by Helen Thomson "I was sitting on the toilet. I suddenly felt an explosion in the left side of my head and ended up on the floor. I think the only thing that kept me conscious was that I didn't want to be found with my pants down. Then the other side of my head went bang! I woke up in hospital and looked out of the window to see the tree was sprouting numbers. 3, 6, 9. Then I started talking in rhyme…" Ten days after having a subarachnoid haemorrhage – a stroke caused by bleeding in and around the brain – Tommy McHugh, an ex-con who'd been in his fair share of scraps, became a new man, with a personality that nobody recognised. When he was a young man, Tommy did time in prison. But after his stroke at age 51, everything changed. "I could taste the femininity inside of myself," he said. "My head was full of rhymes and images and pictures." Not only did he feel a sudden urge to write poetry, but he also began to paint and draw obsessively for up to 19 hours a day. He was never artistic before – in fact, he joked that he'd never even been in an art gallery "except to maybe steal something". Desperate to find out what was going on, Tommy wrote to several neuroscientists and end up working closely with Alice Flaherty at Harvard Medical School and Mark Lythgoe at University College London. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Laterality; Stroke
Link ID: 18142 - Posted: 05.11.2013

By Ian Chant Most people make good decisions most of the time. But when drug addiction, disease or brain injury enters the picture, rational thinking can go awry. What if the damaged brain just needed a little reminder of how it feels to choose wisely? Enter the MIMO neural prosthesis, an array of electrodes implanted in the brain that make contact with eight neuron circuits in the prefrontal cor-tex, the brain's command center for decision making. The device can both record the brain activity associated with good choices and stimulate the relevant neurons to get the brain back on track. Although the implant can listen in only on a tiny subset of the neurons in this region, the scientists who developed it, based at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, were surprised to discover that they could still pick up signature patterns associated with correct choices, at least in the context of a simple task. The researchers tested the neural prosthesis on monkeys that were trained to move a cursor over a picture on a computer screen to get a food reward. The implant first recorded the brain activity associated with choosing the correct picture. Then the monkeys were given cocaine, and their performance plummeted. But when the implant was switched on to send electric current to the neurons that had earlier been associated with the correct answers, the monkeys immediately started selecting the right pictures again. Some of them did an even better job than they had before receiving cocaine. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18141 - Posted: 05.11.2013

By Bruce Bower Provocative evidence that certain memory exercises make people smarter has sparked the rise of online brain-training programs such as Lumosity. But at least one type of brain training may not work as advertised, a new study finds. As expected, practicing improved volunteers’ performance on tests of memory and the ability to locate items quickly in busy scenes, say psychologist Thomas Redick of Indiana University Purdue University Columbus and his colleagues. That improvement did not, however, translate into higher scores on tests of intelligence and multitasking, the researchers report in the May Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Redick’s investigation is part of a growing scientific debate about brain training, which is promoted by some companies as having a variety of mental benefits. Some researchers say that extensive instruction and training on memory tasks can indeed fortify reasoning and problem solving. Others are skeptical that vigorous memory sessions produce such wide-ranging effects. The dispute feeds into a longstanding scientific controversy about whether enriched environments can increase intelligence, as measured on IQ tests. What’s not up for debate is that many people feel smarter after brain training. In the new study, 10 of 23 individuals who completed memory sessions said that the program helped them to think, multitask and focus better in daily life. But the scientists say that even if some participants performed daily tasks better after memory training, they may simply have tried harder or felt better about their efforts due to a belief that training had strengthened their minds. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18140 - Posted: 05.11.2013

By John McCarthy Into brains of newborn mice, researchers implanted human “progenitor cells.” These mature into a type of brain cell called astrocytes (see below). They grew into human astrocytes, crowding out mouse astrocytes. The mouse brains became chimeras of human and mouse, with the workhorse mouse brain cells – neurons – nurtured by billions of human astrocytes. Neuroscience is only beginning to discover what astrocytes do in brains. One job that is known is that they help neurons build connections (synapses) with other neurons. (Firing neurotransmitter molecules across synapses is how neurons communicate.) Human astrocytes are larger and more complex than those of other mammals. Humans’ unique brain capabilities may depend on this complexity. Human astrocytes certainly inspired the mice. Their neurons did indeed build stronger synapses. (Perhaps this was because human astrocytes signal three times faster than mouse astrocytes do.) Mouse learning sharpened, too. On the first try, for instance, altered mice perceived the connection between a noise and an electric shock (a standard learning test in mouse research). Normal mice need a few repetitions to get the idea. Memories of the doctored mice were better too: they remembered mazes, object locations, and the shock lessons longer. The reciprocal pulsing of billions of human and mouse brain cells inside a mouse skull is a little creepy. Imagine one of these hybrid mice exploring your living room. Would you feel like a Stone Age tribesman observing a toy robot? Does the thing think? © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Glia; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18139 - Posted: 05.11.2013

Roberta Kwok Sitting motionless in her wheelchair, paralysed from the neck down by a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson seems to take no notice of the cable rising from the top of her head through her curly dark hair. Instead, she stares intently at a bottle sitting on the table in front of her, a straw protruding from the top. Her gaze never wavers as she mentally guides a robot arm beside her to reach across the table, close its grippers around the bottle, then slowly lift the vessel towards her mouth. Only when she finally manages to take a sip does her face relax into a luminous smile. This video of 58-year-old Hutchinson illustrates the strides being taken in brain-controlled prosthetics1. Over the past 15 years, researchers have shown that a rat can make a robotic arm push a lever2, a monkey can play a video game3 and a person with quadriplegia — Hutchinson — can sip from a bottle of coffee1, all by simply thinking about the action. Improvements in prosthetic limbs have been equally dramatic, with devices now able to move individual fingers and bend at more than two dozen joints. But Hutchinson's focused stare in that video also illustrates the one crucial feature still missing from prosthetics. Her eyes could tell her where the arm was, but she could not feel what it was doing. Nor could she sense when the grippers touched the bottle, or whether it was slipping out of their grasp. Without this type of sensory feedback, even the simplest actions can be slow and clumsy, as Igor Spetic of Madison, Ohio, knows well. Fitted with a prosthetic after his right hand was crushed in an industrial accident in 2010, Spetic describes breaking dishes, grabbing fruit too hard and bruising it and dropping a can when trying to pick it up at the local shop. Having a sense of touch would be “tremendous”, he says. “It'd be one step closer to having the hand back.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Robotics
Link ID: 18138 - Posted: 05.09.2013

Ed Yong Many moths have evolved sensitive hearing that can pick up the ultrasonic probes of bats that want to eat them. But one species comes pre-adapted for anything that bats might bring to this evolutionary arms race. Even though its ears are extremely simple — a pair of eardrums on its flanks that each vibrate four receptor cells — it can sense frequencies up to 300 kilohertz, well beyond the range of any other animal and higher than any bat can squeak. “A lot of previous work has suggested that some bats have evolved calls that are out of the hearing range of the moths they are hunting. But this moth can hear the calls of any bat,” says James Windmill, an acoustical engineer at the University of Strathclyde, UK, who discovered the ability in the greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella). His study is published in Biology Letters1. Windmill's collaborator Hannah Moir, a bioacoustician now at the University of Leeds, UK, played sounds of varying frequencies to immobilized wax moths. As the insects “listened”, Moir used a laser to measure the vibrations of their eardrums, and electrodes to record the activity of their auditory nerves. The moths were most sensitive to frequencies of around 80 kilohertz, the average frequency of their courtship calls. But when exposed to 300 kilohertz, the highest level that the team tested, the insects' eardrums still vibrated and their neurons still fired. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 18137 - Posted: 05.09.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Two studies have found that depression and the use of certain antidepressants are both associated with increased risk for Clostridium difficile infection, an increasingly common cause of diarrhea that in the worst cases can be fatal. Researchers studied 16,781 men and women, average age 68, using hospital records and interviews to record cases of the infection, often called C. diff, and diagnoses of depression. The interviews were conducted biennially from 1991 to 2007 to gather self-reports of feelings of sadness and other emotional problems. There were 404 cases of C. difficile infection. After adjusting for other variables, the researchers found that the risk of C. diff infection among people with a history of depression or depressive symptoms was 36 to 47 percent greater than among people without depression. A second study, involving 4,047 hospitalized patients, average age 58, found a similar association of infection with depression. In addition, it found an association of some antidepressants — Remeron, Prozac and trazodone — with C. diff infection. There was no association with other antidepressants. “We have known for a long time that depression is associated with changes in the gastrointestinal system,” said the lead author, Mary A.M. Rogers, a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan, “and this interaction between the brain and the gut deserves more study.” Both reports appeared in the journal BMC Medicine. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18136 - Posted: 05.09.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Flu during pregnancy may increase the risk of the unborn child developing bipolar disorder later in life, research suggests. A study of 814 expectant women, published in JAMA Psychiatry, showed that infection made bipolar four times more likely. The overall risk remained low, but it echoes similar findings linking flu and schizophrenia. Experts said the risks were small and women should not worry. Bipolar leads to intense mood swings, which can last months, ranging from depression and despair to manic feelings of joy, overactivity and loss of inhibitions. Researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center identified a link between the condition, often diagnosed during late teens and twenties, and experiences in the womb. In their study looking at people born in the early 1960s, bipolar disorder was nearly four times as common in people whose mothers caught flu during pregnancy. The condition affects about one in 100 people. The lead researcher, Prof Alan Brown, estimated that influenza infection during pregnancy could lead to a 3-4% chance of bipolar disorder in the resulting children. However, in the vast majority of cases of bipolar disorder there would no history of flu. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18135 - Posted: 05.09.2013

By Ben Thomas Horror isn’t the only film genre that specializes in dread. War movies like Apocalypse Now, sci-fi mysteries like Brazil and Blade Runner, and dramas like Melancholia and Requiem for a Dream all masterfully evoke a less violent, more subtle and pervasive sense that something is unwell with the world – that somewhere along the line, something went deeply wrong and now normality itself is unraveling before our eyes. The director David Lynch has arguably built his entire career on directing these kinds of films. In Lynch’s universe, even the most banal moments are still somehow suffused with unnerving suspense. In films like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, disturbing surprises erupt into scene after scene of buried tension, until every ordinary conversation feels like a trap waiting to spring. And then there’s the infamous Eraserhead, where family life itself is transformed into an onslaught of surreal and nauseating images. It’s hard to come away from these movies without feeling that a little of Lynch’s unease has rubbed off on you. So when a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia set out to describe and treat an ancient biological alarm system buried deep within the human brain, they turned to Lynch’s films as an analogy for – and a set of examples of – the feeling of omnipresent yet maddeningly vague “wrongness” that seems to underlie many anxiety disorders. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18134 - Posted: 05.09.2013

By Nathan Seppa Multiple sclerosis, long considered a disease of white females, has affected more black women in recent years, a new study finds. Hispanic and Asian women, who have previously seemed to be at less risk of MS, remain so, researchers report May 7 in Neurology. The findings bolster a theory that vitamin D deficiency, which is common in people with dark skin in northern latitudes, contributes to MS. MS is a debilitating condition in which the protective coatings on nerves in the central nervous system get damaged, resulting in a loss of motor control, muscle weakness, vision complications and other problems. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society estimates that 2.1 million people worldwide have the condition. The researchers scanned medical information from 3.5 million people who were members of the health maintenance organization Kaiser Permanente Southern California and found that 496 people received diagnoses of MS from 2008 through 2010. Of these patients, women comprised 70 percent, not an unusual fraction for people with MS. Surprisingly, the patients included 84 black women. That means the annual incidence of MS in black women was 10.2 cases per 100,000 people. That’s not a great risk for an individual, but it was higher than the annual rates for white, Hispanic and Asian women, which were 6.9, 2.9 and 1.4 per 100,000 people, respectively. Among blacks, women had three times the incidence as men; in the other racial and ethnic groups, the MS rate in women was roughly double that of men. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18133 - Posted: 05.09.2013

By Ingrid Wickelgren I have seen the invisible arms of multiple sclerosis, a potentially devastating disease of the nervous system, touch friends, relatives and acquaintances. They perturbed the personality of a father of a close friend and left him unable to keep a job and support the family. They forced a young woman I met years ago to walk tentatively, watching her step. They put one beloved member of my extended family with two small children in a wheelchair and took away his voice. Nowadays, many people with MS find that new medications can mitigate the progression of their disease (see “New Treatments Tackle Multiple Sclerosis,” by James D. Bowen, Scientific American Mind, July/August 2013). But many mysteries remain about the cause of the disorder and no one knows how to prevent or cure it. About a decade ago, a technology entrepreneur named Art Mellor, who was diagnosed with MS in 2000, founded an organization called Accelerated Cure Project based in Waltham, Massachusetts to help speed progress on solving these mysteries, in part through greater collaboration among scientists. In one of its efforts, it maintains a repository of thousands of blood samples from patients who visited any of 10 U.S. clinics. The samples are made available to anyone willing to share their data with the Project. Scientists have used these samples in more than 70 different studies into the causes of MS and how to diagnose and treat it. A number of these experiments involve trying to identify molecular signs of the disease in the blood, in hopes of developing a simple blood test for the disorder. Such a test might reduce the time and cost of an MS diagnosis. The primary tool for spotting MS today is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which can reveal inflammation in the brain characteristic of the disorder. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 18132 - Posted: 05.08.2013

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE DEERFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Baxter International Inc. says that a blood product it was testing failed to slow mental decline or to preserve physical function in a major study of 390 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The company says that people who received 18 months of infusions with its drug, Gammagard, fared no better than others given infusions of a dummy solution. Gammagard is immune globulin, natural antibodies culled from donated blood. Researchers thought these antibodies might help remove amyloid, the sticky plaque that clogs patients’ brains, sapping memory and ability to think. Patients with moderate disease and those with a gene that raises risk of Alzheimer’s who were taking the higher of two doses in the study seemed to benefit, although the study was not big enough to say for sure. ‘‘The study missed its primary endpoints, however we remain interested by the prespecified sub-group analyses’’ in groups that seemed to benefit, Ludwig Hantson, president of Baxter’s BioScience business, said in a statement. Gammagard is already sold to treat some blood disorders, and the results of the Alzheimer’s study do not affect those uses. About 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5 million have Alzheimer's. Current medicines such as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. There is no known cure. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 18131 - Posted: 05.08.2013

by Elizabeth Norton If you've ever cringed when your parents said "groovy," you'll know that spoken language can have a brief shelf life. But frequently used words can persist for generations, even millennia, and similar sounds and meanings often turn up in very different languages. The existence of these shared words, or cognates, has led some linguists to suggest that seemingly unrelated language families can be traced back to a common ancestor. Now, a new statistical approach suggests that peoples from Alaska to Europe may share a linguistic forebear dating as far back as the end of the Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago. "Historical linguists study language evolution using cognates the way biologists use genes," explains Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. For example, although about 50% of French and English words derive from a common ancestor (like "mere" and "mother," for example), with English and German the rate is closer to 70%—indicating that while all three languages are related, English and German have a more recent common ancestor. In the same vein, while humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas have common genes, the fact that humans share almost 99% of their DNA with chimps suggests that these two primate lineages split apart more recently. Because words don't have DNA, researchers use cognates found in different languages today to reconstruct the ancestral "protowords." Historical linguists have observed that over time, the sounds of words tend to change in regular patterns. For example, the p sound frequently changes to f, and the t sound to th—suggesting that the Latin word pater is, well, the father of the English word father. Linguists use these known rules to work backward in time, making a best guess at how the protoword sounded. They also track the rate at which words change. Using these phylogenetic principles, some researchers have dated many common words as far back as 9000 years ago. The ancestral language known as Proto-Indo-European, for example, gave rise to languages including Hindi, Russian, French, English, and Gaelic. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18130 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Ella Pickover A “helpful” new drug which could help problem drinkers reduce the amount of alcohol they consume will today become available to UK patients. If dependent drinkers take the drug nalmefene and undergo counselling they can cut their consumption levels by 61 per cent, manufacturers said. The pill, also known as selincro, has been licensed for use by health officials and will be available for doctors to prescribe to their patients from today. The drug, which is to be taken once a day, has been licensed for "the reduction of alcohol consumption in adult patients with alcohol dependence without physical withdrawal symptoms and who do not require immediate detoxification". While current drugs help patients to become teetotal, nalmefene helps people with drinking problems to cut back on the amount they drink. The drug works by modulating the reward mechanism in the brain. A clinical trial into the drug helped patients cut the amount they consumed from 12.75 units a day to five units a day - a 61 per cent reduction. And patients who underwent counselling as well as taking the drug reduced their "heavy drinking days" from 23 days a month to nine days a month after undergoing the treatment for six months, researchers said. "The people who we saw in the study were not stereotypical alcoholics, most of them had families and jobs," said drug investigator Dr David Collier, of Barts and The London School of Medicine. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18129 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By PAM BELLUCK and BENEDICT CAREY Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific “lack of validity.” The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research. “As long as the research community takes the D.S.M. to be a bible, we’ll never make progress,” Dr. Insel said, adding, “People think that everything has to match D.S.M. criteria, but you know what? Biology never read that book.” The revision, known as the D.S.M.-5 and the first since 1994, has stirred unprecedented questioning from the public, patient groups and, most fundamentally, senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18128 - Posted: 05.07.2013

by Emily Underwood The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—slated for release this month—has lost a major customer before even going to print. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), declared last week on his blog that the institution will no longer use the manual to guide its research. Instead, NIMH is working on a long-term plan to develop new diagnostic criteria and treatments based on genetic, physiologic, and cognitive data rather than symptoms alone. Insel's pronouncement is the most recent hit in a long barrage of criticism that has rained down upon the latest DSM revision process since it began over a decade ago. "While DSM has been described as a 'Bible' for the field," he wrote, "it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each." Although the manual's strength has been to standardize these labels, he wrote, "[t]he weakness is its lack of validity," and "[p]atients with mental disorders deserve better." Although Insel's blog was reported as a "bombshell," and "potentially seismic," NIMH's decision to scrap the DSM criteria has been public for several years, says Bruce Cuthbert, director of NIMH's Division of Adult Translational Research and Treatment Development. In 2010, the agency began to steer researchers away from the traditional categories of DSM by posting new guidance for grant proposals in five broad areas. Rather than grouping disorders such as schizophrenia and depression by symptom, the new categories focus on basic neural circuits and cognitive functions, such as those for reward, arousal, and attachment. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 18127 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Posted by Helen Shen More than 150 neuroscientists descended on Arlington, Virginia this week to begin planning the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—an ambitious but still hazy proposal to understand how the brain works by recording activity from an unprecedented numbers of neurons at once. President Barack Obama announced the initiative on 2 April, which will be carried out by three federal agencies—the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—alongside a handful of private foundations. Most neuroscientists have relished the attention on their field, but have also been left wondering what it means in scientific terms to “understand” the brain, what it will take to get there, and how much will be feasible in the programme’s projected 10-year lifespan. They gathered at an inaugural NSF planning meeting taking place from 5-6 May to discuss their ideas and concerns. “The belief is we’re ready for a leap forward,” says Van Wedeen, a neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the NSF meeting organizers. “Which leap and in which direction is still being debated.” The NSF group invited researchers representing neuroscience, computer science, and engineering — as many as would fit in the hotel conference room. Another estimated 200 or so followed the meeting by live webcast on Monday. Roughly 75 participants accepted NSF’s open invitation to submit one-page documents outlining the major © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18126 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By Gisela Telis, I’ve seen friends fret over the purported link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease and have often wondered if their fears are founded on fact. Should they give up aluminum pans or aluminum-containing antiperspirants? I’ve always heard that aluminum’s health dangers are just hype. So what’s the real deal? The connection between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease is less a myth than a longstanding scientific controversy. It began in 1965, when researchers discovered that injecting rabbits’ brains with aluminum caused them to develop neurofibrillary tangles, the twisted proteins found in brain cells of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disorder that destroys memory and cognition. The finding spurred a rush of research. Just eight years later, a Canadian group studying brain tissue from deceased Alzheimer’s patients found that certain parts of their brains had two to three times more aluminum than a normal brain. By 1980, Daniel Perl and Arnold Brody had managed to actually peer inside human tangle-bearing brain cells — and found aluminum there, too. “That really changed the whole complexion of the thing,” recalls Perl, now a professor of pathology in the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. “I was getting called all the time, because there was so much public interest.” Despite the rise in interest, no one could figure out what this meant for human health. Part of the problem was that scientific techniques were — and still are — too imperfect to provide an answer. Whether they were studying brain cells or conducting population-wide epidemiological studies that tracked aluminum exposure and Alzheimer’s risk, researchers lacked the tools to get very precise or conclusive results. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18125 - Posted: 05.07.2013

By Dina Fine Maron Almost a decade after manufacturers stopped using certain chemical flame retardants in furniture foam and carpet padding, many of the compounds still lurk in homes. New work to be presented today reaffirms that the chemicals may also still be hurting young children who were exposed before they were born. Researchers investigating the health impacts of prenatal exposure to flame retardants collected blood samples from 309 pregnant women early in their second trimester. Spikes in the levels of one class of flame retardant, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) correlated with behavior and cognition difficulties during early childhood. The researchers tracked children through the first five years of their lives, looking at a battery of tests for IQ and behavior. They found that children of mothers who had high PBDE levels during their second trimester showed cognition deficits when the children were five years old as well as higher rates of hyperactivity at ages two to five. If the mother’s blood had a 10-fold increase in PBDEs, the average five-year-old had about a four-point IQ deficit. “A four-point IQ difference in an individual child may not be perceivable in…ordinary life. However, in a population, if many children are affected, the social and economic impact can be huge due to the shift of IQ distribution and productivity,” says lead author Aimin Chen, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. The findings, based on women and children from Cincinnati, will be presented May 6 at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Washington, D.C. The unpublished results have been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but the paper has not yet been accepted. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 18124 - Posted: 05.07.2013

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have uncovered firm evidence for what many mothers have long suspected: women’s brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant. Researchers asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men’s brains remained in the resting state. “Previous studies have shown that, on an emotional level, men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant crying,” said study co-author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the institute that conducted the study. “Our findings indicate that men and women show marked differences in terms of attention as well.” The earlier studies showed that women are more likely than men to feel sympathy when they hear an infant cry, and are more likely to want to care for the infant. Their findings appear in NeuroReport. Previous studies have shown differences in patterns of brain activity between when an individual’s attention is focused and when the mind wanders. The pattern of unfocused activity is referred to as default mode, Dr. Bornstein explained. When individuals focus on something in particular, their brains disengage from the default mode and activate other brain networks.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 18123 - Posted: 05.07.2013