By NATALIE ANGIER Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the 14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance a chance to shine. Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate. In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5271 - Posted: 04.13.2004

Thirty-five million Americans, more than 16% of the population, suffer from depression severe enough to warrant treatment at some time in their lives. Poet Eve Stern has battled depression for years, taking different medications for her condition. "The usual direction the doctors will point you in is in the direction of medication," says Stern. "I got pushed there to the point where I had tried over 50 meds and one became poisonous to my brain and I nearly died." To prevent situations like this, scientists are trying to learn how the brain reacts to depression remedies. "We have no idea about the neurobiology of what starts depression," says Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine. "We've got clues from these studies of different kinds of depressed people. We have clues knowing that not everybody gets better on whatever you treat them with first. But we've not got these clues that the brain may be actually giving us very important info so that we can treat optimally." © ScienCentral, 2000-2004.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5270 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Primatologists often characterize learned behavioral differences as "cultural" traits, since they arise independently of genetic factors and can be passed on to succeeding generations. Such cultural traditions have been documented in African chimp populations (e.g. using stones to crack nuts). While most of these cases involve tool use, Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share now provide evidence, in the latest issue of the open-access journal PLoS Biology, of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, they reveal the emergence of a unique pacific culture affecting this troop. Typically, male baboons angle either to assume or maintain dominance with higher ranking males or engage in bloody battles with lower ranking males. Females are often harassed and attacked and internecine feuds are routine. However, in the mid-1980s an unexpected outbreak of TB infected and killed the most aggressive males of Forest Troop, drastically changing the gender composition and the behavior of the group; males were significantly less aggressive.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5269 - Posted: 04.13.2004

If you're one of those insufferable people who can finish the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, you probably have a gift for insight. The puzzles always have an underlying hint to solving them, but on Saturdays that clue is insanely obtuse. If you had all day, you could try a zillion different combinations and eventually figure it out. But with insight, you'd experience the usual clueless confusion, until--voilą--the fog clears and you get the clue, which suddenly seems obvious. The sudden flash of insight that precedes such "Aha!" moments is characteristic of many types of cognitive processes besides problem-solving, including memory retrieval, language comprehension, and various forms of creativity. Now, researchers from Northwestern and Drexel Universities report on studies revealing a unique neural signature of such insight solutions. Mark Jung-Beeman and colleagues mapped both the location and electrical signature of neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the electroencephalogram (EEG). Neural activity was mapped with fMRI while the participants were given word problems--which can be solved quickly with or without insight, and evoke a distinct Aha! moment about half the time they're solved. Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5268 - Posted: 04.13.2004

By Elizabeth Svoboda Remembering Satan, Lawrence Wright’s widely read book, profiles a 1980s father who “remembers” inflicting ritual abuse on his daughters. The book blames false memories primarily on interrogators who use techniques like hypnosis and leading questions. New neuroimaging research at Johns Hopkins University, however, suggests that what happens in the brain at the moment a memory forms is just as essential to false-memory development as are retrieval methods that are used much later. Yoko Okado, a psychology graduate student at Johns Hopkins, and her adviser, Craig Stark, wanted to find out if differences in brain activation during an event influenced subsequent memories. Their subjects first sat in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and read short descriptions of ordinary events, each containing 12 critical details, such as “left-handed robber.” The subjects then returned to the fMRI scanner and read similar descriptions in which the 12 details had been changed (the “misinformation” phase). The participants who successfully identified which details had appeared during the first phase showed more neural activity in the hippocampus, a brain area important in establishing memories, during that initial phase. © Copyright 1991-2004 Sussex Publishers

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5267 - Posted: 06.24.2010

"Functional" MRI is yielding a clearer picture of what thoughts look like The clanking from within the giant white magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner sounds like somebody banging a wrench on a radiator. "Tommy," a healthy 8-year-old, is halfway inside the machine's round chamber, and his little white-sweat-socked feet keep time with the noise. A mirror on a plastic cage around his head will allow him to see images and video. During the next 45 minutes, Dr. Golijeh Golarai, a researcher at Stanford University, will ask Tommy to hold his feet still, as she directs a computer to flash pictures at him, including faces of African American men, landscapes, faces of white men, then scrambled faces in a cubist redux. When the boy thinks he sees the same image twice, he pushes a button. The machine is tracking the blood in his brain as it flows to the neurons he is using to perform the assigned task. When Golarai's software is done analyzing the data, she'll have nothing less than a set of snapshots of the boy's thoughts, pinpointing exactly what part of his brain recognizes faces. "There go those feet again," chuckles Tommy's father, watching from the control room. Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5266 - Posted: 04.13.2004

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. The Department of Agriculture refused yesterday to allow a Kansas beef producer to test all of its cattle for mad cow disease, saying such sweeping tests were not scientifically warranted. The producer, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to use recently approved rapid tests so it could resume selling its fat-marbled black Angus beef to Japan, which banned American beef after a cow slaughtered in Washington State last December tested positive for mad cow. The company has complained that the ban is costing it $40,000 a day and forced it to lay off 50 employees. The department's under secretary for marketing and regulation, Bill Hawks, said in a statement yesterday that the rapid tests, which are used in Japan and Europe, were licensed for surveillance of animal health, while Creekstone's use would have "implied a consumer safety aspect that is not scientifically warranted." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5265 - Posted: 04.12.2004

By FELICIA R. LEE She has been called "the closest thing we have to a doyenne of psychiatric disorder" by The Village Voice, because of her quirky memoirs and her offbeat takes on subjects like self-esteem. Peter D. Kramer, author of "Listening to Prozac," calls her "smart, charming, iconoclastic and inquisitive." Now Lauren Slater, a 39-year-old psychologist, is being called a liar. The charges, which Dr. Slater denies, are being circulated mostly among academics in psychology and psychiatry. Some say that she put invented quotations in her new book, "Opening Skinner's Box," her reflections on 10 major psychological experiments, which was published in the United States by Norton last month. Others question her methods and data in her own experiment in faking mental illness or challenge the accuracy of her description of some famous past experiments. Critics have been publicizing their accusations in book reviews on Amazon.com and other Internet sites, while professors at several schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Emory universities, have been exchanging information on their views of the book's failings. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5264 - Posted: 04.12.2004

WASHINGTON— There really may be something different about the brains of math-heads. Mathematically gifted teens did better than average-ability teens and college students on tests that required the two halves of the brain to cooperate, as reported in the April issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In the study, a joint effort of psychologists at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Fort Benning, Ga. and the University of Melbourne, Australia, researchers studied 60 right-handed males: 18 mathematically gifted (averaging nearly 14 years in age), 18 of average math ability (averaging just over 13), and 24 college students (averaging about 20). Math giftedness seems to favor boys over girls, appearing an estimated six to 13 times more often. It’s not known why but prenatal exposure to testosterone is suspected to be one influence due to its selective benefit to the right half of the brain. The gifted boys were recruited from a Challenges for Youth-Talented program at Iowa State University. Whereas the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) math score for college-bound high-school seniors is 500 (out of 800), the mathematically gifted boys’ average SAT math score in middle school was 620. © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5263 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON— There really may be something different about the brains of math-heads. Mathematically gifted teens did better than average-ability teens and college students on tests that required the two halves of the brain to cooperate, as reported in the April issue of Neuropsychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA). In the study, a joint effort of psychologists at the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Fort Benning, Ga. and the University of Melbourne, Australia, researchers studied 60 right-handed males: 18 mathematically gifted (averaging nearly 14 years in age), 18 of average math ability (averaging just over 13), and 24 college students (averaging about 20). Math giftedness seems to favor boys over girls, appearing an estimated six to 13 times more often. It’s not known why but prenatal exposure to testosterone is suspected to be one influence due to its selective benefit to the right half of the brain. The gifted boys were recruited from a Challenges for Youth-Talented program at Iowa State University. Whereas the average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) math score for college-bound high-school seniors is 500 (out of 800), the mathematically gifted boys’ average SAT math score in middle school was 620. © 2004 American Psychological Association

Keyword: Laterality
Link ID: 5262 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found that a new generation of medications called "atypical antipsychotics" can significantly lower the risk of violent behavior in people with schizophrenia who are being treated in community-based centers. In a two-year study, the researchers found that patients who consistently took one of the newer medications had less than one-third the incidence of getting into fights or engaging in violent actions toward others, compared to subjects who consistently took one of the older antipsychotic medications. This study is the first to examine the long-term impact of treatment with the newer class of drugs on violent behavior measured directly in the community, under "real world" conditions, the researchers said. Examples of drugs in this newer class include clozapine, risperidone and olanzapine. © 2001-2004 Duke University Medical Center.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 5261 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Approximately 2 percent of Caucasians have a gene segment variation that can cause a certain form of schizophrenia. Most people with the variation, known as a polymorphism, do not have the disease. A University of Iowa Health Care study reveals a good prognosis for people who do have this form of schizophrenia. The team also found that this polymorphism is associated with overall benefits for human survival, and the initial mutation occurred in a single common ancestor about 100,000 years ago. The findings have implications for finding better ways to treat this particular type of schizophrenia and possibly augmenting the positive influences of the polymorphism on human survival. The findings also point the way for studying other gene defects. The UI Research Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) share a patent for this X-chromosome gene polymorphism, known as HOPA12pb. The study results appeared in the February 11 online issue of the American Journal of Medical Genetics. "While this polymorphism makes us more vulnerable to a certain illness, in this case schizophrenia, overall it is evolutionarily beneficial," said Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., UI associate professor of psychiatry in the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and the study's principal investigator.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5260 - Posted: 04.12.2004

By Laura Spinney A prominent British psychiatrist recently revived old arguments about the origins of language and the evolution of humans. Tim Crow at Warneford Hospital in Oxford says that reports on ape brain asymmetry are distorted by observer bias.1 Those criticized point to "plenty of evidence" that general functions and skills have gravitated to one side of the brain or the other in animals from chicks to chimps. Crow argues that researchers are finding evidence of language precursors in apes because they want to believe in a graduated theory of evolution, rather than the leap proposed by Thomas Huxley, Stephen J. Gould, and others. Crow points to studies that have reanalyzed data and found no support for initial conclusions of asymmetry.2 He also asserts his support for the model proposed by neuropsychologist Marian Annett in 2002,3 in which she suggests that a single gene gave rise to language in the brain's left hemisphere, and brought a shift towards right-handedness. In 1877, Paul Broca argued that brain asymmetry distinguishes humans from other animals and gives humans the capacity for language. Then scientists started finding evidence of asymmetry in other vertebrates. "Many of the lateralized functions of the human are the same as those in animals," says Lesley Rogers of the University of New England in Australia, who with Richard Andrew coauthored the 2002 book Comparative Vertebrate Lateralization.4 "Language has a left-hemisphere location in most humans. It might rely on the evolution of some nuance of laterality, but the point is, it was superimposed on other lateralities that were already there." © 2004, The Scientist LLC, All rights reserved.

Keyword: Language; Laterality
Link ID: 5259 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MILT FREUDENHEIM A few months ago, George Miller, 55, a computer sales manager in Lexington, S.C., had reading glasses scattered all over the house. Worse, he found it was impossible to read a menu at night in a dimly lighted restaurant or the many car magazines that came to his house. "It really bothered me a lot because I love to read," Mr. Miller said. So, when he heard about a new experimental eye surgery on the local television news, he researched it on the Internet and called his ophthalmologist. "I'm a little vain," Mr. Miller conceded. Though the new procedure, which uses radio waves to correct near-vision problems, had not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for his problem, he had it done last winter. "It was a no-brainer," said Mr. Miller, who no longer needs reading glasses. "I can't imagine why anyone who could afford it would not do it." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 5258 - Posted: 04.11.2004

John Pickrell in England for National Geographic News New genetic findings reveal that ruling dynasties may monopolize leadership of many neighboring communities of Africa's western gorillas—like a primate version of the Mafia. Paternity tests reveal that leaders of adjacent western lowland gorilla territories in Africa are closely related as fathers, sons, and brothers. The results, detailed in the current issue of the science journal Current Biology, may help to explain curiously peaceful interactions among neighboring social groups. The groups were observed in new behavioral studies of the western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). The study could also provide clues about the role and development of kinship in early human society, say researchers behind the work. Despite being the most numerous kind of gorilla, the western lowland gorilla species is the shyest and least understood. Up to a hundred thousand western lowland gorillas are thought to inhabit the forests of central Africa. © 2004 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved.

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 5257 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Contestants on NBC's "The Apprentice" hate the idea of Donald Trump jabbing his hand at them and saying, "You're fired." But they love the idea of getting a job with the billionaire. Two different emotions, but each has the same effect ---- motivating contestants to work hard and/or ingratiate themselves with The Donald. Carl Olson doesn't have a television, so he hasn't seen the reality series. But the Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist can tell you what is going on in the heads of those contestants ---- or at least where it is going on. As he and University of Pittsburgh graduate student Matthew Roesch reported in yesterday's issue of the journal Science, the process of evaluating a reward and the process of determining how hard to work to obtain a reward or avoid a penalty take place in separate parts of the brain's frontal cortex. Copyright ©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Vision
Link ID: 5256 - Posted: 06.24.2010

'WE CAN BUILD BETTER BRAINS' By ANNE McILROY, From Saturday's Globe and Mail Monday is Brain Imaging Day at this exclusive Vancouver private school. The kindergarten class troops down to the assessment room, where one by one the boys and girls slip behind the curtain for a quick session in the magnetic resonance imaging machine. The MRI technician can quickly tell which regions of their brains are the most primed to learn that day. The results determine what each student will focus on that week — improving their memories or spatial skills, or learning music, math or problem solving. It might be a good week for working on understanding facial expressions, or on a second or even third language. Does this sound improbable? It's the future as imagined by Max Cynader, director of the Brain Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. "Forty or 50 years from now, a student will stick her head in a scanner and see what she could best learn that day," he says. "That's a dream. We aren't there, but we can see how to get to there from here." © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 5255 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. In her most recent book, "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments Of The 20th Century," Lauren Slater reports interviews with several famous psychologists and psychiatrists. Unfortunately, many, if not all, of those interviewees deny having said some of the things attributed to them by Slater. Letters from some of the interviewees are available from links at the bottom of this web page. Two of Slater's books, "Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir" and "Spasm - A Memoir with Lies," seem to imply that she has difficulty with the truth. From the Amazon.com synopsis of "Spasm": Between the ages of 13 and 17, Lauren Slater was epileptic. Surgery stopped her seizures; but by then the psychological reflex was ingrained - the habit of invention to fill the gaps in her memory and experience. She'd learned to lie. She may even have lied about her epilepsy. She may never have had it at all. Her memoir is a work of non-fiction that uses the freedoms of fiction to shape the story of its author's life. Slater characterizes her approach to writing as "creative nonfiction." According to one web site, "She teaches creative nonfiction writing for Goucher College's M.F.A. program." How creative may one be while still considering one's work to be nonfiction? Slater seems to feel that artistic license allows for any sort of fabrication.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5254 - Posted: 04.11.2004

By DENISE GRADY The drugs now available to treat the memory and thinking problems of Alzheimer's disease have not lived up to the public's high expectations for them and offer such modest benefits on average that many doctors are unsure about whether to prescribe them. Although the drugs have their advocates, grateful for any sign of improvement, others express disappointment in light of earlier hopes that the drugs approved in the last decade would stop the disease or markedly slow it. At a meeting in late March at Johns Hopkins University, doctors and other health professionals heard Alzheimer's researchers debate the usefulness of the drugs and the prospects of better treatments becoming available any time soon. Some researchers say it may be decades before real progress is made in reducing the toll of the disease. When a frustrated doctor in the audience accused a panel of experts of evading the question of whether the drugs should be prescribed, the auditorium burst into applause. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 5253 - Posted: 04.10.2004

By GARDINER HARRIS Pediatricians and family physicians should not prescribe antidepressants for depressed children and adolescents because the drugs barely work and their side effects are often significant, Australian researchers have concluded. The researchers analyzed data from five published trials of three antidepressants, Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, in depressed patients under age 18. They found that the drugs offered only a "very modest" benefit over placebos. At the same time, the drugs carry significant risks, the researchers said in their report, published in today's issue of the British medical journal BMJ. "If the drugs were highly advantageous over placebo, then you'd live with the risks," Jon Jureidini, a child psychiatrist in Adelaide and the study's lead author, said in an interview. "If the drugs were completely safe, then you might argue that there's nothing wrong with giving something that's only slightly better than a placebo." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 5252 - Posted: 04.10.2004