by Hal Hodson WHETHER striding ahead with pride or slouching sullenly, we all broadcast our emotions through body language. Now a computer has learned to interpret those unspoken cues as well as you or I. Antonio Camurri of the University of Genoa in Italy and colleagues have built a system which uses the depth-sensing, motion-capture camera in Microsoft's Kinect to determine the emotion conveyed by a person's body movements. Using computers to capture emotions has been done before, but typically focuses on facial analysis or voice recording. Reading someone's emotional state from the way they walk across a room or their posture as they sit at a desk means they don't have to speak or look into a camera. "It's a nice achievement," says Frank Pollick, professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow, UK. "Being able to use the Kinect for this is really useful." The system uses the Kinect camera to build a stick figure representation of a person that includes information on how their head, torso, hands and shoulders are moving. Software looks for body positions and movements widely recognised in psychology as indicative of certain emotional states. For example, if a person's head is bowed and their shoulders are drooping, that might indicate sadness or fear. Adding in the speed of movement – slow indicates sadness, while fast indicates fear – allows the software to determine how someone is feeling. In tests, the system correctly identified emotions in the stick figures 61.3 per cent of the time, compared with a 61.9 per cent success rate for 60 human volunteers (arXiv.org/1402.5047). Camurri is using the system to build games that teach children with autism to recognise and express emotions through full-body movements. Understanding how another person feels can be difficult for people with autism, and recognising fear is more difficult than happiness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 19334 - Posted: 03.08.2014

A man blind since birth is taking up a surprising new hobby: photography. His newfound passion is thanks to a system that turns images into sequences of sound. The technology not only gives “sight” to the blind, but also challenges the way neurologists think the brain is organized. In 1992, Dutch engineer Peter Meijer created vOICe, an algorithm that converts simple grayscale images into musical soundscapes. (The capitalized middle letters sound out “Oh, I see!”). The system scans images from left to right, converting shapes in the image into sound as it sweeps, with higher positions in the image corresponding to higher sound frequencies. For instance, a diagonal line stretching upward from left to right becomes a series of ascending musical notes. While more complicated images, such as a person sitting on a lawn chair, at first seem like garbled noise, with enough training users can learn to “hear” everyday scenes. In 2007, neuroscientist Amir Amedi and his colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem began training subjects who were born blind to use vOICe. Despite having no visual reference points, after just 70 hours of training, the individuals went from “hearing” simple dots and lines to “seeing” whole images such as faces and street corners composed of 4500 pixels. (For comparison, Nintendo’s Mario was made up of just 192 pixels in his first video game appearance.) By attaching a head-mounted camera to a computer and headphones, the blind users were even able to navigate around a room by the sound cues alone. Every few steps the system snaps a photo and converts it into sound, giving the users their bearings as they traverse tables and trashcans. One patient even took up photography, using the head-mounted system to frame his snapshots. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Vision; Aggression
Link ID: 19333 - Posted: 03.08.2014

by Bruce Bower Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s February death from a drug overdose triggered media reports blaming the terrible disease of addiction for claiming another life. But calling addiction a “disease” may be misguided, according to an alternative view with some scientific basis. Most people who are addicted to cigarette smoking, alcohol or other drugs manage to quit, usually on their own, after experiencing major attitude adjustments. Although relapses occur, successes ultimately outnumber fatalities. People can permanently walk away from addiction. Evidence that addiction is a solvable coping problem rather than a chronic, recurring disease seems like encouraging news. But it’s highly controversial. Neuroscientists and many clinicians regard drug addictions as brain illnesses best vanquished with the help of medications that fight cravings and withdrawal. From this perspective, drug-induced brain changes increase a person’s thirst for artificial highs and make quitting progressively more difficult. This conflict over addiction’s nature plays out in two lines of research: studies of remission and relapse among treated substance abusers and long-term studies of the general population. Follow-up investigations of people who attend treatment programs report that addicts never completely shake an urge to snort, inject, guzzle or otherwise consume their poisons of choice. Ongoing treatment in psychotherapy, rehab centers or 12-step groups encourages temporary runs of sobriety, but it’s easier to kick the bucket than to kick the habit. Surveys and long-term studies of the general population, however, observe that addicts typically spend their youth in a substance-induced haze but drastically cut back or quit using drugs altogether by early adulthood. Most of those who renounce the “high” life do so without formal treatment. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19332 - Posted: 03.08.2014

By SABRINA TAVERNISE Middle and high school students who used electronic cigarettes were more likely to smoke real cigarettes and less likely to quit than students who did not use the devices, a new study has found. They were also more likely to smoke heavily. But experts are divided about what the findings mean. The study’s lead author, Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been critical of the devices, said the results suggested that the use of e-cigarettes was leading to less quitting, not more. “The use of e-cigarettes does not discourage, and may encourage, conventional cigarette use among U.S. adolescents,” the study concluded. It was published online in the journal JAMA Pediatrics on Thursday. But other experts said the data did not support that interpretation. They said that just because e-cigarettes are being used by youths who smoke more and have a harder time quitting does not mean that the devices themselves are the cause of those problems. It is just as possible, they said, that young people who use the devices were heavier smokers to begin with, or would have become heavy smokers anyway. “The data in this study do not allow many of the broad conclusions that it draws,” said Thomas J. Glynn, a researcher at the American Cancer Society. The study is likely to stir the debate further over what electronic cigarettes mean for the nation’s 45 million smokers, about three million of whom are middle and high school students. Some experts worry that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking real cigarettes for young people, though most say the data is too skimpy to settle the issue. Others hope the devices could be a path to quitting. So far, the overwhelming majority of young people who use e-cigarettes also smoke real cigarettes, a large federal survey published last year found. Still, while e-cigarette use among youths doubled from 2011 to 2012, regular cigarette smoking for youths has continued to decline. The rate hit a record low in 2013 of 9.6 percent, down by two-thirds from its peak in 1997. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19331 - Posted: 03.08.2014

by Graham Lawton In August 2013, professional rugby union player Andy Hazell received a massive blow to the head while playing for his club Gloucester. Six "horrendous" months later he retired from the game, stricken by dizziness, mood swings and a sense of detachment. Hazell isn't the first rugby player to experience concussion during a game, and probably won't be the last to have to retire as a result. According to a campaign launched this week, rugby union players don't know enough about the risks of concussion – and the governing bodies aren't doing enough to prevent it. The problem isn't so much one-off blows like the one that ended Hazell's career, but long-term damage caused by repeated concussions over many years. Studies of boxers and American footballers have shown that these can lead to a degenerative brain disease called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). CTE leads to memory problems, personality change and slowness of movement. It usually shows up in middle age, long after a sporting career is over. CTE has been an issue in American Football for years. Thousands of ex-professionals sued the National Football League alleging that it knew about the risks but covered them up. Last year the NFL offered a $765 million settlement package. Neurologists have long suspected that other contact sports might also lead to CTE – particularly rugby union because of its emphasis on high-speed "hits". Concussion is the fourth most common injury in the professional game. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19330 - Posted: 03.08.2014

Londa Schiebinger. In Madrid a couple of years ago, I was interviewed for Spanish newspapers. When I later ran the text through Google Translate, I got a shock: I was referred to repeatedly as “he”. Like much science and technology, Google Translate has a male default. When I drive a car, the seatbelt is not designed to accommodate breast tissue. Any medicines I take are more likely to have been tested on male than on female animals. There are moral issues here: women pay taxes and buy products and should not be short-changed. But scientific objectivity is at stake, too. Because medical research is done mainly in males, there is a male bias in, for example, the choice of drug targets. Science is halving the potential field of innovation. This is not about active discrimination; the bias is largely unconscious. Google Translate defaults to the masculine pronoun because 'he' is more commonly found on the Web than 'she'. Yet that is changing: an analysis of American-English texts in Google Books shows that the ratio of masculine to feminine pronouns has fallen to around 2:1, from a peak of 4:1 in the 1960s. In the summer of 2012, I invited Google and several language-processing experts to a Gendered Innovations workshop at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They listened to the problem for about 20 minutes, then said: “We can fix that!” Although it is complicated, the search for solutions is on. Fixing the problem is great, but constantly retrofitting for women is not the best road forwards. A better way is to include gender at all relevant phases of research — when setting priorities, gathering and analysing data, evaluating results, developing patents and, finally, transferring ideas to markets. Science and technology should take into account the biological and social needs of both women and men. Unconscious sex and gender bias can be socially harmful and expensive. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19329 - Posted: 03.06.2014

Clara Moskowitz When mathematicians describe equations as beautiful, they are not lying. Brain scans show that their minds respond to beautiful equations in the same way other people respond to great paintings or masterful music. The finding could bring neuroscientists closer to understanding the neural basis of beauty, a concept that is surprisingly hard to define. In the study, researchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from "ugly" to "beautiful." Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex is associated with emotion, and this particular region of it has shown in previous tests to be correlated with emotional responses to visual and musical beauty. The researchers wondered whether the trend would extend to mathematical beauty, which "has a much deeper intellectual source than visual or musical beauty, which are more 'sensible' and perceptually based," they wrote in a paper reporting their results published on 13 February in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. Investigating mathematical beauty allowed the researchers to test the role of culture and learning in aesthetic appreciation. The scientists hypothesized that while people with no musical or artistic training can still appreciate Beethoven’s and Michelangelo's works, only those who understand the meaning behind certain mathematical formulas would find them beautiful. © 2014 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19327 - Posted: 03.06.2014

By Tara Bahrampour, Alzheimer’s disease likely plays a much larger role in the deaths of older Americans than is reported, according to a new study that says the disease may be the third-leading cause of death in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists Alzheimer’s as the sixth-leading cause of death, far below heart disease and cancer. But the new report, published Wednesday in the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, suggests that the current system of relying on death certificates for causes misses the complexity of dying for many older people and underestimates the impact of Alzheimer’s. While the CDC attributed about 84,000 deaths in 2010 to Alzheimer’s, the report estimated that number to be 503,400 among people 75 and older. That puts it in a close third place, behind heart disease and cancer, and well above chronic lung disease, stroke and accidents, which rank third, fourth and fifth. Alzheimer’s is somewhat of a sleeping giant compared with other leading killers that have received more funding over the years. While deaths from these diseases have been going down thanks to better treatment and prevention, the number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s is quickly rising and the disease is always fatal. More than 5 million people in the United States are estimated to have Alzheimer’s. With the aging of the baby-boom generation, this number is expected to nearly triple by 2050 if there are no significant medical breakthroughs, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19326 - Posted: 03.06.2014

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Obesity may have harmful effects on the brain, and exercise may counteract many of those negative effects, according to sophisticated new neurological experiments with mice, even when the animals do not lose much weight. While it’s impossible to know if human brains respond in precisely the same way to fat and physical activity, the findings offer one more reason to get out and exercise. It’s been known for some time that obesity can alter cognition in animals. Past experiments with lab rodents, for instance, have shown that obese animals display poor memory and learning skills compared to their normal-weight peers. They don’t recognize familiar objects or recall the location of the exit in mazes that they’ve negotiated multiple times. But scientists hadn’t understood how excess weight affects the brain. Fat cells, they knew, manufacture and release substances into the bloodstream that flow to other parts of the body, including the heart and muscles. There, these substances jump-start biochemical processes that produce severe inflammation and other conditions that can lead to poor health. Many thought the brain, though, should be insulated from those harmful effects. It contains no fat cells and sits behind the protective blood-brain barrier that usually blocks the entry of undesirable molecules. However, recent disquieting studies in animals indicate that obesity weakens that barrier, leaving it leaky and permeable. In obese animals, substances released by fat cells can ooze past the barrier and into the brain. The consequences of that seepage became the subject of new neurological experiments conducted by researchers at Georgia Regents University in Augusta and published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19323 - Posted: 03.05.2014

by Tom Siegfried Max Planck, who shook the world with his discovery of quantum physics, also offered a warning. “One must be careful,” he said, “when using the word, real.” It was good advice. As physicists explored the quantum domain, they found that usual ideas about reality did not apply. Reality in the realm of atoms was nothing like the world of rocks and baseballs and planets, where Newton’s laws of motions ruled with rigor. Among atoms, the rules were more like Olympic ice skating judging, with unpredictable scores. Gradually physicists, engineers and even screenwriters became familiar with quantum weirdness and used it in lasers, computers and movie plots. Quantum reality might be crazy, but it’s our reality, and most scientists, anyway, have become more or less used to it. Nevertheless, Planck’s warning still applies. Perhaps the quantum picture of reality is another illusion, just like Newton’s was. Human insight into nature may not yet have penetrated reality’s ultimate veil. In other words, maybe reality always dresses itself up in Newtonian or Einsteinian or quantum clothing, and science hasn’t yet seen what reality looks like naked. And that might explain why nature has been able to protect so many of its mysteries from science’s prying eyes — mysteries like the identity of dark matter, the math describing quantum gravity, the mechanism underlying consciousness. And whether humans have free will. Maybe reality always dresses itself up in Newtonian or Einsteinian or quantum clothing, and science hasn’t yet seen what reality looks like naked. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19319 - Posted: 03.04.2014

By Deborah Kotz Glaring gaps persist in medical researchers’ efforts to understand gender differences in common diseases, two decades after the passage of pivotal legislation mandating that more women be included in government-funded clinical trials, concludes a report being released Monday at a women’s health summit in Boston. The authors said research still lags on understanding how treatments for heart disease—the number one killer of women—affect the sexes differently, because women make up only one-third of the participants in clinical trials to test new drugs and medical devices, and most of these studies don’t report results for men and women separately. Women who don’t smoke are, for unknown reasons, three times more likely than non-smoking men to get lung cancer, but they’re still less likely than men to enroll in lung cancer studies, notes the report from Brigham and Women’s Hospital. And twice as many women suffer from depression as men, but fewer than 45 percent of animal studies to better understand anxiety and depression use female lab animals. “Women are now routinely included in clinical trials, but we are far from achieving equity in biomedical research,” said report leader Dr. Paula Johnson, executive director of the Brigham’s Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology. To address research disparities, the authors recommended that government agencies, drug manufacturers, hospital review boards that approve studies, and medical journal editors institute substantial changes to make women’s health a research priority. © 2014 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19318 - Posted: 03.04.2014

By ANDREW POLLACK In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.” Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy. The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. Already the molecular system, known as Crispr, is being used to make genetically engineered laboratory animals more easily than could be done before, with changes in multiple genes. Scientists in China recently made monkeys with changes in two genes. Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease. Working in a laboratory — not, as yet, in actual humans — researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands showed they could fix a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. But even as it is stirring excitement, Crispr is raising profound questions. Like other technologies that once wowed scientists — like gene therapy, stem cells and RNA interference — it will undoubtedly encounter setbacks before it can be used to help patients. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 19317 - Posted: 03.04.2014

By LISA FELDMAN BARRETT CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face? It sure seems like it. In everyday life, you can often “read” what someone is feeling with the quickest of glances. Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments, from fear and anger to joy and surprise. Increasingly, companies like Apple and government agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are banking on this transparency, developing software to identify consumers’ moods or training programs to gauge the intent of airline passengers. The same assumption is at work in the field of mental health, where illnesses like autism and schizophrenia are often treated in part by training patients to distinguish emotions by facial expression. But this assumption is wrong. Several recent and forthcoming research papers from the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, which I direct, suggest that human facial expressions, viewed on their own, are not universally understood. The pioneering work in the field of “emotion recognition” was conducted in the 1960s by a team of scientists led by the psychologist Paul Ekman. Research subjects were asked to look at photographs of facial expressions (smiling, scowling and so on) and match them to a limited set of emotion words (happiness, anger and so on) or to stories with phrases like “Her husband recently died.” Most subjects, even those from faraway cultures with little contact with Western civilization, were extremely good at this task, successfully matching the photos most of the time. Over the following decades, this method of studying emotion recognition has been replicated by other scientists hundreds of times. In recent years, however, at my laboratory we began to worry that this research method was flawed. In particular, we suspected that by providing subjects with a preselected set of emotion words, these experiments had inadvertently “primed” the subjects — in effect, hinting at the answers — and thus skewed the results. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 19316 - Posted: 03.03.2014

|By Christie Nicholson Our memories are inaccurate, more than we’d like to believe. And now a study demonstrates one reason: we apparently add current experiences onto memories. Study subjects examined the location of objects on a computer screen against a background of an underwater ocean scene. Researchers then showed the subjects a fresh screen with a different background, this time a photo of farmland. And the subjects had to place an object in the same position it was in on the original screen. And they always placed the object in the wrong position. The researchers then presented three objects on the original ocean background. One was in the original location, another was in the location the subject just chose in the previous task and the third was in a new location. The subject was asked to pick the original location of the object in the original ocean background. And instead of choosing the original correct location, they always picked the position they had chosen. That is, they now believed the position they’d picked on the farm scene was the original position on the ocean background. The study is in the Journal of Neuroscience. [Donna J. Bridge and Joel L. Voss, Hippocampal Binding of Novel Information with Dominant Memory Traces Can Support Both Memory Stability and Change] The researchers note that recent and easily retrievable information “can overwrite what was there to begin with.” Consider that next time you hear eyewitness testimony. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19312 - Posted: 03.03.2014

Linda Carroll TODAY contributor Insomnia isn’t something that just happens at night. Researchers have now shown that insomniacs have more active brains than sound sleepers, according to a report published Friday in the journal Sleep. That means sleeplessness may, in fact, have its roots in brain wiring that affects the way our minds work, no matter what time of day it is. “We see insomnia now as more of a 24/7 disorder,” said Dr. Rachel Salas, an assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the new study. “It’s like a light switch is continually on. So their brains are always running.” Salas originally thought that sound sleepers would be the ones with more alert and plastic brains. (Brain plasticity basically means how neural pathways can be modified by experience or that it is able to adapt or grow.) To prove the theory, Salas set up an experiment that compared 18 chronic insomniacs to 10 sound sleepers. All of the study volunteers were hooked up to a device that sends magnetic waves through the skull and into the brain. Because transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) can be aimed a specific site, the researchers were able to target a point in the motor cortex that controls movements of the thumb. Each magnetic pulse sparked an involuntary twitching of the digit. After 65 run-throughs with the TMS, study volunteers were asked to practice moving their thumbs on their own in a manner opposite to the one that was sparked by the TMS. So, for example, if the TMS sent volunteers’ thumbs flicking up and left, they would be asked to wiggle their digits down and right.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19305 - Posted: 03.01.2014

By MICHAEL HEDRICK I still remember the first group therapy session I went to after I got out of the hospital. I was 20 and had been diagnosed as schizophrenic after a road trip that took me from Colorado to the United Nations building in New York City, my mind riddled with notions of good and evil, demons and angels, and a determination to save the world. Now I was in something of a state of shock, having come to understand that amid the delusions and paranoia that swarmed through my head I was, in reality, insane. A constant need to move felt like ants crawling over my skin, a side effect of the antipsychotic medications I had been prescribed. Every second of every day, I felt like clawing out my eyes and tearing out my hair because I just couldn’t sit still. I held up my front, though. I smiled when I thought I had to and tried to be nice to people. Laughter, however, was not something that was possible, and wouldn’t be for a long time. The group was a dual-functioning therapy technique to address both mental health issues and drug abuse. I had been assigned to it after disclosing that I had a marijuana habit. The doctors had told me that therapy groups were an integral part of my getting better. I agreed to go only to get out of the hospital prison and back home to my warm bed. I sat in a circle with a melting pot of people. There was the construction worker still wearing dusty boots and clothes splattered with mud, and the depressed sorority girl, makeup and hair still impeccable. The two had formed a friendship over their history with methamphetamine. There was the quiet bipolar Hispanic man who spoke only in short staccato sentences, and the rotund marketing guy who introduced himself by saying his drugs of choice were food, cocaine and marijuana. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19302 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Helen Thomson People in a vegetative state showed signs of awareness after electric brain stimulation – and minimally conscious people were able to communicate again TALK about an awakening. People who have been in a minimally conscious state for weeks or years have been temporarily roused using mild electrical stimulation. Soon after it was applied to their brains, 15 people with severe brain damage showed signs of consciousness, including moving their hands or following instructions using their eyes. Two people were even able to answer questions for 2 hours before drifting back into their previous uncommunicative state. "I don't want to give people false hope – these people weren't getting up and walking around – but it shows there is potential for the brain to recover functionality, even several years after damage," says Steven Laureys at the University of Liège in Belgium, who led the research. People with severe brain trauma often fall into a coma. If they "awaken", by showing signs of arousal but not awareness, they are said to be in a vegetative state. This can improve to a state of minimal consciousness, where they might show fluctuating signs of awareness, which come and go, but have no ability to communicate. External stimulation of the brain has been shown to increase arousal, awareness and aspects of cognition in healthy people. So Laureys and his colleagues wondered if it would do the same in people with severe brain damage. They used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which doesn't directly excite the brain, but uses low-level electrical stimulation to make neurons more or less likely to fire. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19301 - Posted: 02.27.2014

By JOHN BRANCH Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head, has been found posthumously in a 29-year-old former soccer player, the strongest indication yet that the condition is not limited to athletes who played sports known for violent collisions, like football and boxing. Researchers at Boston University and the VA Boston Healthcare System, who have diagnosed scores of cases of C.T.E., said the player, Patrick Grange of Albuquerque, was the first named soccer player found to have C.T.E. On a four-point scale of severity, his disease was considered Stage 2. Soccer is a physical game but rarely a violent one. Players sometimes collide or fall to the ground, but the most repeated blows to the head may come from the act of heading an airborne ball — to redirect it purposely — in games and practices. Grange, who died in April after being found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was especially proud of his ability to head the ball, said his parents, Mike and Michele. They recalled him as a 3-year-old, endlessly tossing a soccer ball into the air and heading it into a net, a skill that he continued to practice and display in college and in top-level amateur and semiprofessional leagues in his quest to play Major League Soccer. Grange sustained a few memorable concussions, his parents said — falling hard as a toddler, being knocked unconscious in a high school game and once receiving 17 stitches in his head after an on-field collision in college. “He had very extensive frontal lobe damage,” said Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist who performed the brain examination on Grange. “We have seen other athletes in their 20s with this level of pathology, but they’ve usually been football players.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19300 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Tom Siegfried If freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then “free will” is just another phrase for ability to choose. Bad, wasn’t it? But if free will is an illusion, as many scientists and philosophers have argued, then you shouldn’t blame me. On the other hand, I do blame myself. Because like most bloggers, and possibly even the several dozen humans who don’t blog, I think I decided for myself what to write. Besides, as many investigators of this issue have pointed out, it’s not so obvious that free will is illusory now that quantum mechanics has inserted some randomness into nature. Sadly, though, that reasoning doesn’t get you very far. There’s randomness in the quantum world, all right, just like the unpredictable sequence of winning numbers on a roulette wheel. But in the long run all the numbers turn up about equally often. Free will isn’t worth much if you can’t use it to beat a casino. And as MIT physicist Scott Aaronson points out, quantum math is similar: It gives the odds about what various possible things will happen, and those odds are always predicted precisely. The probability distribution of results is always just what the quantum math says it will be. Aaronson doesn’t see any free will there. Still, the free will question has elicited some sophisticated musing from quantum physicists who like to contemplate the interface of mentality and physical reality. It seems reasonable enough to reexamine such an old question in the light of the latest understanding of the universe. It may be that modern physics can offer a perspective giving hope for those who like to make up their own mind. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 19299 - Posted: 02.27.2014

by Emily Sohn Immediately after birth on many dairy farms, baby cows are separated from their mothers and housed in their own pens to protect them from getting sick. Two months later, they join the herd. But early-life isolation may be depriving baby cows of the opportunity to reach their full potential, found a new study. Compared to calves raised in pairs, isolated calves were much slower to learn new things and had a harder time adapting to changes in their environment. Aside from animal welfare concerns, the new findings suggest that dairy farmers have long been overlooking the brain development of their cows by depriving them of social interaction in their early weeks. “Imagine I said that instead of sending your child to kindergarten, I could put him in the classroom one-on-one with the teacher and all the same resources,” said Daniel Weary, a professor of animal welfare and dairy science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “But at the end of the day, if we found that individuals in this system were showing cognitive deficits in relation to other individuals, we would feel bad about that.” For cows, he said, “it means we’re not keeping these animals in an environment that allows them to be what they can be and should be.” © 2014 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19298 - Posted: 02.27.2014