By Laura Sanders Octopuses cycle through two stages of slumber, a new study reports. First comes quiet sleep, and then a shift to a twitchy, active sleep in which vibrant colors flash across the animals’ skin. These details, gleaned from four snoozing cephalopods in a lab in a Brazil, may provide clues to a big scientific mystery: Why do animals sleep? Sleep is so important that every animal seems to have a version of it, says Philippe Mourrain, a neurobiologist at Stanford University who recently described the sleep stages of fish (SN: 7/10/19). Scientists have also catalogued sleep in reptiles, birds, amphibians, bees, mammals and jellyfish, to name a few. “So far, we have not found a single species that does not sleep,” says Mourrain, who was not involved in the new study. Cephalopod neuroscientist and diver Sylvia Medeiros caught four wild octopuses, Octopus insularis, and brought them temporarily into a lab at the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil. After tucking the animals away in a quiet area, she began to carefully record their behavior during the day, when octopuses are more likely to rest. Two distinct states emerged, she and her colleagues report March 25 in iScience. In the first, called quiet sleep, the octopuses are pale and motionless with the pupils of their eyes narrowed to slits. Active sleep comes next. Eyes dart around, suckers contract, muscles twitch, skin textures change and, most dramatically, bright colors race across octopuses’ bodies. This wild sleep is rhythmic, happening every half an hour or so, and brief; it’s over after about 40 seconds. Active sleep is also rare; the octopuses spent less than 1 percent of their days in active sleep, the researchers found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 27749 - Posted: 03.27.2021

By Veronique Greenwood There’s nothing quite like the peculiar, bone-jarring reaction of a damaged tooth exposed to something cold: a bite of ice cream, or a cold drink, and suddenly, that sharp, searing feeling, like a needle piercing a nerve. Researchers have known for years that this phenomenon results from damage to the tooth’s protective outer layer. But just how the message goes from the outside of your tooth to the nerves within it has been difficult to uncover. On Friday, biologists reported in the journal Science Advances that they have identified an unexpected player in this painful sensation: a protein embedded in the surface of cells inside the teeth. The discovery provides a glimpse of the connection between the outer world and the interior of a tooth, and could one day help guide the development of treatments for tooth pain. More than a decade ago, Dr. Katharina Zimmerman, now a professor at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, discovered that cells producing a protein called TRPC5 were sensitive to cold. When things got chilly, TRPC5 popped open to form a channel, allowing ions to flow across the cell’s membrane. Ion channels like TRPC5 are sprinkled throughout our bodies, Dr. Zimmerman said, and they are behind some surprisingly familiar sensations. For instance, if your eyes start to feel cold and dry in chilly air, it’s a result of an ion channel being activated in the cornea. She wondered which other parts of the body might make use of a cold receptor such as TRPC5. And it occurred to her that “the most sensitive tissue in the human body can be teeth” when it comes to cold sensations. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 27748 - Posted: 03.27.2021

By Erin Garcia de Jesús One defective gene might turn some bunnies’ hops into handstands, a new study suggests. To move quickly, a breed of domesticated rabbit called sauteur d’Alfort sends its back legs sky high and walks on its front paws. That strange gait may be the result of a gene tied to limb movement, researchers report March 25 in PLOS Genetics. Sauteur d’Alfort rabbits aren’t the only animal to adopt an odd scamper if there’s a mutation to this gene, known as RORB. Mice with a mutation to the gene also do handstands if they start to run, says Stephanie Koch, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved with the rabbit work. And even while walking, the mice hike their back legs up to waddle forward, almost like a duck. “I spent four years looking at these mice doing little handstands, and now I get to see a rabbit do the same handstand,” says Koch, who led a 2017 study published in Neuron that explored the mechanism behind the “duck gait” in mice. “It’s amazing.” Understanding why the rabbits move in such a strange way could help researchers learn more about how the spinal cord works. The study is “contributing to our basic knowledge about a very important function in humans and all animals — how we are able to move,” says Leif Andersson, a molecular geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 27747 - Posted: 03.27.2021

by Angie Voyles Askham Mice that lack CNTNAP2, a gene linked to autism, have an atypical collection of microbes in their intestines, according to a new study. Treating the mice with a strain of gut bacteria commonly found in wildtype mice, people and other mammals improves their social behavior. The CNTNAP2 mice are hyperactive, and those raised in isolation prefer to spend time alone or with a familiar cagemate rather than with a stranger mouse. But when they grow up alongside wildtype littermates, their social deficits — but not their hyperactivity — disappear, the study shows. Because mice that live together eat one another’s feces, which can alter the microbial content of their guts, the researchers wondered if a change in the microbiome might be driving the change in the isolated animals’ social behaviors. “It was sort of a serendipitous discovery,” says lead investigator Mauro Costa-Mattioli, professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. The findings highlight how some autism traits associated with genetic mutations may be shaped, and potentially eased, via changes to the gut microbiome. Figuring out which behaviors can be attributed to the environment is particularly helpful for thinking about treatments because the environment can be changed, whereas “genetics is still hard to correct,” says Sarkis Mazmanian, professor of microbiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not involved in the work. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27746 - Posted: 03.27.2021

By Christina Caron When Laura Drager contracted Covid-19 in July, it was as though someone had suddenly muted her olfactory system. One morning she was sipping her favorite Gatorade (the yellow one), and two hours later the drink was completely flavorless. She immediately lit a candle and blew it out, but she couldn’t smell the smoke. Her sense of smell had disappeared. Now, she said, “everything either tastes like bleach or tastes like nothing.” Over the past few months she has lost 19 pounds. “I don’t have that ‘I’m hungry’ feeling,” said Ms. Drager, 41, who lives in Sevierville, Tenn., about 45 minutes from Knoxville. “I think you forget how much smell and taste is a part of your life until it goes away.” As the coronavirus continues to spread, there are increasing numbers of people who have either lost their senses of smell after contracting Covid or are struggling with parosmia, a disturbing disorder that causes previously normal odors to develop a new, often unpleasant aroma. One meta-analysis published in September found that as many as 77 percent of those who had Covid were estimated to have some form of smell loss as a result of their infections. The recommended treatment for these conditions is smell training. But how exactly do you do it, and why should you bother? © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27745 - Posted: 03.27.2021

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have discovered specific regions within the DNA of neurons that accumulate a certain type of damage (called single-strand breaks or SSBs). This accumulation of SSBs appears to be unique to neurons, and it challenges what is generally understood about the cause of DNA damage and its potential implications in neurodegenerative diseases. Because neurons require considerable amounts of oxygen to function properly, they are exposed to high levels of free radicals—toxic compounds that can damage DNA within cells. Normally, this damage occurs randomly. However, in this study, damage within neurons was often found within specific regions of DNA called “enhancers” that control the activity of nearby genes. Fully mature cells like neurons do not need all of their genes to be active at any one time. One way that cells can control gene activity involves the presence or absence of a chemical tag called a methyl group on a specific building block of DNA. Closer inspection of the neurons revealed that a significant number of SSBs occurred when methyl groups were removed, which typically makes that gene available to be activated. An explanation proposed by the researchers is that the removal of the methyl group from DNA itself creates an SSB, and neurons have multiple repair mechanisms at the ready to repair that damage as soon as it occurs. This challenges the common wisdom that DNA damage is inherently a process to be prevented. Instead, at least in neurons, it is part of the normal process of switching genes on and off. Furthermore, it implies that defects in the repair process, not the DNA damage itself, can potentially lead to developmental or neurodegenerative diseases.

Keyword: Epigenetics; Parkinsons
Link ID: 27744 - Posted: 03.27.2021

By Karen J. Bannan Hayley Gudgin of Sammamish, Wash., got her first migraine in 1991 when she was a 19-year-old nursing student. “I was convinced I was having a brain hemorrhage,” she says. “There was no way anything could be that painful and not be really serious.” She retreated to her bed and woke up feeling better the next day. But it wasn’t long until another migraine hit. And another. Taking a pill that combines caffeine with the pain relievers acetaminophen and codeine made life manageable until she got pregnant and had to stop taking her medication. After her son was born, the migraines came back. She started taking the drugs again, but they didn’t work and actually made her attacks worse. By the time Gudgin gave birth to her second son in 1997, she was having about 15 attacks a month. Her symptoms worsened over time and included severe pain, nausea, sensitivity to light, swollen hands, difficulty speaking, vomiting and diarrhea so intense she often wound up dehydrated in the emergency room. “It hit me [that] I had to do something when I was vomiting in the toilet, and my 3-year-old came and pulled my hair back,” she says. “It was no way to live — and not just because of the pain. You go to sleep every night not knowing how you’re going to wake up. You make plans knowing you might have to cancel them.” A headache specialist prescribed several preventive medicines, but each caused side effects for Gudgin, including weight gain and kidney stones. Then, in 2018, Gudgin read about a new type of treatment for frequent migraine sufferers. Her neurologist agreed it was worth a try. After much wrangling with her insurance company — the drug is costly, and she had to prove that two other drugs had failed to help her — she got approval to take it. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 27743 - Posted: 03.23.2021

By Alyson Krueger Samantha LaLiberte, a social worker in Nashville, thought she had made a full recovery from Covid-19. But in mid-November, about seven months after she’d been sick, a takeout order smelled so foul that she threw it away. When she stopped by the house of a friend who was cooking, she ran outside and vomited on the front lawn. “I stopped going places, even to my mom’s house or to dinner with friends, because anything from food to candles smelled so terrible,” Ms. LaLiberte, 35, said. “My relationships are strained.” She is dealing with parosmia, a distortion of smell such that previously enjoyable aromas — like that of fresh coffee or a romantic partner — may become unpleasant and even intolerable. Along with anosmia, or diminished sense of smell, it is a symptom that has lingered with some people who have recovered from Covid-19. The exact number of people experiencing parosmia is unknown. One recent review found that 47 percent of people with Covid-19 had smell and taste changes; of those, about half reported developing parosmia. “That means that a rose might smell like feces,” said Dr. Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He noted that people typically recover their smell within months. Right now, Ms. LaLiberte can’t stand the scent of her own body. Showering is no help; the smell of her body wash, conditioner and shampoo made her sick. What’s more, she detected the same odor on her husband of eight years. “There is not a whole lot of intimacy right now,” she said. “And it’s not because we don’t want to.” “It’s a much bigger issue than people give it credit for,” said Dr. Duika Burges Watson, who leads the Altered Eating Research Network at Newcastle University in England and submitted a journal research paper on the topic. “It is something affecting your relationship with yourself, with others, your social life, your intimate relationships.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27742 - Posted: 03.23.2021

By Kelly Servick The most advanced mind-controlled devices being tested in humans rely on tiny wires inserted into the brain. Now researchers have paved the way for a less invasive option. They’ve used ultrasound imaging to predict a monkey’s intended eye or hand movements—information that could generate commands for a robotic arm or computer cursor. If the approach can be improved, it may offer people who are paralyzed a new means of controlling prostheses without equipment that penetrates the brain. “This study will put [ultrasound] on the map as a brain-machine interface technique,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Krishna Shenoy, who was not involved in the new work. “Adding this to the toolkit is spectacular.” Doctors have long used sound waves with frequencies beyond the range of human hearing to create images of our innards. A device called a transducer sends ultrasonic pings into the body, which bounce back to indicate the boundaries between different tissues About a decade ago, researchers found a way to adapt ultrasound for brain imaging. The approach, known as functional ultrasound, uses a broad, flat plane of sound instead of a narrow beam to capture a large area more quickly than with traditional ultrasound. Like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional ultrasound measures changes in blood flow that indicate when neurons are active and expending energy. But it creates images with much finer resolution than fMRI and doesn’t require participants to lie in a massive scanner. The technique still requires removing a small piece of skull, but unlike implanted electrodes that read neurons’ electrical activity directly, it doesn’t involve opening the brain’s protective membrane, notes neuroscientist Richard Andersen of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a co-author of the new study. Functional ultrasound can read from regions deep in the brain without penetrating the tissue. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 27741 - Posted: 03.23.2021

By Pam Belluck Ivan Agerton pulled his wife, Emily, into their bedroom closet, telling her not to bring her cellphone. “I believe people are following me,” he said, his eyes flaring with fear. He described the paranoid delusions haunting him: that people in cars driving into their suburban Seattle cul-de-sac were spying on him, that a SWAT officer was crouching in a bush in their yard. It was a drastic change for the 49-year-old Mr. Agerton, a usually unflappable former marine and risk-taking documentary photographer whose most recent adventure involved exploring the Red Sea for two months in a submarine. He was accustomed to stress and said that neither he nor his family had previously experienced mental health issues. But in mid-December, after a mild case of Covid-19, he was seized by a kind of psychosis that turned life into a nightmare. He couldn’t sleep, worried he had somehow done something wrong, suspected ordinary people of sinister motives and eventually was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward twice. “Like a light switch — it happened this fast — this intense paranoia hit me,” Mr. Agerton said in interviews over two months. “It was really single-handedly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.” Mr. Agerton’s experience reflects a phenomenon doctors are increasingly reporting: psychotic symptoms emerging weeks after coronavirus infection in some people with no previous mental illness. Doctors say such symptoms may be one manifestation of brain-related aftereffects of Covid-19. Along with more common issues like brain fog, memory loss and neurological problems, “new onset” psychosis may result from an immune response, vascular issues or inflammation from the disease process, experts hypothesize. Sporadic cases have occurred with other viruses, and while such extreme symptoms are likely to affect only a small proportion of Covid survivors, cases have emerged worldwide. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 27740 - Posted: 03.23.2021

Tinbete Ermyas & Kira Wakeam Roughly 35 bills are being proposed that would limit or prohibit transgender women from competing in women's athletics. Above, athletes run in the Women's 400 meter final during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Shaun Botterill/Shaun Botterill/Getty Images Throughout the country, roughly 35 bills have been introduced by state legislators that would limit or prohibit transgender women from competing in women's athletics, according to the LGBTQ rights group Freedom for All Americans. That's up from only two in 2019. The latest action in this push came last week, when Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves signed into law the "Mississippi Fairness Act." The law prohibits schools from allowing transgender female students to compete in female sports and cites "inherent differences between men and women" as one of the reasons to block these athletes from competition. The often heated debates around these bills have centered on whether transgender women and girls have an unfair advantage over cisgender women — a term used for those who identify with the sex assigned to them at birth. Proponents say the legislation is needed in order to maintain fairness in women's athletics by reducing what they believe is an inherent competitive edge of trans athletes who identify as female. Critics call that a false argument and say the proposals are being used as a way to discriminate against transgender Americans. These proposals, they say, also risk opening the door to humiliating treatment of women and girls who don't fit culturally-accepted notions of femininity. Often missing from the culture-war aspect of the debate is a focus on the type of questions that Dr. Eric Vilain has spent much of his career researching. Vilain, a pediatrician and geneticist who studies sex differences in athletes, says there are no good faith reasons to limit transgender women's participation in sports, especially at the high school level. Vilain has advised both the International Olympic Committee and the NCAA, and says these laws generally aren't based in scientific evidence, but rather "target women who have either a different biology or ... simply look different." © 2021 npr

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27739 - Posted: 03.23.2021

Amanda Heidt In 2015, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke released a report stating that more than 600 neurological conditions—including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and motor neuron disease, among others—affect an estimated 50 million Americans, a number that is growing each year. Many of these diseases share a common feature in the degradation of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), the cloak of endothelial cells that disposes of the brain’s waste while also providing necessary nutrients. To better understand these diseases and to develop new ways to treat them, scientists rely on increasingly sophisticated cellular models that attempt to mimic the full complexity of the BBB. The advent of hydrogels, microfluidics, and so-called organs on a chip all rely on stable cell lines to build a useful proxy, but new research suggests that all cells may not respond equally to experimentation. The Scientist spoke with Alisa Morss Clyne and Callie Weber, two bioengineers at the University of Maryland whose recent review, published March 16 in APL Bioengineering, makes the case for the inclusion of sex as a biological variable in cell-based experiments. Men and women, a growing body of evidence shows, respond differently to brain diseases in ways that can profoundly influence a study’s findings. Men, for example, are 1.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and often experience the condition more severely, perhaps because the higher levels of estrogen in premenopausal women shield the BBB from damage. When purchasing cells, Clyne says, scientists are rarely aware of the sex of the original cell donor, but it may ultimately have important consequences for the study of diseases, neurological or otherwise. © 1986–2021 The Scientist

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 27738 - Posted: 03.23.2021

By Jake Buehler A light crackling sound floats above a field in northern Switzerland in late summer. Its source is invisible, tucked inside a dead, dried plant stem: a dozen larval mason bees striking the inner walls of their herbaceous nest. While adult bees and wasps make plenty of buzzy noises, their young have generally been considered silent. But the babies of at least one bee species make themselves heard, playing percussion instruments growing out of their faces and rear ends, researchers report February 25 in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. The larvae’s chorus of tapping and rasping may be a clever strategy to befuddle predatory wasps. Unlike honeybees, the mason bee (Hoplitis tridentata) lives a solitary life. Females chew into dead plant stems and lay their eggs inside, often in a single row of chambers lined up along its length. After hatching, the larvae feed on a provision of pollen left by the mom, spin a cocoon and overwinter as a pupa inside the stem. Andreas Müller, an entomologist at the nature conservation research agency Natur Umwelt Wissen GmbH in Zurich, has been studying bees in the Osmiini tribe, which includes mason bees and their close relatives, for about 20 years. Noticing that H. tridentata populations have been declining in northern Switzerland, he and colleague Martin Obrist tried to help the bees. “We offered the bees bundles of dry plant stems as nesting sites, and when we checked the bundles we heard the larval sounds for the first time,” says Müller. “This is a new phenomenon not only in the osmiine bees, but in bees in general.” He and Obrist, a biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, gathered stem nests from the field and subjected them to various types of physical disturbance, trying to determine what kinds of pestering triggers the bee larvae to drum. In some nests, the duo cut windows into the stems to observe larvae through the translucent cocoon walls, unveiling the secret of how the insects were creating the noises. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 27737 - Posted: 03.17.2021

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre If you’ve ever counted to three before jumping into the pool with a friend, you’ve got something in common with dolphins. The sleek marine mammals use coordinated clicks and whistles to tell each other the precise moment to perform a backflip or push a button, according to new research. That makes them the only animals besides humans known to cooperate with vocal cues. The new work is “fascinating,” says Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who was not involved with the research. “We just see so much cooperation and synchrony [among dolphins] in the wild. This helps us understand how they accomplish that.” Free-roaming dolphins are often in sync. They hunt in large groups and drive away rivals with coordinated displays. They can even match others’ movements down to their breathing patterns. But how do they achieve such synchronicity? Scientists have long suspected the cetaceans coordinate their actions through vocal cues. Underwater microphones, called hydrophones, have been picking up their whistles and clicks for decades. But dolphins don’t open their mouths when they “talk,” and tracking underwater sound has long been a technical challenge. So scientists have been developing ways to capture those sounds. In France, researchers recently combined five hydrophones to set up a star-shaped pattern that can pinpoint which dolphin in a group is “speaking,” says ethologist Juliana Lopez-Marulanda of Paris-Saclay University who co-developed the approach. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 27736 - Posted: 03.17.2021

By Lisa Sanders, M.D. The 35-year-old man rose abruptly from the plastic chair in the waiting room at the Health Sciences Center Emergency Department in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He lurched toward the door, arms held stiffly before him as if warding off something only he could see. “I gotta get out of here,” he muttered. His eyes looked unfocused as he glanced at the family he didn’t seem to recognize. His mother hurried to his side. “It’s OK, Sean,” she murmured in his ear. “We’re here with you.” She took him over to his seat. And then, just as suddenly, he was back to normal, back to the man his family knew and loved. This was why Sean was in the E.D. that day. He had been completely healthy until the day before, when his brother-in-law found him wandering through the house, confused. He didn’t seem to know where he was, or even who he was. But by the time the ambulance reached the community hospital near their home, the confusion had cleared, and he seemed fine. The doctors in the E.D. ordered a few tests and, when they were unrevealing, sent him home. Only a few hours later, it happened again. That’s when they brought him here, to the biggest hospital in the city. By the time they arrived, the bizarre episode had subsided. A second attack in the waiting room lasted only a few minutes, so when the E.D. doctors saw him, he was fine. These doctors also wanted to send him home, but the mother was adamant. Her 30-year-old daughter, Andrea, was admitted to another hospital in the city just three months earlier. Andrea had episodes of confusion, too. And she died in that hospital 12 days later. No one understood what her daughter had or why she died, the mother told the doctors. She wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to her son. Re-enacting His Sister’s Symptoms? And so Sean was admitted for observation. Over the next two days, he had many of these strange episodes. He would try to leave the unit. He wouldn’t answer questions; he didn’t even seem to hear them. He looked afraid. And then it would be over. He was seen by specialists in internal medicine and neurology. He had an M.R.I., a spinal tap and many blood tests. When none of those tests provided an answer, the doctors worried that he had been so emotionally traumatized by his sister’s sudden death that he developed psychological symptoms, something known as conversion disorder. He was transferred to the psychiatric unit for further evaluation. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 27735 - Posted: 03.17.2021

Greg Rosalsky Last month, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed three bills making it official: marijuana will soon be growing legally in the gardens of the Garden State for anyone over 21 to enjoy. The bills follow through on a marijuana legalization ballot initiative that New Jerseyans approved overwhelmingly last year. New Jersey is now one of a dozen states, plus the District of Columbia, which have let loose the magic dragon — and more states, like Virginia, may be on the way. It's been almost a decade since Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana. That's given economists and other researchers enough time to study the effects of the policy. Here are some of the most interesting findings: Legalization didn't seem to substantially affect crime rates — Proponents of legalizing weed claimed it would reduce violent crimes. Opponents said it would increase violent crimes. A study by the CATO Institute finds, "Overall, violent crime has neither soared nor plummeted in the wake of marijuana legalization." Legalization seems to have little or no effect on traffic accidents and fatalities — Opponents of marijuana legalization argued it would wreak havoc on the road. A few studies have found that's not the case. Economists Benjamin Hansen, Keaton S. Miller & Caroline Weber, for instance, found evidence suggesting it had no effect on trends in traffic fatalities in both Colorado and Washington. © 2021 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27734 - Posted: 03.17.2021

By Penelope Green In 1999, Rosalind D. Cartwright, a renowned sleep researcher, testified for the defense in the murder trial of a man who arose from his bed early one night, gathered up tools to fix his pool’s filter pump, stabbed his beloved wife to death, rolled her into the pool and went back to bed. When he was awakened by the police, he said he had no memory of his actions. His lawyers argued that the man, who had no motive to kill his wife, had been sleepwalking and was therefore in an unconscious state and not responsible for his behavior. Dr. Cartwright, who had successfully served as a witness for the defense in a similar case a decade earlier (working pro bono in both trials), agreed. The jury did not, and the man was sentenced to life in prison. As Dr. Cartwright was leaving the courtroom, however, a bailiff asked for her business card. Abashedly, he told her, “I beat people up in my sleep.” Nicknamed the Queen of Dreams by her peers, Dr. Cartwright studied the role of dreaming in divorce-induced depression, worked with sleep apnea patients and their frustrated spouses, and helped open one of the first sleep disorder clinics. She died at 98 on Jan. 15 at her home in Chicago. Her daughter, Carolyn Cartwright, said the cause was a heart attack. The earlier sleepwalking murder case that hinged on Dr. Cartwright’s testimony was a notorious one, even inspiring a television movie, “The Sleepwalker Killing”: In 1987 a young Canadian man murdered his mother-in-law and brutally attacked his father-in-law after driving from his home to theirs in his pajamas. Like the pool man, he had no motive to kill them. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27733 - Posted: 03.17.2021

Alexandra Jones In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a trail motorbike into a wall at his parents’ house in Cambridgeshire. He’d been hiding it in the shed, but “it was far too powerful for me, and on my very first time starting it in the garden, I smashed it into a wall”. His mother came outside to find the skinny teenager in a heap next to the crumpled motorbike. “I was in a lot of trouble.” Grant hadn’t given this childhood memory much thought in the intervening years, but one hot August day in 2019, it came back to him with such clarity that, at 53, now a stocky father of two, he suddenly understood it as a clue to his dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol. The day before, a team of specialists at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital had given him an intravenous infusion of ketamine, a dissociative hallucinogen, in common use as an anaesthetic since the 1970s, and more recently one of a group of psychedelic drugs being hailed as a silver bullet in the fight to save our ailing mental health. To date, more than 100 patients with conditions as diverse as depression, PTSD and addiction have been treated in research settings across the UK, using a radical new intervention that combines psychedelic drugs with talking therapy. What was once a fringe research interest has become the foundation of a new kind of healthcare, one that, for the first time in modern psychiatric history, purports to not only treat but actually cure mental ill health. And if advocates are to be believed, that cure will be available on the NHS within the next five years. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27732 - Posted: 03.13.2021

By Rachel Nuwer The ability to link language to the world around us is a crowning feature of our species. For very young infants, it is not yet about learning the meaning of words like “cat” or “dog.” Rather, the acoustic signals in speech help foster infants' fundamental cognitive capacities, including the formation of categories of objects, such as cats or dogs. The sounds that activate this key step in development can come not just from human language but also from vocalizations made by nonhuman primates. A new study shows that babies do not use just any natural sound to build cognition, however. While primate calls and human language pass the test, birdsongs do not. “By tracing the link from language to cognition and how it’s built up with babies’ experiences with objects in the world, we get to see what are the components of this quintessential human ability to go beyond the here and now,” says Sandra Waxman, a developmental scientist at Northwestern University and senior author of the findings, which were published today in PLOS ONE. “Asking how broad that earliest link is helps to answer questions about our evolutionary legacy.” By three or four months of age, infants can categorize objects—from toys and food to pets and people—based on commonalities those objects share. This ability is boosted if the objects are presented while the infants are listening to language. The new findings build on previous work Waxman and her colleagues conducted about which sounds outside of the realm of human speech support infants’ ability to categorize objects. In past studies, they found that sequences of pure tones and backward speech do not help infants under six months of age to categorize objects, whereas listening to vocalizations from nonhuman primates—specifically, lemurs—does..” © 2021 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Language
Link ID: 27731 - Posted: 03.13.2021

Neuroskeptic A new paper published in Nature Medicine reveals the wide variety of emotional experiences that can be triggered by electrical stimulation of the brain. Authors Katherine W. Scangos and colleagues tell how they implanted a single patient with 10 electrodes in different parts of the limbic system. The patient, a 36-year-old woman, had a history of severe depression, and was currently suffering a depressive episode which had not responded to any treatments. So, she agreed to undergo experimental deep brain stimulation (DBS). Over the course of 10 days, Scangos et al. tried many different stimulation parameters across the 10 electrodes, while the patient reported what she felt. Here's the full map of the emotional responses: Stimulation could evoke a gamut of emotions, from joy and relaxation to fear and darkness. For instance, stimulation of the left amygdala produced "a good feeling, more alert", but when it came to the right amygdala, stimulation instead caused feelings of "doom and gloom, very scary". The patient reported a feeling of "apathy" leading her to comment that "a lot of idiots must live like this", following right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) stimulation. Interestingly, stimulation of certain sites could be either pleasant or unpleasant, depending on the patient's mood at the time. For example, OFC stimulation was "positive and calming if delivered during a high/neutral arousal state, but worsened mood if delivered during a low arousal state, causing the patient to feel excessively drowsy." © 2021 Kalmbach Media Co.

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 27730 - Posted: 03.13.2021