By NICHOLAS WADE On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted. The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars. “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats at the farm, about six miles from Akademgorodok, near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Frank Albert, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is working with both the tame and the hyperaggressive Siberian strains in the hope of understanding the genetic basis of their behavioral differences. “The ferocious rats cannot be handled,” Mr. Albert said. “They will not tolerate it. They go totally crazy if you try to pick them up.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9174 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Philip E. Ross A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row. How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one." He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient. But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. © 1996-2006 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 9173 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Prior research has shown that chronic alcoholism is associated with numerous olfactory deficits in odor judgment, odor identification, odor sensitivity, and the ability to qualitatively discriminate between odors. New findings indicate that olfactory deficits among alcoholics are associated with prefrontal cognitive dysfunction, specifically, impairment in the functional integrity of the prefrontal lobe. Results are published in the August issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. "Both frontal and medial temporal lobe brain regions play a major role in olfactory functioning, particularly in the abilities of odor quality discrimination and identification," said Claudia I. Rupp, clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Innsbruck Medical University, and corresponding author for the study. "Given that alcohol can cause brain damage and dysfunction in frontal and medial temporal brain regions, and that neuropsychological tasks such as executive function and memory may represent sensitive measures of the integrity of these brain areas, we were interested in whether olfactory deficits in alcohol dependence are related to executive dysfunctions or memory impairments," she said.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 9172 - Posted: 07.25.2006

Rochester, Minn. -- According to a new study, men transmit multiple sclerosis (MS) to their children 2.2 times more often than women in families where the father or mother and a child have multiple sclerosis. This study involved an investigation of 444 children of an MS-affected father or mother from 3,598 individuals in 206 families to compare the transmission of MS between affected men and women. The findings by researchers from Mayo Clinic, the University of California at San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Kaiser Permanente will be published in the July 25 issue of the journal Neurology. "Fathers with MS tend to have more children who develop MS than do mothers with the disease," says Brian Weinshenker, M.D., Mayo Clinic neurologist and study investigator. "When we looked at a large population of MS patients, when there was a parent and a child who had MS in a family, the child with MS got the disease twice as often from the father rather than the mother." MS affects approximately 1 in 1,000 people, and it is twice as common in women as in men. In 85 percent of cases, no cause is known. For 15 percent of MS patients, a family member within a generation also is affected by the disease. For familial cases, no single gene has been identified that strongly predisposes a person to MS.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 9171 - Posted: 07.25.2006

Richard Van Noorden If you're one of the many people who while away hours playing FreeCell, that heinously addictive and complicated version of Solitaire, you may be interested to hear that some researchers think your performance in this computerized card game might reveal early signs of dementia. As Holly Jimison from the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology explains, scientists are looking for ways to spot mild loss of brain function, termed 'mild cognitive impairment' (MCI), before the full-blown symptoms of Alzheimer's disease emerge. This would allow doctors to plan their treatments earlier. That's a tricky task. MCI is poorly defined: it is not clear, for example, how much memory impairment should be considered abnormal, nor whether measured MCI will lead to Alzheimer's disease. "Standard memory tests, brain imaging and biological markers are all currently being used. There are a lot of interesting data but no solid answers," says William Jagust, a neuroscientist from the University of California, Berkeley. The Oregon researchers wanted to develop an unobtrusive continuous monitoring system that might reveal more reliable information than intensive, yearly memory check-ups. "We thought of using a suite of computer games," says Jimison. "So we interviewed elderly people, and FreeCell was by far their favourite. FreeCell requires a lot of mental planning to play, and it's cheap, non-invasive and fun." ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9170 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Wild A bout of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may do damage to the brain that kick-starts memory problems, scientists have discovered. Even patients who had recovered from a period of stress started to get age-related memory difficulties about a decade earlier than non-traumatized people, they report. Post-traumatic stress, a condition that can cause patients to feel physical pain on remembering a traumatic event, is known to have a number of effects on the mind and body. One of the side effects is that patients tend to be forgetful, unable to remember a story or a list of words after they've heard it, for example. This problem, which could come from emotional distraction and an inability to concentrate, can interfere with everyday tasks. Rachel Yehuda and her team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York decided to investigate further the link between PTSD and memory problems, by looking at what happens to patients as they age. Their study, due to be published in Biological Psychiatry1, looks at three groups of people: Holocaust survivors with continued PTSD, survivors who had recovered from their trauma, and a control group who had not lived through the Holocaust and had never had PTSD. The researchers looked at the study participants' ability to remember associations between common words such as 'desk and chair', a task that is known to become more difficult as we age. They tested their participants at the age of 67, and again at 72. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Stress; Alzheimers
Link ID: 9169 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pearson A new study helps to explain why smokers tend to have boozier nights out than non-smokers. The work, done in rats, shows that a heavy dose of nicotine can cut blood-alcohol levels in half. If cigarettes similarly lower intoxication in people, it could mean that smokers need to drink more than non-smokers to get the same buzz. Many studies have shown that smokers tend to drink more alcohol than non-smokers, and a number of reasons are proposed for this. People who indulge in one habit may be simply more inclined to indulge in another, and socially both habits tend to go hand-in-hand at pubs and parties. Researchers also know that both nicotine and alcohol trigger a release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, but that indulging too much in either habit can breed tolerance to the drugs and reduce this pleasurable reward. So heavy users of one may boost use of the other to help bring their dopamine response back up. The research suggests that nicotine also directly alters the potency of alcohol in the body. Wei-Jung Chen of Texas A&M University, College Station, first saw hints of this in 1998, in a study of newborn rats given alcohol and nicotine1. ©2006 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 9168 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Early dementia could be detected with a simple eye test, similar to those used to test for high blood pressure and diabetes, US scientists believe. The test, developed by a team led by Dr Lee Goldstein, of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, uses a non-invasive laser to study the lens of the eye. It checks for deposits of beta-amyloid - the protein found in the brains of those with Alzheimer's disease. The procedure has worked in a trial in mice, a conference in Spain heard. During the trial, a brief pulse of infrared light into the eyes of four mice with Alzheimer's and four without accurately identified which had the condition. Dr Goldstein and his team envisage the test could be used to detect the disease at its earliest stages as well as to track disease progression and monitor how people respond to Alzheimer's treatments. Currently there is no simple test to make a diagnosis of dementia and it can only be confirmed with certainty by looking at someone's brain in a post-mortem examination. The scientists believe the technology, known as quasi-elastic light scattering, may detect the very earliest stages of amyloid deposits in the lens, even when they appear completely clear to the naked eye. The amyloid deposits appear as unusual cataracts. These are different from common, age-related cataracts. Dr Goldstein told the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders in Madrid: "Amyloid in the lens can be detected using extremely sensitive, non-invasive optical techniques. This makes the lens an ideal window for early detection and disease monitoring in Alzheimer's." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9167 - Posted: 07.24.2006

By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON, — Four of every 10 patients who undergo weight-loss surgery develop complications within six months, the federal government said Sunday. The number of such surgical procedures has been rising rapidly, along with the incidence of obesity, which now afflicts 30 percent of adults in the United States, health officials said. Obesity surgery is helping thousands of Americans lose weight and reduce the risk of diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, said Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Public Health Service. But she added, “This study shows how important it is for patients to consider the potential complications.” Many of the complications were so serious that patients were readmitted to hospitals or visited emergency rooms within six months. In the procedure, known as bariatric surgery, doctors reduce the number of calories that a person can consume and absorb. One of the more common techniques restricts the size of the stomach and the length of the intestine, where nutrients are absorbed. Federal researchers found that complications from obesity surgery significantly increased costs. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 9166 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jonathan Haidt, reviewed by James Flint The idea of the "divided self" is nothing new. Forget RD Laing: Buddha compared the experience of being human to that of a trainer (rationality) sitting astride an elephant (animal impulse); Plato to that of a charioteer (the rational mind) trying to control two horses, a noble one pulling to the right and a libidinal one pulling to the left. And of course there's Freud's Victorian version: the mind as buggy in the bucket seat of which "the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits on the backseat lecturing the driver on what he's doing wrong". In the late 20th century these pictures were dismissed by many in the social sciences and replaced with metaphors of information processing and rational consumption, metaphors which in turn reflected the preoccupations of their time. When Jonathan Haidt suggests that we now abandon these and return to the idea of elephant and rider as a template for the workings of the mind, it seems at first blush rather an unpromising start to a book purporting to tell us how to be happy. But unlike so many of the world's purveyors of self-help and lifestyle philosophy, not to mention its economists and computational psychologists, Haidt knows what he's talking about. Thanks to having taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 20 years he has a deep understanding of his subject. He adds to that the distinction of being broadly right. What horses and chariots and elephants with riders draw attention to, he argues, is something that psychologists have only recently begun to realise: "that there are really two information processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes". © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 9165 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Trends analysis of drug poisoning deaths has helped explain a national epidemic of overdose deaths in the USA that began in the 1990s, concludes Leonard Paulozzi and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, USA. The contribution of prescription pain killers to the epidemic has only become clear recently. This research is published this week in the journal, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. Drugs called "opioids" are frequently prescribed to relieve pain, but if abused they can kill. Over the past 15 years, sales of opioid pain killers, including oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone and fentanyl, have increased, and deaths from these drugs have increased in parallel. In 2002, over 16,000 people died in the USA as a result of drug overdoses, with most deaths related to opioids, heroin, and cocaine. Opioids surpassed both cocaine and heroin in extent of involvement in these drug overdoses between 1999 and 2002. The situation appears to be accelerating. Between 1979 and 1990 the rate of deaths attributed to unintentional drug poisoning increased by an average of 5.3% each year. Between 1990 and 2002, the rate increased by 18.1% per year. The contribution played by opioids is also increasing. Between 1999 and 2002 the number of overdose death certificates that mention poisoning by opioid pain killers went up by 91.2%. While the pain killer category showed the greatest increase, death certificates pointing a finger of blame at heroin and cocaine also increased by 12.4% and 22.8% respectively.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 9164 - Posted: 07.24.2006

by Emily Anthes • You may fancy yourself a lover of all humanity, but according to a new study out of Princeton University, when confronted with extreme social outcasts, such as drug addicts and homeless people, your brain may unconsciously categorize them as less than human. Neuroimaging research to be published in the October issue of Psychological Science shows that the stereotyping of groups as being sub-human can happen on an unconscious, neurological level, even when a person is not outwardly repulsed. "People spontaneously categorize other people into 'us' and 'them' and they do that within milliseconds of encountering other people," said Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske, a co-author of the study. Social research has shown that people evaluate people unlike them according to two scales: how nice, or warm, they appear and how smart, or competent, they seem. Some social groups are commonly viewed as being low in competence and high in warmth (the elderly), while others are stereotyped as being high in competence but low in warmth (the wealthy). Social groups that are stereotyped as having neither warmth nor competence—like drug addicts—are often judged to be both hostile and stupid. © Copyright 2006 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 9163 - Posted: 06.24.2010

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with Parkinson disease can be apathetic without being depressed, and apathy may be a core feature of the disease, according to a study published in the July 11, 2006, issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Apathy is a mental state characterized by a loss of motivation, loss of interest, and loss of effortful behavior. In apathy, the mood is neutral and there is a sense of indifference. In depression, the mood is negative and there is emotional suffering. Because apathy and depression share some of the same symptoms, the disorders can be misdiagnosed. “This study shows that it’s important to screen for both apathy and depression so patients can be treated appropriately,” said study author Lindsey Kirsch-Darrow, MS, of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “It will also be important to educate family members and caregivers about apathy to help them understand that it is a characteristic of Parkinson disease. Apathetic behavior is not something the patient can voluntarily control, and it is not laziness or the patient trying to be difficult – it is a symptom of Parkinson disease.” The study compared 80 people with Parkinson disease to 20 people with dystonia, another movement disorder. The researchers hypothesized that apathy would occur more often in people with Parkinson disease, because the disease affects areas of the brain in the frontal cortex that are involved in non-motor activities, whereas dystonia affects areas mainly involved with movement.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Depression
Link ID: 9162 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jaron Lanier Lngwidge iz a straynge thingee. You could probably read that sentence without much trouble. Sentence also not this time hard. You can screw around quite a bit with both spelling and word order and still be understood. This shouldn't be surprising: Language is flexible enough to evolve into new slangs, dialects, and entirely new tongues. In the 1960s, many early computer scientists hoped that human language was a type of code that could be written down in a neat, compact way, so there was a race to crack that code. If you could decipher the code, then a computer ought to be able to speak with people! That approach turned out to be extremely difficult, though. Automatic language translation, for instance, never really took off. In the last five years or so computers have gotten so powerful that it has become possible to shift methods. A program can look for correlations in large amounts of text. Even if it isn't possible to capture all the language variations that might appear in the real world (such as the oddities that I used at the start of this month's column) a sufficiently huge number of correlations eventually yields results. For instance, suppose you have a lot of text in two languages, like Chinese and English. If you start searching for sequences of letters or characters that appear in each text under similar circumstances, you can start to build a dictionary of correlations, even if the correlations don't always fit perfectly into a rigid organizing principle, such as a grammar. © 2005 Discover Media LLC.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 9161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eleven-year-old Azjanae Fields used to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like she was choking. "It was scary because I thought I was dying or something," she says. "I didn't know what was wrong with me. I just would wake up choking." The sleeping problems spilled over to the daytime, when she would nod off during class and take naps immediately after returning home from school. Doctors told her that her enlarged tonsils getting in the way of her air supply at night. University of Michigan sleep researcher Ron Chervin says that more subtle symptoms, like snoring, can also signal breathing problems that might be caused by enlarged tonsils. He says that typically children from two to 12 years old don't snore regularly, except when they have a cold. Enlarged tonsils or adenoids, both types of soft tissue around the throat, can cause sleep apnea, a condition when the throat closes, partially or fully, while a person is sleeping. Tonsillectomies, while historically thought of as a procedure just for recurrent infection, are the most common way to treat suspected sleep apnea, according to Chervin. He says prior research also showed a connection between sleep disorders and behavior problems. "Disrupting sleep, which is important for the brain, leads to abnormal behavior during the day," he says. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 9160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mary Beckman If you've ever tried to speak to someone who doesn't share your native tongue, you could probably intuit a bit of what they were saying just by how they said it. Anger, happiness, and even confusion traverse the language barrier quite well. Now a new study shows that emotions aren't the only information that piggybacks on our speech: We subconsciously convey important details about the objects around us just by verbally describing them. Language is largely symbolic--most of the time we use our words to convey ideas. But how we say something can be as important as what we say: "Hey man, nice car!" spoken with enthusiasm carries a much different connotation than when spoken with sarcasm. But can we communicate other information with our speech patterns, such as where the car is or where it's going? To find out, psychologist Howard Nusbaum and colleagues at the University of Chicago asked 24 college students to describe a dot moving across a screen. The students were told to use one of two sentences: "It is going up" or "It is going down." The team found that when students described the dots going up, the pitch of their voice was, on average, 6 hertz higher than that of those describing the dot going down. The same thing happened when another 24 students read the sentences from a computer screen, indicating people change the sound of their voice according to directional information contained within words. In another experiment, the researchers changed the speed of the dots; they found that, when describing the dots, the students spoke faster when the dots moved faster. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 9159 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have discovered a critical function for a protein involved in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the number one genetic killer of children under the age of two. The disease is caused when a key protein loses its ability to promote the survival and vigor of motor neurons. According to the Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy organization, spinal muscular atrophy affects 1 in 6,000 newborns, causing progressive muscle weakness, wasting, or atrophy as motor neurons degenerate. August is National Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness Month. In an article published in the July 21, 2006, issue of the journal Molecular Cell, researchers led by Gideon Dreyfuss, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, report that they now know the identity of a protein that is crucial for recognizing specific RNA molecules needed to process genetic information inside the cell. This process breaks down in people who have SMA. In 1994, researchers discovered that the gene, survival of motor neurons (Smn), is deleted or mutated in people with SMA. This observation strongly suggested that reduced levels of or mutations in the SMN protein cause spinal muscle atrophy. Dreyfuss and his colleagues subsequently showed that the SMN protein is needed by all cells to produce messenger RNA (mRNA). Production of mRNA is a critical step in gene expression, and ultimately, in the production of functional proteins. Specifically, the SMN protein plays a crucial role in the genesis of mRNA from a precursor called pre-mRNA. The conversion of pre-mRNA to mRNA takes place in the cell nucleus during a process called splicing. © 2006 Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 9158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest. When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day. The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels. According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply. Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s. Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors. The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked. Although the men reported they had slept better with a partner, they fared more badly in the tests, with their results suggesting they actually had more disturbed sleep. Both sexes had a more disturbed night's sleep when they shared their bed, Professor Kloesch told a meeting of the Forum of European Neuroscience. But women apparently managed to sleep more deeply when they did eventually drop off, since they claimed to be more refreshed than their sleep time suggested. Their stress hormone levels and mental scores did not suffer to the same extent as the men. But the women still reported that they had the best sleep when they were alone in bed. Bed sharing also affected dream recall. Women remembered more after sleeping alone and men recalled best after sex. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 9157 - Posted: 07.20.2006

By DENISE GRADY A blood product normally used to treat immune disorders and a type of leukemia may also slow or stop mental decline in people with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported yesterday at an Alzheimer’s conference in Madrid. The product is called IVIg (pronounced EYE-vig), for intravenous immunoglobulin, also known as gamma globulin. Made from pooled blood plasma, it is a thick soup of antibodies, the proteins made by the immune system to get rid of unwanted substances. It has been used for 30 years for other diseases and is dripped into a vein like a transfusion. But the findings in Alzheimer’s are based on an experiment involving only eight patients with no comparison group and need to be verified by larger studies, scientists said. “This is not ready for widespread use,” said Dr. Norman R. Relkin, director of the Memory Disorders Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Relkin and scientific advisers to the Alzheimer’s Association, the presenter of the conference, nonetheless said the results were promising and might lead to new methods of treatment, and to a better understanding of the disease. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9156 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY Middle-age people with prediabetes, high blood pressure and other factors that might increase their risk of Alzheimer's should just say no to that chocolate milkshake and go for a walk instead, according to research out Wednesday. Several studies presented at the 10th International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders this week in Spain add to the evidence suggesting that lifestyle factors might help maintain the brain's mental edge and might protect against Alzheimer's. The worldwide cost of treating the incurable brain disease that afflicts one in 10 people over 65 is estimated at $248 billion, a price tag that will increase as the population gets older, says William Thies of the Chicago-based Alzheimer's Association, which sponsored the meeting. "If we don't deal with this disease, we're going to bankrupt the health care system," he says. He adds that the problem could get worse if Americans don't start paying attention to risk factors such as those identified in a study done by Tulane University in New Orleans. Jeanette Gustat studied 72 men and women who were primarily in their 30s and early 40s. The team took blood pressure readings and drew blood to check for risk factors such as prediabetes, a condition that can lead to full-blown diabetes. The recruits also took a number of cognitive tests. Copyright 2006 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 9155 - Posted: 07.20.2006