By Randy Dotinga Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as "neuromarketing," could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes. "The hope in neuromarketing is that there's some process in the brain that is a better predictor of whether people will actually buy things than what we already have," said Colin Camerer, professor of business economics at the California Institute of Technology. Over the past several years, American and German neuroscientists have been using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, brain scans to observe what happens in the brain when people evaluate things like beer, cars and politicians. The latest big finding came from neuroeconomists, who study how people make decisions about everything from buying a lottery ticket to deciding whether to avoid sitting next to a creepy guy on the bus. Earlier this month, Stanford University researchers reported that they've pinpointed the parts of the brain that handle two major parts of a choice -- figuring out how nifty something is and then calculating how likely it is that you'll get it. The study, published in the May 11 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, was designed to analyze different parts of the decision-making process. Researchers told subjects to press a button quickly when they saw a target on a screen. Before the target appeared, the subjects were told how much they might win during that round, from nothing to $5. © Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 7437 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A male fly's sexual courtship of a female fly is a complicated business of tapping, singing, wing vibration, and licking, but a single gene is all that is needed to produce this complex behavior, according to new research published in this week's issue of the journal Cell. The gene encodes the Fruitless protein. Male and female flies carry different versions of the fruitless protein, as a result of sex-specific splicing of the mRNA. The male form of Fruitless is critical for the male courtship ritual and males' preference for mating with females, as previous studies have shown. Now, Barry J. Dickson and Ebru Demir of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences show just how intimately fruitless is linked to these stereotypically male behaviors. They discovered that female flies with the male version of fruitless behave like males, directing at other females a sexual display nearly identical to their male counterparts. Female flies with the male version of the protein also make amorous advances toward male flies that express female pheromones. In these cases, "we have been able to reverse the sex roles during Drosophila courtship," Dickson and Demir say. Dickson and Demir created male-spliced versions of fruitless in female flies and female-spliced versions in male flies. Males with the female version of fruitless "barely court at all" when paired with virgin female flies in an observation chamber, according to the researchers.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7436 - Posted: 06.03.2005

Roxanne Khamsi Male and female fruitflies have been engineered to switch courtship roles, through the manipulation of a single gene. The study, which appears in Cell1, shows how a simple genetic adjustment can cause a dramatic change in sexual behaviour. "It was quite something to see," says Barry Dickson, who is one of the authors and is based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The mating behaviours of the Drosophila fruitfly are a far cry from intricate Hollywood romance. The male performs a series of tapping and tilting movements, to which the female usually responds if she has not recently mated. Females, in contrast, never court at all. But Dickson and his colleague Ebru Demir reversed this behaviour by designing female flies with the male version of a gene called fruitless. These insects initiated courtship with other females as often as their male counterparts did. The tweaked female flies could only be encouraged to court males if the males were designed to emit female pheromones, a form of natural chemical attractant. When male flies were given the female version of the fruitless gene, they stopped courting and became passive about sex. ©2005 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7435 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A single gene which hastens a fruit fly larva’s change into a buzzing sexual adult has been unveiled by researchers. This “maturity gene” could help scientists understand the stormy process of growing up in all animals and maybe even generate ways to manipulate the length of childhood in higher vertebrates, including humans. “It’s metamorphosis in insects and puberty in humans. Either way, it’s just the onset of adult form. Anyone who has watched a child mature knows that they change in very dramatic ways,” says Carl Thummel at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, US, one of the study authors. The timing of maturity is a complex process, influenced by factors like the availability food and genetics. But the molecular pathways remain similar throughout the animal kingdom. For example, the steroid hormones oestrogen and testosterone play an important role human adolescence, while the steroid ecdysone drives maturation in flies. To better understand the network of signals that control metamorphosis in flies, Thummel and his colleagues reduced the function of a receptor called DHR4 in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. To their surprise, they found that mutant flies with reduced DHR4 activity had a shorter juvenile phase and proceeded to adulthood at a smaller size. The immature larvae had cut short their youthful feeding frenzy by a day. This feeding session - crucial during the maturation process from hatching to pupae - usually lasts about four days. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7434 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Shankar Vedantam Scientists have found the chemical equivalent of the perfect sales pitch: a hormone that makes us more trusting than we normally are. Volunteers in a study were told they were participating in a decision-making experiment. Those who inhaled the hormone, which occurs naturally in the brain, were more likely to entrust others with large sums of money than were volunteers who inhaled no hormone. The experiment has profound implications about the nature of human trust. Researchers said their finding might lead to cures for people with disorders that prompt them to hold others at arm's length, but they acknowledged that the chemical, which is widely used in medicine, could be misused. The experiment, involving 128 participants, was conducted by scientists at the University of Zurich and other academic centers. Researchers had some volunteers inhale oxytocin and then examined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock transaction. The transaction involved taking a risk: handing over money to a "banker" who had the option of returning the investment with a profit or withholding principal and profit, leaving the investor with nothing. The experiment was a measure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers. Volunteers who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature. © 2005 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 7433 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY In a finding that may someday benefit the socially manipulative as well as the socially awkward, Swiss researchers are reporting that doses of a natural hormone significantly increased the level of trust that people placed in strangers who were handling their money. Scientists have long known that the hormone used in the study - oxytocin, which circulates widely in the body during childbirth and lactation - prompts warm relations and mating in other mammals. But they say the Swiss study, which appears in today's issue of the journal Nature, is the first to show that a simple administration of a hormone in humans can consistently alter something as socially sensitive as trust. The new finding could help researchers not only understand the biological system underlying social judgments but also perhaps correct it when it goes awry, as in conditions like social phobia or autism, scientists say. In the study, the participants played an investment game with anonymous partners. Those who were given oxytocin invested more money with the partners than did those who did not receive the hormone, the researchers found. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 7432 - Posted: 06.02.2005

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Remember how it felt the last time you burned your finger on a hot stove? Imagine what it's like to have that burning pain in your hands or feet all the time and know there's virtually nothing you can do about it. It's called neuropathic pain, and it's a common complication of many diseases and medical conditions, especially diabetes. Drugs have little effect on this type of pain, which is caused by damage to sensory neurons that transmit pain, temperature and touch signals to and from the brain. Now, scientists at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and the University of Michigan Medical School have developed a way to block the signals responsible for neuropathic pain. The secret to their success is based on a virus called herpes simplex or HSV – the same virus that causes cold sores and genital herpes. The scientists use a disabled form of the virus, called a vector, to deliver genes to the nucleus of neural cells. A study published today in the June, 2005 of the Annals of Neurology describes how laboratory rats with nerve damage showed much less pain-related behavior after receiving injections of the HSV-based vector, which contained a gene called GAD, or glutamic acid decarboxylase. The treatment's pain-killing effect lasted up to six weeks, and even longer in rats that received additional injections.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 7431 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When Ellen Bramble was 49 she stepped off a flight of stairs into thin air. She tumbled down, her laundry flying "every which way" and her limbs relaxed, as if she didn't even know she was falling. "I just kind of rolled and bounced on the concrete stairs…and I didn't get hurt, just a couple of bruises," says Bramble, a photographer from Portland, Oregon. This was the first of three falls that later led doctors to diagnose Bramble with multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is a disease in which the body's own white blood cells attack and erode the protective insulation around nerve fibers in the brain, spinal cord, and optical nerves, causing patients' bodies to go numb and lose track of what they're doing. As her disease progressed, Bramble, who is now 59, learned to deal with her physical limitations. But what's been most frustrating is that she's often felt lost in a "fog." Bramble has "cognitive dysfunction," a symptom shared by half of America's 400,000 multiple sclerosis patients, which makes it difficult for her to think clearly and to do simple things many people take for granted — remembering words, reading, keeping track of her daily chores, or even knowing where she's going when she pulls out of her driveway. (C) ScienCentral, 2000-2005.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 7430 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By studying in detail the ability of patients with selective brain damage to recall events in their past, researchers, led by Larry R. Squire of the University of California San Diego and Veterans Affairs Medical Center, have helped settle a long-standing controversy about where the long-term memory of one's personal experiences are stored. The research is published in the June 2 issue of Neuron. The controversy has revolved around whether long-term memory continues to depend on the region called the medial temporal lobe, which contains the brain's memory-processing center, the hippocampus. According to this view, such "autobiographical" memories depend on specific contextual information that would require the continued involvement of the brain's central memory structures. The other view is that autobiographical memories, like other types of shorter-term memories, gradually become independent of the medial temporal lobe as time passes. Memory studies of brain-damaged patients have not yielded a clear winner, because of the complexity of such damage and the difficulty in accurately documenting the quality of such memories. Now, Squire and his colleagues have presented evidence that "the ability to recollect remote autobiographical events depends not on the medial temporal lobe but on widely distributed neocortical areas."

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 7429 - Posted: 06.02.2005

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Using a newly released method to analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Northwestern University researchers have demonstrated that the interconnections between different parts of the brain are dynamic and not static. This and other findings answer longstanding debates about how brain networks operate to solve different cognitive tasks. They are presented in the current (June 1) issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Equally important, the researchers discovered that the brain region that performed the integration of information shifted depending on the task their subjects performed. In this study, the subjects were assigned two language tasks. In both, subjects were asked to read individual words and then make a spelling or rhyming judgment. "We found that one network takes different configurations depending on the goal of the task," said Tali Bitan, primary author of "Shifts of Effective Connectivity Within a Language Network during Rhyming and Spelling." Bitan worked with Associate Professor James Booth of the same department and M-Marsel Mesulam, director of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center in Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. Mesulam, who was among the first scientists to predict the existence of convergence zones within interconnected brain networks, said the study presents "the clearest and most convincing evidence to date" of the dynamics in effective connectivity.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7428 - Posted: 06.02.2005

Giving people a whiff of a key chemical can make them more inclined to trust strangers with their cash, a new study reveals. Just three puffs of a nasal spray containing a hormone called oxytocin increased the chance that people would part with their money. The research centred around a game in which an “investor” player gives part or all of his money on blind trust to an anonymous “trustee” player who earns interest on the combination of his own money and the invested sum. But the investor is told there is no obligation for the “trustee” to give any money back at all - they risk losing any money they choose to invest. Michael Kosfeld at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who led the study found that investors gave away their money far more willingly if they had sniffed oxytocin than if they had sniffed a placebo. But this extra willingness disappeared when the trustee’s role was computerised, rather than carried out by another human, confirming that the effect was interpersonal, and not simply a general willingness to gamble. Kosfeld speculates that the hormone reduces people’s aversion to betrayal, overcoming an unwillingness to initiate interaction with strangers. This matches observations in animal studies. “It helps animals to approach one another, which is a parallel with trust in our game,” he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7427 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Cancer survivors are twice as likely to develop cognitive problems as individuals who have never been treated for cancer, according to an article in the June 1 Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Previous research has raised concerns about a possible link among cancer, cancer therapies and cognitive dysfunction. This study found that long-term cancer survivors were at increased risk of cognitive impairment. An accompanying editorial urged a cautious interpretation of the results pending further research. In the study, USC psychologists studied 702 cancer survivors and their cancer-free twins in the Swedish Twin Registry. Studying twins removes statistical influences from genetic or early childhood causes of both cancer and cognitive deficits. Working with colleagues at the Karolinska Institute and Gothenberg University in Sweden, the researchers evaluated the survivors through a standardized mental status interview. Participants were scored on a scale from zero to three. Anyone who scored a three, defined as having verbal, orientation or recall problems that interfere with daily life, was considered to have cognitive dysfunction.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7426 - Posted: 06.01.2005

The following tests were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Baron-Cohen's theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. He calls it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with care and sensitivity. Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems. The tests work out your empathising quotient (EQ) and systemising quotient (SQ). The interactive version, which will calculate your results for you, requires Flash (version 5). Alternatively, the plain HTML version allows you to print off the questionnaire and calculate your own scores. In either case, do both the SQ and EQ questionnaires then click on the link at the end for "your brain type". This will tell you whether you have a male brain, a female brain or if you're perfectly balanced. You can post your results or comments on the tests on the Essential Difference talkboard. Or you can send us an email at life@guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Autism
Link ID: 7425 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Christen Brownlee Researchers decades ago mapped out the brain's sense of touch, with patches of neurons corresponding to body parts, such as a hand, a lip, or the torso. A new study suggests that the sense of smell may have its own brain atlas. The finding adds to a growing body of research on smell, which scientists haven't studied as much as touch, hearing, or sight. Last year, Linda Buck of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Richard Axel of Columbia University shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in deciphering the mechanisms behind smell (SN: 10/9/04, p. 229: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041009/fob5.asp). Over the past 15 years, the two scientists have independently worked out how scents are perceived by olfactory neurons in the nose. Their work has also detailed how these neurons transmit signals to the olfactory bulb, a structure at the front of the brain. However, researchers still knew little about how the brain processes odor information in the olfactory cortex, a region in the temporal lobe, which extends along the sides of the brain. "We know quite a bit about the mechanisms used to encode touch and sight, but we knew nothing about how different odorants are encoded in the olfactory cortex," says Zhihua Zou of the Fred Hutchinson center. Copyright ©2005 Science Service.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 7424 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News — Three newly discovered primate species that lived 30 million years ago suggest that our first ancestors originated in Asia and not in Africa, challenging the well-known "Out of Africa" theory about human evolution. The actuality could be something a bit more complicated, such as "Out of Asia into Africa and Back to Asia," since some researchers now think Asian primates journeyed to Africa, where they evolved into humans, who then traveled both in and out of Africa. According to a study published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, numerous fossil teeth for the three new anthropoids were found in the Bugti Hills of central Pakistan. Scientists believe our world-traveling animal cousins were anthropoids, which means "apes" and refers to the group of primates from which humans evolved. "The Oligocene period (30-25 million years ago) in South Asia was so far totally undocumented paleontologically," said Laurent Marivaux, lead author of the paper. "So, it is not surprising that the discovery of fossilized animals from this period is totally new for science, and that they (may) change or modify substantially our previous view on mammal evolution, notably here, the evolutionary history of anthropoid primates." Copyright © 2005 Discovery Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 7423 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have not only identified a critical gene involved in heroin addiction relapse, but they have also successfully blocked it, eliminating cravings for the drug. The study was conducted on heroin-addicted rats. But the researchers now think that, within a few years, better treatments will become available to human heroin users who cannot quit due to insidious cycles of relapse. “Many people try to stop taking heroin, but in a few months almost all of them go back to using the drug,” said Ivan Diamond, at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center in California, US, and one of the research team. David Shurtleff, director of the Division of Basic Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Maryland, US, is encouraged by the research. “It will take creativity and additional research to translate this into usable therapies, but it does provide hope that we will be able to prevent compulsive drug seeking behaviour,” he told New Scientist. Previous research has indicated that a section of the midbrain called the nucleus accumbens plays a central role in the “mental reward circuitry” of animals, such as rats and humans. This circuitry generates feelings of pleasure in response to drugs, as well as in response to other things, including food, sex and, in humans, work accomplishments. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 7422 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff In findings that highlight the difficulty of making air travel safer, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital report that when the target of a visual search -- like a gun or a knife -- occurs only rarely, it is likelier to escape notice. It was already known that detecting weapons in luggage -- or tumors in breasts, for that matter -- are tremendously difficult visual-search tasks, too complicated to be fully automated and exhausting for fallible human eyes. But it had not been shown experimentally before that human performance could decline so very miserably when search targets were rare, according to the lead researcher, Jeremy M. Wolfe. ''This is a red flag that says we need to look at any situation where the targets are rare and the searches are difficult, to make sure people are spending enough time to do the search," said Kyle R. Cave, a vision researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. When the people took more time to look at each image, their performance was more accurate. Wolfe emphasized that the study, which was funded by the federal Transportation Security Administration and published in the latest issue of Nature, is basic research with uncertain implications in the real world. But it is suggestive enough that ''we plan to work with the TSA people to ask whether this is a real problem, and if it is a real problem, to see if we can try some things to fix it," Wolfe said. © 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 7421 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis. Dr. Lucy Brown, above, and Dr. Helen Fisher, left, analyzed 2,500 brain images from 17 college students in the throes of new love - a drive, Dr. Fisher said, that "can be stronger than the will to live." Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment. In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal. It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment. The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 7420 - Posted: 05.31.2005

Perhaps "zeitgeist" is the word for it; "the spirit of the age" is how my dictionary translates it; and Steven Rose dissects and unfolds it, as possibly no other writer in his field can, in this awesome account of the most complex structure in the known universe. What is it? It is that sense that many of us have, at whatever level of understanding, that our cumulated edifice of scientific knowledge will soon empower humanity with the simultaneously thrilling, yet terrifying, ability—to fully explain, mend, and manipulate the mind. This book's range is awesome because, in just 300 pages, Jones covers the fields of human neurogenetics, neuroembryology, comparative neuroanatomy, neurodevelopment, neurophysiology, neurodegeneration, neuropharmacology, psychiatry, and more. He builds his varied arguments like the proverbial brick wall, with solid foundations of neuroscience written with verve and authority and then, in a final sweep—weeding out any possibility of complacency—he explores the implications of this knowledge as "a citizen, in discussing how we should try to respond." Within these foundations, I discovered myriad new facts that I can now bore my students with—that most brain myelination occurs in the first two years of life (I was taught eight) or that all the familiar neurotransmitters may work as neuro-wet nurses long before they transmit anything. As the book developed, I took vicarious delight in Jones' merciless debunking of fashionable scientific perspectives. He hasn't got a positive thing to say about any of them—behavioural genetics, evolutionary psychology, Chomskyan linguistics, biological reductionism, consciousness theories—they all wither and die under Rose's scrutiny. © 2005 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 7419 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Stanford, CA. Until now it has been impossible to accurately measure the levels of important chemicals in living brain cells in real time and at the level of a single cell. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology and Stanford University are the first to overcome this obstacle by successfully applying genetic nanotechnology using molecular sensors to view changes in brain chemical levels. The sensors alter their 3-dimensional form upon binding with the chemical, which is then visible via a process known as fluorescence resonance energy transfer, or FRET. In a new study, the nanosensors were introduced into nerve cells to measure the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate--the major brain chemical that increases nerve-cell activity in mammalian brains. It is involved in everything from learning and memory to mood and perception. Too much glutamate is believed to contribute to conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The research is published in the May 30-June 3 on-line early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The fluorescent imaging technique allows us to see living cells do their jobs live and in color," explained Sakiko Okumoto, lead author of the study at Carnegie. "Understanding when and how glutamate is produced, secreted, reabsorbed, and metabolized in individual brain cells, in real time, will help researchers better understand disease processes and construct new drugs." "FRET is like two musical tuning forks, which have the same tone," Okumoto continued. "If you excite one, it gives a characteristic tone. If you bring the second fork close to the first one, it will also start to give you a tone even though they do not touch. This is resonance energy transfer."

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 7418 - Posted: 05.31.2005