Biological Psychology Links

By Larry O'Hanlon There are theories galore about why some dog breeds appear to be smarter than others, but new research suggests that size alone might make a difference. All larger dogs appear to be better at following pointing cues from humans than smaller dogs, which makes them appear smarter. It's possible that bigger dogs appear smarter not just because they are bred for taking orders, but because their wider set eyes give them better depth perception. As a result, they can more easily discern the direction a person is pointing. This latter hypothesis was tested by researchers in New Zealand, who think there might be something to it. "We do know that dog breeds are different," said William Helton of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Human breeding has created dogs with huge physical differences, like shorter snouts for more powerful bites. Even the internal structure of dogs eyes can vary among some breeds, he said. But can something as simple as the distance between the eyes be a factor too? To see if all larger dogs in general were better at discerning human pointing cues, Helton and his colleagues put 104 dogs to the test -- 61 large dogs (greater than 50 lbs) and 43 small dogs (less than 50 lbs). © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN, M.D. NEW HAVEN — Two floors below the main level of Yale’s medical school library is a room full of brains. No, not the students. These brains, more than 500 of them, are in glass jars. They are part of an extraordinary collection that might never have come to light if not for a curious medical student and an encouraging and persistent doctor. The cancerous brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, who was one of America’s first neurosurgeons. They were donated to Yale on his death in 1939 — along with meticulous medical records, before-and-after photographs of patients, and anatomical illustrations. (Dr. Cushing was also an accomplished artist.) His belongings, a treasure trove of medical history, became a jumble of cracked jars and dusty records shoved in various crannies at the hospital and medical school. Until now. In June 2010, after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material — 500 of 650 jars have been restored — the brains found their final resting place behind glass cases around the perimeter of the Cushing Center, a room designed solely for them. These chunks of brains floating in formaldehyde bring to life a dramatic chapter in American medical history. They exemplify the rise of neurosurgery and the evolution of 20th-century American medicine — from a slipshod trial-and-error trade to a prominent, highly organized profession. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By Laura Sanders Vivid, violent dreams can portend brain disorders by half a century, a new study finds. The result, reported in the Aug. 10 Neurology, highlights how some neurological diseases may take hold decades before a person is diagnosed. Spotting early warning signs of the disease may allow clinicians to monitor and treat patients long before the brain deteriorates. People with a mysterious sleep disturbance called REM sleep behavior disorder, or RBD, experience a sudden change in the nature of dreams. Dreams increasingly become more violent and frequently involve episodes in which an attacker must be fought off. The normal muscle paralysis that accompanies dreams is gone, leaving the dreamer, who is most often male, to act out the dream’s punches, twists and yells. In many cases, a person sharing the dreamer’s bed can be injured. Doctors used to think of RBD as an isolated disorder. But follow-up studies revealed that a striking number of these patients later develop neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. The exact figures vary, but some studies find that anywhere from 80 to 100 percent eventually get a neurodegenerative disorder. “The consensus among all RBD researchers is that it’s not a matter of if, but when,” says sleep expert Carlos Schenck of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who was one of the first researchers to describe RBD. “Basically, the longer you follow these men, the more they will convert to a neurodegenerative disorder.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

by Alison Motluk OVERSIZED brains are to humans what trunks are to elephants and elaborate tail feathers are to peacocks - our defining glory. What would we be without our superlative, gargantuan, neuron-packed brains? Like Donald Trump without his towers, Simon Cowell without his sneering put-downs or Bridget Jones without her diaries. We would just be ordinary primates. Unquestionably smart ones, of course, just not special. Uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, it is looking increasingly likely that our brains are not something to write home about after all. One group of researchers has scrutinised the primate archaeological record and concluded that the human brain has evolved just as would be expected for a primate of our size. Meanwhile, a biologist who has compared the number of neurons in the brains of all sorts of animals says there is nothing special about the human brain compared with other primates. No one is doubting the fact of human intelligence, but they say it can no longer be attributed to a "supersized" brain. Humans, apparently, are no more than ordinary primates with ordinary-sized brains. These findings undermine a fundamental and long-standing belief about our place in the kingdom of life: that Homo sapiens is the greatest species ever to grace the Earth and that we have become the greatest because our brains are the best ever to have evolved. Admittedly, justifying this assertion has taxed our self-professed ingenuity. Clearly ours is not the biggest brain on the planet in absolute terms - whales and elephants outdo us by up to six times - but we counter this by arguing that bigger animals are bound to have bigger brains. And if you take body size into account our brain is exceptionally large, as much as seven times larger than those of other mammals (Science, vol 121, p 447). The underlying assumption is still that when it comes to intelligence, brain size matters. But does it? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Janelle Weaver A Canadian research team that induced pain in mice to help develop a 'grimace scale' recently came under fire from a researcher-support organization, which posted an online commentary suggesting that the scientists may not have complied with Canada's animal welfare regulations. But Canadian officials have since determined that the study did follow national rules for the care of laboratory animals. The research team, led by pain geneticist Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, videotaped the facial expressions of mice during 14 pain-inducing procedures, such as immersing the tail in hot water, putting a binder clip on tails, cutting the paw, injecting chemicals into the paw or stomach and constricting or damaging nerves during surgery. The researchers coded the intensity of facial expressions and reported their technique this May in the journal Nature Methods1. Two weeks ago, the Principal Investigators Association, a non-profit organization in Naples, Florida, that "communicates and promotes best practices and continuing professional education", posted a discussion-board topic about the study on Lab Animal eAlert, its online subscription newsletter for researchers. The commentary accused the McGill team of causing severe pain to mice that were not anaesthetized, and questioned whether Mogil and his collaborators followed regulations set by the Canadian Council on Animal Care, the national organization that oversees the use of animals in research. Canadian animal-research guidelines preclude or strongly discourage procedures that elicit severe pain "at or above the pain tolerance threshold". © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

by Dave Munger Imagine being trapped in a small pressurized underwater chamber (like a diving bell) where you were fed once a day by an octopus that tossed food in from the opening in the floor. Each day an octopus also reached in to poke you gently with a stick. Suppose this went on for two weeks. Do you think you’d be able to figure out that there were actually two octopuses—one “poker” and one “feeder”? Would you be able to tell the difference between the two? Octopuses are so different from humans that it might actually be rather difficult for you to tell them apart—especially since you would only be able to see them through the distorting lens of the water. On the other hand, if you did manage to figure out which octopus was which, you might be able to get out of the way of the stick when the “poker” showed up. You also might be able to demonstrate to the octopuses that you were “intelligent,” perhaps inspiring them to treat you better while in captivity. Obviously this is just a thought experiment, and the real research was done in reverse, but hopefully this example gives you some sense of how difficult the problem of octopus intelligence really is. Because octopus brains evolved independently from human brains, their anatomical structure is very different from our own, so understanding whether octopuses are “intelligent” is not a simple task. How would you tell if an eight-legged alien from another planet was intelligent? ©2005-2009 Seed Media Group LLC.

By Emily Anthes Perhaps the most unlikely hero to emerge from this summer’s World Cup was Paul the octopus, a lightly spotted invertebrate living in an aquatic center in Germany. Paul earned worldwide fame for successfully “predicting” the winner of eight out of eight soccer games, including the final match. Before each game, Paul’s keepers would place two food-filled boxes, each of which was decorated with one team’s national flag, in the creature’s tank. Whichever box Paul ate from first was considered to be his pick. The octopus nailed it all eight times. Though Paul’s success seems mainly to have been luck — evidence for psychic sports forecasting ability in octopuses is, well, somewhat lacking — if you were looking to consult a brainy animal, you could do worse than an octopus. Research is increasingly revealing that there’s something sophisticated going on inside the octopus’s soft and squishy head. The critters, it seems, are surprisingly smart. Octopuses “make decisions all the time, complicated decisions,” says Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. “People don’t expect that from a creature related to an oyster.” What scientists are discovering about the octopus calls into question many of our assumptions about intelligence. Partly this is because the creatures are so different from the kinds of animals — social vertebrates, especially mammals — that have long been seen as having a monopoly on smarts. Octopuses are members of a class of creatures known as cephalopods, which appeared on the planet even before the first fish, and they are almost as far removed from us primates as another animal can get. And although it has long been theorized that intelligence evolved in social creatures as a way for species that live in groups to navigate the complex social world, the octopus leads a solitary life. © 2010 NY Times Co.

by Debora MacKenzie INFECTIOUS disease is taking an unexpected toll by sapping people's brainpower in the world's poorest countries. So say Christopher Eppig and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, who found that a country's disease burden is strongly linked to the average IQ of its population. Building and maintaining the brain requires 87 per cent of all the body's energy in newborns and 44 per cent in 5-year-old children. Fighting infection also takes enormous amounts of energy, so children may struggle to do both at the same time. Eppig reasoned that an increased risk of catching an infectious disease during critical developmental stages may affect subsequent IQ levels. His team matched three sets of IQ estimates of healthy people in 192 countries, against the World Health Organization's estimate of the burden of 28 infectious diseases in those countries. With only a few exceptions, they found very high correlations: the more disease, the lower the IQ. Disease was more closely related to IQ than any other variable they tested. IQ differences are known to correlate with GDP, and educational and nutritional levels, but when variation in IQ due to disease was accounted for, IQ showed no correlation with these other factors (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0973). This may explain the effect discovered by the political philosopher James Flynn, who noted that IQ soars following economic development. "Others have suggested that it is caused by better education, but we found that infectious disease is a much better predictor," Eppig says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Valentina Sivryukova knew her public service messages were hitting the mark when she heard how one Kazakh schoolboy called another stupid. “What are you,” he sneered, “iodine-deficient or something?” Ms. Sivryukova, president of the national confederation of Kazakh charities, was delighted. It meant that the years spent trying to raise public awareness that iodized salt prevents brain damage in infants were working. If the campaign bore fruit, Kazakhstan’s national I.Q. would be safeguarded. In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success. In 1999, only 29 percent of its households were using iodized salt. Now, 94 percent are. Next year, the United Nations is expected to certify it officially free of iodine deficiency disorders. That turnabout was not easy. The Kazakh campaign had to overcome widespread suspicion of iodization, common in many places, even though putting iodine in salt, public health experts say, may be the simplest and most cost-effective health measure in the world. Each ton of salt needs about two ounces of potassium iodate, which costs about $1.15. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

By DENISE GRADY OPERATING ROOM 14, Dec. 12, 9:30 a.m. — “I always prep my own patients,” Dr. David J. Langer said. “It relaxes me.” He picked up a sponge soaked in antiseptic and began scrubbing the shaved skull of Chris Ratuszny, 26, a mechanic from Lindenhurst, N.Y. Mr. Ratuszny lay on the operating table, anesthetized and oblivious. His head jutted out past the end of the table, supported by four pins that had been screwed into his skull. The pins were attached, like spokes in a wheel, to a semicircular frame — surreal but standard, the hardware typically used to immobilize the head for brain surgery. A thick purple line had been drawn from his neck to the top of his head, to guide the scalpels. He was about to become the first person in the United States to undergo an operation involving the use of an excimer laser to treat a giant brain aneurysm, a dangerous ballooning of an artery that could burst and kill him or leave him with devastating brain damage. The aneurysm was too big for the most common treatments, which involve clips or metal coils; it required bypass surgery on an artery in the brain. The laser is not approved for brain surgery in the United States, but Dr. Langer got permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use it on an emergency basis for Mr. Ratuszny (ra-TOOSH-nee) last Tuesday at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

By DENNIS OVERBYE I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes. My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face. The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table. O.K., I can imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God. Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years. After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.” Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest. A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By CORNELIA DEAN In 1950, in a letter to bishops, Pope Pius XII took up the issue of evolution. The Roman Catholic Church does not necessarily object to the study of evolution as far as it relates to physical traits, he wrote in the encyclical, Humani Generis.” But he added, “Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.” Pope John Paul II made much the same point in 1996, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an advisory group to the Vatican. Although he noted that in the intervening years evolution had become “more than a hypothesis,” he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was “incompatible with the truth about man.” But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well. The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By BENEDICT CAREY In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup. That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java. Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

If plaques and tangles in the brain cause Alzheimer's Disease, why do some people with affected brains stay sharp into their nineties? Neurologist and researcher Deniz Erten-Lyons is sizing up why certain old folks have both brain plaques and intact memories. She says these special seniors have bigger brains. As she reported to the American Academy of Neurology, her team from Oregon Health and Science University and Portland's VA Medical Center did post-mortem autopsies on research volunteers involved in long-term aging studies. After grouping together the twelve research subjects who fit their main criteria — lots of brain plaques and clear thinking and good memory before death — the researchers tried to figure out what kept this special group mentally healthy during life. "These twelve people — even though they were in their nineties — were able to function, live independently� do their day-to-day functions without any assistance," says Erten-Lyons. When she compared these twelve people to people who did have Alzheimer's Disease and the associated brain lesions, she found a surprise. "The group that died with sharp minds had larger brains" compared to the Alzheimer's Disease group, she says. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

By NATALIE ANGIER Certain things should never be taken for granted, among them your spouse, your mother, the United States Constitution, and the precise meaning of words that are at the heart of your profession. Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.” O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors. Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley. Mr. Levitis decided to ask the people who should know best: working behavioral biologists. The provocative and crisply written results of his quest, carried out with his colleagues, William Lidicker Jr. and Glenn Freund, appear in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour. Among the highlights of the report: biologists don’t agree with one another on what a behavior is; biologists don’t agree with themselves on what a behavior is; biologists can be as parochial as the rest of us, meaning that animal behaviorists tend to reflexively claim the behavior label for animals only, while botanists sniff that, if the well-timed unfurling of a smelly, colorful blossom for the sake of throwing your seed around isn’t the ultimate example of a behavior, then there’s no such thing as Valentine’s Day; and, finally, words may count, but thoughts do not. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

BRUSSELS - For 23 torturous years, Rom Houben says he lay trapped in his paralyzed body, aware of what was going on around him but unable to tell anyone or even cry out. The car-crash victim had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it, and unlocked Houben’s mind again. The 46-year-old Houben is now communicating with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair. “Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it,” he said, punching the message into the screen during an interview with the Belgian RTBF network, aired Monday. He has called his rescue his “renaissance.” Over the years, Houben’s family refused to accept the word of his doctors, firmly believing their son knew what was happening around him, and gave no thought to letting him die, said his mother, Fina. She was vindicated when the breakthrough came. “At that moment, you think, ‘Oh, my God. See, now you know.’ I was always convinced,” she said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. The discovery took place three years ago but only recently came to light, after publication of a study on the misdiagnosis of people with consciousness disorders. Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain’s thinking circuitry, yet also appears to increase risk for schizophrenia*, a severe mental illness marked by impaired thinking, scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. The seeming paradox emerged from the first study to explore the effects of variation in the human gene for a brain master switch, DARPP-32. The researchers identified a common version of the gene and showed how it impacts the way two key brain regions exchange information, affecting a range of functions from general intelligence to attention. Three fourths of subjects studied had at least one copy of the version that results in more efficient filtering of information processed by the brain’s executive hub, the prefrontal cortex. However, the same version was also more prevalent among people who developed schizophrenia, a severe mental illness marked by delusions, hallucinations and impaired emotion that affects one percent of the population. “We have found that DARPP-32 shapes and controls a circuit coursing between the human striatum and prefrontal cortex that affects key brain functions implicated in schizophrenia, such as motivation, working memory and reward related learning,” explained Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, M.D. “Our results raise the question of whether a gene variant favored by evolution, that would normally confer advantage, may translate into a disadvantage if the prefrontal cortex is impaired, as in schizophrenia,” added Daniel Weinberger, M.D.

Day 3: Tuesday Nov 5th, 2002
Preventing a shaky future for Parkinson's patients Investigators: Anders Björklund and Gary Housley Anders Björklund of Lund University in Sweden, a leader in fetal tissue transplantation, issued a clarion call to his fellow scientists by mapping out future research priorities. Experimental cell transplants have helped hundreds of Parkinson's patients, but challenges remain in basic research.
A whole new view of the Parkinson's problem Investigators: Jonathan Dostrovsky and Jerrold Vitek The real culprit behind the motor symptoms of Parkinson's may be the irregular pattern - and not the rapid rate - of neuronal firing, mounting new evidence suggests.
New evidence of aggregate toxicity in Huntington's Disease Investigators: Wen Yang and Ronald Wetzel A new assay provides "the best in vitro evidence" that polyglutamine protein aggregates are toxic in Huntington's disease, according to a study presented today at SFN.
Markers for memory decline Investigator: Michela Gallagher Memory makes us who we are. However, scientists are finding that memory loss associated with aging isn't what they once thought it was. In healthy elderly animals, subtle functional changes in the neurons seem to be correlated with memory impairment.
Brain cancer infiltrates SFN Investigators: Luis Parada, Terry Van Dyke, William Weiss and Thomas Curran Today, for the first time ever, brain cancer made a scheduled appearance at the annual meeting of Society for Neuroscience. Researchers say the time is right to join the fields and break down the barriers that have slowed progress in the disciplines.

Age-dependent learning deficit can be overcome by the reduced production of a potassium channel in the mouse model All of us experience a successive decline in learning and memory capacities with ageing. In the course of their investigations of the neurophysiological basis of this decline, Thomas Blank, Ingrid Nijholt, Min-Jeong Kye, Jelena Radulovic, and Joachim Spiess from the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen have obtained new insight into the mechanisms of age-related learning deficits in the mouse model. In experiments with mice, the Max Planck researchers were able to revert the observed age-related learning and memory deficits by down-regulation of calcium-activated potassium channels (SK3) located in the hippocampus, a brain region recognized to be important for learning and memory. The researchers published their results as a Brief Communication in the journal Nature Neuroscience. In the study, young (4-6 months) and aged mice (22-24 months) had to learn that a defined tone was associated with a mild electric footshock serving as an aversive stimulus. If the tone was immediately followed by a footshock, young and aged mice remembered easily the association on the following day. They showed their memory by a so-called "freezing response" when exposed to the same tone used for training, but without application of a foot shock. This freezing, a naturally occurring defense behavior, is characterized by complete immobility of the mouse. The scientists then generated a more complex learning task by separating the tone from the shock by several seconds. As result of this change, the task now required specifically the hippocampus. Under these conditions, the aged mice were strongly impaired in comparison to the young mice. In agreement with the behavioral differences between aged and young mice, the scientists observed that "long-term potentiation" (LTP), an electrophysiological phenomenon indicating neuronal plasticity was lower in hippocampal brain tissue of aged mice when compared to LTP in hippocampus of young mice.

Tiny particles enter the brain after being inhaled. JIM GILES Nanoparticles - tiny lumps of matter that could one day to be used to build faster computer circuits and improve drug delivery systems - can travel to the brain after being inhaled, according to researchers from the United States1. The finding sounds a cautionary note for advocates of nanotechnology, but may also lead to a fuller understanding of the health effects of the nanosized particles produced by diesel engines. G�nter Oberdörster of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues tracked the progress of carbon particles that were only 35 nanometres in diameter and had been inhaled by rats. In the olfactory bulb - an area of the brain that deals with smell - nanoparticles were detected a day after inhalation, and levels continued to rise until the experiment ended after seven days. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

Chapter 1. Biological Psychology: Scope and Outlook