Bedtime use of cellphones or tablets by children — even just having access to them — is consistently linked to excessive daytime sleepiness and poor sleep, researchers say. They called on teachers, health care professionals, parents and children to be educated about the damaging influence of device use on sleep. The portable media devices have entered the bedroom, giving children unprecedented access to technology and media before researchers have had a chance to explore the positive and negative impacts. To explore whether there's an association between use of, or access to, media devices and sleep quantity and quality, researchers reviewed 20 sleep studies involving 125,198 children aged six to 19. In Monday's issue of JAMA Pediatrics, the reviewers concluded there's strong and consistent evidence of an association between access to or use of devices and reduced sleep quantity (defined as less than 10 hours for children and less than nine hours for adolescents) or quality, as well as increased daytime sleepiness. The way device use leads to poor sleep is thought to be light emission. But the review looked at examples of holding a device in the bedroom and not using it, which excludes light emission as the sole mechanism, said study author Ben Carter of the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. "We are presenting results that highlight that it looks likely there are also other causes," Carter said in an email. ©2016 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22812 - Posted: 11.01.2016

Emily Sohn After a mother killed her four young children and then herself last month in rural China, onlookers quickly pointed to life circumstances. The family lived in extreme poverty, and bloggers speculated that her inability to escape adversity pushed her over the edge. Can poverty really cause mental illness? It's a complex question that is fairly new to science. Despite high rates of both poverty and mental disorders around the world, researchers only started probing the possible links about 25 years ago. Since then, evidence has piled up to make the case that, at the very least, there is a connection. People who live in poverty appear to be at higher risk for mental illnesses. They also report lower levels of happiness. That seems to be true all over the globe. In a 2010 review of 115 studies that spanned 33 countries across the developed and developing worlds, nearly 80 percent of the studies showed that poverty comes with higher rates of mental illness. Among people living in poverty, those studies also found, mental illnesses were more severe, lasted longer and had worse outcomes. And there's growing evidence that levels of depression are higher in poorer countries than in wealthier ones. Those kinds of findings challenge a long-held myth of the "poor but happy African sitting under a palm tree," says Johannes Haushofer, an economist and neurobiologist who studies interactions between poverty and mental health at Princeton University. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 22811 - Posted: 10.31.2016

By Diana Kwon Can you feel your heart beating? Most people cannot, unless they are agitated or afraid. The brain masks the sensation of the heart in a delicate balancing act—we need to be able to feel our pulse racing occasionally as an important signal of fear or excitement, but most of the time the constant rhythm would be distracting or maddening. A growing body of research suggests that because of the way the brain compensates for our heartbeat, it may be vulnerable to perceptual illusions—if they are timed just right. In a study published in May in the Journal of Neuroscience, a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne conducted a series of studies on 143 participants and found that subjects took longer to identify a flashing object when it appeared in sync with the rhythm of their heartbeats. Using functional MRI, they also found that activity in the insula, a brain area associated with self-awareness, was suppressed when people viewed these synchronized images. The authors suggest that the flashing object was suppressed by the brain because it got lumped in with all the other bodily changes that occur with each heartbeat—the eyes make tiny movements, eye pressure changes slightly, the chest expands and contracts. “The brain knows that the heartbeat is coming from the self, so it doesn't want to be bothered by the sensory consequences of these signals,” says Roy Salomon, one of the study's co-authors. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 22810 - Posted: 10.31.2016

A snake with the largest venom glands in the world could hold the answer to pain relief, scientists have found. Dubbed the "killer of killers", the long-glanded blue coral snake is known to prey on the likes of king cobras. The venom of the two-metre-long snake native to South East Asia acts "almost immediately" and causes prey to spasm. New research published in the journal Toxin found it targets receptors which are critical to pain in humans and could be used as a method of treatment. "Most snakes have a slow-acting venom that works like a powerful sedative. You get sleepy, slow, before you die," said Dr Bryan Fry of the University of Queensland who is one of a team of researchers working on a study into the effect of the snake's venom. "This snake's venom however, works almost immediately because it usually preys on very dangerous animals that need to be quickly killed before they can retaliate. It's the killer of killers." Turning into medicine? Cone snails and scorpions are some of a handful of invertebrates whose venom has been studied for its medical use. However, as a vertebrate, the snake is evolutionarily closer to humans, and so a medicine developed from its venom could potentially be more effective, says Dr Fry. "The venom targets our sodium channels, which are central to our transmission of pain. We could potentially turn this into something that could help relieve pain, and which might work better on us." The snake's venom glands extend to up to one-quarter of its body length. "It's got freaky venom glands, the longest of any in the world, but it's so beautiful. It's easily my favourite species of snake," said Dr Fry. © 2016 BBC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 22809 - Posted: 10.31.2016

Erin Wayman SALT LAKE CITY — The earliest primate was a tiny, solitary tree dweller that liked the night life. Those are just some conclusions from new reconstructions of the primate common ancestor, presented October 27 at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Eva Hoffman, now a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, and colleagues at Yale University looked at behavioral and ecological data from 178 modern primate species. Examining patterns of traits across the primate family tree, the researchers inferred the most likely characteristics of ancestors at different branching points in the tree — all the way back to the common ancestor. This ancient primate, which may have lived some 80 million to 70 million years ago, was probably no bigger than a guinea pig, lived alone and gave birth to one offspring at a time, the researchers suggest. Living in trees and active at night, the critter probably ventured out to the ends of tree branches to eat fruits, leaves and insects. But this mix of traits probably didn’t arise in primates, Hoffman says. After adding tree shrews and colugos — primates’ closest living relatives — to the analysis, the researchers concluded these same attributes were also present in the three groups’ common ancestor. So explanations of early primate evolution that rely on these features need to be reconsidered, Hoffman says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22808 - Posted: 10.31.2016

By STEPH YIN Halloween is here again. That means your co-workers have planted surprise spiders around the office. You’ve been invited to a haunted hayride. Your neighbor’s yard has a full cemetery, rigged with motion detectors and pop-up zombies. Chicken-livered from the start, I have always dreaded this time of year. Haunted houses, ghost tours and horror film fests are not my thing, and why people love having the daylights scared out of them completely escapes me. I decided to try to understand my friends who are on the lookout for thrills this time of year. As it turns out, there are many possible reasons some people like to be scared stiff. Each person’s threshold for experiences that provoke fear is made up of a unique recipe that blends nature and nurture. “The ingredients vary from person to person,” said Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and a former president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Farley is interested in what draws certain people to extreme behaviors, like driving racecars, climbing Mount Everest and flying hot air balloons across oceans. In the 1980s, he coined the term “Type T” personality to refer to the behavioral profile of thrill-seekers. What makes someone thrill-seeking, he said, comes down to a mix of genes, environment and early development. Spooky Science Stories, Just in Time for Halloween Gather around as the crypt keepers of our Science department share scientific curiosities of things that slither and crawl and fly. David Zald, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University, studies one piece of the equation. His research partly focuses on dopamine, a chemical involved in our brain’s response to reward. In the past, he has found that people who lack what he calls “brakes” on dopamine release tend to pursue thrilling activities. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 22807 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By Bob Holmes It’s not something to be sniffed at. Computers have cracked a problem that has stumped chemists for centuries: predicting a molecule’s odour from its structure. The feat may allow perfumers and flavour specialists to create new products with much less trial and error. Unlike vision and hearing, the result of which can be predicted by analysing wavelengths of light or sound, our sense of smell has long remained inscrutable. Olfactory chemists have never been able to predict how a given molecule will smell, except in a few special cases, because so many aspects of a molecule’s structure could be important in determining its odour. Andreas Keller and Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University in New York City decided to crowdsource the power of machine learning to address the problem. First, they had 49 volunteers rate the odour of 476 chemicals according to how intense and how pleasant the smell was, and how well it matched 19 other descriptors, such as garlic, spice or fruit. Then they released the data for 407 of the chemicals, along with 4884 different variables measuring chemical structure, and invited anyone to develop machine-learning algorithms that would make sense of the patterns. They used the remaining 69 chemicals to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithms of the 22 teams that took up the challenge. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 22806 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By David Tuller After living in Oklahoma for 40 years, Nita and Doug Thatcher retired in 2009 to the Rust Belt city of Lorain, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb that hugs Lake Erie. When Nita needed to find a new primary care doctor, a friend recommended someone from the Cleveland Clinic. Nita knew the institution’s reputation for cutting-edge research and superior medical services. But as a longtime patient grappling with chronic fatigue syndrome, a debilitating disorder that scientists still don’t fully understand, she was wary when she learned that the clinic was promoting a common but potentially dangerous treatment for the illness: a steady increase in activity known as graded exercise therapy. The notion that people with chronic fatigue syndrome should be able to exercise their way back to health has enjoyed longstanding and widespread support, and “graded exercise” has become the de facto standard of clinical care. This approach has obvious intuitive appeal. Exercise helps all kinds of illnesses, and it’s a great tool for boosting energy. How could it possibly hurt? British psychiatrists and psychologists developed the graded exercise strategy for treating chronic fatigue syndrome during the 1990s. They offered a straightforward rationale: These patients were not medically sick but severely out of shape (“deconditioned”) from prolonged avoidance of activity. And they avoided activity because they wrongly believed they had a biological disease that would get worse if they overexerted themselves. During treatment, patients were encouraged to question this “dysfunctional cognition,” view any resurgent symptoms as transient, and push through the exhaustion and pain to rebuild their strength. Copyright 2016 Undark

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22805 - Posted: 10.29.2016

By Ruth Williams .Newly made cells in the brains of mice adopt a more complex morphology and connectivity when the animals encounter an unusual environment than if their experiences are run-of-the-mill. Researchers have now figured out just how that happens. According to a study published today (October 27) in Science, a particular type of cell—called an interneuron—in the hippocampus processes the animals’ experiences and subsequently shapes the newly formed neurons. “We knew that experience shapes the maturation of these new neurons, but what this paper does is it lays out the entire circuit through which that happens,” said Heather Cameron, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda who was not involved with the work. “It’s a really nicely done piece of work because they go step-by-step and show all of the cells that are involved and how they’re connected.” Most of the cells in the adult mammalian brain are mature and don’t divide, but in a few regions, including an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, neurogenesis occurs. The dentate gyrus is thought to be involved in the formation of new memories. In mice, for instance, exploring novel surroundings electrically activates the dentate gyrus and can affect the production, maturation, and survival of the newly born cells. Now, Alejandro Schinder and his team at the Leloir Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina, have investigated the process in detail. © 1986-2016 The Scientist

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 22804 - Posted: 10.29.2016

Ramin Skibba Some common swifts spend ten months in flight without taking a break, setting a flight record that would be the envy of Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. Researchers report these long hauls, which occurred during migrations between Scandinavia and central Africa, on 27 October in Current Biology1. Ornithologists and birdwatchers have speculated about the long-distance prowess of common swifts (Apus apus) since the 1960s. People had seen the birds fill the sky in Liberia, for example, but couldn't find any nearby roost sites where the birds might land. Scientists attached tags that combined tiny data loggers and accelerometers to the 40-gram birds to record their route and flight activity during their annual journey. The team tracked 13 individual birds, some for multiple seasons, starting and ending at their breeding grounds in Sweden. The researchers found that some of the birds made a few brief night landings in winter but remained airborne for 99% of the time. Three birds didn't touch down once in the entire ten months. “These long-term flights confirm what everybody suspected for quite some time now,” says Felix Liechti of the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach. Other birds can remain aloft for long periods. Alpine swifts (Tachymarptis melba) fly nonstop for half the year during their migrations2. And the much larger frigate birds (Fregata minor) off the coast of Ecuador can go for two months without landing while they forage for food in the ocean. They can even sleep on the wing3. But common swifts are in a class of their own. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 22803 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Catherine Caruso Babies and children undergo massive brain restructuring as they mature, and for good reason—they have a whole world of information to absorb during their sprint toward adulthood. This mental renovation doesn’t stop there, however. Adult brains continue to produce new cells and restructure themselves throughout life, and a new study in mice reveals more about the details of this process and the important role environmental experience plays. Through a series of experiments, researchers at the Leloir Institute in Buenos Aires showed that when adult mice are exposed to stimulating environments, their brains are able to more quickly integrate new brain cells into existing neural networks through a process that involves new and old cells connecting to one another via special helper cells called interneurons. The adult mammalian brain, long believed to lack the capacity to make new cells, has two main areas that continuously produce new neurons throughout life. One of these areas, the hippocampus (which is involved in memory, navigation, mood regulation and stress response) produces new neurons in a specialized region called the dentate gyrus. Many previous studies have focused on how the dentate gyrus produces new neurons and what happens to these neurons as they mature, but Alejandro Schinder and his colleagues at Leloir wanted to go one step further and understand how new neurons produced by the dentate gyrus are incorporated into the existing neural networks of the brain, and whether environment affects this process. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22802 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS Neither of the two drugs used most frequently to prevent migraines in children is more effective than a sugar pill, according to a study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers stopped the large trial early, saying the evidence was clear even though the drugs — the antidepressant amitriptyline and the epilepsy drug topiramate — had been shown to prevent migraines in adults. “The medication didn’t perform as well as we thought it would, and the placebo performed better than you would think,” said Scott Powers, the lead author of the study and a director of the Headache Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. A migraine is a neurological illness characterized by pulsating headache pain, sometimes accompanied by nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and noise. It’s a common childhood condition. Up to 11 percent of 7- to 11-year-olds and 23 percent of 15-year-olds have migraines. At 31 sites nationwide, 328 migraine sufferers aged 8 to 17 were randomly assigned to take amitriptyline, topiramate or a placebo pill for 24 weeks. Patients with episodic migraines (fewer than 15 headache days a month) and chronic migraines (15 or more headache days a month) were included. The aim was to figure out which drug was more effective at reducing the number of headache days, and to gauge which one helped children to stop missing school or social activities. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22801 - Posted: 10.28.2016

Katherine Hobson Placebos can't cure diseases, but research suggests that they seem to bring some people relief from subjective symptoms, such as pain, nausea, anxiety and fatigue. But there's a reason your doctor isn't giving you a sugar pill and telling you it's a new wonder drug. The thinking has been that you need to actually believe that you're taking a real drug in order to see any benefits. And a doctor intentionally deceiving a patient is an ethical no-no. So placebos have pretty much been tossed in the "garbage pail" of clinical practice, says Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In an attempt to make them more useful, he has been studying whether people might see a benefit from a placebo even if they knew it was a placebo, with no active ingredients. An earlier study found that so-called "open-label" or "honest" placebos improved symptoms among people with irritable bowel syndrome. And Kaptchuk and his colleagues found the same effect among people with garden-variety lower back pain, the most common kind of pain reported by American adults. The study included 83 people in Portugal, all of whom had back pain that wasn't caused by cancer, fractures, infections or other serious conditions. All the participants were told that the placebo was an inactive substance containing no medication. They were told that the body can automatically respond to placebos, that a positive attitude can help but isn't necessary and that it was important to take the pills twice a day for the full three weeks. © 2016 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22800 - Posted: 10.28.2016

Nicola Davis A brown, pebble-sized object found in a rock pool on a beach near Bexhill, Sussex bears the first evidence of fossilised dinosaur brain tissue, scientists say. Found in 2004 by an amateur fossil collector, the object is the cast of a dinosaur’s brain cavity, and appears to show a thin veneer of mineralised tissues on its surface. Scientists say the find is most likely from a relative of the Iguanodon, which lived around 125 million years ago. Large, hefty herbivores, Iguanodons reached up around eight metres in length, could walk on either two legs or all fours and boasted sharp spikes on their thumbs - a feature initially thought to be a horn on the nose and immortalised as such in the Victorian dinosaur sculptures of Crystal Palace Park. While casts of the inside of dinosaur brain cases have been found before, it is the first time fossilised brain soft tissue has been discovered for any land-living vertebrate. “The most striking thing is that something as delicate as brain tissue, and which you wouldn’t expect to ever see, has been preserved,” said Alex Liu, co-author of the research from the University of Cambridge. “It just speaks volumes [about] the spectacular preservational quality that can be obtained in the fossil record even 130 million years after this dinosaur is alive.” Writing in a special publication from the Geological Society of London to commemorate the work of the late co-author Martin Brasier, an international team of researchers describe how the cast was discovered near other dinosaur remains, including ribs and leg bones. “We can’t say it is from the same organism, but it is from a fairly large dinosaur,” said Liu. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22799 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Brian Owens Chimpanzees and their relatives bonobos are closer than we thought. Bonobos seem to have donated genes to chimps at least twice in the roughly two million years since they last shared an ancestor. The two closely related apes have occasionally interbred in captivity, and bonobos are renowned for their free and easy sex life. But the finding that they interbred in the wild was unexpected. The two species split sometime between 1.5 and 2.1 million years ago, around the same time that the Congo River system formed. Wild bonobo populations are entirely contained in that river system, separated from two nearby subspecies of chimps, the eastern and central subspecies. Scientists assumed the river was an impenetrable barrier, says Christina Hvilsom from Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark, one of the researchers who worked on the genetic project. But it turns out that it must have been breached more than once – although it’s not clear how that happened. Hvilsom and her colleagues weren’t actually looking for genetic evidence of ancient interspecies erotica. They were mapping genetic markers that could be used to determine where illegally traded chimps came from so they could be returned to their homes in the wild. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 22798 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Melissa Dahl A rule that spans time and space and morning routines: It is entirely too easy to underestimate the time it takes to get to work. Maybe once — one time — it took just 20 minutes to get to work, but it typically takes 25 to 30, and you know that, but still you leave late and, thus, arrive late. It’s dumb. It is also, maybe, human nature. As Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest reports, a team of neuroscientists has just uncovered a very handy if rather complicated excuse for tardiness — it seems people tend to underestimate how long it will take to travel familiar routes. The laws of time and space do not actually bend in order to transport you to work or school more quickly, but at least part of you believes that they will. And yet the oddest part of this new study, published in the journal Hippocampus, is that the participants tended to overestimate the physical length of those routes, even as they underestimated how long it would take to travel them. It does make a certain amount of sense that people would exaggerate the breadth of familiar distances, because the level of detail you’ve stored about them matters to your memory. If you remember every Starbucks and street corner you pass on the way you usually walk to school, for instance, the walking route will likely feel longer when you recall it than one you don’t know as well. As Jarrett explains, the researchers “thought a more detailed neural representation would make that space seem larger.” And when they asked a group of students — all of whom had been living in the same building in London for 9 months — to draw a little map of their neighborhood, this is indeed what they found. The students exaggerated the physical distance of the routes they walked the most, drawing their maps a little bigger they should have. © 2016, New York Media LLC.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22797 - Posted: 10.28.2016

By Michael-Paul Schallmo, Scott Murray, Most people do not associate autism with visual problems. It’s not obvious how atypical vision might be related to core features of autism such as social and language difficulties and repetitive behaviors. Yet examining how autism affects vision holds tremendous promise for understanding this condition at a neural level. Over the past 50 years, we have learned more about the visual parts of the brain than any other areas, and we have a solid understanding of how neural activity leads to visual perception in a typical brain. Differences in neuronal processing in autism are likely to be widespread, and may be similar across brain regions. So pinpointing these differences in visual areas might reveal important details about processing in brain regions related to social functioning and language, which are not as well understood. Studying vision in autism may also help connect studies of people to those of animal models. Working with animals allows neuroscientists to study neural processing at many different levels—from specific genes and single neurons to small neural networks and brain regions that control functions such as movement or hearing. But animals do not display the complexity and diversity in language and social functioning that people do. By contrast, visual brain processes are similar between people and animals. We can use our rich knowledge of how neurons in animals process visual information to bridge the gap between animals and people. We can also use it to test hypotheses about how autism alters neural functioning in the brain. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Vision
Link ID: 22796 - Posted: 10.27.2016

By Helen Thomson IN THE 2009 Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, people live their lives by embodying themselves as robots. They meet people, go to work, even fall in love, all without leaving the comfort of their own home. Now, for the first time, three people with severe spinal injuries have taken the first steps towards that vision by controlling a robot thousands of kilometres away, using thought alone. The idea is that people with spinal injuries will be able to use robot bodies to interact with the world. It is part of the European Union-backed VERE project, which aims to dissolve the boundary between the human body and a surrogate, giving people the illusion that their surrogate is in fact their own body. In 2012, an international team went some way to achieving this by taking fMRI scans of the brains of volunteers while they thought about moving their hands or legs. The scanner measured changes in blood flow to the brain area responsible for such thoughts. An algorithm then passed these on as instructions to a robot. “The feeling of embodying the robot was good, although the sensation varied over time“ The volunteers could see what the robot was looking at via a head-mounted display. When they thought about moving their left or right hand, the robot moved 30 degrees to the left or right. Imagining moving their legs made the robot walk forward. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 22795 - Posted: 10.27.2016

Alison Abbott Psychiatrist Joshua Gordon wants to use mathematics to improve understanding of the brain. The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has a new director. On 12 September, psychiatrist Joshua Gordon took the reins at the institute, which has a budget of US$1.5 billion. He previously researched how genes predispose people to psychiatric illnesses by acting on neural circuits, at Columbia University in New York. His predecessor, Thomas Insel, left the NIMH to join Verily Life Sciences, a start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, in 2015. Gordon says that his priorities at the NIMH will include “low-hanging clinical fruit, neural circuits and mathematics — lots of mathematics", and explains to Nature exactly what that means. What do you plan to achieve in your first year in office? I won’t be doing anything radical. I am just going to listen to and learn from all the stakeholders — the scientific community, the public, consumer advocacy groups and other government offices. But I can say two general things. In the past twenty years, my two predecessors, Steve Hyman [now director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts] and Tom Insel, embedded into the NIMH the idea that psychiatric disorders are disorders of the brain, and to make progress in treating them we really have to understand the brain. I will absolutely continue this legacy. This does not mean we are ignoring the important roles of the environment and social interactions in mental health — we know they have a fundamental impact. But that impact is on the brain. Second, I will be thinking about how NIMH research can be structured to give pay-outs in the short-, medium- and long-terms. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 22794 - Posted: 10.27.2016

By Kerry Grens Scientists have observed changes in the human brain as study participants tell lies—specifically, as white lies became outright deception, the amygdalas of the fibbing volunteers became less active. The researchers’ findings, published in Nature Neuroscience yesterday (October 24), offer a possible neural mechanism for a common human failing, that lying can lead to more extensive dishonesty. “The reduction in activity in the amygdala can predict how much people increase dishonesty subsequently,” study coauthor Neil Garrett, a psychologist at University College London, told The Verge. Garrett and colleagues asked 25 volunteers who saw a big image of a jar of pennies to give others (who only saw a small picture of the jar) estimates about the number of pennies. The volunteers were given incentives to lie, and after they had fibbed previously, fMRI data showed reduced activity in the amygdala when people were dishonest again. This brain region is involved in processing emotions. “It’s an intriguing possibility that adaptation of amygdala response might underlie escalation in self-serving dishonesty,” Tom Johnstone, a neuroscientist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the study, told Scientific American, “though the results need to be replicated in a larger sample of participants, in order to examine the involvement of the many other brain regions previously shown to play a role in generating and regulating emotional responses.” © 1986-2016 The Scientist

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 22793 - Posted: 10.27.2016