By TARA PARKER-POPE More than 10 million Americans suffer from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. And while people tend to think such problems are limited to adolescence and young adulthood, Judith Shaw knows otherwise. A 58-year-old yoga instructor in St. Louis, Ms. Shaw says she was nearing 40 when she decided to “get healthy” after having children. Soon, diet and exercise became an obsession. “I was looking for something to validate myself,” she told me. “Somehow, the weight loss, and getting harder and firmer and trimmer and fitter, and then getting recognized for that, was fulfilling a need.” Experts say that while eating disorders are first diagnosed mainly in young people, more and more women are showing up at their clinics in midlife or even older. Some had eating disorders early in life and have relapsed, but a significant minority first develop symptoms in middle age. (Women with such disorders outnumber men by 10 to 1.) Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that though it was initially aimed at adolescents, since 2003 half of its patients have been adults. “We’re hearing from women, no matter how old they are, that they still have to achieve this societal ideal of thinness and perfection,” she said. “Even in their 50s and 60s — and, believe it or not, beyond — women are engaging in extreme weight- and shape-control behaviors.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 15144 - Posted: 03.29.2011

by Rebecca Kessler Fear of heights can drive people to extremes, from crossing the country by bus to avoid flying to commuting extra hours every week to circumvent a high bridge. A new study now suggests one counterintuitive path to relief: The human stress hormone cortisol seems to improve the effectiveness of behavioral therapy to help people overcome their fear of heights. The standard treatment for many phobias involves exposing someone to the source of their fear in a safe environment—either in real life or, increasingly, using virtual reality. When nothing bad happens, that person gradually learns that the source—whether it's heights, snakes, or enclosed spaces—is safe. In a process called "extinction," new memories of safe experiences prevail over ingrained memories of scary ones. The treatment works, but it can take many repetitions to stick and is unpleasant enough that some patients drop out. So researchers have been looking for drugs that might be used in combination with extinction-based therapy and can help speed it up. One drug called D-cycloserine, which helps new memories form, is being tested in clinical trials in people with certain phobias. But human and animal studies have shown that hormones released during stressful situations go one step further, not only promoting the creation of new "safe" memories but also inhibiting fear memories, says cognitive neuroscientist Dominique de Quervain of the University of Basel in Switzerland, who lead the present study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15143 - Posted: 03.29.2011

By Randy Dotinga MONDAY, March 28 (HealthDay News) -- Memories of devastating heartbreaks appear to trigger activity in the brain that's similar to when people suffer physical pain, new research suggests. "This tells us how serious rejection can be sometimes," said study author Edward E. Smith, director of cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University. "When people are saying 'I really feel in pain about this breakup,' you don't want to trivialize it and dismiss it by saying 'It's all in your mind.'" The finding could lead to more than a better understanding of the link between emotional and physical pain, Smith said. "Our ultimate goal is to see what kind of therapeutic approach might be useful in relieving the pain of rejection." Previous research has shown a link between what Smith calls "socially induced pain" -- the kind you get from dealing with other people -- and physical pain. For the new study, Smith and colleagues looked at rejection specifically. "From everyday experience, rejection seems to be one of the most painful things we experience," Smith said. "It seems the feelings of rejection can be sustained even longer than being angry." But where do you find rejected people? In New York City, of course, where hundreds or even thousands of relationships must fall apart every day. The researchers advertised online and in newspapers in search of people whose romantic partners had broken up with them. In all cases, they hadn't wanted the breakups to happen. © 2011 U.S.News & World Report LP

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15142 - Posted: 03.29.2011

By Michelle Andrews, In any given year, more than a quarter of U.S. adults have a diagnosable mental health problem — from depression to bipolar disorder — yet fewer than half get any kind of treatment for it. The figures are similar for children. Many who do receive care get it through their primary-care physician rather than a mental health professional like a psychiatrist or psychologist. That’s partly by choice: People prefer to talk to someone they know and trust about medical problems, and for many, there’s still a stigma in seeing a “shrink.” But part of the reason people turn to their primary-care doctors or go without care is that it can be tough to get an appointment with a mental health expert. Psychiatrists, in particular, are in short supply, especially in rural areas. A recent survey conducted for the Tennessee Psychological Association, for example, found that the average wait to see a psychiatrist for a non-emergency appointment was 54 days for patients with private health insurance and 90 days for those covered by TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, says Lance Laurence, director of professional affairs for the TPA. “It’s a huge access issue,” says Katherine Nordal, executive director for professional practice at the American Psychological Association, a trade group for psychologists. Psychologists say they have a solution to help address the access problems: Give them more authority to prescribe psychotropic medications. They can already prescribe in New Mexico and Louisiana, as well as in all branches of the military and the Indian Health Service. A half-dozen other states are considering measures that would give more psychologists prescribing authority. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 15141 - Posted: 03.28.2011

By JESSE LICHTENSTEIN One day in the fall of their sophomore year, Matthew Fernandez and Akash Krishnan were at Akash’s house in Portland, Ore., trying to come up with an idea for their school’s science fair. At Oregon Episcopal School, all students in 7th to 11th grade are required to enter a project in the Aardvark Science Expo (the aardvark is the school’s mascot), and these two had teamed up for the last three years. Temporarily defeated, they popped in a DVD of “I, Robot.” There’s a scene in the movie when Will Smith, who plays a robot-hating cop, visits Bridget Moynahan, the impossibly gorgeous scientist, and they begin to argue. She gets angry. Her personal robot immediately walks into the room and asks: “Is everything all right, Ma’am? I detected elevated stress patterns in your voice.” It’s a minor exchange — a computer recognizing emotion in a human voice — in a movie full of futuristic robots wreaking havoc, but it was an aha moment for a desperate research team. Their reaction, as Matt describes it, was: “ ‘Hey, that’s really cool. I wonder if there’s any science there.’ ” There was — it was just really hard. With emotion recognition, they stumbled onto a thorny problem. Computers have become very good at parsing an audio signal into specific words and identifying their meaning. But spoken language is more than just semantics. “If I say ‘happy’ and you say ‘happy,’ it’ll sound kind of similar, and a computer can try to match that up,” Matt explains. But it’s far from clear what elements in an audio signal indicate happiness or anger as a quality of voice. Trying to figure that out quickly consumed them. Matt stayed up late reading research papers, ignoring his other homework. Akash was up until 3 a.m. many nights, reading and programming. They spent long hours at each other’s houses or talking on Skype. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Robotics
Link ID: 15140 - Posted: 03.28.2011

By JEFF Z. KLEIN The debate in the N.H.L. over how to curb concussions is only the latest example of tensions between liberal and traditional forces that have shaped hockey since its beginnings in 19th-century Canada. Montreal's former star Ken Dryden has urged the N.H.L. to ban all hits to the head. The extremes in the current standoff include general managers, sponsors and fans who favor a ban on hits to the head and their old-school counterparts who see such a drastic rule change as potentially robbing the league of its rugged appeal just when its popularity is growing. “The nature of the game is always being changed, but the rules, regulations, understandings and mythologies don’t change,” Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie from the Montreal Canadiens, said in describing the traditionalist impulse. “That’s when you get into trouble,” he added, “when you don’t recognize the immense changes on one side, and don’t have the corresponding changes that make sense to the different game that evolves.” Dryden broke his long silence on hockey matters this month, joining the team sponsors Air Canada and Via Rail, and the team owners Mario Lemieux of Pittsburgh and Geoff Molson of Montreal in urging the league’s general managers to recommend a prohibition of all hits to the head. The International Ice Hockey Federation, the N.C.A.A. and the Ontario Hockey League — all feeder organizations to the N.H.L. — have bans. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15139 - Posted: 03.28.2011

By Emma Brennand Cuckoos' egg forgery skills are increasingly being put to the test, as host birds evolve better defences, say scientists. These brood parasites, as they are called, are master deceivers - hiding their eggs in other species' nests. To avoid detection, cuckoos have evolved to mimic colour and pattern of their favoured host birds' eggs. But researchers have developed "bird's-eye view" models to find out how the hosts see the intruders' copycat eggs. If host birds do not reject cuckoo eggs, the newly hatched cuckoo chick ejects other eggs from the nest by hoisting them onto its back and dumping them over the edge. This study revealed details about the "evolutionary arms race" in which cuckoos are embroiled; as they evolve better mimicry, their hosts evolve the skills to spot these damaging intruders. Mary Caswell Stoddard and Martin Stevens from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, published their findings in the journal Evolution. Previous egg pattern research has focused on assessing differences between colour and markings based on human visual inspection."But birds have better colour vision than humans do," Ms Stoddard told BBC News. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Evolution; Vision
Link ID: 15138 - Posted: 03.28.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg Navy sonar unquestionably disturbs beaked whales, concludes a new analysis investigating how underwater sound affects these elusive deep-divers. The results, published online March 14 in PLoS ONE, suggest that the current noise levels deemed risky for beaked whales need to be lowered. During sonar exercises at the U.S. Navy’s underwater test range in the Bahamas, beaked whales stopped their chirpy echolocations and fled the area, experiments employing a huge array of underwater microphones revealed. Other experiments that exposed tagged whales to increasing levels of sound found that at exposures of around 140 decibels, the animals stopped hunting for food and slowly swam toward the surface, heading north toward the only exit of the deepwater basin known as the Tongue of the Ocean. Current regulations rate underwater exposures of about 160 decibels as disturbing. “It seems beaked whales may be more sensitive than other species to sound,” says study leader Peter Tyack of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “At the very least we may need a special rule for these whales,” he says. “If the criteria are changed they will be more protected.” Until a few different species of beaked whales started showing up in unusual mass strandings, the animals were understudied and rarely seen. Because the strandings often coincided with nearby naval sonar exercises, scientists suspected sonar was somehow driving these whales to the beach. And strange bubbles in the bodies of some of the whales suggested that sonar might trigger behavior that gave the whales the equivalent of the bends. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 15137 - Posted: 03.26.2011

By Janet Raloff Obesity subtly diminishes memory and other features of thinking and reasoning even among seemingly healthy people, an international team of scientists reports. At least some of these impairments appear reversible through weight loss. Researchers also report one likely mechanism for those cognitive deficits: damage to the wiring that links the brain’s information-processing regions. A number of studies in recent years have shown that individuals with diseases linked to obesity, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension and type 2 diabetes, don’t score as well on cognitive tests as less hefty individuals do. To test whether weight alone — and not disease — might be partially responsible, John Gunstad of Kent State University in Ohio and his colleagues recruited 150 obese individuals for a series of cognitive tests. These people weighed on average just under 300 pounds, although some were substantially heavier. Two-thirds would shortly undergo weight-loss surgery. Scores on the tests were assessed against those of people in the Brain Resource International Database, a large multicenter project with data on very healthy people. Obese individuals in the new study initially performed on the low end of the normal range for healthy individuals from the database on average, Gunstad says, although nearly one-quarter of the obese participants’ scores on memory and learning actually fell within what researchers consider the impaired range. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 15136 - Posted: 03.26.2011

by Carl Zimmer Teenagers are a puzzle, and not just to their parents. When kids pass from childhood to adolescence their mortality rate doubles, despite the fact that teenagers are stronger and faster than children as well as more resistant to disease. Parents and scientists alike abound with explanations. It is tempting to put it down to plain stupidity: Teenagers have not yet learned how to make good choices. But that is simply not true. Psychologists have found that teenagers are about as adept as adults at recognizing the risks of dangerous behavior. Something else is at work. Scientists are finally figuring out what that “something” is. Our brains have networks of neurons that weigh the costs and benefits of potential actions. Together these networks calculate how valuable things are and how far we’ll go to get them, making judgments in hundredths of a second, far from our conscious awareness. Recent research reveals that teen brains go awry because they weigh those consequences in peculiar ways. Some of the most telling insight into the adolescent mind comes not from humans but from rats. Around seven weeks after birth, rats hit puberty and begin to act a lot like human teens. They start spending less time with their parents and more with other adolescent rats; they become more curious about new experiences and increasingly explore their world. Teenage rats also develop new desires. It’s not just that they get interested in sex but also that their landscape of pleasure goes through an upheaval. Miriam Schneider, a behavioral pharmacologist who studies adolescence at the University of Heidelberg, and her colleagues recently documented this shift. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15135 - Posted: 03.26.2011

Matt Kaplan It seems that the constant threat of predation could have a more subtle effect on prey animals than first thought. Female birds that are exposed to predators while they are ovulating produce smaller offspring than unexposed females, researchers have found. The chicks may be smaller, but surprisingly, their wings grow faster and longer than those of chicks from unexposed mothers — an adaptation that might make them better at avoiding predators in flight. The mere presence of a predator can change the behaviour of prey animals. Numerous studies show that birds which are frequently presented with predators increase their nest-defence behaviours and usher their youngsters out of the nest faster, presumably to stop them from being sitting ducks. Yet a new study by Swiss ecologists suggests that predator effects could go beyond behaviour, to physiology. In a previous study in 20051, when ovulating female barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) were presented with models of predators, researchers found that their eggs contained higher than normal levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone. A follow-up examination showed that increased corticosterone reduced egg hatchability and led to fledglings being smaller. However, no one was sure whether this was simply the negative effects of stress or an adaptive response to help offspring cope better with intense predator presence. Keen to tease apart this problem, evolutionary ecologists Michael Coslovsky and Heinz Richner at the University of Bern in Switzerland studied a natural population of ovulating great tits (Parus major) nesting in Bremgartenwald forest near Bern. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 15134 - Posted: 03.26.2011

Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor A paralysed woman was still able to accurately control a computer cursor with her thoughts 1000 days after having a tiny electronic device implanted in her brain, say the researchers who devised the system. The achievement demonstrates the longevity of brain-machine implants. The woman, for whom the researchers use the pseudonym S3, had a brainstem stroke in the mid-1990s that caused tetraplegia - paralysis of all four limbs and the vocal cords. In 2005, researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the Providence VA Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston implanted a tiny silicon electrode array the size of a small aspirin into S3's brain to help her communicate better with the outside world. The electrode array is part of the team's BrainGate system, which includes a combination of hardware and software that directly senses the electrical signals produced by neurons in the brain which control the planning of movement. The electrode decodes these signals to allow people with paralysis to control external devices such as computers, wheelchairs and bionic limbs. In a study just published, the researchers say that in 2008 - 1000 days after implantation - S3 proved the durability of the device by performing two different "point-and-click" tasks by thinking about moving a cursor with her hand. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15133 - Posted: 03.26.2011

by Jacob Aron The latest generation of 3D technology has seen mixed success at the cinema, and 3D TVs are yet to establish themselves in the living room. Perhaps the true home of 3D is on mobile devices, where you don't even need special glasses. New Scientist takes a look at the future of 3D on the move. How can you have 3D without glasses? Simple – you do it all the time. We perceive the world in three dimensions because our eyes see two slightly different images and our brain interprets the difference as depth. Films or games displayed on an ordinary 2D screen don't contain any of that depth information, so we perceive them as flat surfaces. Traditional 3D screens add depth information back in by simultaneously displaying or rapidly alternating between two images, relying on viewing glasses to show the separate images to each eye. The red and cyan filters of the original 3D specs have now been replaced by the polarised light systems used in cinemas or active shutter glasses for 3D TVs, but the principle is much the same. Everyone would like to get rid of those 3D glasses, which is why screen manufacturers are researching two other techniques. Parallax barriers add a slotted barrier in front of the screen: each slot reveals a thin strip of the screen to one eye while the adjacent barrier blocks it from the other, so that all the slots together create separate images for each eye. Another technology, lenticular lenses, achieves the same effect with columns of bumpy lenses that redirect light to each eye – you might have once owned a ruler that used a very basic version to make moving or 3D images. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15132 - Posted: 03.26.2011

By Laura Sanders When courting, male mice lacking the chemical messenger serotonin don’t seem to care whether the object of their affection is female. Mice without the neurotransmitter no longer eschew the smells of other males, wooing them instead with squeaky love songs and attempts to mount them, researchers report online March 23 in Nature. Serotonin’s surprise role in mouse courtship may lead to a deeper understanding of how brain cells control a complex behavior. “Nobody thought that serotonin could be involved in this kind of sexual preference,” says study coauthor Zhou-Feng Chen of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Scientists emphasize that the male-male courtship seen in the lab isn’t equivalent to human homosexuality. And what, if anything, serotonin has anything to do with human sexual behavior is still an open question. “We have to be cautious because this is work done in mice,” Chen says. “I would be extremely careful to extrapolate these results into humans. We just don’t know much about this.” In the study, male mice that were genetically engineered to lack serotonin-producing brain cells still courted females. But when given the choice between males or females, these mice no longer reliably chose females over males. In tests where both a male and a female mating partner were present, nearly half of the serotonin-lacking males mounted the male first, report researchers led by Yi Rao of the National Institute of Biological Sciences and Peking University in Beijing. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15131 - Posted: 03.24.2011

by Shanta Barley Female hamadryas baboons may be vulnerable to a form of domestic violence from which they feel unable to escape – even if they have the opportunity. Most large papionin monkeys – a group including macaques, baboons and mandrills – rely on wandering males to disperse genes through the population. But studies suggest that gene flow through populations of hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas) in north-east Africa is mainly through females – even though males keep tight control of them and punish wanderers through vicious biting. In 1968, biologist Hans Kummer suggested that females move when they are abducted by another male – but only now have biologists observed such abductions. Mathew Pines at the Filoha Hamadryas Project in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, witnessed three abductions between 2007 and 2009. Each time, the original male embarked on an often bloody rescue mission to locate and retrieve the female. Larissa Swedell at the City University of New York, Pines's co-author on the new study, speculates that abduction is not considered a "fair" way to gain a new female, and so the loss isn't accepted by the original male. The rescue missions were helped by the females, who willingly returned to the rescuer despite a history of violent treatment by that male. "The bond is so strong that a female will run to her male when she is frightened, even if he is the source of the threat," says Swedell. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15130 - Posted: 03.24.2011

By Nathan Seppa Using brain surgery to insert replacement genes, doctors can alleviate some movement problems in people with Parkinson’s disease. While not all of the gene therapy recipients in a new study improved, the group on average registered tangible gains after getting a gene that revs up production of a much-needed neurotransmitter, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Lancet Neurology. Notably, none of the patients had significant side effects attributable to the therapy. “The pendulum on gene therapy has really swung back and forth,” says study coauthor Matthew During, a physician and neuroscientist at Ohio State University in Columbus. “It was enormously hyped at first.” But the death of a patient in Philadelphia in 1999 and the appearance of leukemia in children in France getting gene therapy for an immune disorder — leading to a temporary suspension of trials in 2003 — stalled the research. “The field languished for a while,” During says. But he and his colleagues have continued to pursue the technology, using a disabled, nonpathogenic virus as the delivery vehicle for potentially useful genes. To treat Parkinson’s disease, the team has targeted a troublesome part of the brain where signaling gets obstructed in patients with the neurological disorder. In the new study, the researchers randomly assigned 16 patients with advanced Parkinson’s to undergo an operation to install gene replacements; 21 similar patients got sham surgery and received no genes. Neither group was told which operation they were getting. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15129 - Posted: 03.24.2011

by Ferris Jabr A handful of people around the world have never known the meaning of physical pain – not because they live incredibly sheltered lives, but because their nerves lack a crucial ion channel that helps transmit signals between adjacent nerve cells. A new study reveals that our sense of smell depends on this same protein gate, establishing a previously unrecognised link between the perception of pain and scent. Jan Weiss of the University of Saarland School of Medicine in Homburg, Germany, and his colleagues recruited three people who cannot feel pain because they have a rare condition known as congenital analgesia. Weiss wanted to know whether people with this disorder have difficulty with other senses. The trio of participants – two of whom were siblings – could see and hear well and had never complained about a lousy sense of smell, but the researchers decided to put their noses to the test anyway. When the participants sniffed cotton wool pads soaked in balsamic vinegar, orange, mint, perfume and coffee, they failed to identify any of the odours. In contrast, nine healthy volunteers and the siblings' parents performed just fine, breathing deeply from the pleasant orange and mint scents and turning sharply away from the vinegar. Weiss and his team already knew that people who cannot experience physical pain usually lack a sodium ion channel called Nav1.7 in the membranes of nerve cells in the dorsal root ganglion and in the ganglia that are part of the autonomic nervous system, and wondered whether this loss could also explain the smelling problems. To find out, they examined tissue samples taken from the nose and olfactory system of normal people during surgery. The examinations revealed Nav1.7 channels in the cell membranes of the neurons that stipple these tissues. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15128 - Posted: 03.24.2011

By Daniela Schiller and David Carmel Think about the last time you got bored with the TV channel you were watching and decided to change it with the remote control. Or a time you grabbed a magazine off a newsstand, or raised a hand to hail a taxi. As we go about our daily lives, we constantly make choices to act in certain ways. We all believe we exercise free will in such actions – we decide what to do and when to do it. Free will, however, becomes more complicated when you try to think how it can arise from brain activity. Do we control our neurons or do they control us? If everything we do starts in the brain, what kind of neural activity would reflect free choice? And how would you feel about your free will if we were to tell you that neuroscientists can look at your brain activity, and tell that you are about to make a decision to move – and that they could do this a whole second and a half before you yourself became aware of your own choice? Scientists from UCLA and Harvard -- Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and Gabriel Kreiman -- have taken an audacious step in the search for free will, reported in a new article in the journal Neuron. They used a powerful tool – intracranial recording – to find neurons in the human brain whose activity predicts decisions to make a movement, challenging conventional notions of free will. Fried is one of a handful of neurosurgeons in the world who perform the delicate procedure of inserting electrodes into a living human brain, and using them to record activity from individual neurons. He does this to pin down the source of debilitating seizures in the brains of epileptic patients. Once he locates the part of the patients’ brains that sparks off the seizures, he can remove it, pulling the plug on their neuronal electrical storms. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15127 - Posted: 03.24.2011

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Amir Lahav peered into the incubators where his premature twins slept, their frighteningly tiny bodies entwined with tubes and wires. This was a world very different from the womb, he thought. It wasn’t just the ventilators and the IV lines that made him anxious for Mia and Agami, born 3 1/2 months too soon. A musician and a neurology researcher, Lahav also worried about the din of the neonatal intensive care unit. The soundscape of the womb had been replaced by beeping alarms, pagers, ventilators, and talking. “Every time the door was open, there was so much noise coming in from the room,’’ Lahav said. He persuaded Dr. Steven Ringer, chief of newborn medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to allow him to play a recording of his wife, Galit, speaking to the infants. When the parents could not be there to snuggle the babies directly on their skin, the recording could be played on a small speaker in their incubators. He hoped it would make the hospital sound more like the womb, in which babies can hear their mother’s muffled voice and heartbeat. At the time, in 2007, Lahav was thinking with his gut, not his head. But he began to realize this was a critical period — a time when the twins’ developing brains were especially malleable, with neurological connections being formed and molded as easily as Play-Doh. He wondered whether the abrupt change in the acoustic environment could be one reason that premature babies are more likely to have developmental problems later, including learning disabilities, cognitive or language deficits, or attention problems. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Language
Link ID: 15126 - Posted: 03.22.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO It is always a challenge to remember a new computer password after an old one has expired, or to memorize a new phone number. That is because the brain is competing to recall old memories and new ones that are associated with the same thing, researchers from Yale and Stanford report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Brice Kuhl, a psychologist at Yale, and his colleagues found that when the brain is cluttered with similar events, the difficulty in recalling just one of them is visible through the brain-scanning technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers provided subjects with words that had both face associations and scene associations. When they ran a scan and asked the subjects to recall the association they had most recently seen, blood flowed in parts of the brain that are used to recall faces and scenes. Most people regularly encounter this competition. “I park in a garage every day at work, and I park in a different space every day, depending on availability,” Dr. Kuhl said. “And I very often walk to where I parked the day before. It’s not that I totally forgot where I parked, it’s just that I still remember yesterday’s spot.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15125 - Posted: 03.22.2011