Brain Abnormality Linked to Pathology By ERICA GOODE Ask the average social scientist why people become criminals, and the answer is apt to center on poverty and abuse, not brain structure and neurochemicals. But in a new study, appearing in the February issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers report that 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis often applied to people with a history of criminal behavior, had subtle abnormalities in the structure of the brain's frontal lobe.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 6 - Posted: 10.20.2001

N E W Y O R K, Feb. 28 - Taryn Sardis and her parents will never forget November 19, 1997 - on that day it was as if somebody had cast a spell on the 17-year-old. “I went to school and slept through my first-period class, which I don’t do,” Taryn said. Taryn’s father remembers getting a call to bring her home. “I picked her up. She went right back to bed,” Mr. Sardis said. “It was almost impossible to wake her up. And we thought someone had given her something or she had taken something,” Mrs. Sardis said. Ten days later, Taryn suddenly snapped out of it, and everything seemed to go back to normal - but not for long. She would be OK for a few weeks, but then mysteriously Taryn would sleep for about 20 hours a day for weeks at a time.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 4 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Deconstructing Smell and Taste
Summary: Linda Buck is exploring the mechanisms underlying smell, taste, and pheromone sensing in mammals. Her goal is to understand how the nervous system translates thousands of different chemical structures into diverse perceptions and behavioral responses. The Sensing of Odors and Pheromones Much of our research has focused on the mechanisms underlying olfactory perception. In mammals, the olfactory system detects odorants that elicit odor perceptions as well as pheromones that stimulate instinctive behaviors. The prevailing view has been that odorants are detected in the nose, while pheromones are detected primarily in the vomeronasal organ (VNO). Recently, however, we found that some odorants are also detected in the VNO. We have explored these two subsystems by identifying multigene families encoding odor and VNO receptors and then using receptor genes to study how the olfactory system detects different chemicals and how sensory information is organized in the brain to elicit perceptions and behaviors.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 1 - Posted: 10.20.2001