By Deborah Kotz / Globe Staff Public health officials, politicians, and smoking researchers cheered the Wednesday announcement from CVS Caremark that they will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at CVS pharmacy stores by October. President Obama, a former smoker, said CVS is setting a “powerful example” and that will help public health efforts to reduce smoking-related deaths and illnesses. The American Public Health Association called it a “historic decision,” and the American Association of Cancer Research called it a “visionary move.” Dozens of other anti-smoking organizations and medical organizations—whose physicians treat the lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease caused by smoking—proferred their approval and hope that other big chain pharmacies would follow suit. “CVS made a very compelling argument today that if you’re in the business of healthcare, you shouldn’t be in the business of selling tobacco products,” said Vince Willmore, spokesperson for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “We’ll be taking that argument to every store with a pharmacy to make sure this is a catalyst for them.” Whether the CVS decision will result in fewer smokers remains unknown, said Margaret Reid, who directs tobacco control efforts at the Boston Public Health Commission, but added that it will certainly make tobacco products less readily available to smokers. When Boston implemented a ban on tobacco sales in pharmacies five years ago, it resulted in 85 fewer tobacco retailers in the city—about a 10 percent drop in the number of places permitted to sell cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. © 2014 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 19213 - Posted: 02.06.2014

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Changing the way people think about and deal with schizophrenia could be as effective as drugs, say researchers. Cognitive behavioural therapy is an officially recommended treatment, but is available to less than 10% of patients in the UK with schizophrenia. A study published in the Lancet indicates CBT could help the many who refuse antipsychotic medication. Experts say larger trials are needed. About four-in-10 patients benefit from taking antipsychotic medication. But the drugs do not work for the majority and they cause side-effects such as type 2 diabetes and weight gain. Up to half of patients with schizophrenia end up not taking the drugs. The study looked at cognitive behaviour therapy in 74 people. The therapy works by identifying an individual patient's problem - such as hearing voices, paranoid thinking or no longer going out of the house - and developing techniques to deal with them. Prof Tony Morrison, director of the psychosis research unit at Greater Manchester West Mental Health Foundation Trust, said: "We found cognitive behavioural therapy did reduce symptoms and it also improved personal and social function and we demonstrated very comprehensively it is a safe and effective therapy." It worked in 46% of patients, approximately the same as for antipsychotics - although a head-to-head study directly comparing the two therapies has not been made. Douglas Turkington, professor of psychiatry at Newcastle University, said: "One of our most interesting findings was that when given the option, most patients were agreeable to trying cognitive therapy." BBC © 2014

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 19212 - Posted: 02.06.2014

Posted by Maria Konnikova On a typical workday morning, if you’re like most people, you don’t wake up naturally. Instead, the ring of an alarm clock probably jerks you out of sleep. Depending on when you went to bed, what day of the week it is, and how deeply you were sleeping, you may not understand where you are, or why there’s an infernal chiming sound. Then you throw out your arm and hit the snooze button, silencing the noise for at least a few moments. Just another couple of minutes, you think. Then maybe a few minutes more. It may seem like you’re giving yourself a few extra minutes to collect your thoughts. But what you’re actually doing is making the wake-up process more difficult and drawn out. If you manage to drift off again, you are likely plunging your brain back into the beginning of the sleep cycle, which is the worst point to be woken up—and the harder we feel it is for us to wake up, the worse we think we’ve slept. (Ian Parker wrote about the development of a new drug for insomnia in the magazine last week.) One of the consequences of waking up suddenly, and too early, is a phenomenon called sleep inertia. First given a name in 1976, sleep inertia refers to that period between waking and being fully awake when you feel groggy. The more abruptly you are awakened, the more severe the sleep inertia. While we may feel that we wake up quickly enough, transitioning easily between sleep mode and awake mode, the process is in reality far more gradual. Our brain-stem arousal systems (the parts of the brain responsible for basic physiological functioning) are activated almost instantly. But our cortical regions, especially the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in decision-making and self-control), take longer to come on board. © 2013 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19211 - Posted: 02.06.2014

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR There are many well established risk factors for cardiovascular death, but researchers may have found one more: slower reaction time. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, researchers measured the reaction times of 5,134 adults ages 20 to 59, having them press a button as quickly as possible after a light flashed on a computer screen. Then they followed them to see how many would still be alive after 15 years. The study is in the January issue of PLOS One. Unsurprisingly, men, smokers, heavy drinkers and the physically inactive were more likely to die. But after controlling for these and other factors, they found that those with slower reaction times were 25 percent more likely to die of any cause, and 36 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease, than those with faster reactions. Reaction time made no difference in cancer mortality. The reasons for the connection are unclear, but the lead author, Gareth Hagger-Johnson, a senior research associate at University College London, said it may reflect problems with the brain or nervous system. He stressed, though, that “a single test of reaction time is not going to tell you when you’re going to die. There’s a link at a population level. We didn’t look at individual people.” © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 19210 - Posted: 02.06.2014

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, The National Institutes of Health is undertaking an ambitious collaboration with private industry in an attempt to speed up the search for treatments for some of the world’s most devastating diseases — Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. The pilot projects announced Tuesday will involve the sharing of not only scientists but also of data, blood samples and tissue specimens among 10 rival companies, the federal government and several nonprofit groups and research foundations. The companies that have signed up to participate include most of the large drug makers, which in the past had resisted calls to share detailed data and samples from experiments, preferring to instead use the information to gain lucrative patents. The agreement with NIH represents a major break from how they used to do business. The competing pharmaceutical companies have said they will hold off launching commercial ventures based on discoveries from the partnership until after the data has been made publicly available. The idea behind the collaboration is similar to that of the “open source” movement among some computer scientists who believe that sharing their code with anyone who wants it is the best way to innovate. The first group of projects, which will last three to five years, will involve an investment of more than $230 million from industry participants including Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi and Takeda, as well as a few smaller biotech companies. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 19206 - Posted: 02.05.2014

Karen Weintraub, Every time you pull up a memory – say of your first kiss – your mind reinterprets it for the present day, new research suggests. If you're in the middle of an ugly divorce, for example, you might recall it differently than if you're happily married and life is going well. This makes your memory quite unlike the video camera you may imagine it to be. But new research in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests it's very effective for helping us adapt to our environments, said co-author Joel Voss, a researcher at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Voss' findings build on others and may also explain why we can be thoroughly convinced that something happened when it didn't, and why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. The new research also suggests that memory problems like those seen in Alzheimer's could involve a "freezing" of these memories — an inability to adapt the memory to the present, Voss said. Our memories are thus less a snapshot of the past, than "a record of our current view on the past," said Donna Rose Addis, a researcher and associate professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who was not involved in the research. Using brain scans of 17 healthy volunteers as they were taught new data and recalled previously learned information, Voss and his colleagues were able to show for the first time precisely when and where new information gets implanted into existing memories.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19205 - Posted: 02.05.2014

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS This winter’s frigid temperatures could be having one desirable side effect. They may be revving up your metabolism. Shivering in the cold sparks a series of biochemical reactions deep within the body that alters fat cells and bolsters metabolism, much as formal exercise does, according to a fascinating series of new experiments. The findings intimate that exercise and shivering are related in ways not previously suspected. For the new study, which was published Tuesday in Cell Metabolism, scientists affiliated with several branches of the National Institutes of Health recruited 10 healthy adult men and women and invited them to the lab on three separate occasions. There, the researchers drew blood and obtained small samples of muscle and fat cells. During one lab visit, the volunteers completed a short but very intense session of stationary bicycling, riding as hard as they could until they were exhausted. Then, on another day, they rode the bike at a gentle, easily sustained pace for an hour. Throughout these workouts, the laboratory temperature was maintained at a moderate 65 degrees or so. On their final visit, though, the researchers had each volunteer lie in bed, lightly clad, for 30 minutes as the lab’s temperature dropped from about 75 to a chilly 53 degrees. Monitors were placed on their skin to measure skin and muscle reactions, and by the end of the session, the volunteers were noticeably shivering. After each session, the scientists gathered more blood and other samples and started checking for changes. In particular, they wanted to see what was happening with the volunteers’ white and brown fat. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 19204 - Posted: 02.05.2014

By JAMES GORMAN Males’ aggression toward each other is an old story throughout the animal kingdom. It’s not that females aren’t aggressive, but in many species, male-on-male battles are more common. Take fruit flies. “The males are more aggressive than females,” said David J. Anderson, a California Institute of Technology neuroscientist who knows their tussles well. Dr. Anderson runs a kind of fight club for fruit flies in his lab at Caltech, with the goal of understanding the deep evolutionary roots of very fundamental behaviors. Dr. Anderson, Kenta Asahina and a group of their colleagues recently identified one gene and a tiny group of neurons, sometimes as few as three, present only in the brains of male fruit flies, that can control aggression. The gene is also found in mammals, and has also been associated with aggression in some mammalian species, perhaps even in humans, although that is not clear. The discovery, reported in the journal Cell last month, does not tell the whole story of fly aggression. Some fighting is inextricably linked to food and mating, while the mechanism the scientists found is not. But it is a striking indication of how brain structure and chemistry work together, as well as a reminder that as different as humans and flies are, they are not always very far apart. The painstaking process of discovery, recounted step by step in the paper, gives a glimpse of modern brain research and the lengths to which scientists must go if they want to get down to the level of how neurons control behavior. “They did a huge amount of experiments,” said Ulrike Heberlein at the Janelia Farm research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Heberlein also studies fly behavior and recently demonstrated another human-fly connection, showing that jilted male flies will turn to drink. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 19203 - Posted: 02.04.2014

About two-thirds of people are left with ringing in their ears after a night out at a club, gig or pub, a poll suggests. Campaign group Action on Hearing Loss said the poll of 1,000 adults also showed a third would ignore the "safe level" on their music players. The group warns that people doing either increase the risk of tinnitus. DJ Paul Oakenfold urged people to wear ear defenders to gigs and to "turn down the volume". Half of those surveyed said they listened to music for between one and six hours a day - up to a third of their waking day - perhaps in the background at work or on their MP3 player on their way to and from work or studies. But one in five would not do anything differently to take any care of their hearing. Action on Hearing Loss warned that one in 10 people across the UK is affected by tinnitus every day, ranging from a "light buzzing" to a "constant roar" in the ears and head. It can affect everything from the ability to concentrate at work to getting to sleep at night. The poll also found that one in 10 people does not know what tinnitus is, with 3% thinking it was "big ears" and 4% a "repetitive strain injury". It has created an audio version of what tinnitus sounds like in order to raise awareness. Paul Breckell, chief executive of Action on Hearing Loss, said: "Listening to loud music for a long time can trigger tinnitus and is an indication of damaged hearing. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 19201 - Posted: 02.04.2014

By JEFF Z. KLEIN Hockey players who sustained concussions during a recent season experienced acute microstructural changes in their brains, according to a series of studies published in the Journal of Neurosurgery on Tuesday. “We’ve seen evidence of chronic injuries later in life from head trauma, and now we’ve seen this in current players,” said Dr. Paul Echlin, an Ontario sports concussion specialist who conducted the study in collaboration with Dr. Martha Shenton of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and researchers from Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and Western University of Canada. The researchers said these were the first studies in which an independent medical team used magnetic resonance imaging analysis before, during and after a season to measure the effects of concussions on athletes. Forty-five male and female Canadian university hockey players were observed by independent physicians during the 2011-12 season. All 45 players were given M.R.I. scans before and after the season. The 11 who received a concussion diagnosis during the season were given additional scans within 72 hours, two weeks and two months of the incident. The scans found microscopic white matter and inflammatory changes in the brains of individuals who had sustained a clinically diagnosed concussion during the period of the study. Additional analysis found that players who sustained a concussion during the study period or reported a history of concussions showed significant differences in their brains’ white matter microstructure compared with players who did not sustain a concussion, or who reported no history of concussions. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 19200 - Posted: 02.04.2014

Alice Roberts Just how special do you think you are? How different do you think you are from other animals? Do you think of yourself as an animal or do you see yourself, and your fellow humans, as somehow set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom? Most of us – and I would unashamedly label us as the sensible majority of the population – accept that evolution is the best explanation for the pattern of life that we observe on the planet, both living and fossilised. However much creationists bang on about evolution being "just a theory", it beautifully explains all the evidence we have to hand (and there's masses of that: anatomical, genetic, palaeontological, embryological), without a single piece of evidence having turned up that threatens to bring the whole edifice tumbling down around our ears. So, I'm hoping you're a sensible sort of person and that you consider evolution to be as true as the spherical nature of the Earth, or the fact that the Earth orbits the sun and not vice versa. But just how comfortable are you with the idea of being a product of evolution? I think it's still, even among the most enlightened of us, really hard to come to terms with the idea that we are just another animal. A naked ape. The third chimpanzee, even. You have to admit, science has done a very good job at bringing us down a peg or two, at knocking us off the pedestal of our own construction. We can no longer view ourselves as a special creation, something created in the image of a deity and close to angels (whatever they are or look like). We can no longer see ourselves as the ultimate destination, as the pinnacle of evolution, either. Our species is just a tiny twig on the massive, dense tree of life. But that's so difficult to stomach! © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 19198 - Posted: 02.04.2014

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. In history’s long parade of pushy mothers and miserably obedient children, no episode beats Dr. Frank H. Netter’s for a happy ending. Both parties got the last laugh. Netter was born to immigrant parents in New York in 1906. He was an artist from the time he could grab a pencil, doodling through high school, winning a scholarship to art school, and enunciating intentions of making his living as an illustrator. Then his mother stepped in, and with an iron hand, deflected him to medicine. Frank’s siblings and cousins all had respectable careers, she informed him, and he would, too. To his credit, he lasted quite a while: through medical school, hospital training and almost an entire year as a qualified doctor. But he continued drawing the whole time, making sketches in his lecture notes to clarify abstruse medical concepts for himself, then doing the same for classmates and even professors. Then, fatefully, his work attracted the notice of advertising departments at pharmaceutical companies. In the midst of the Depression, he demanded and received $7,500 for a series of five drawings, many times what he might expect to earn from a full year of medical practice. He put down his scalpel for good. Thanks to a five-decade exclusive contract with Ciba (now Novartis), he ultimately became possibly the best-known medical illustrator in the world, creating thousands of watercolor plates depicting every aspect of 20th-century medicine. His illustrations were virtually never used to market specific products, but distributed free of charge to doctors as a public service, and collected into popular textbooks. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 19197 - Posted: 02.04.2014

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Cells taken from the donated eyes of dead people may be able to give sight to the blind, researchers suggest. Tests in rats, reported in Stem Cells Translational Medicine, showed the human cells could restore some vision to completely blind rats. The team at University College London said similar results in humans would improve quality of life, but would not give enough vision to read. Human trials should begin within three years. Donated corneas are already used to improve some people's sight, but the team at the Institute for Ophthalmology, at UCL, extracted a special kind of cell from the back of the eye. These Muller glia cells are a type of adult stem cell capable of transforming into the specialised cells in the back of the eye and may be useful for treating a wide range of sight disorders. In the laboratory, these cells were chemically charmed into becoming rod cells which detect light in the retina. Injecting the rods into the backs of the eyes of completely blind rats partially restored their vision. Brain scans showed that 50% of the electrical signals between the eye and the brain were recovered by the treatment. One of the researchers, Prof Astrid Limb, told the BBC what such a change would mean in people: "They probably wouldn't be able to read, but they could move around and detect a table in a room. BBC © 2014

Keyword: Vision; Aggression
Link ID: 19193 - Posted: 02.01.2014

By LAUREN BRADY When I was 18 I watched my father perform what would be his final surgery. It was the summer of 2007 and I had just returned to Colorado after surviving my freshman year of film school at New York University. One day my dad invited me to observe a vitrectomy. And while I hadn’t a clue what this would entail I immediately accepted, honored by the invitation and determined not to faint. My father’s 21 years as an ophthalmologist produced over 15,000 operations, a private practice spanning three offices, and very little vacation time. While I sensed from an early age that the long hours were taxing on him I never felt an absence. In fact, my childhood was picturesque: two loving parents, a rowdy little brother whom I pushed around until he was big enough to push back, family trips in the Jeep to the Rocky Mountains. He was the dad with the Handycam at every soccer game and school play. He worked as a surgeon, but he lived for his children. The morning of the vitrectomy we left extra early because of a limp in my dad’s right leg that had appeared a few months earlier and had gradually worsened. He suspected it was a pinched nerve and had been meaning to get it checked out. In the interim, he had started using a chair during surgery. Walking toward the hospital entrance we encountered a fellow doctor who greeted me with the familiarity of someone who’d been exposed to years of my father’s wallet photos. He asked how I liked Greenwich Village, whether I had directed any films yet and if I had tried a bialy. We walked and talked until I noticed at one point that my dad was no longer part of the conversation. Turning around I realized he was a half block back pushing himself up from the ground. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 19192 - Posted: 02.01.2014

Controversy delights Dick Swaab; brains delight him; complexity delights him, though I don't know if you'd get that from reading his book, We Are Our Brains, in which causal links are made quite casually, like a man doing a crossword with a pencil. The Dutch neurologist is, after a 50-year career, a giant in the field. He is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Amsterdam. His directorship of the Dutch Institute for Brain Research yielded material that has been sent to 500 other research groups in 25 countries. He has propounded groundbreaking theories in his specialist area: the impact on brain development in the womb. Nonetheless, his book, despite directing itself squarely to the layperson, has been miles more successful than he thought, selling 100,000 copies ("the publishers say they knew it would be a hit. But at the start, they only printed 3,000 copies. So I know that is not true."). There are a number of lines you might file under, "Well, there's a curiosity" (for instance: "In professional violinists, the part of the cerebral cortex that directs the fingers of the left hand is five times as large as it is in people who don't play a stringed instrument"). And yet the real fireworks of the book are both more predictable and more profound: Swaab says hormones and chemical substances in utero affect the development of our sexual orientation or, put more simply, you have a gay brain by the time you are born. Male and female brains have "hundreds of differences", which explain all the ways in which men and women are different; "phobia, impulsiveness, ADHD and depression later in life" can be traced back to a mother's fearfulness during pregnancy, which activates her baby's "fear axis". © 2014 Guardian News

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 19189 - Posted: 01.30.2014

By Meeri Kim, Neanderthal genes lurk among us. Small traces of Neanderthal DNA have been confirmed in the areas of the genome that affect skin and hair of modern humans, according to two new studies that also give clues as to which Neanderthal traits may have been helpful — or harmful — to the survival of our species. The studies, published online Wednesday in the journals Nature and Science, came to similar conclusions despite using vastly different methods of genomic analysis. For East Asian and European populations, genes that provide the physical characteristics of skin and hair have a high incidence of Neanderthal DNA — possibly lending toughness and insulation to weather the cold as early man emerged from Africa, the studies conclude. Neanderthals were thought to have already been adapted to a chillier, more northern environment. Perhaps most notably, Neanderthal DNA was not found in genes that influence testicles or the X chromosome, according to the Nature study, hinting that when the Neanderthal ventured outside his species for sex, the introduction of his DNA may have reduced male fertility in early humans. As a result, evolution wiped away the Neanderthal DNA that negatively affected procreation. “There’s strong evidence that when the two met and mixed, they were at the edge of biological compatibility,” said Nature study author and Harvard University geneticist David Reich. “The people who eventually survived and thrived had quite a bit of hurdles to overcome.” This is consistent with what is seen in nature: When two species mate that are sufficiently far away biologically, the resulting hybrids tend to have lowered fertility. Early humans and Neanderthals interbred about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago around the Middle East, during man’s migration out of Africa. © 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Keyword: Evolution; Aggression
Link ID: 19188 - Posted: 01.30.2014

by Susan Milius Male bee flies fooled into trying to copulate with a daisy may learn from the awkward incident. Certain orchids and several forms of South Africa’s Gorteria diffusa daisy lure pollinators by mimicking female insects. The most effective daisy seducers row a dark, somewhat fly-shaped bump on one of their otherwise yellow-to-orange petals. Males of small, dark Megapalpus capensis bee flies go wild. But tests show the daisy’s victims waste less time trying to mate with a second deceptive daisy than with the first. “Far from being slow and stupid, these males are actually quite keen observers and fairly perceptive for a fly,” says Marinus L. de Jager of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Males’ success locating a female bee fly drops in the presence of deceitful daisies, de Jager and Stellenbosch University colleague Allan Ellis say January 29 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. That’s the first clear demonstration of sexual deceit’s cost to a pollinator, Ellis says. Such evolutionary costs might push the bee fly to learn from mating mistakes. How long bee flies stay daisy-wary remains unknown. In other studies, wasps tricked by an Australian orchid forgot their lesson after about 24 hours. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Aggression
Link ID: 19186 - Posted: 01.30.2014

|By Roni Jacobson There is nothing like a good night's sleep to help you feel your best the next day. Now scientists are finding that good sleep habits may do more than restore cognitive function on a nightly basis—they may also fortify the brain over the long term, according to a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that during sleep, activity ramps up in genes that are involved in producing oligodendrocytes—brain cells responsible for coating neurons with myelin. Myelin is the brain's insulating material. The fatty substance surrounds the signal-transmitting tail that extends from every neuron, enabling electrical communications to travel quickly and efficiently to other neurons. Myelin deficiency is at the root of the neurodegenerative disease multiple sclerosis and can contribute to symptoms such as fatigue, vision and hearing impairment, and a loss of coordination. In this study, sleeping mice had heightened activity in the genes responsible for creating oligodendrocytes, but awake or sleep-deprived rodents showed greater activity in genes involved in cellular stress and death. Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist and author on the paper, suggests that sleep helps cells regenerate and repair themselves, by enabling the body to produce new myelin after it has deteriorated. Cellular repair probably takes weeks or even months, however, so pulling an occasional all-nighter is unlikely to disrupt the process. © 2014 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 19185 - Posted: 01.30.2014

by Ashley Yeager Monkeys may have rudimentary brain wiring that later evolved into the connections that gave humans the ability to understand language, think flexibly and make decisions. Brain scans of 25 humans and 25 macaques show that 11 components of the ventrolateral frontal cortex, located behind the temples, were similarly wired in both species. The results suggest that humans did not develop completely new and specialized brain systems for certain types of complex thought, researchers report January 28 in Neuron. The scans also show that macaques do not have the lateral frontal pole, which helps humans with strategic planning, decision-making and multitasking. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2014.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 19184 - Posted: 01.30.2014

Henry Molaison, the famous amnesic patient better known as “H.M.,” was unable to form new long-term memories following brain surgery to treat his epilepsy. Scientists who studied his condition made groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how memory works, and before his 2008 death, H.M. and his guardian agreed that his brain would be donated to science. One year after his death, H.M.’s brain was sliced into 2,401 70-micron-thick sections for further study. MIT neuroscience professor emerita Suzanne Corkin studied H.M. during his life and is now part of a team that is analyzing his brain. She is an author of a paper appearing in Nature Communications today reporting preliminary results of the postmortem study. The research team was led by Jacopo Annese at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Q: What can we learn from studying H.M.’s brain after his death? And when did you begin laying the groundwork for these postmortem studies? A: It was important to get H.M.’s brain after he died, for three reasons: first of all, to document the exact locus and extent of his lesions, in order to identify the neural substrate for declarative memory. Second, to evaluate the status of the intact brain tissue, revealing the possible brain substrates for the many cognitive functions that H.M. performed normally, including nondeclarative learning without awareness. The third reason was to identify any new abnormalities that occurred as a result of his getting old and were unrelated to the operation. In 1992, I explained to H.M. and his conservator that it would be extremely valuable to have his brain after he died. I told them how important he was to the science of memory, and that he had already made amazing contributions. It would make those even more significant to actually have his brain and see exactly where the damage was. That year, they signed a brain donation form leaving his brain to Massachusetts General Hospital [MGH] and MIT.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 19182 - Posted: 01.29.2014