By Diana Kwon Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is marked by repetitive, anxiety-inducing thoughts, urges and compulsions, such as excessive cleaning, counting and checking. These behaviors are also prevalent in the general population: one study in a large sample of U.S. adults found more than a quarter had experienced obsessions or compulsions at some point in their life. Although most of these individuals do not develop full-blown OCD, such symptoms can still interfere with daily life. A new study, published on January 18 in Nature Medicine, hints that these behaviors may be alleviated by stimulating the brain with an electrical current—without the need to insert electrodes under the skull. Robert Reinhart, a neuroscientist at Boston University, and his group drew on two parallel lines of research for this study. First, evidence suggests that obsessive-compulsive behaviors may arise as a result of overlearning habits—leading to their excessive repetition—and abnormalities in brain circuits involved in learning from rewards. Separately, studies point to the importance of high-frequency rhythms in the so-called high-beta/low-gamma range (also referred to as simply beta-gamma) in decision-making and learning from positive feedback. Drawing on these prior observations, Shrey Grover, a doctoral student in Reinhart’s lab, hypothesized with others in the team that manipulating beta-gamma rhythms in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)—a key region in the reward network located in the front of the brain—might disrupt the ability to repetitively pursue rewarding choices. In doing so, the researchers thought, the intervention could reduce obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with maladaptive habits. To test this hypothesis, Grover and his colleagues carried out a two-part study. The first segment was aimed at identifying whether the high-frequency brain activity influenced how well people were able to learn from rewards. The team recruited 60 volunteers and first used electroencephalography to pinpoint the unique frequencies of beta-gamma rhythms in the OFC that were active in a given individual while that person took part in a task that involved associating symbols with monetary wins or losses. Previous work had shown that applying stimulation based on the particular patterns of rhythms in a person’s brain may enhance the effectiveness of the procedure. © 2021 Scientific American

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 27657 - Posted: 01.20.2021

Katherine J. Wu In a perfect world, the entrance to every office, restaurant and school would offer a coronavirus test — one with absolute accuracy, and able to instantly determine who was virus-free and safe to admit and who, positively infected, should be turned away. That reality does not exist. But as the nation struggles to regain a semblance of normal life amid the uncontrolled spread of the virus, some scientists think that a quick test consisting of little more than a stinky strip of paper might at least get us close. The test does not look for the virus itself, nor can it diagnose disease. Rather, it screens for one of Covid-19’s trademark signs: the loss of the sense of smell. Since last spring, many researchers have come to recognize the symptom, which is also known as anosmia, as one of the best indicators of an ongoing coronavirus infection, capable of identifying even people who don’t otherwise feel sick. A smell test cannot flag people who contract the coronavirus and never develop any symptoms at all. But in a study that has not yet been published in a scientific journal, a mathematical model showed that sniff-based tests, if administered sufficiently widely and frequently, might detect enough cases to substantially drive transmission down. Daniel Larremore, an epidemiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the study’s lead author, stressed that his team’s work was still purely theoretical. Although some smell tests are already in use in clinical and research settings, the products tend to be expensive and laborious to use and are not widely available. And in the context of the pandemic, there is not yet real-world data to support the effectiveness of smell tests as a frequent screen for the coronavirus. Given the many testing woes that have stymied pandemic control efforts so far, some experts have been doubtful that smell tests could be distributed widely enough, or made sufficiently cheat-proof, to reduce the spread of infection. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27656 - Posted: 01.20.2021

By Cathleen O’Grady Golden paper wasps have demanding social lives. To keep track of who’s who in a complex pecking order, they have to recognize and remember many individual faces. Now, an experiment suggests the brains of these wasps process faces all at once—similar to how human facial recognition works. It’s the first evidence of insects identifying one another using “holistic” processing, and a clue to why social animals have evolved such abilities. The finding suggests holistic processing might not require big, complex brains, says Rockefeller University neuroscientist Winrich Freiwald, who wasn’t involved with the research. “It must be so hard to train these animals, so I find it fascinating how one can get such clear results,” he says. Most people recognize faces not from specific features, such as a unique beauty spot or the shape of a nose, but by processing them as a whole, taking in how all the features hang together. Experiments find that people are good at discriminating between facial features—like noses—when they see them in the context of a face but find it much harder when the features are seen in isolation. Other primates, including chimpanzees and rhesus macaques, use such holistic processing. And studies have even found that honey bees and wasps, trained to recognize human faces, have more difficulty with partial faces than whole ones, suggesting holistic processing. But biologists didn’t know whether insects actually use holistic processing naturally with each other. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 27655 - Posted: 01.20.2021

By Amy Barrett Amy Barrett: So, let’s start at the very beginning. What’s involved in forming a thought? David Badre: Forming a thought is sort of the core problem, that’s a big mystery in human psychology and neuroscience. This book is kind of asking the next question; how do we go from a thought that we have, that we form. Some idea about what we want to do, some task we want to take, some goal that we have. How do we translate that into the actions we need to do to actually achieve that? And that’s something that we kind of take for granted. We do it at lots of times during the course of our day. And these can be big goals. You know, you want to go to university or you want to start a business or something. But it can also be just simple everyday goals like going and getting a cup of coffee, which is the example I use in the book. All of that requires making a link between this idea you have, a goal you have, and the actual actions. It turns out that’s not a trivial thing. The brain requires a special class of mechanisms to do that. And those are called cognitive control mechanisms by scientists. And that’s really what the book is about, because it affects so many aspects of our lives. How we do that translation between our thoughts and how we behave. (C)BBC

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 27654 - Posted: 01.20.2021

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have discovered Jekyll and Hyde immune cells in the brain that ultimately help with brain repair but early after injury can lead to fatal swelling, suggesting that timing may be critical when administering treatment. These dual-purpose cells, which are called myelomonocytic cells and which are carried to the brain by the blood, are just one type of brain immune cell that NIH researchers tracked, watching in real-time as the brain repaired itself after injury. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) Intramural Research Program at NIH. “Fixing the brain after injury is a highly orchestrated, coordinated process, and giving a treatment at the wrong time could end up doing more harm than good,” said Dorian McGavern, Ph.D., NINDS scientist and senior author of the study. Cerebrovascular injury, or damage to brain blood vessels, can occur following several conditions including traumatic brain injury or stroke. Dr. McGavern, along with Larry Latour, M.D., NINDS scientist, and their colleagues, observed that a subset of stroke patients developed bleeding and swelling in the brain after surgical removal of the blood vessel clot responsible for the stroke. The swelling, also known as edema, results in poor outcomes and can even be fatal as brain structures become compressed and further damaged. To understand how vessel injury can lead to swelling and to identify potential treatment strategies, Dr. McGavern and his team developed an animal model of cerebrovascular injury and used state-of-the-art microscopic imaging to watch how the brain responded to the damage in real-time.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 27653 - Posted: 01.20.2021

Michelle Andrews Once the rules for implementing it are worked out, a bill signed into federal law in December will eliminate the required five-month waiting period for diagnosed ALS patients to begin disability benefits, enabling quicker Medicare coverage as well. LumiNola/Getty Images Anita Baron first noticed something was wrong in August 2018, when she began to drool. Her dentist chalked it up to a problem with her jaw. Then her speech became slurred. She managed to keep her company going — it offers financing to small businesses — but working became increasingly difficult for her as her speech worsened. Finally, nine months, four neurologists and countless tests later, Baron, now 66, got a diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS, often called Lou Gehrig's disease after the New York Yankees first baseman who died of the disease in 1941, destroys motor neurons, causing people to lose control of their limbs, their speech and, ultimately, their ability to breathe. It's usually fatal in two to five years, though about 10% of people survive ten years or more. People with ALS often must quit their jobs — and sometimes their spouses do, too, to provide care — leaving families in financial distress. A decade-long campaign by advocates highlighting this predicament notched a victory last month when Congress passed a bill opening key support programs earlier for ALS patients. © 2021 npr

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 27652 - Posted: 01.20.2021

Daniel Osorio The neuroscientist Michael Land, who has died aged 78 from respiratory disease, was the Marco Polo of the visual sciences. He visited exotic parts of the animal kingdom, and showed that almost every way humans have discovered to bend, reflect, shape and image light with mirrors and lenses is also used by some creature’s eye. His research revealed the many different ways in which animals see their own versions of reality, often to find members of the opposite sex. His 1976 discovery that prawns focus light not by lenses, but with a structure of mirror-lined boxes, helped lead to the discovery of a method to focus X-rays, and in the 1990s he developed a simple device to track humans’ gaze as they move their eyes while doing everyday tasks. Land’s PhD thesis at University College London in the early 1960s, on how scallops evade the attacks of predatory starfish, turned out to be a serendipitous choice. He was supposed to investigate what passes for the brain of this shellfish, but found its eyes far more interesting. Scallops have many pinhead-sized eyes, just inside the lip of the shell. Rather than focusing light with a lens as people do, they use a concave mirror in the manner of a Newtonian telescope. Moving from UCL, with his first wife, Judith (nee Drinkwater), to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, he turned his attention to jumping spiders. These arachnids do not build webs but are visual hunters. Each of their four pairs of eyes has a different task, and Land showed how the most acute of these eyes moves to detect prey and mates. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 27651 - Posted: 01.20.2021

Catherine S. Woolley, Ph.D. Sex differences in the brain are real, but they are not what you might think. They’re not about who is better at math, reading a map, or playing chess. They’re not about being sensitive or good at multi-tasking, either. Sex differences in the brain are about medicine and about making sure that the benefits of biomedical research are relevant for everyone, both men and women. You may be surprised to learn that most animal research is done in males. This is based on an erroneous view that hormonal cycles complicate studies in female research animals, and an assumption that the sexes are essentially the same down at cellular and molecular levels. But these beliefs are starting to change in neuroscience. New research shows that some fundamental molecular pathways in the brain operate differently in males and females, and not just by a little. In some cases, molecular sex differences are all-or-nothing. Recognition that male and female brains differ at a molecular level has the potential to transform biomedical research. Drugs act on molecular pathways. If those pathways differ between the sexes, we need to know how they differ as early as possible in the long (and expensive) process of developing new medicines and treatments for disease. The bulk of public attention to brain sex differences is focused on structural differences and their purported relationship to behavior or cognition. Yet structural sex differences are actually quite small, and their interpretation is often based on gender stereotypes with little to no scientific justification. © 2021 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 27650 - Posted: 01.15.2021

Michael Marshall One treatment for survivors of COVID-19 who have lost their sense of smell is 'smell training', in which they relearn prescribed scents, such as those of roses and lemons.Credit: Christine E. Kelly Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it emerged that many people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus were losing their sense of smell — even without displaying other symptoms. Researchers also discovered that infected people could lose their sense of taste and their ability to detect chemically triggered sensations such as spiciness, called chemesthesis. Almost a year later, some still haven’t recovered these senses, and for a proportion of people who have, odours are now warped: unpleasant scents have taken the place of normally delightful ones. Nature surveys the science behind this potentially long-lasting and debilitating phenomenon. How many people with COVID-19 lose their sense of smell? The exact percentage varies between studies, but most suggest that smell loss is a common symptom. One review published last June1 compiled data from 8,438 people with COVID-19, and found that 41% had reported experiencing smell loss. In another study, published in August2, a team led by researcher Shima T. Moein at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences in Tehran, Iran, administered a smell-identification test to 100 people with COVID-19 in which the subjects sniffed odours and identified them on a multiple-choice basis. Ninety-six per cent of the participants had some olfactory dysfunction, and 18% had total smell loss (otherwise known as anosmia). © 2021 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27649 - Posted: 01.15.2021

By Gina Kolata In a small clinical trial, an experimental Alzheimer’s drug slowed the rate at which patients lost the ability to think and care for themselves, the drug maker Eli Lilly announced on Monday. The findings have not been published in any form, and not been widely reviewed by other researchers. If accurate, it is the first time a positive result has been found in a so-called Phase 2 study, said Dr. Lon S. Schneider, professor of psychiatry, neurology and gerontology at the University of Southern California. Other experimental drugs against Alzheimer’s were never tested in Phase 2 trials, moving straight to larger Phase 3 trials, or failed to produce positive results. The Phase 3 studies themselves have repeatedly had disappointing results. The two-year study involved 272 patients with brain scans indicative of Alzheimer’s disease. Their symptoms ranged from mild to moderate. The drug, donanemab, a monoclonal antibody, binds to a small part of the hard plaques in the brain made of a protein, amyloid, that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Patients received the drug by infusion every four weeks. Participants who received the drug had a 32 percent deceleration in the rate of decline, compared with those who got a placebo. In six to 12 months, plaques were gone and stayed gone, said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, the company’s chief scientific officer. At that point, patients stopped getting the drug — they got a placebo instead — for the duration of the study. The small study needs to be replicated, noted Dr. Michael Weiner, a leading Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Still, “this is big news,” he said. “This holds out hope for patients and their families.” Eli Lilly did not release the sort of pertinent data needed for a thorough analysis, Dr. Schneider said. For example, the company provided only percentages describing declines in function among the participants, not the actual numbers. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 27648 - Posted: 01.15.2021

By Jonathan Lambert One Volta’s electric eel — able to subdue small fish with an 860-volt jolt — is scary enough. Now imagine over 100 eels swirling about, unleashing coordinated electric attacks. Such a sight was assumed to be only the stuff of nightmares, at least for prey. Researchers have long thought that these eels, a type of knifefish, are solitary, nocturnal hunters that use their electric sense to find smaller fish as they sleep (SN: 12/4/14). But in a remote region of the Amazon, groups of over 100 electric eels (Electrophorus voltai) hunt together, corralling thousands of smaller fish together to concentrate, shock and devour the prey, researchers report January 14 in Ecology and Evolution. “This is hugely unexpected,” says Raimundo Nonato Mendes-Júnior, a biologist at the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation in Brasilia, Brazil who wasn’t involved in the study. “It goes to show how very, very little we know about how electric eels behave in the wild.” Group hunting is quite rare in fishes, says Carlos David de Santana, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “I’d never even seen more than 12 electric eels together in the field,” he says. That’s why he was stunned in 2012 when his colleague Douglas Bastos, now a biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, reported seeing more than 100 eels congregating and seemingly hunting together in a small lake in northern Brazil. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2021.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 27647 - Posted: 01.15.2021

Kayt Sukel Psychedelic drugs conjure images of tie-dyed tee shirts, Woodstock, and Vietnam War protests. While early research into the properties of drugs like psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) during the middle of the 20th century suggested therapeutic potential for diverse mental health conditions, their role in the 1960s anti-war and counterculture movement made them suspect by law enforcement. Not long after American psychologist Timothy Leary called for people to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” endorsing the regular use of psychedelic drugs for health and well-being, the federal Controlled Substances Act classified them as highly dangerous Schedule 1 compounds, or drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” “Initially, psychedelics showed quite a lot of promise for treating a wide range of mental health conditions—in particular, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” says Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. “There’s long been a blame game going regarding what led to these drugs being outlawed, mostly focusing on people like Timothy Leary promoting indiscriminate use of what we know are quite powerful drugs. But the end result was that, despite their promise, it became nearly impossible for anyone to do any research at all on them.” Over the past decade, however, there has been a revival of psychopharmacology and neuroscience research into the effects of psychedelic drugs. In fact, despite continuing legal barriers and funding challenges involved with using these banned drugs in research studies—many researchers wait years for Food and Drug Administration approvals and require funding from non-governmental agencies to move forward—several unique research centers, including the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research, are now actively studying LSD, psilocybin, and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), from both basic science and clinical perspectives. © 2021 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 27646 - Posted: 01.15.2021

Dana G Smith This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one. Last Wednesday was a dark day for the United States. I’m obviously not a political reporter, so I’m not going to talk about security breaches or the future of our democracy or just how terrifying and disgraceful what happened at the Capitol was (you should check out our sister publication GEN for those types of stories). But I am going to discuss what might have been going on in the brains of those who attempted the insurrection. Hatred and violence toward another group of people is an extension — and perversion — of our natural human tendency to classify “us” from “them.” Evolutionarily, group membership and the cooperation it facilitates was essential for human survival. Our species forms alliances easily, sometimes based on genetic or familial ties but sometimes more arbitrarily. Take affinity for a certain sports team; it says nothing about a person’s qualities and offers no real benefits, and yet people have literally killed opposing team’s fans. In-group/out-group categorizations are made almost instantaneously in the brain and, when paired with negative stereotypes, can result in feelings of fear, disgust, and dehumanization. Studies have shown that viewing pictures of people from a different race, for example, activates the amygdala — a brain region strongly implicated in fear.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 27645 - Posted: 01.15.2021

by Sarah DeWeerdt Children with autism may have a subtly different set of bacteria in their gut than their non-autistic siblings, according to unpublished data presented virtually on Tuesday at the 2021 Society for Neuroscience Global Connectome. The prospect that manipulating the microbiome could ease gastrointestinal problems and other autism traits has tantalized many families of autistic children. But studies of the gut microbiome in people with autism are scarce and have shown conflicting results, and mouse studies can be difficult to interpret. For the new work, researchers recruited 111 families that each have two children — one with autism and one without — born within two years of each other and aged 2 to 7 years old. “We tried to be as careful as possible by using a control cohort that were siblings,” says study leader Maude David, assistant professor of microbiology at Oregon State University in Corvallis. This study design helped control for variables such as household environment, pets and other factors that can shape the microbiome, she says. The researchers collected stool samples from the children at three time points, two weeks apart. The repeated sampling reduced the likelihood that short-term shifts in the children’s gut microbiome — due to transient environmental influences, such as day-to-day dietary changes — would skew the results. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 27644 - Posted: 01.15.2021

By Nicholas Bakalar People who consume a diet rich in vitamins C and E may be at reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease. Researchers followed 41,058 Swedish men and women for an average of 18 years, gathering data on their health and diet. They assessed intake of vitamins C and E as well as beta-carotene and a measure called NEAC, which takes into account all antioxidants from food and their interactions with each other. Over the course of the study, published in Neurology, there were 465 cases of Parkinson’s disease. After adjusting for age, sex, B.M.I., education, smoking, alcohol consumption and other characteristics, they found that compared with the one-third of people with the lowest intake of vitamin C or E, the one-third with the highest intake had a 32 percent reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease. Those in the highest one-third in consumption of both vitamins together had a 38 percent reduced risk. There was no effect for beta-carotene or the NEAC measure. The lead author, Essi Hantikainen, who was a researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca when the work was done, said that more research needs to be done before drawing definitive conclusions or offering advice about diet or supplement use and the risk of Parkinson’s. Still, she said, “Implementation of a diet that includes foods rich in vitamins C and E might help protect against the development of Parkinson’s later in life. In any case, it’s never wrong to implement a healthy diet.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 27643 - Posted: 01.15.2021

By Roni Caryn Rabin Until March, when everything started tasting like cardboard, Katherine Hansen had such a keen sense of smell that she could recreate almost any restaurant dish at home without the recipe, just by recalling the scents and flavors. Then the coronavirus arrived. One of Ms. Hansen’s first symptoms was a loss of smell, and then of taste. Ms. Hansen still cannot taste food, and says she can’t even tolerate chewing it. Now she lives mostly on soups and shakes. “I’m like someone who loses their eyesight as an adult,” said Ms. Hansen, a realtor who lives outside Seattle. “They know what something should look like. I know what it should taste like, but I can’t get there.” A diminished sense of smell, called anosmia, has emerged as one of the telltale symptoms of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. It is the first symptom for some patients, and sometimes the only one. Often accompanied by an inability to taste, anosmia occurs abruptly and dramatically in these patients, almost as if a switch had been flipped. Most regain their senses of smell and taste after they recover, usually within weeks. But in a minority of patients like Ms. Hansen, the loss persists, and doctors cannot say when or if the senses will return. Scientists know little about how the virus causes persistent anosmia or how to cure it. But cases are piling up as the coronavirus sweeps across the world, and some experts fear that the pandemic may leave huge numbers of people with a permanent loss of smell and taste. The prospect has set off an urgent scramble among researchers to learn more about why patients are losing these essential senses, and how to help them. “Many people have been doing olfactory research for decades and getting little attention,” said Dr. Dolores Malaspina, professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, genetics and genomics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “Covid is just turning that field upside down.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 27642 - Posted: 01.09.2021

Our staff took a look back at the papers we wrote about in 2020 that most shaped our understanding of autism and how to diagnose or treat it. Despite the chaos of this year, there were many to consider. But we reviewed them all, asked some researchers for input and winnowed the list down to 10. Some of our selections highlight new insights into factors that influence autism traits, including fever, mitochondria and exons — the protein-coding parts of genes. Others expand our understanding of the genes and genetic regions linked to autism, as well as their roles in related conditions. Two new gene therapies for autism-related syndromes also caught our eye. And we single out a study of the sperm from men who have children on the spectrum, and a look at what happens to the toddlers who screen positive for autism. Here are our picks for the past year’s most notable papers, in reverse chronological order. DNA helix1. Mutations in the same exon linked to similar autism traits People with autism who carry DNA variants in the same exon, or protein-coding region of a gene, have more similar cognitive abilities and behaviors than those who carry mutations in different regions of the same gene, this study found. A separate study detailed how one particular exon contributes to social behavior and cognitive abilities in mice; a third paper described a new tool that helps researchers determine how mutations in an exon affect the number of protein isoforms a gene can express. © 2021 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 27641 - Posted: 01.09.2021

By Elizabeth Pennisi Hammer a nail into a tree, and it will get stuck. So why doesn’t the same thing happen to the sharp beaks of woodpeckers? Scientists say they finally have the answer. In a new study, researchers took high-speed videos of two black woodpeckers (Dryocopus martius) pecking away at hardwood trunks in zoos and analyzed them frame by frame to see how the head and beak moved throughout each peck. The bird’s secret: an ability to move its upper and lower beaks independently, the team reports this week at the virtual annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Once the tip of the woodpecker’s bill hits the wood, the bird’s head rotates to the side ever so slightly, lifting the top part of the beak and twisting it a bit in the other direction, the videos reveal. This pull opens the bill a tiny amount and creates free space between the beak tip and the wood at the bottom of the punctured hole, so the bird can then easily retract its beak. Until now, scientists have thought woodpecker bills would need to be rigidly attached to the skull to successfully drill into the wood to find insect prey. But actually, the bill’s flexibility in these joints ensures that the bird’s signature “rat-a-tat-tat” doesn’t stop at “rat.” © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Evolution
Link ID: 27640 - Posted: 01.09.2021

By Pam Belluck Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual. The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them. “It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill,’” Dr. Goueli, a psychiatrist, said. The patient described one of her children being run over by a truck and another decapitated. “It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them,’” he said. The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children. At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking. “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’” Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus. In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described: A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window. © 2020 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 27639 - Posted: 12.31.2020

David Eagleman When he was two years old, Ben stopped seeing out of his left eye. His mother took him to the doctor and soon discovered he had retinal cancer in both eyes. After chemotherapy and radiation failed, surgeons removed both his eyes. For Ben, vision was gone forever. But by the time he was seven years old, he had devised a technique for decoding the world around him: he clicked with his mouth and listened for the returning echoes. This method enabled Ben to determine the locations of open doorways, people, parked cars, garbage cans, and so on. He was echolocating: bouncing his sound waves off objects in the environment and catching the reflections to build a mental model of his surroundings. Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.” How could blindness give rise to the stunning ability to understand the surroundings with one’s ears? The answer lies in a gift bestowed on the brain by evolution: tremendous adaptability. Whenever we learn something new, pick up a new skill, or modify our habits, the physical structure of our brain changes. Neurons, the cells responsible for rapidly processing information in the brain, are interconnected by the thousands—but like friendships in a community, the connections between them constantly change: strengthening, weakening, and finding new partners. The field of neuroscience calls this phenomenon “brain plasticity,” referring to the ability of the brain, like plastic, to assume new shapes and hold them. More recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that the brain’s brand of flexibility is far more nuanced than holding onto a shape, though. To capture this, we refer to the brain’s plasticity as “livewiring” to spotlight how this vast system of 86 billion neurons and 0.2 quadrillion connections rewires itself every moment of your life.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 27638 - Posted: 12.31.2020