Recent years have seen a flood of media attention devoted to the relationship between the digital age and the human brain (in these pages and elsewhere; The New York Times has a whole series on the topic). New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik divides commentators on the subject into three camps: "the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers" -- that is, roughly speaking, those who see the Internet and all that goes along with it as unambiguously good for humanity; those who think just the opposite; and those who "insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on," and the upheavals of our own time aren't so different from those of any other. Cathy N. Davidson, author of the forthcoming book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking) could safely be deemed a Never-Better, with perhaps a dash of the Ever-Waser. The major technological changes of the past decade and a half present an array of "exciting opportunities," Davidson argues -- opportunities to promote efficiency, satisfaction and success at every stage from kindergarten through career. If we are inclined to side with the Better-Nevers, worrying that our brains never evolved for shifts of such magnitude -- if kids attend to text messages and video games with alacrity, but fall behind in school, while adults feel swamped by information overload and spread too thin by multitasking -- the trouble, in Davidson's view, is not with all our new technologies, but rather with our failure thus far to adapt and restructure ourselves and our institutions. In Now You See It, Davidson gathers data and anecdotes on a wide array of topics -- attention, learning, the American school system and its history, the modern workplace and how it came about -- to argue that the human brain is perfectly well-suited to the digital world, if only we are willing to rethink the classroom, the workplace, and how we measure success. © Copyright 2011 Inside Higher Ed

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15484 - Posted: 06.25.2011

By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent The research, which follows studies indicating that it slows the progress of Alzheimer's, suggests lithium could be a cheap therapy to combat a range of brain disorders common in the elderly. Scientists at the Buck Institute for Ageing in San Francisco made the finding in a study of mice. They hope to conduct their first trials in humans soon. Compounds of lithium - itself a soft alkali metal - have been used for over 50 years to treat mania and mood swings. But its effect on a range of neuro-degenerative diseases is only starting to be appreciated. Earlier this year a small-scale study of people with mild cognitive impairment -trouble with memory and thinking - found it delayed the onset of full-blown Alzheimer's. Psychiatrists believe it slows the formation of amyloid plaques and brain cell tangles thought to cause the disease. The American researchers think lithium works in a similar way to prevent Parkinson's, which is caused because specific brain nerve cells die. They said their study - the first in animals - showed it stopped the build up of toxic proteins and cell death. Prof Julie Andersen, of the Buck Institute, said trials in people to determine the correct dosage could start soon. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 15483 - Posted: 06.25.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO The cruel, persistent bullying that older siblings display toward younger ones does not have lifelong consequences — at least among blue-footed boobies, a new study finds. Boobies are marine birds that typically lay two eggs that hatch four days apart. During a four-month nesting period, the senior sibling is known to peck and attack its junior sibling incessantly until the younger bird becomes habitually submissive. Senior chicks end up gaining an advantage in terms of size, strength and motor coordination over their younger siblings. Younger siblings receive fewer feedings and less fish from parents, and during the first three weeks of life their weight is 11 percent lower. Younger chicks also suffer from elevated levels of stress hormones that are 109 percent higher than in senior chicks in the first 15 to 20 days of life. Yet all adult boobies seem equally capable of displaying aggression toward intruders approaching their nests, said Oscar Sánchez-Macouzet , an evolutionary biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the study’s first author. He and his colleagues report their findings in the journal Biology Letters. “To our surprise, former junior and senior chicks did not differ in their aggressiveness defending their nests,” he said. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15482 - Posted: 06.23.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE Many animals rely on the magnetic field for navigation, and researchers have often wondered if people, too, might be able to detect the field; that might explain how Polynesian navigators can make 3,000-mile journeys under starless skies. But after years of inconclusive experiments, interest in people’s possible magnetic sense has waned. That may change after an experiment being reported Tuesday by Steven M. Reppert, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his colleagues Lauren E. Foley and Robert J. Gegear. They have been studying cryptochromes, light-sensitive proteins that help regulate the daily rhythm of the body’s cells, and how they help set the sun compass by which monarchs navigate. But the butterflies can navigate even when the sun is obscured, so they must have a backup system. Since physical chemists had speculated the cryptochromes might be sensitive to magnetism, Dr. Reppert wondered if the monarch butterfly was using its cryptochromes to sense the earth’s magnetic field. He first studied the laboratory fruit fly, whose genes are much easier to manipulate and showed three years ago that the fly could detect magnetic fields but only when its cryptochrome gene was in good working order. He then showed that the monarch butterfly’s two cryptochrome genes could each substitute for the fly’s gene in letting it sense magnetic fields, indicating that the butterfly uses the proteins for the same purpose. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Animal Migration
Link ID: 15481 - Posted: 06.23.2011

By Nathan Seppa If there was ever any suggestion that French fries are good for you, it’s now dispelled in stark detail. An analysis of data from three lengthy surveys that assigns actual pounds of weight gain to foods finds that fries, sodas and several other guilty pleasures are among the most potent waist expanders. On the bright side, researchers attribute weight loss to eating yogurt, fruit, nuts and vegetables. The report appears in the June 23 New England Journal of Medicine. “Conventional wisdom often recommends ‘everything in moderation’ with a focus only on total calories consumed, rather than the quality of what is consumed,” says study coauthor Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Our results demonstrate that the quality of the diet — the types of foods and beverages that one consumes — are strongly linked to weight gain.” Mozaffarian and his colleagues combined data from three long-term surveys conducted between 1986 and 2006 that included more than 22,000 men and nearly 100,000 women. The weight, diet and lifestyle information collected in those surveys enabled the researchers to calculate an effect for specific foods. None of the participants was obese or had any serious medical problems at the study’s outset, and no one was asked to go on a diet. Starting with each volunteer’s weight at the outset, the researchers monitored any gain or loss at four-year intervals. On average, participants had gained 3.35 pounds at each four-year point. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15480 - Posted: 06.23.2011

by Wendy Zukerman People with an anaesthetised finger can be convinced that a plastic finger is their own, in a modified version of the famous "rubber hand illusion". This suggests that the sense of touch is not essential to conjure up the illusion, as our muscles and nerves also play a role. Over 10 years ago, psychologists found they could convince people a rubber hand was theirs by putting a fake hand on a table in front of them and stroking the rubber hand and the person's own hand at the same time. More than just a party trick, the illusion revealed how easily our sense of ownership over our body can be manipulatedMovie Camera. This is important, because disowning a healthy arm or a leg is common in people who have had a stroke or have schizophrenia. Understanding exactly what causes our perception of body ownership should help develop treatments. The illusion was thought to be induced by a mismatch of information from our eyes and sense of touch. But Lee Walsh from Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney suspects that our sense of body position, called proprioception, also plays a part. To find out, Walsh and colleagues injected a local anaesthetic into one index finger of 30 people to deaden the finger's sense of touch. The participants could still sense the finger's movement and position, however, as the nerves that send this information to the brain start in the hand and arm muscles, which were not affected by the anaesthetic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15479 - Posted: 06.23.2011

By Stephanie Pappas Senior writer Parrots are capable of logical leaps, according to a new study in which a gray parrot named Awisa used reasoning to figure out where a bit of food was hidden. The task is one that kids as young as 4 could figure out, but the only other animals that have been shown to use this type of reasoning are great apes. That makes gray parrots the first non-primates to demonstrate such logical smarts, said study researcher Sandra Mikolasch, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna. "We now know that a gray parrot is able to logically exclude a wrong possibility and instead choose the right one in order to get a reward, which is known as 'inference by exclusion,'" Mikolasch wrote in an email to LiveScience. Parrots are no birdbrains. One famous gray parrot, Alex, even understood the concept of "zero," something children don't grasp until they are 3 or 4. Alex, who died in 2007, had a vocabulary of 150 words, which he seemed to use in two-way communication with the researchers who worked with him. Other animals have also revealed high levels of intelligence. Elephants, for example, know when and how to cooperate. And hyenas are even better than primates at cooperation. Earlier studies had shown that about one out of five chimps and other great apes could use logical reasoning to find hidden food. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15478 - Posted: 06.23.2011

Analysis by Marianne English The warning signs may seem subtle at first -- a child unable to empathize with others; another seems to fear nothing, not even the consequences of violence. With time, researchers say, these descriptions might reflect a growing association between criminality and antisocial behavior. But most recently, determining who might become a danger to society may be as easy as performing a brain scan, according to neurocriminology, a scientific discipline that uses neuroscience to predict and potentially reduce crime. Along these lines, is it realistic to use brain scans to pinpoint which individuals are more at risk for criminal behavior before they commit crimes? For some researchers, the idea is plausible, with the field reviving the nature versus nurture debate, as highlighted by Josh Fischman in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that profiles the work of University of Pennsylvania researcher Adrian Raine. Raine's work, which draws from neuroscience and the legal system, focuses on differences in the minds of criminals and non-criminals. Over the years, he's established evidence for a link between the brain and criminal behavior. By working with murderers, rapists and pedophiles, he's helped confirm that two brain structures -- the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex -- are smaller and less active in individuals with antisocial and criminal tendencies. Both areas are thought to give rise to complex behaviors shaped by emotion and fear. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Aggression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 15477 - Posted: 06.23.2011

Alison Abbott Epidemiologists showed decades ago that people raised in cities are more prone to mental disorders than those raised in the countryside. But neuroscientists have avoided studying the connection, preferring to leave the disorderly realm of the social environment to social scientists. A paper in this issue of Nature represents a pioneering foray across that divide. Using functional brain imaging, a group led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg's Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, showed that specific brain structures in people from the city and the countryside respond differently to social stress (see pages 452 and 498). Stress is a major factor in precipitating psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. The work is a first step towards defining how urban life can affect brain biology in a way that has a potentially major impact on society — schizophrenia affects one in 100 people. It may also open the way for greater cooperation between neuroscientists and social scientists. "There has been a long history of mutual antipathy, particularly in psychiatry," says sociologist Craig Morgan at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. "But this is the sort of study that can prove to both sides that they can gain from each others' insights." Meyer-Lindenberg works on risk mechanisms in schizophrenia, and previously focused on the role of genes. But although a dozen or so genes have been linked to the disorder, "even the most powerful of these genes conveys only a 20% increased risk", he says. Yet schizophrenia is twice as common in those who are city-born and raised as in those from the countryside, and the bigger the city, the higher the risk (see 'Dose response?'). © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Stress
Link ID: 15476 - Posted: 06.23.2011

A protein in spinal fluid could be used to predict the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, according to German researchers. Patients with high levels of the chemical - soluble amyloid precursor protein beta - were more likely to develop the disease, they found. Doctors said in the journal Neurology this was more precise than other tests. Alzheimer's Research UK said early diagnosis was a key goal, and the study represented a potential new lead. Doctors analysed samples of spinal fluid from 58 patients with mild cognitive impairment, a memory-loss condition which can lead to Alzheimer's. The patients were followed for three years. Around a third developed Alzheimer's. Those who developed the illness had, on average, 1,200 nanograms/ml of the protein in the spinal fluid at the start of the study. Those who did not started with just 932 nanograms/ml. Beta amyloid proteins have already been implicated in Alzheimer's itself, but not as a "predictor" of the disease. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15475 - Posted: 06.23.2011

By Oliver Wright, Whitehall Editor Britain's leading health charities last night warned that vital medical research into cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's could be set back by decades because of a high-profile boycott campaign being launched by animal rights campaigners. Animal Aid plans to take out a series of newspaper adverts urging the public to stop giving money to Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, the Alzheimer's Society and Parkinson's UK unless they end their support for animal testing. But the campaign has been condemned as irresponsible and damaging by the charities and scientists, who have warned that it could set back medical research and damage other important areas of the charities' work. "This is an illogical and ill-conceived campaign," said Lord Willis of Knaresborough, the chairman of the Association of Medical Research Charities. "It will have consequences for charities targeted as, during tight economic times, any small downturn in donations could really put back cures by decades." Colin Blakemore, a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, added: "This is an utterly irresponsible attack by Animal Aid on some of the most important charitable contributors to medical research in this country. "These charities have a duty to use money given to them to support patients and to understand and treat disease. They support research on animals only when it's absolutely essential. If Animal Aid were successful in discouraging donation to medical charities, they would be guilty of delaying progress towards treatments and cures for devastating conditions." ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15474 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Will Hunt The laser in a tiny but powerful microscope is giving neuroscientists their best look yet at how the brains of rats work as they scurry about their daily activities. Until now, the ability of researchers to study the animals’ brains while they socialize or look for food has been relatively limited. The best method was to hook up a restrained rat to electrodes that monitor brain signals and then play images on a screen in front of the rat to create the illusion that it is roaming through a landscape. But virtual reality can go only so far in simulating natural movement. “To understand how the animal’s brain operates, we need to let it behave as naturally as possible,” says Jason Kerr, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. To that end, Kerr and his team recently developed a 0.2-ounce multi-photon microscope that can track networks of brain cells and individual neurons. Mounted on a rat’s head, the 1.5-inch plastic and titanium instrument allows the animal to move freely and captures in real time how brain cells interact during everyday behaviors. One key to the microscope’s success is its powerful 
2-photon laser, which emits pulses that probe up to 300 microns deep into the brain. Before researchers activate the laser, they must inject a fluorescent dye to highlight brain cells. Then the laser bombards the dye with photons, causing it to glow green when a cell is active. A miniature scanner guides the beam across the cells. A plastic optical fiber collects the emitted light, which is converted into an electric signal that appears as an image on a computer screen, allowing scientists to track cells without limiting the rats’ mobility. Since rats and humans probably share similar decision-making mechanisms, this technology could help us understand how we make choices, Kerr says. Copyright © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15473 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Menno Schilthuizen BERNHARD HUBER's bespectacled face is just visible behind the piles of vials and bottles that form a skyline on his desk at Museum Koenig in Bonn, Germany. In them float the pickled remains of thousands of daddy-long-legs spiders waiting to be returned to natural history museums around the world. And somewhere amongst them sit a few specimens of Metagonia mariguitarensis. It was this tiny Venezuelan species that first put Huber, a world expert on daddy-long-legs spiders - not to be confused with crane flies or harvestmen - on the untrodden trail of the evolution of asymmetric genitalia. Spiders, he explains, are among the most perfectly symmetric animals. As anybody with any experience of disembowelling knows, outwardly symmetric creatures are often much less neatly laid out inside, with internal organs jumbled around. Think, for example, of our own loopy intestines, left-sided heart and right-sided liver. Not so the spider. As a rule, its left half is an exact mirror image of the right. That's why M. mariguitarensis was such a surprise when it was discovered in 1986. All male spiders have a pair of sex organs called pedipalps, held like two boxing gloves in front of their face, but in this particular daddy-long-legs spider the right pedipalp was twice as large as the left. For many years, it was thought to be one-of-a-kind. Although genital asymmetry is extraordinarily rare among spiders, when Huber started looking into the matter it soon became clear that the rest of the natural world is awash with lopsided penises and crooked vulvas. He also realised that from an evolutionary point of view, all this blatant asymmetry is very strange. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Laterality
Link ID: 15472 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Andy Coghlan Childhood autism is two to four times as common in Eindhoven, the centre of the Dutch information technology industry, as it is in two comparably sized Dutch cities with far fewer IT employees. The result supports the suggestion that people who work in hi-tech engineering and computing industries, which demand the kinds of systemising and analytical skills often seen in people with autism, are more likely to have autistic children too. Rising autism has also been seen in regions such as Silicon Valley, California. But the Dutch study claims to be the first to directly ask whether concentrations of IT workers mean more children with autism too. Researchers analysed data on autism prevalence on 62,000 schoolchildren in three Dutch cities, each with populations of around quarter a million. In Eindhoven, where 30 per cent of all jobs are in IT and computing industries, there were 229 cases of autism-spectrum disorders per 10,000 school-age children. This was more than double the corresponding figure of 84 in Haarlem and four times the figure of 57 in Utrecht. Each city has half as many IT jobs as Eindhoven. By contrast, all three cities had the same prevalence of two other childhood psychiatric conditions unrelated to autism, namely attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyspraxia. "These figures are pretty striking," says Rosa Hoekstra of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15471 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By Laura Sanders Like side-by-side computer RAM cards, the left and the right hemispheres of the brain store information separately, a new study finds. The results help explain why people can remember only a handful of objects at one time, and suggest that people may be able to maximize their cognitive power by delivering information in equal doses to both sides of the brain, researchers suggest online the week of June 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. On average, people can hold about four things in their working memory at once, such as the location of four cards in a game of Concentration. Though many studies have linked this memory capacity to intelligence, scientists still don’t completely understand how the brain reaches this limit. “Why can’t you think about 100 things simultaneously, or 50 things simultaneously? Why only four?” says study coauthor Earl Miller of MIT. “If we understand something about that, we’ll understand something very deep about how the brain represents information and how thoughts are made conscious.” Miller and his colleagues tested two monkeys (monkeys also have a four-item working memory capacity) in a simple task. First, the monkeys saw two to five colored squares flash on a computer screen for a little less than a second. The screen went blank for about the same amount of time, and then the squares reappeared — but one was a different color. The monkeys were rewarded for spotting the change. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Laterality
Link ID: 15470 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Dani Cooper, ABC Science Online The mystery of how the brain develops the sense of ownership that recognizes our body belongs to us is a step closer to being solved. Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role. The finding, published recently in the Journal of Physiology, will help in designing treatments for disorders of body ownership that can occur with conditions such as stroke and epilepsy. Lead author Lee Walsh, of Neuroscience Research Australia, explained we instinctively know our body parts "belong" to us. However, how the brain develops that map of what belongs to it is still in part unknown. "How do I know my hand is mine and not yours and that the telephone is not a part of my body," he said. Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand. This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject's hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand. "Once the illusion of ownership of the hand is established, subjects have physiological responses to threats made against the rubber hand," Walsh and his colleagues wrote in the paper. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 15469 - Posted: 06.21.2011

Nicola Nosengo If you are a small animal, it is useful to know whether there is anything around that might want to eat you. Stephen Liberles from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have analysed urine samples from a variety of zoo inhabitants, including lions and bears, and discovered how rodents can use smell to do just that. In a research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team identifies a chemical found in high concentrations in the urine of carnivores that makes mice and rats run for cover1. Chemicals have already been identified that allow prey to recognize a known predator. But this is the first example of a generic clue that allows an animal to detect any potential predator, irrespective of whether the two species have ever come into contact. The researchers started by analysing an engimatic group of olfactory receptors discovered in 2001 called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs)2. They are found in most vertebrates, in varying numbers. Mice, for example, have 15, rats 17 and humans have just 6. Very little is known about what chemicals bind to them. Liberles and his colleagues found that one member of the receptor family, TAAR4, is strongly activated by bobcat urine, which is sold online and used by gardeners to keep rodents and rabbits away. They managed to extract the molecule responsible for activating the receptor, called 2-phenylethylamine. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 15468 - Posted: 06.21.2011

by Tim Wogan Atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty deposits on the walls of major arteries, can kill without warning. The disease causes few symptoms in its early stages, so sufferers are often hit with a heart attack or stroke before they realize anything is wrong. Now researchers have devised a way to spot the deposits before they cause serious harm by using a combination of infrared light and ultrasound. To detect atherosclerosis early, doctors need to spot fat inside artery walls. They can glean some information by bombarding soft tissue (anything that's not bone) with infrared radiation from a laser, which passes through the tissue until it hits a specific chemical bond, causing it to vibrate like a spring. Different chemical bonds absorb infrared radiation of different wavelengths, so the radiation absorbed by a tissue sample can give doctors some clue to what's inside it. But to diagnose atherosclerosis, doctors not only need to know that tissue contains fat but also need to see that it's on the inside of an artery wall. In the new study, researchers took advantage of the fact that infrared-induced vibration of chemical bonds is swiftly damped by surrounding tissue; the energy is converted to heat. This leads to rapid expansion of the tissue, which sends a pressure wave traveling outward in all directions to the surface of the sample, where it is emitted as ultrasound. By using a series of detectors to pick up the ultrasound, the team realized that it could work out where the expansion took place—a technique called photoacoustic imaging. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Stroke; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15467 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By KAY E. HOLEKAMP After nine months trapped behind my desk in Michigan, I’m finally back in the African bush, the one place I love above all others on earth. Only here are the skies so vast you can see both rainbows and bright sunshine while sitting under a drenching downpour from a massive black thunderhead. Only here can you be sure to see some weird and interesting form of animal life no matter where you look. Ever heard of a duiker? A solifugid? A pangolin? A springhare? A cameroptera? They all live here, along with hundreds of other animal species. Elephants forage in the riverbed that runs beside our camp, hippos chuckle in the pool below my tent, the shrill calls of white-browed robin-chats tell me when I have overslept, baboons steal our sugar jar whenever one of us is dumb enough to leave it unattended, and giraffes browse silently through camp after dark like great ships drifting in the night. But the best thing about the African bush is that it is where you can find spotted hyenas. As I have done every spring since I joined the faculty in the department of zoology at Michigan State University, I’ve once again traded sitting through endless committee meetings and grading overwhelming stacks of student papers for life in a tented camp where my most pressing concern every day is whether or not I will encounter a grumpy hippo on the footpath connecting my sleeping tent to our lab tent and dining area. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15466 - Posted: 06.21.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE In an eighth-floor laboratory overlooking the East River, Cornelia I. Bargmann watches two colleagues manipulate a microscopic roundworm. They have trapped it in a tiny groove on a clear plastic chip, with just its nose sticking into a channel. Pheromones — signaling chemicals produced by other worms — are being pumped through the channel, and the researchers have genetically engineered two neurons in the worm’s head to glow bright green if a neuron responds. These ingenious techniques for exploring a tiny animal’s behavior are the fruit of many years’ work by Dr. Bargmann’s and other labs. Despite the roundworm’s lowliness on the scale of intellectual achievement, the study of its nervous system offers one of the most promising approaches for understanding the human brain, since it uses much the same working parts but is around a million times less complex. Caenorhabditis elegans, as the roundworm is properly known, is a tiny, transparent animal just a millimeter long. In nature, it feeds on the bacteria that thrive in rotting plants and animals. It is a favorite laboratory organism for several reasons, including the comparative simplicity of its brain, which has just 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses, or neuron-to-neuron connections. These connections are pretty much the same from one individual to another, meaning that in all worms the brain is wired up in essentially the same way. Such a system should be considerably easier to understand than the human brain, a structure with billions of neurons, 100,000 miles of biological wiring and 100 trillion synapses. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15465 - Posted: 06.21.2011