By GINA KOLATA As concern rises over the effect of continuous use of headphones and earbuds on hearing, a new paper by federal researchers has found something unexpected. The prevalence of hearing loss in Americans of working age has declined. The paper, published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, which periodically administers health tests to a representative sample of the population. The investigators, led by Howard J. Hoffman, the director of the epidemiology and statistics program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, compared data collected between 1999 and 2004 with data from 2011 and 2012, the most recent available. Hearing loss in this study meant that a person could not hear, in at least one ear, a sound about as loud as rustling leaves. The researchers reported that while 15.9 percent of the population studied in the earlier period had problems hearing, just 14.1 percent of the more recent group had hearing loss. The good news is part of a continuing trend — Americans’ hearing has gotten steadily better since 1959. Most surprising to Mr. Hoffman, a statistician, was that even though the total population of 20- to 69-year-olds grew by 20 million over the time period studied — and the greatest growth was in the oldest people, a group most likely to have hearing problems — the total number of people with hearing loss fell, from 28 million to 27.7 million. Hearing experts who were not associated with the study said they were utterly convinced by the results. “It’s a fantastic paper,” said Brian Fligor, an audiologist with Lantos Technologies of Wakefield, Mass., which develops custom earpieces to protect ears from noise. “I totally believe them.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 22996 - Posted: 12.17.2016

Joy Ho The hipbone's connected to the leg bone, connected to the knee bone. That's not actually what those body parts are called, but we'll forgive you if you don't sing about the innominate bone connecting to the femur connecting to the patella. It just doesn't have the same ring to it. When the ancient Greeks were naming body parts, they were probably trying to give them names that were easy to remember, says Mary Fissell, a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. "Sure, there were texts, but the ancient world was very oral, and the people learning this stuff have to remember it." So the Greek scholars, and later Roman and medieval scholars, named bones and organs and muscles after what they looked like. The thick bone at the front of your lower leg, the tibia, is named after a similar-looking flute. And although you or I might get confused when a paleoanthropologist writes about the foramen magnum (which translates to "really big hole") a native Latin speaker would know exactly what to look for — the really big hole where your brain attaches to your spine. Sometimes the names get a little bit more abstract. Take the tragus, a tiny flap of skin on the outer ear. It's named after goats not because it looks like them, but because some people have tufts of hair on the tragus like goats do on their chins. "I'm fascinated by the struggle of translating sensory experiences to words, and that's what these early anatomists were doing. Sometimes in the names or descriptions you can almost feel the struggle of someone seeing this object and trying to reduce it to words,"says Fissell. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 22995 - Posted: 12.17.2016

By Sarah DeWeerdt, Toddlers with autism are oblivious to the social information in the eyes, but don’t actively avoid meeting another person’s gaze, according to a new study. The findings support one side of a long-standing debate: Do children with autism tend not to look others in the eye because they are uninterested or because they find eye contact unpleasant? “This question about why do we see reduced eye contact in autism has been around for a long time,” says study leader Warren Jones, director of research at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Georgia. “It’s important for how we understand autism, and it’s important for how we treat autism.” If children with autism dislike making eye contact, treatments could incorporate ways to alleviate the discomfort. But if eye contact is merely unimportant to the children, parents and therapists could help them understand why it is important in typical social interactions. The work also has implications for whether scientists who study eye contact should focus on social brain regions rather than those involved in fear and anxiety. Lack of eye contact is among the earliest signs of autism, and its assessment is part of autism screening and diagnostic tools. Yet researchers have long debated the underlying mechanism. The lack-of-interest hypothesis is consistent with the social motivation theory, which holds that a broad disinterest in social information underlies autism features. On the other hand, anecdotal reports from people with autism suggest that they find eye contact unpleasant. Studies that track eye movements as people view faces have provided support for both hypotheses. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 22994 - Posted: 12.17.2016

Older folks tend not to engage as much in risky behavior as teenagers and young adults do. You might call that wisdom or learned experience. But this also may be a result of older brains having less gray matter in a certain spot, according to a new study. Researchers found that adults who were less inclined to take risks had less gray matter in the right posterior parietal cortex, which is involved in decisions that entail risk. In the study, the researchers asked volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 88 to play a game involving risk. The participants were allowed to choose between a guaranteed gain, such as pocketing $5, or an uncertain gain, such as a lottery to earn between $5 and $120 with varying chances of winning or losing. As the researchers expected, those participants who chose the guaranteed gain — that is, no risk — tended to be older than those who opted for the lottery. It wasn’t a perfect correlation, but it was close. One could call this old-age wisdom. Yet when the researchers analyzed brain scans of these volunteers obtained through an MRI technique called voxel-based morphometry (VBM), they found that lower levels of gray matter, even more than age, best accounted for risk aversion. These results suggest that the brain changes that occur in healthy aging people may be behind more decision-making patterns and preferences than previously thought, the researchers noted in their findings, published Dec. 13 in the journal Nature Communications. © 1996-2016 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22993 - Posted: 12.17.2016

By PHIL BARBER SAN FRANCISCO — Paraag Marathe’s structured, analytical mind has served him well in the offices of Silicon Valley and the National Football League. He figured that he could lean on those traits the first time he spoke publicly about his sister, Shilpa, and how anorexia had taken her life. But composure failed Marathe in 2011, six years after Shilpa’s death, while he spoke to survivors and grieving family members at an event for Andrea’s Voice, a nonprofit foundation that tries to promote education about eating disorders and their treatments. “Not only did I break down a little bit during that speech,” said Marathe, 39, the San Francisco 49ers’ chief strategy officer and executive vice president for football operations. “It was also one of those weird moments afterwards. I emotionally collapsed in the arms of somebody there who had lost her daughter.” The memories were back. Marathe had watched his brilliant sister succumb to self-destructive thoughts and starve herself. He had seen Shilpa wither to less than 50 pounds in the last years of her life, had felt the shame and puzzlement that her condition brought to his family. Fueled by regret — why had he not noticed sooner, and why wasn’t he more assertive in trying to help Shilpa? — Marathe has found his voice. He will patiently tell you that 30 million Americans are believed to suffer from eating disorders, and that medical insurance plans rarely cover treatment of the condition. He will remind you that anorexia has the highest fatality rate among mental illnesses — about 10 percent, according to a 2011 meta-analysis published in Archives of General Psychiatry and cited by the National Institute of Mental Health. Eating-disorder caregivers and advocates welcome Marathe’s help in shattering the myth that anorexia afflicts only well-to-do white girls and women. The illness claims men, too, and frequently remains a taboo subject in less affluent or nonwhite families, said Kristina Saffran of Project HEAL, an organization that raises money to cover care from diagnosis to recovery. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 22992 - Posted: 12.15.2016

By Kai Kupferschmidt New York City is known for its strange sights. But on 12 July, even locals were shocked by what they saw: more than 30 people staggering around a Brooklyn block with empty stares, shuffling their arms and feet and occasionally groaning. What sounds like the opening of a horror movie was suspected from the start to be the work of a synthetic cannabinoid. Now, a new analysis, out today in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirms those suspicions. But it has also raised scientific ire over its prolific use of the word “zombie.” Developed by academics and pharma companies to study cannabinoid receptors in the human body, synthetic cannabinoids act on the same receptor on brain cells as cannabis. The compounds, which can be up to 100 times more potent than cannabis, are a rapidly growing class of drugs, usually dissolved in liquid and sprayed on leaves to be smoked. There are hundreds of different compounds, and though they are quickly made illegal in many places, new ones appear every year. To find out what was responsible for the Brooklyn episode, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), started with a foil-wrapped pouch of herbs found on one of the patients, labeled “AK-47 24 Karat Gold.” When they analyzed a sample, they found it contained the substance AMB-FUBINACA, a powerful synthetic cannabinoid similar to a compound first patented by Pfizer in 2009. The researchers also found breakdown products of AMB-FUBINACA in the blood of eight patients. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22991 - Posted: 12.15.2016

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. and PAM BELLUCK Babies born to Zika-infected mothers are highly likely to have brain damage, even in the absence of obvious abnormalities like small heads, and the virus may go on replicating in their brains well after birth, according to three studies published Tuesday. Many types of brain damage were seen in the studies, including dead spots and empty spaces in the brain, cataracts and congenital deafness. There were, however, large differences among these studies in how likely it was that a child would be hurt by the infection. One study, published by The Journal of the American Medical Association, assessed 442 pregnancies registered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between January and September in the continental United States and Hawaii, most of them in returning travelers. That report found that 6 percent had birth defects. None of those birth defects occurred in infants born to women infected in the second or third trimester. By contrast, in a study of 125 Zika-infected women in Rio de Janeiro done by Brazilian and American scientists and released by The New England Journal of Medicine, almost half of pregnancies had “adverse outcomes,” ranging from fetal deaths to serious brain damage. Of the 117 infants born alive, 42 percent had “grossly abnormal” brain scans or physical symptoms, the authors said. Other studies from Colombia, Brazil and French Polynesia have suggested that brain damage rates are between 1 and 13 percent. But each one uses different measurements of brain damage and different definitions of which mothers to include, so the question remains unanswered. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22990 - Posted: 12.15.2016

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News website Detailed MRI scans should be offered to some women in pregnancy to help spot brain defects in the developing baby, say researchers. Ultrasounds are already used to look inside the womb and check that the baby is growing properly. However, the study on 570 women published in the Lancet showed doctors were able to make a much better diagnosis using MRI scans. Experts called for the scans to become routine practice. Pregnant women are offered an ultrasound scan at about 20 weeks that can spot abnormalities in the brain. They are detected in three in every 1,000 pregnancies. If the brain fails to develop properly it can result in miscarriage or still birth. Couples are generally offered counselling and some choose to have an abortion More certainty The study, carried out across 16 centres in the UK, analysed the impact of using MRI scans - which use magnetic fields and radio waves to image the body - to confirm any diagnoses. Overall, it showed ultrasound gave the correct diagnosis 68% of the time. But combining that with MRI increased the accuracy to 93%. Image copyright SPL Image caption The detailed picture of the developing baby's brain revealed by MRI The extra tests were most useful in borderline cases where doctors were uncertain of the outcome. The number of pregnant women who were given an "unknown" diagnosis was more than halved by the extra scans, increasing the confidence that the developing baby's brain was healthy or not. © 2016 BBC.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22989 - Posted: 12.15.2016

The important role vitamin D plays in early life is back in the spotlight after Australian researchers noticed a link between a deficiency during pregnancy and autism. The study found pregnant women with low vitamin D levels at 20 weeks’ gestation were more likely to have a child with autistic traits by the age of six. The finding has led to calls for the widespread use of vitamin D supplements during pregnancy, just as taking folate has reduced the incidence of spina bifida in the community. “This study provides further evidence that low vitamin D is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders,” said Professor John McGrath from the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute, who led the research alongside Dr Henning Tiemeier from the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands. McGrath said supplements might reduce the incidence of autism, a lifelong developmental condition that affects, among other things, how an individual relates to their environment and other people. “We would not recommend more sun exposure, because of the increased risk of skin cancer in countries like Australia,” he said. “Instead, it’s feasible that a safe, inexpensive, and publicly accessible vitamin D supplement in at-risk groups may reduce the prevalence of this risk factor.” Vitamin D usually comes from exposure to the sun, but it can also be found in some foods and supplements. While it’s widely known vitamin D is vital for maintaining healthy bones, there’s also a solid body of evidence linking it to brain growth. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 22988 - Posted: 12.14.2016

By Claire Asher We pride ourselves on our big brains, but when it comes to figuring out whether people or other animals with particularly big brains do better than others, the evidence has been lacking. Now, for the first time, a study in red deer is showing that bigger brained mammals tend to be more successful in the wild, and that brain size is a heritable trait that they can pass on to their offspring. Corina Logan from the University of Cambridge and her team have looked at the skulls of 1314 red deer (Cervus elaphus) from the Isle of Rum. The complete life histories of the deer are well known thanks to the Isle of Rum Red Deer Project, which has been collecting data on the island for more than 40 years, spanning seven deer generations. “This kind of study has not been conducted before because it requires long-term data from a large number of individuals,” says Logan. Heritable heads The team found that the ratio of skull volume to body size was highly heritable, explaining 63 per cent of variation between individuals. Female deer with larger skulls lived significantly longer and raised more offspring to adulthood, though it’s not clear yet why bigger brains are advantageous to females. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 22987 - Posted: 12.14.2016

A little over a decade ago, neuroscientists began using a new technique to inspect what was going on in the brains of their subjects. Rather than giving their subjects a task to complete and watching their brains to see which parts lit up, they’d tell them to lie back, let their minds wander, and try not to fall asleep for about six minutes. That technique is called resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging, and it shares a problem with other types of fMRI: It only tracks changes in the blood in the brain, not the neurons sending the signals in the first place. Researchers have recently called fMRI into question for its reliance on possibly-faulty statistics. And things get even less certain when the brain isn’t engaged in any particular task. “These signals are, by definition, random,” says Elizabeth Hillman, a biomedical engineer at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. “And when you’re trying to measure something that’s random amidst a whole bunch of noise, it becomes very hard to tell what’s actually random and what isn’t.” Six years ago, Hillman, along with many others in the field, was deeply skeptical of resting state fMRI’s ability to measure what it promised to. But this week, in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she presents compelling evidence to the contrary: a comprehensive visualization of neural activity throughout the entire brain at rest, and evidence that the blood rushing around in your brain is actually a good indicator of what your neurons are doing. Ever since 1992, when researcher Bharat Biswal first started scanning people who were just sitting around, resting state fMRI has become increasingly popular. Partly, that’s because it’s just way simpler than regular, task-based fMRI.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 22986 - Posted: 12.14.2016

Abby L. Wilkerson The new class I was teaching — “Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies” — was one of several first-year writing seminars offered at George Washington University. Given the focus, it was likely to be a challenge for at least some of the students. And it was presenting a particular challenge to me. Even before the class began, I was anxious. I have depression, and I wondered: Should I acknowledge it in the class? Would the students benefit if I did? I wanted to be sure I knew what I was doing, for everyone’s sake, before taking the leap. But I was not at all certain. The idea of disclosing in the classroom made me feel conflicted and vulnerable. Though the World Health Organization identifies depression as “the leading cause of disability,” not everyone with depression identifies herself as disabled. One of the central meanings of disability for me is “crip” pride — resistance to medical notions of disability as a defect and related social stigmas. My depression has given me unasked-for gifts, including a sensitivity to others’ suffering. But let’s face it — on some level, depression is suffering. How could I reconcile this with the fierce crip attitude in others that I’ve so admired? In class, how would the dull weight of depression sit with the “crip” in the course title? If I were going to do this, I needed to get it right. And I wasn’t sure how. Though I have suffered severe depression in the past, these days, my episodes tend to be milder and less frequent. Some days, I feel fine. But I might soon begin feeling melancholy — yet still able to laugh, think clearly, sleep at night and enjoy my life. Then one morning, for no discernible reason, I wake up mired in mud, my body now freight to be pushed through daily routines. The rhythm of life is suddenly ground down almost to nothing. I feel somehow both numb and raw, skin thin, laid open. Everything that matters is now far-off in the distance. Other people seem remote, existing in some parallel universe. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22985 - Posted: 12.14.2016

Laura Sanders Fewer teenagers in the United States used drugs in 2016 than in previous decades. The positive news comes from an annual survey of almost 45,500 U.S. students in grades eight, 10 and 12. “There’s a lot of good news here,” says pediatrician Sharon Levy of Boston Children’s Hospital. Public health messages from pediatricians, educators and others seem to be sinking in, she says. “I think that’s fabulous. Substance use is one of the most important — yet modifiable — behavioral health issues of adolescents.” Adolescents’ use of many of the substances, including alcohol and cigarettes, hit an all-time low since the survey, known as the Monitoring the Future study, began collecting data 42 years ago. Heroin, methamphetamines, inhalants and stimulants also hit lows this year. E-cigarettes have been particularly concerning as more adolescents gave the new devices a try, reaching a high in 2015 (SN: 5/28/16, p. 4). For the first time, the number of students who vape is declining, the survey found. In 2015, 16.3 percent of 12th-graders reported vaping in the last 30 days. In 2016, that fell to 12.5. Similar declines were evident among eighth- and 10th-graders. In a happy surprise, misuse of prescription opioid use decreased in the last five years among 12th-graders. The drop was “a big surprise,” particularly against a backdrop of a much wider opioid epidemic in the general population (SN: 9/3/16, p. 14), Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., said December 13 at a news briefing. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22984 - Posted: 12.14.2016

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS As the opioid epidemic sweeps through rural America, an ever-greater number of drug-dependent newborns are straining hospital neonatal units and draining precious medical resources. The problem has grown more quickly than realized and shows no signs of abating, researchers reported on Monday. Their study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, concludes for the first time that the increase in drug-dependent newborns has been disproportionately larger in rural areas. The rising rates are due largely to widening use of opioids among pregnant women, the researchers found. From 2004 to 2013, the proportion of newborns born dependent on drugs increased nearly sevenfold in hospitals in rural counties, to 7.5 per 1,000 from 1.2 per 1,000. By contrast, the uptick among urban infants was nearly fourfold, to 4.8 per 1,000 from 1.4 per 1,000. “The problem is accelerating in rural areas to a greater degree than in urban areas,” said Dr. Veeral Tolia, a neonatologist who works at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas and was not involved in the new report. Other recent studies have underscored the breadth of the problem. The hospital costs associated with treating addicted newborns rose to $1.5 billion in 2013, from $732 million in 2009, according to a study in the Journal of Perinatology. Some neonatal intensive care units, called NICUs, now devote 10 percent of their hours to caring for infants who have withdrawal symptoms. Hospitals in the eye of this storm are commonly underresourced, experts said. “Typically, rural hospitals that deliver babies have traditionally focused on the lower-risk population in areas they serve,” said Dr. Alison V. Holmes, an associate professor of pediatrics at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22983 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By Veronique Greenwood Baffling grammar, strange vowels, quirky idioms and so many new words—all of this makes learning a new language hard work. Luckily, researchers have discovered a number of helpful tricks, ranging from exposing your ears to a variety of native speakers to going to sleep soon after a practice session. A pair of recent papers suggests that even when you are not actively studying, what you hear can affect your learning and that sometimes listening without speaking works best. In one study, published in 2015 in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, linguists found that people who took breaks from learning new sounds performed just as well as those who took no breaks, as long as the sounds continued to play in the background. The researchers trained two groups of people to distinguish among trios of similar sounds—for instance, Hindi has “p,” “b” and a third sound English speakers mistake for “b.” One group practiced telling these apart one hour a day for two days. Another group alternated between 10 minutes of the task and 10 minutes of a “distractor” task that involved matching symbols on a worksheet while the sounds continued to play in the background. Remarkably, the group that switched between tasks improved just as much as the one that focused on the distinguishing task the entire time. “There's something about our brains that makes it possible to take advantage of the things you've already paid attention to and to keep paying attention to them,” even when you are focused on something else, suggests Melissa Baese-Berk, a linguist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study. In a 2016 study published in the Journal of Memory and Language, Baese-Berk and another colleague found that it is better to listen to new sounds silently rather than practice saying them yourself at the same time. Spanish speakers learning to distinguish among sounds in the Basque language performed more poorly when they were asked to repeat one of the sounds during training. The findings square with what many teachers have intuited—that a combination of focused practice and passive exposure to a language is the best approach. “You need to come to class and pay attention,” Baese-Berk says, “but when you go home, turn on the TV or turn on the radio in that language while you're cooking dinner, and even if you're not paying total attention to it, it's going to help you.” © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Language; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22982 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By BENEDICT CAREY About one in six American adults reported taking at least one psychiatric drug, usually an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medication, and most had been doing so for a year or more, according to a new analysis. The report is based on 2013 government survey data on some 242 million adults and provides the most fine-grained snapshot of prescription drug use for psychological and sleep problems to date. “I follow this area, so I knew the numbers would be high,” said Thomas J. Moore, a researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., and the lead author of the analysis, which was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. “But in some populations, the rates are extraordinary.” Mr. Moore and his co-author, Donald R. Mattison of Risk Sciences International in Ottawa, combed household survey and insurance data compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They found that one in five women had reported filling at least one prescription that year — about two times the number of men who had — and that whites were about twice as likely to have done so than blacks or Hispanics. Nearly 85 percent of those who had gotten at least one drug had filled multiple prescriptions for that drug over the course of the year studied, which the authors considered long-term use. “To discover that eight in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms,” Mr. Moore said. Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, said the new analysis provided a clear, detailed picture of current usage: “It reflects a growing acceptance of and reliance on prescription medications” to manage common emotional problems, he said. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 22981 - Posted: 12.13.2016

Answer by Paul King, Director of Data Science, on Quora: There are hundreds of surprising, perspective-shifting insights about the nature of reality that come from neuroscience. Every bizarre neurological syndrome, every visual illusion, and every clever psychological experiment reveals something entirely unexpected about our experience of the world that we take for granted. Here are a few to give a flavor: 1. Perceptual reality is entirely generated by our brain. We hear voices and meaning from air pressure waves. We see colors and objects, yet our brain only receives signals about reflected photons. The objects we perceive are a construct of the brain, which is why optical illusions can fool the brain. Recommended by Forbes 2. We see the world in narrow disjoint fragments. We think we see the whole world, but we are looking through a narrow visual portal onto a small region of space. You have to move your eyes when you read because most of the page is blurry. We don't see this, because as soon as we become curious about part of the world, our eyes move there to fill in the detail before we see it was missing. While our eyes are in motion, we should see a blank blur, but our brain edits this out. 3. Body image is dynamic and flexible. Our brain can be fooled into thinking a rubber arm or a virtual reality hand is actually a part of our body. In one syndrome, people believe one of their limbs does not belong to them. One man thought a cadaver limb had been sewn onto his body as a practical joke by doctors. 4. Our behavior is mostly automatic, even though we think we are controlling it.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22980 - Posted: 12.13.2016

By DANIEL A. YUDKIN and JAY VAN BAVEL During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.” Her comment moved to the forefront of public conversation an issue that scientists have been studying for decades: namely, that even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups. Studies have shown that these subtle biases are widespread and associated with discrimination in legal, economic and organizational settings. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has said that an “accusation of implicit bias” in cases where a white police officer shoots a black civilian serves to “demean law enforcement.” Writing in National Review, David French claimed that the concept of implicit bias lets people “indict entire communities as bigoted.” But implicit bias is not about bigotry per se. As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of “us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team. This doesn’t make the effects of implicit bias any less worrisome, but it does mean people should be less defensive about it. Furthermore, our research gives cause for optimism: Implicit bias can be overcome with rational deliberation. In a series of experiments whose results were published in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, we set out to determine how severely people would punish someone for stealing. Our interest was in whether a perpetrator’s membership in a particular group would influence the severity of the punishment he or she received. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 22979 - Posted: 12.12.2016

By Chloé Hecketsweiler Can brain science predict when someone will commit a crime, or tell whether a defendant knew right from wrong? In recent decades, scientists and criminal justice experts have been trying to answer tantalizing questions like these — with mixed success. The science of predicting crime using algorithms is still shaky, and while sophisticated tools such as neuroimaging are increasingly being used in courtrooms, they raise a host of tricky questions: What kind of brain defect or brain injury should count when assessing a defendant’s responsibility for a crime? Can brain imaging distinguish truth from falsehood? Can neuroscience predict human behavior? Judith Edersheim, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and also a lawyer who specializes in forensic evaluations, focuses her research on these gray areas. In 2009, she co-founded the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital, with the goal of “translating neuroscience into the legal arena.” And on December 15, at an event at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Edersheim will talk about the vulnerability of the aging brain, highlighting the case of a man affected by an undetected brain disease. For this installment of the Undark Five, we asked her what brain imaging can reveal about the “criminal brain,” how relationships between brain functioning and behavior can inform the courtroom, and what controversies this iconoclastic science may raise. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity, and Undark has supplied some additional links. UNDARK — Using brain imaging, scientists have identified correlations between certain brain abnormalities and criminal behaviors. Is there a signature for the “criminal brain”? JUDITH EDERSHEIM — There may be no criminal minds; there may be criminal moments. Copyright 2016 Undark

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 22978 - Posted: 12.12.2016

Ian Boldsworth If you deal with mental health issues of any sort, talking about them is often a struggle, especially with all the stigma around them. It turns out, putting them out there for the world to hear is even more tricky. Nonetheless, after years of producing podcasts that stretched idiocy to previously unchartered territories, I recently did precisely this and released my first semi-serious project, all about discussing and sharing personal experiences of dealing with mental health problems. Three days after it was released, I’d still not listened to the completed series myself. Despite being the presenter and producer, I’d slightly bottled it. Those closest to me will tell you that I was battling a real anxiety in the lead-up to releasing the full series of The Mental Podcast, and that I’d already made my excuses to them. Every time somebody said they were looking forward to it I told them not to, and my initial promotional tweets had a cautionary, apologetic feel of “you may like this, you may not”. For the record, I’ve never had any issues talking about mental health stuff, always more than happy to casually drop it into an interview or real-life conversation, but with this new series, as the release date loomed closer, I started to get worried about it. On a purely business level, I was concerned that it wouldn’t make its money back. Over the last 12 months or so I’ve financed my independent stuff up front and then, with a reward incentivised (not a word) donations drive at the end of the series, attempted to recoup the cost. It’s a very high risk/utterly idiotic business model as podcast listeners have “getting stuff free” in their DNA, but so far I’ve fluked a decent, if modest, return. The last two series of podcasts were called The ParaPod and consisted of me lambasting a ghost-believing-buffoon with the simple tools of logic and facts, a pretty easy concept to get on board with and you don’t need to be worrying that it will potentially take you to the darkest depths of depression (although the commitment of an adult to such a ludicrous supernatural premise should at least waver your faith in human intelligence). © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22977 - Posted: 12.12.2016