 38-year-old man had managed to pull it off. The man, whose identity was withheld, had suffered severe brain damage in a 1999 mugging and spent the past eight years in the dark cognitive well that neuroscientists call a minimally conscious state. Improbably, however, he can now greet both his parents. He can identify objects, hold very brief conversations and watch movies, and he recently recited the first 16 words of the Pledge of Allegiance. "I told him to say the pledge, and he did," says neuropsychologist Joseph Giacino of the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute and the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute. "I didn't have to cue him." None of this is the stuff of functioning adulthood, but all of it is huge for a person who was never supposed to manage anything like it again. And all of it is a result of the growing therapeutic science of deep-brain stimulation (DBS). Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic inserted a pair of fine wires into the mugging victim's brain last year, threading them down to the thalamus, a deep, intact structure that could, in theory, jump- start the surviving circuits in the damaged cerebral cortex above. © 2007 Time Inc

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10710 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Seward The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists. Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page. Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer's eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one metre away. Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Periods when the eyes are still are called fixations. Professor Simon Liversedge, from the University of Southampton, said: "We found that in a very substantial number of fixations that people make when they read, they aren't looking at the same letter." Instead, the eyes often focussed on different letters in the same word, about two characters apart, he said. "They could be uncrossed, in the sense that the two lines of sight are not crossed when you look at a word, or alternatively the two lines of sight may be crossed," he added. (C)BBC

Keyword: Language; Vision
Link ID: 10709 - Posted: 09.10.2007

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. WATERLOO, Sierra Leone — Although the rainy season was coming on fast, Zainabu Sesay was in no shape to help her husband. Ditches had to be dug to protect their cassava and peanuts, and their mud hut’s palm roof was sliding off. But Mrs. Sesay was sick. She had breast cancer in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the tumor had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges. “It bone! It booonnnne lie de fi-yuh!” she said of the pain — it burns like fire — in Krio, the blended language spoken in this country where British colonizers resettled freed slaves. No one had directly told her yet, but there was no hope — the cancer was also in her lymph glands and ribs. Like millions of others in the world’s poorest countries, she is destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs — one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10708 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers. Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science. "I've been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they're saying to me, 'We're seeing things we've never seen before,'" said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University's brain injury rehabilitation program. Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened. But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first "graduates" of Vanderbilt's program committed suicide three weeks later. "Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought," Schneider said. "They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell" _ a guy who planned to go to art school. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10707 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Could people one day evolve to eat rich food while remaining perfectly slim and svelte? This may not be so wild a fantasy. It is becoming clear that the human genome does respond to changes in diet, even though it takes many generations to do so. Researchers studying the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars like glucose have found that people living in countries with a high-starch diet produce considerably more of the enzyme than people who eat a low-starch diet. The reason is an evolutionary one. People in high-starch countries have many extra copies of the amylase gene which makes the starch-converting enzyme, a group led by George H. Perry of Arizona State University and Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics. The production of the extra copies seems to have been favored by natural selection, according to a genetic test, the authors say. If so, the selective pressure could have occurred when people first started to grow cereals like wheat and barley at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, or even much earlier. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10706 - Posted: 09.10.2007

Roxanne Khamsi A brain scan might one day predict your voting patterns. That is the implication of a study that found different brain activity among liberals and conservatives asked to carry out a simple button-pushing test. The study implies that our political diversity may be the result of neurological differences. Researchers have long known that conservatives and liberals score differently in psychological profiling tests. Now they are beginning to gather evidence about why this might be. David Amodio of New York University, US, and his colleagues recruited 43 subjects for their test. They asked the participants to rate their political persuasion on a scale of -5 to 5, with the lowest number representing the most liberal extreme and the highest number representing the most conservative score. The participants then had to sit before a computer screen and press one of two buttons depending on whether they saw an "M" or a "W". They had half a second to make each response, so there was a great deal of pressure to react quickly. Out of the 500 trials that each subject completed, he or she was presented with the same letter 80% of the time. This meant that the participants felt compelled to press the same button repeatedly. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10705 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Spit might have helped human evolution by enabling our ancestors to harvest more energy from starch than their primate cousins. Compared with chimpanzees, humans boast many more copies of the gene that makes salivary amylase — a saliva enzyme that breaks down starch into digestible sugars. And carbohydrate-loving societies carry more copies of the gene than those that follow low-carbohydrate diets, claims a new study in Nature Genetics1. This strongly implies that people have adapted to their local environment. "High starch foods and a high starch diet have been an important evolutionary force for humans," says George Perry, an anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who led the new analysis. The change could possibly have supported the growth in hominin brains that occurred some two million years ago, says Nate Dominy, an anthropologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz involved in the study. "Our diet must have had some shift to feed that brain," says Dominy, who thinks root vegetables like African tubers allowed large-brained humans to flourish. Starch, which helps to make a baked potato mushy, is an important source of food for modern humans. But without amylase in the saliva, man can make little use of such complex carbohydrates - enzymes elsewhere in the body are not as good at breaking the compounds down. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10704 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ARTHUR MAX VENLO, Netherlands -- Do you find your fingers drifting into your mouth when you're nervous, anxious or just bored? Are your nails chewed to splinters or your cuticles gnawed to bleeding pulp? Nail biting is more than a bad habit. Doctors say it is one of the most common symptoms of stress or of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially for teenagers or younger children, and can lead to disfigurement and serious infection. Alain-Raymond van Abbe, a former health industry and cosmetics promoter, estimates the world's pathological nail biters number 600 million or more. He saw that onychophagy was so widespread that he has opened a business devoted to a cure. A car carrying an advertisement of the nail biting clinic with a slogan saying: "Stop nail biting now!" drives in front of the nail biting clinic, O-Centrum, in Venlo, Netherlands, Monday, Aug. 20, 2007. Alain-Raymond van Abbe, a former health industry and cosmetics promoter, estimates the world's pathological nail biters number 600 million or more. He saw that onychophagy was so widespread that he has opened a clinic devoted to curing nail biters. "In four weeks nail biting can be over, and over forever," he says. (AP Photo/Ermindo Armino) (Ermindo Armino - Associated Press) Studies show around 45 percent of adolescents nibble their nails. That drops to about 20 percent as young adults learn to cope with their anxieties or become too embarrassed by their self-inflicted deformity. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stress; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 10703 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matthew Swulinski was steps from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 when he managed to take a series of haunting photographs. "It was too late for me to run away, it was too late for me to hide anywhere," he recalls. "I was actually standing and waiting for this to be over." His photos are a physical record of what he experienced that day, but neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps at New York University and graduate student Tali Sharot, now a post doctoral fellow at University College London, studied people like Swulinski to learn about a different kind of snapshot: the so-called "flashbulb memory," a vivid moment in time that we seem to remember as if it were a photograph. Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “flashbulb memory” in 1977 to describe people’s uncanny ability to recount where they were and what they were doing on November 22, 1963, the moment they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Swulinksi describes his September 11, 2001 experience with extra intensity because he was at Ground Zero. “I remember parts of the building falling around me everywhere. And I was just basically hit by glass– it’s kind of a miracle. And later – that’s the moment I realized that I’m in danger– and after the second plane, I left the area. I was still involved because of the falling towers and the cloud that appeared after that. The clouds actually covered me.” © ScienCentral, 2000-2007

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 10702 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed. Had the then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild. Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeksalthough he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain's pituitary gland. There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10701 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Kaplan It may seem strange, but many monkeys wash their hands and feet with urine. Researchers now think they know why. Since this odd behaviour was first observed, explanatory theories have varied wildly from suggesting that it helps monkeys improve their grip when climbing to saying it is a method of cleaning. One widely supported theory argues that monkeys use urine washing to cool themselves down when temperatures get too high. But new research hints that it's all about social communication. The notion of animals using chemical scents to communicate with each other is hardly new. Dogs classically use urine to mark their territory, for example, as do many other creatures. But when it comes to peeing on oneself, researchers had thought physiological reasons might be as important as social ones. It seems they were wrong. Primatologist Kimran Miller and her research colleagues at the National Institutes of Health Animal Center in Poolesville, Maryland, monitored capuchin monkeys for ten months in a captive environment. The researchers would record daily the enclosure temperature and humidity and then note rates of urine washing. Their report, to be published in the American Journal of Primatology, shows that urine washing behaviours did not change with either temperature or humidity. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 10700 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Depression is a more disabling condition than angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes, World Health Organization research shows. And those with depression plus a chronic illness, such as diabetes, fare particularly badly, the study of more than 245,000 people suggests. Better treatment for depression would improve people's overall health, the researchers concluded in the Lancet. Experts called for better funding for mental health services. Dr Somnath Chatterji and colleagues asked people from 60 countries taking part in the World Health Survey a variety of questions about their health, such as how they sleep, how much pain they have, and whether they have any problems with memory or concentration. Participants were also asked about how they manage with day-to-day tasks. After taking into account factors such as poverty and other health conditions, the researchers found that depression had the largest effect on worsening health. And people with depression who also had one or more chronic diseases had the worst health scores of all the diseases looked at or combinations of diseases. Dr Somnath Chatterji said: "The co-morbid state of depression incrementally worsens health compared with depression alone, with any of the chronic diseases alone, and with any combination of chronic diseases without depression. "These results indicate the urgency of addressing depression as a public health priority to reduce disease burden and disability, and to improve the overall health of populations." The team called on doctors around the world to be more alert in the diagnosis and treatment of the condition, noting that it is fairly easy to recognise and treat. (C)BBC

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 10699 - Posted: 09.08.2007

By Jennifer Couzin It's no secret that we humans are smarter than our primate relatives. But exactly how are we smarter? Experiments with chimpanzees, orangutans, and more than 100 German toddlers suggest that our social intelligence is what sets us apart from other apes, allowing us to build on our inborn intelligence. As intuitive as this might sound, the conclusion is controversial. Ph.D. student Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, along with her adviser, psychologist Michael Tomasello, and their colleagues, compared 106 juvenile and adult chimpanzees living in sanctuaries in Uganda and in the Republic of the Congo, 32 orangutans at a care center in Indonesia, and 105 2.5-year-olds from Germany. The participants were asked to perform an involved series of tests lasting 3 to 5 hours. Six tasks were social, meaning that one of the scientists took part and the children, chimps, or orangutans needed to discern social cues. The other 10 were physical, such as tracking down a reward (food for the apes and toys for the children) after it had been hidden. On the physical tasks, children performed no better than the chimps or orangutans. The chimps even outperformed the children on three tasks. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10698 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller Mice with a gene mutation linked to rare human cases of autism show a hallmark symptom of the disorder: impaired social interactions. The finding, published online today in Science, adds to recent evidence that defects in the synaptic connections between neurons can contribute to autism and related conditions. Autism is a widespread disorder characterized by social and communication difficulties and obsessive or repetitive behaviors. Scientists don't know what causes it, but genetics appears to be important. Variations in several genes have been implicated. For example, a 2003 study identified a mutation--a single-letter switch in the genetic code for a protein called neuroligin-3--in two Swedish brothers, one with autism and one with the related but milder Asperger syndrome. Neuroligin-3 resides at synapses, the communication points between neurons, but little is known about its function, let alone how it contributes to symptoms of autism. To investigate, researchers led by Katsuhiko Tabuchi and Thomas Südhof at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas created a strain of mice with the same mutation found in the Swedish brothers. The mutant mice had normal activity levels and coordination, but when the researchers put mutant mice in an enclosure with a mouse that had been restrained in a small cage, they were unusually shy, spending less time sniffing and interacting with the caged mouse than did normal mice. (The mouse had to be restrained, because otherwise it would have initiated interactions with the mutants, confounding the test.) There was no difference between mutant and normal mice when it came to investigating an empty cage, however, and the mutants even outperformed normal mice on a test of spatial learning and memory, suggesting that their deficit was specific for social behavior. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 10697 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rebecca Morelle The mystery behind the tree rubbing antics of North America's grizzly bears may at last have been solved. A few select trees are used by grizzlies to perform strange rubbing rituals, but for years the reasons for this behaviour have baffled ecologists. Now, a study suggests that male grizzlies seeking mates are marking the trees to communicate with other males - possibly to dodge deadly bear battles. The work will be presented next week at a British Ecological Society meeting. Owen Nevin, a behavioural ecologist at Cumbria University, UK, who carried out the study, said: "A handful of trees ('rub trees') are used for years by different grizzlies who each approach the trees in exactly the same way. "They will step into the footprints of other bears that have approached the trees, urinating as they approach. "Then they rub their back on the tree, turn around and then bite the tree and claw it. Then they give it a 'bear hug' by rubbing their chest against it, and then they rub it with their back again." Many theories have been put forward as to why grizzlies are rubbing these trees: some thought they were using them to scratch an itch, others that they were trying to rub on tree sap to repel insects, while some thought they were using the trees to attract mates. Dr Nevin told the BBC News website: "Until now, we haven't really known which bears use these trees and why they use them." To investigate the bears' behaviour, Dr Nevin looked at a grizzly population living in a 150 sq km (58 sq miles) valley in British Columbia, Canada. He set up digital cameras, activated by infra-red sensors, at four frequently used rub trees and attached satellite collars to bears to track their movements. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10696 - Posted: 09.06.2007

By Andrea Thompson We remember the bad times better than the good because our emotions influence how we process memories, a new review of research shows. When people recall significant, emotional events in their lives, such as their wedding day or the birth of their first child, they're generally very confident about how well they remember the details of the event. But whether or not this confidence is warranted is debatable, because details remembered with confidence often aren’t exactly correct, according to the review of research on emotional memories. Memories are generally prone to distortion over time, but researchers have found some evidence to suggest that emotional memories are more resistant to the decay processes that wear away at all memories with time, says review author Elizabeth Kensinger of Boston College. "It's clear that there's something very kind of special and prioritized about how we remember those emotional experiences," said Kensinger, whose review is published in the August issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Negative events may edge out positive ones in our memories, according to research by Kensinger and others. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10695 - Posted: 06.24.2010