A failure in the chemical messaging system in the brain has been identified in people with schizophrenia. A team from the UK's Institute of Psychiatry compared hi-tech scans of the brains of people with the condition with healthy volunteers. They found a glitch at the chemical junction which needs to be negotiated for nerve cells to talk to each other. The charity Rethink said the research was important, but added schizophrenia was "more than a chemical imbalance". Schizophrenia affects around 1% of the population - as many as are affected by diabetes - and it often strikes young people as they aim to complete their education or begin work. It is linked to disrupted thinking and behaviour, but scientists want to discover why that happens. The IoP researchers, working with colleagues from University College London, used a scanning technique called single photon emission tomography (SPET). They compared brains in 13 healthy people with five people with untreated schizophrenia and another 16 who were on medication for the condition. When the communication system in the brain works properly, neurons talk to each other by sending out branches. These branches connect at a junction where the chemical glutamate acts as a key to unlock a barrier - a chemical called NDMA receptor - and allow the message through. A failure in this system leads to poor connections between areas of the brain that need to talk to each other. (C)BBC

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 8757 - Posted: 04.10.2006

The difficulties people with autism have in relating to others could be due to poor communication between brain areas, scientists suggest. It may explain why they do not interact well, as the weak links mean they benefit less from social situations. It had been thought that their lack of social skills was due to abnormalities in particular brain areas. The study in Neuroimage, carried out by University of London researchers, compared brain scans of 32 people. The researchers took brain scans of 16 people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and above-average IQs, as well as those of 16 unaffected volunteers. They were shown four images on the screen - two of houses and two of faces. They were then asked to concentrate on either the faces or houses and decide if they were identical. Scans showed there were marked differences in the brain activity of the two groups. In the control group, paying attention to pictures of faces caused a significant increase in brain activity. But for people with ASD, paying attention to faces made no impact at all on the brain, explaining their lack of interest in faces. Both groups had the same reaction to houses. Dr Geoff Bird, at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who led the research, said: "The standard view of social problems in ASD is that there is a problem in the part of the brain that processes faces. Our research suggests that this is not the real problem - it seems to be that paying attention to faces doesn't lead to the normal increase in brain activity. (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 8756 - Posted: 04.10.2006

Nearly 1 in 7 adults in New York City described their mental health last year as being frequently "not good," compared with 1 in 10 adults in a comparable national survey, according to data being released today by the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The findings, from the city's community health survey, a telephone poll of 10,000 randomly selected adults conducted each year since 2002, confirm what many New Yorkers suspect — that life in the nation's most populous city can be difficult and lonely. Thirteen percent of adults who answered the city's survey last year reported that their mental health was "not good" on 14 or more days of the month, compared with 10 percent in a similar national survey that measured "frequent mental distress," like stress, depression or other emotional problems. The data will be presented today in a conference at Hunter College organized by Dr. Neal L. Cohen, a former city health commissioner. Dr. Lloyd I. Sederer, the executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the health department, said he believed that the higher rate of "frequent mental distress" reported by city residents was statistically significant, although the precise reasons were not clear. "I wish we knew, in a way that we could say with confidence, why that difference is," he said. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 8755 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Abby Christopher More than 50,000 people die of head injuries in the United States every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that number could be dramatically reduced if a new handheld brain scanner proves its mettle in the field. The InfraScanner, under development at Drexel University, could help medical teams detect brain injuries much more cheaply and quickly on the battlefield and at accident scenes. "How do you triage a soldier? How does an EMT figure out who to bring to a trauma center?" asked Dr. Geoff Manley, an associate professor of neurological surgery at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center and neurotrauma chief at San Francisco General Hospital's trauma center. "A triage device is desperately needed. This device can help with early diagnosis, which reduces the chances of secondary injury," Manley said. The device, which consists of a scanner and a Windows-based PDA, uses patented near-infrared optical brain imaging to determine if there is bleeding in the brain. After scanning eight points on the head, the InfraScanner sends the data through a Bluetooth connection to the PDA, where it is displayed and stored. Results for each point scanned are coded green for no bleeding and red for bleeding. © Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 8754 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Susan Kruglinski In a recent issue of Discover, we wrote about people who use mnemonic skills to demonstrate incredible feats of memory (How to Win the World Memory Championship, April, 2006) Post press update: Our writer, Joshua Foer, actually won the event. Neuroscientists at the University of Irvine now claim to be studying a remarkable woman who is the first ever reported to have an extraordinary capacity for memory without using any mnemonic tricks – long ago memories simply pop into her head. Critics of this research wonder if she is not simply using ordinary memory skills in an unconscious way. In our June issue of Discover, we will have an article about this woman, who remains anonymous but is called AJ, and the controversial research. In the meantime, associate editor Susan Kruglinski has conducted an E-mail interview with AJ, asking her what it is like to remember every day as if it were yesterday. When and how did you realize you had superior memory skills? It was in 1978 when I was 12 years old. I was studying for my first set of finals at the end of the 7th grade and I was sitting and listening to my mother drone on and on about science and such, and I started to think about the year before when I was in the sixth grade, and how easy life was back then. It was May of 1978, so I started to think about that exact day back in May 1977, and I just started thinking about each day from that month the year before. It actually startled me at first to think that I could remember so exactly. What are you good at remembering? I can remember everything that has happened to me. What day it was on, what was happening in the world, who was in my life at the time, and usually what the weather was like. I am very affected by the weather, so it is always something I remember. If you were to tell me the day you were married or the day your child was born (in the last 30 years) I could tell you what day it was, what I was doing, etc. © 2005 Discover Media LLC.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8753 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The discovery of a possible hibernation hormone in the brain may unlock the mystery behind the dormant state, researchers reported in the April 7, 2006 issue of Cell. Hibernation allows animals from bears to rodents to survive unscathed--in a state of suspended animation--under the harshest of winter conditions. If the findings in chipmunks are confirmed, the hormone would represent the first essential brain signal governing the seasonal adaptation, according to the researchers. As hibernation factors endow animals with an incredible ability to cope under otherwise lethal conditions--ratcheting down their metabolic rate to survive on limited energy reserves and withstanding extreme cardiovascular and oxygen stresses--the candidate hormone might also pave the way toward clinical therapies that lend humans the same kind of protection, they added. The researchers earlier found that concentrations of "hibernation-specific protein" complex (HPc) decline in the blood of hibernating chipmunks. The team now reports evidence that the level of HPc in the brain increases at the onset of hibernation independently of changes in body temperature. Moreover, treatments that block HP activity in the animals' brains cuts hibernation short.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 8752 - Posted: 04.08.2006

A new skin patch may offer relief to patients in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. The Neupro patch, made by Schwarz Pharma, has been licensed for use in the UK. It delivers a drug that mimics the effects of a naturally occurring brain chemical, which is in short supply in people with Parkinson's. The Parkinson's Disease Society said the patch may help some manage their symptoms more easily. Between 8,000 and 10,000 new cases of Parkinson's are diagnosed in the UK every year, with 95% of cases in those aged over 40. At any one time, 120,000 people in the UK have the condition. People with the disease have a shortage of the brain chemical dopamine, which controls connections between nerve cells, leading to symptoms such as tremors. Until now, patients have mostly taken a dopamine agonist - an agent that acts directly on the dopamine receptors in the brain - in tablet form, or through injections of through a pump. The patch contains a new dopamine agonist, called rotigotine, and delivers a continuous dose of the drug over 24 hours, so patients only having to change the patch once a day. Doctors say it could help people who have problems swallowing pills and those with digestion problems that stop oral drugs being fully absorbed. (C)BBC

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 8751 - Posted: 04.08.2006

CINCINNATI--The number of sites in children's brains involved in language recognition decreases as the children age, according to a University of Cincinnati (UC) study. The finding, says Jerzy Szaflarski, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology at the UC Academic Health Center, suggests that as a child grows more language proficient, recalling words may involve less effort. It also supports earlier explanations as to why young children who injure a large part of one side of the brain often recover completely, or almost completely. Funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the study will be presented April 6 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in San Diego. The paper will also appear in print in the April Annals of Neurology. "The decrease in activity sites may mean that language areas in the brain are more flexible when children are younger and become more specialized as they mature," Dr. Szaflarski says. "This raises hope for rehabilitation of brain function in children after stroke or traumatic brain injuries," he says.

Keyword: Regeneration; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 8750 - Posted: 04.08.2006

Washington, DC — Although the human brain is skilled at facial recognition and discrimination, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center suggests that the brain may not have developed a specific ability for “understanding faces” but instead uses the same kind of pattern recognition techniques to distinguish between people as it uses to search for differences between other groups of objects, such as plants, animals and cars. The study, published in the April 6 edition of the journal Neuron, adds new evidence to the debate over how the brain understands and interprets faces, an area of neuroscience that has been somewhat controversial. Because the process of facial perception is complicated and involves different and widespread areas of the brain, there is much that remains unknown about how humans perform this task. “We found that faces aren’t special in the way many scientists once thought,” says Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, assistant professor of neuroscience and senior author of the study. “Rather, they are particular group of objects which the brain has learned to distinguish very well, much as it would for any other similar objects that are critical to human survival and communication.” Riesenhuber hopes that integrative research of this kind will help scientists better understand the neural bases of object recognition deficits in mental disorders, such as autism, dyslexia or schizophrenia. People with autism, for example, experience difficulty with recognizing faces, which might be caused by a defect on the neural level. Breakthroughs in this kind of research could someday lead to targeted therapies for the millions of people who suffer from these disorders.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 8749 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sociologists have long known that communes and other cooperative groups usually collapse into bickering and disband if they do not have clear methods of punishing members who become selfish or exploitative. Now an experiment by a team of German economists has found one reason punishment is so important: Groups that allow it can be more profitable than those that do not. Given a choice, most people playing an investment game created by the researchers initially decided to join a group that did not penalize its members. But almost all of them quickly switched to a punitive community when they saw that the change could profit them personally. The study, appearing today in the journal Science, suggests that groups with few rules attract many exploitative people who quickly undermine cooperation. By contrast, communities that allow punishment, and in which power is distributed equally, are more likely to draw people who, even at their own cost, are willing to stand up to miscreants. An expert not involved in the study, Elinor Ostrom, co-director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, said it helped clarify the conditions under which people will penalize others to promote cooperation. Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 8748 - Posted: 04.08.2006

By Susan Boni For The Inquirer For a year, William Utermohlen hid his fears and tried to follow his normal routine, teaching art and painting in his London studio. But when his art historian wife, Patricia, finally got inside to see a canvas, she had an unpleasant revelation: It was blank. William Utermohlen had not produced a thing in all those trips to the studio. He was soon found to be suffering with the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. After his diagnosis in 1996 at the age of 61, Utermohlen, a South Philadelphia native who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, started to paint with purpose once again. This time, the superb draftsman, who had always been able to capture the tiniest detail in his commissioned portraits, decided to paint himself. His compelling series of 14 self-portraits, completed over a five-year period, documents a notable artist's journey into dementia.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8747 - Posted: 04.08.2006

Judy Skatssoon Just anticipating a good laugh is enough to increase the level of feelgood hormones in your blood, a conference has heard. Previous work has shown that laughter triggers a cascade of beneficial physiological changes. But researchers presenting a new study at the Experimental Biology 2006 conference in the US recently say they've now shown that merely anticipating "mirthful laughter" before watching a funny video has significant neuroendocrine effects. Professor Lee Berk of Loma Linda University in California says people who were just about to watch their favourite funny video had 27% more beta endorphins and 87% more human growth hormone (HGH) than those who were told they'd be reading magazines for an hour. "We believe that results suggest that the anticipation of a ... laughter ... event initiates changes in neuroendocrine response prior to the onset of the event itself," he says. Beta endorphins provide natural pain relief and low levels are associated with depression. HGH is involved in growth, development and cell maintenance and some research suggests it plays a role in maintaining a healthy immune system. ©2006 ABC

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 8746 - Posted: 06.24.2010

One of Nature's great phenomena is how tiny songbirds can make their way over thousands of miles each fall to their winter feeding grounds and back again the following spring. Scientists have known for years that they travel by night to avoid predators, navigating by the stars and the Earth's invisible magnetic field. Yet how these birds "see" the Earth's magnetic field — a protective field that shields Earth from radiation, and is the basis for the magnetic north and south poles, but which people can't sense at all — has remained a mystery. Now researchers based in the United States and Europe have found a brain region in night-migrating songbirds that they think can "process" information from the Earth's magnetic field and turn it into an internal compass they can see. The brain region is called "Cluster N" — "N" for night-vision because the researchers believe the birds' ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field and transform it into a navigation tool is dependent on their ability to see at night. "What we discovered was that this brain area wasn't exclusively used for sensing magnetic fields, but instead it's being used to perhaps see at night," says Duke University neurobiologist Erich Jarvis. Jarvis collaborated with animal navigation researcher Henrik Mouritsen from the University of Oldenburg, in Germany, to compare the brains of two distantly related types of migrating songbirds, the Garden Warbler and the European Robin, to two types of non-migrating song birds, Canaries and Zebra Finches. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Vision
Link ID: 8745 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Like the rest of the eighteen million Alzheimer's sufferers worldwide, Lola Crosswhite must battle the disease using everyday tactics — the help of medications, written reminders, and assistance from family members, like her daughter Diana Shaw. However, unlike most Alzheimer's patients, Crosswhite also had access to something extra — an experimental gene therapy that she says delayed her decline from Alzheimer's for two years. Unfortunately, as predicted by the researchers, the treatment has since begun to wear off and now her memory loss is progressing again. "Even though I've had it all this time, but then it was better," she says. "Now I'm sliding back. So I'm going down the hill again." In 2002, Crosswhite was one of eight early-stage Alzheimer's patients to volunteer for risky brain surgery to test the safety of the first gene therapy for Alzheimer's. Researchers led by Mark Tuszynski, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, San Diego, introduced cells that had been genetically modified to make more of a substance called nerve growth factor (NGF) into the patients' brains. These cells were injected into areas of the brain where neurons were dying so that they could act as biological pumps, delivering NGF to the surrounding brain cells. © ScienCentral, 2000-2006.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 8744 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Couzin Even oft-repeated gender stereotypes harbor some truth: Angry men are more likely to yell or punch a wall, whereas angry women sit silently stewing. Now, a new study is tracing these distinctions in how men and women process emotion to an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain. Not only does the structure, the amygdala, function differently by gender, but its activity in men is also coupled with very different brain regions than it is in women. The amygdala straddles both sides of the brain and helps control how emotions such as fear are processed and remembered. Several studies have found gender differences when the amygdala is stimulated--by having volunteers recall scary movies, for example. In men, the right side of the amygdala, known simply as the right amygdala, appears more likely to become active, whereas in women it's the left. Neurobiologist Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wondered whether this difference was hardwired--whether, in other words, the amygdala retained its gender-specific tendencies even when nothing was activating it. If so, this would suggest that the structure was inherently different in men than in women. Cahill and his colleagues studied PET scans of 36 men and 36 women, all of whom were right-handed. The scans had been collected for various brain studies where volunteers were asked to close their eyes and relax while the pictures were taken. The team found that, even at rest, the amygdala worked differently in men and women. In women, blood flow to the left amygdala ebbed and flowed along with other brain structures while the right amygdala did little. In men, it was blood flow to the right amygdala that varied along with blood flow elsewhere in the brain, the researchers report 1 April NeuroImage. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 8743 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Christen Brownlee Scientists have prompted mouse-eye cells that aren't normally light sensitive to respond to light. This strategy could lead to new treatments for retinitis pigmentosa and related diseases, which cause blindness in 1 in 3,000 people worldwide. These diseases occur when the retina's light-sensing cells die. Called rods and cones, these cells—when healthy—convert light into an electrical signal. That signal then passes to nearby cells and eventually reaches the brain, where it's interpreted as vision. If rods and cones die, they aren't replaced. To restore vision in people who have lost these cells, scientists have suggested several strategies, such as growing rods and cones from stem cells or replacing them with synthetic chips that sense light. But so far, these approaches face myriad challenges. The new work took a gamble on some preliminary findings that indicated that other cells in the retina continue to function after the rods and cones die. These spared cells include inner retinal neurons, nerve cells that process information from rods and cones before sending it to the brain. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8742 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower The road to exceptional intelligence is paved with dramatic neural alterations, a new brain-imaging study finds. Critical parts of the brain's outer layer, or cortex, thicken more rapidly during childhood and thin more drastically during adolescence in individuals with extremely high IQ scores compared with peers of average or moderately above-average intelligence, say neuroscientist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., and his colleagues. The scientists propose that distinctive brain growth in superior-IQ youth reflects prolonged development of neural circuits that contribute to reasoning, planning, and other facets of analytical thinking. "Cortical thickness at any one age tells you next to nothing about intelligence," Shaw says. "What's important is that cortical development occurs differently in extremely clever kids, possibly as a result of particularly efficient sculpting of the brain." The report appears in the March 30 Nature. The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging scanner to track brain changes in 307 children and teenagers deemed free of psychiatric or neurological disorders. Most volunteers submitted to two or more brain scans at intervals averaging 2 years. Participants also completed a verbal-and-nonverbal IQ test upon entering the study as children or teenagers. ©2006 Science Service.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 8741 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nerve cells that normally are not light sensitive in the retinas of blind mice can respond to light when a green algae protein called channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) is inserted into the cell membranes, according to a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported study published in the April 6, 2006 issue of the journal Neuron. The study was conducted with mice that had been genetically bred to lose rods and cones, the light-sensitive cells in the retina. This condition is similar to the blinding disease retinitis pigmentosa (RP) in humans. Vision normally begins when rods and cones, also called photoreceptors, respond to light and send signals through the retina and the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain, where visual images are formed. Unfortunately, photoreceptors degenerate and die in some genetic diseases, such as RP. Both mice and humans go progressively blind because with the loss of rods and cones there is no signal sent to the brain. This study, funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the NIH, raises the intriguing possibility that visual function might be restored by conveying light-sensitive properties to other surviving cells in the retina after the rods and cones have died. Principal investigator Zhuo-Hua Pan, Ph.D., of Wayne State University School of Medicine, and his colleagues, using a gene-transfer approach, introduced the light-absorbing protein ChR2 into the mouse retinal cells that survived after the rods and cones had died. These cells became light sensitive and sent signals through the optic nerve to the visual cortex.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 8740 - Posted: 04.08.2006

Praying for someone might give you hope, but it won't help them recover from heart surgery. It may even harm them. That's the surprising result from a multi-year clinical trial on the therapeutic effects of prayer. Herbert Benson and Jeffery Dusek of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and their colleagues followed the fates of 1802 patients undergoing coronary bypass operations. Several Christian prayer groups prayed for one set of patients, while another did not receive any prayers. Although all these patients knew they were in the trial, neither they nor their doctors knew which of the groups they were in. The prayers made no detectable difference. In the first month after surgery, 52 per cent of prayed-for patients and 51 per cent of non-prayed-for patients suffered one or more complications, the researchers found (American Heart Journal, vol 151, p 934). A third group of patients received the same prayers as the first group, but were told they were being prayed for. Of these, 59 per cent suffered complications - significantly more than the patients left unsure of whether they were receiving prayers. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Stress
Link ID: 8739 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi Fast language learners have more white matter and less symmetrical brains, a new scanning study has revealed. The results among the first to link brain differences to language learning aptitude in healthy people, says Narly Golestani at University College London, UK. “The bigger picture is that we’re starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people’s abilities,” she says. Those in the study who were quickest to hear subtle differences in sounds from a foreign language were found to have the greatest amount of white, fatty tissue in a brain region responsible for sound processing. “It could be that this translates into greater efficiency in the brain,” comments Adam Brickman, who researches brain structure the Columbia University Medical Center in New York. Scientists’ understanding of white matter has improved recently, he says, thanks to better brain scanning technology. The fatty tissue provides insulation and enables signals to travel faster through nerve fibres. In contrast, the grey matter of the brain contains neurons without this protective layer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language; Glia
Link ID: 8738 - Posted: 06.24.2010