By Travis Riddle You are probably aware that eating plants is good for you. However, what you may not know is that plants can provide benefits even if your taste buds run for cover at the first mention of spinach. New research is beginning to show that just having plants in your workspace may improve how you think. In a study to be published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers show that the mere presence of plants in an office setting boosts one’s ability to maintain attention. As humans spend more of their lives in front of screens, scientists have devoted more attention to the effects these artificial environments have on the mind. Sometimes, this new study suggests, it may be possible to reap benefits with simple changes in decorating strategy. These findings build on a body of research based on Attention Restoration Theory. According to this theory, the reason why you can stare at spreadsheets for only so long before wanting to toss your computer monitor through the window is that everyone has a limited capacity for this kind of work. This limited capacity system makes use of “directed attention” which is effortful, controlled voluntarily, and diminishes with use. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 15109 - Posted: 03.17.2011

By Susan Milius Not to cause dinner table shouting or new excesses of political punditry — but in a test of a particular leadership skill among elephants, age and experience really did trump youth and beauty. Elephant matriarchs 60 years of age or older tended to assess threats in a simulated crisis more accurately than younger matriarchs did, says Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. When researchers played recordings of various lion roars, elephant groups with older matriarchs grew especially defensive at the sound of male cats. Younger matriarchs’ families underreacted, McComb and her colleagues report in an upcoming Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. The older females have it right, McComb says. Male lions rarely attack an elephant, but when they do, they can be especially deadly: A single male can bring down an elephant calf. Studying leadership among animals has become an active research area. “People have become intrigued by some of the parallels between the sorts of characteristics that seem to define a leader in animals and in humans,” McComb says. The new elephant approach “is definitely novel,” says psychologist Mark van Vugt of VU University Amsterdam, who studies the evolution of leadership. The new paper extends a general observation — that older individuals show more leadership in tasks involving specialized knowledge — into situations involving threats. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15108 - Posted: 03.17.2011

By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran Stare at the tiny, central black fixation spot on the white cross in a. After 30 seconds, transfer your gaze to a neutral gray background. You should see a dark—almost black—cross fading in and out. It is especially pronounced if you blink your eyes to revive the image to slow down the fading. This effect is called a negative afterimage because the persistent ghost of the cross is the opposite of what you were looking at—it is dark instead of light. When you fixated on the white cross, you “fatigued” the retinal light receptors by bleaching out the cone pigments. So when you look at neutral gray, the region corresponding to where the white cross had been fires less vigorously than the surrounding area, and the net result is that it is seen as a dark cross. Why does the cross fade? Partly because the fatigued receptors recover slowly as the bleached pigment regenerates. In contrast, with real images our eyes are in constant motion—images sail and jerk across the retina as we scan rooms, roads, texts or faces to identify novel or important bits. This continual movement prevents adaptation or fatigue because new patterns are constantly on any retinal area. With intense focus, you can eliminate all voluntary movements, and you should notice certain objects slowly fade away, as in b (termed the Troxler effect or Troxler fading). This fading is intermittent because your eyes never completely stop moving. Microscopic involuntary trembling characterizes even the steadiest fixation. This “physiological nystagmus” allows the brain’s edge-detecting neurons to avoid being fatigued, even during fixation, by providing moment-to-moment refreshing. But an afterimage, unlike a real image, remains stuck to the retina so the neurons are not refreshed and fatigue quickly kicks in. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15107 - Posted: 03.15.2011

Matt Kaplan The logical argument that ancient human ancestors had to have mastered fire before departing balmy Africa for the often freezing climes of Europe is being challenged by a review revealing that there is no evidence to support the idea. Exactly when fire became a tool in the hominin toolbox is a thorny issue. Unlike stone tools, which hold together reasonably well over the course of time and can be dated as having been in hominin hands for at least 2.6 million years, the ash and charcoal that are often the only remains from ancient fires are rare in the fossil record as they are easily destroyed by the elements. Yet because fire makes food so much more energy efficient to consume and has such a key role in providing warmth, most anthropologists have agreed that hominins had to have mastered fire before they headed into Europe. "We assumed fire had to be an element of the human toolkit to survive northern-latitude winters," says archaeologist, Francesco d'Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France. As logical as the argument seems, the review, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, suggests that it is wrong. Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, searched the European archaeological record for fires and found that the earliest possible evidence comes from two 400,000-year-old sites, one in England that seems to have the remains of an ancient hearth and one in Germany that has a charred wooden tool and heated flint present. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15106 - Posted: 03.15.2011

by Emma Young Every one of us slips into this mysterious state of consciousness every night, yet we are only now waking up to its mind-altering powers "THE interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." So wrote Sigmund Freud in his 1900 classic The Interpretation of Dreams. He saw this idea as a "once in a lifetime" insight, and for much of the 20th century the world agreed. Across the globe, and upon countless psychoanalysts' couches, people recounted their dreams in the belief that they contained coded messages about repressed desires. Dreams were no longer supernatural communications or divine interventions - they were windows into the hidden self. Today we interpret dreams quite differently, and use far more advanced techniques than simply writing down people's recollections. In sleep laboratories, dream researchers hook up volunteers to EEGs and fMRI scanners and awaken them mid-dream to record what they were dreaming. Still tainted by association with psychoanalysis, it is not a field for the faint-hearted. "To say you're going to study dreams is almost academic suicide," says Matt Walker at the University of California, Berkeley. Nevertheless, what researchers are finding will make you see your dreams in a whole new light. Modern neuroscience has pushed Freud's ideas to the sidelines and has taught us something far more profound about dreaming. We now know that this peculiar form of consciousness is crucial to making us who we are. Dreams help us to consolidate our memories, make sense of our myriad experiences and keep our emotions in check. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15105 - Posted: 03.15.2011

By Amanda Chan The children of women who experience a stressful life event either during or before pregnancy are at an increased risk of being hospitalized from infectious disease, according to a new study. Children whose mothers experienced a stressful event, such as the death of a loved one or divorce, while they were pregnant were 71 percent more likely to be hospitalized with a severe infectious disease than children of women who did not undergo prenatal stress, said study researcher Nete Munk Nielsen, an epidemiologist at Statens Serum Institute in Denmark. And the children of women who experienced a stressful life event 11 months before conception were 42 percent more likely to be hospitalized with severe infectious disease than the children of stress-free women, Nielsen said. "We speculate that this is due to effects of longer-lasting stress following the stressful life event," Nielsen told MyHealthNewsDaily. The study was published online last week in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers looked at the health data for 1,670,269 Danish children born between 1977 and 2004, and asked their mothers if they experienced the death of a spouse or a child, or had gotten a divorce before or during pregnancy. The children were followed from four weeks after birth until they turned 15. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Stress; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15104 - Posted: 03.15.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE Every time some human attribute is said to be unique, whether tool-making or language or warfare, biologists soon find some plausible precursor in animals that makes the ability less distinctive. Still, humans are vastly different from other animals, however hard the difference may be to define. A cascade of events, some the work of natural selection, some just plain accidents, propelled the human lineage far from the destiny of being just another ape, down an unexpected evolutionary path to become perhaps the strangest blossom on the ample tree of life. And what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies. Biologists have little hesitation in linking humans’ success to their sociality. The ability to cooperate, to make individuals subordinate their strong sense of self-interest to the needs of the group, lies at the root of human achievement. “Humans are not special because of their big brains,” says Kim Hill, a social anthropologist at Arizona State University. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15103 - Posted: 03.15.2011

— It seems that women become addicted to cocaine more easily than men and find it harder to give up. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biology of Sex Differences reinforces this position by showing that the motivation of female rats to work for cocaine is much higher than males. Researchers from the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute, University of Michigan, found that rats bred to have an elevated stress response and increased impulsiveness are more easily trained to reward themselves with cocaine. They are also more determined, than similar rats with low impulsivity and lower stress responses, in pursuit of their next fix. While cocaine dependency has something to do with thrill seeking and impulsivity, it is also affected by the differences between males and females. At a low dose, for both sets of rats, it was the females who were quickest to learn self-administration and were the most willing to work harder for their next fix. At higher doses, the differences in behaviour between the male and female rats were less apparent. Whilst certain personality types are perhaps predisposed towards drug addiction Dr Jennifer Cummings explained, "An individual's sex continues to increase the likelihood of drug abuse." 1. Jennifer A. Cummings, Brooke A. Gowl, Christel Westenbroek, Sarah M. Clinton, Huda Akil, Jill B. Becker. Effects of a selectively bred novelty-seeking phenotype on the motivation to take cocaine in male and female rats. Biology of Sex Differences, 2011; 2: 3 DOI: 10.1186/2042-6410-2-3 © 1995-2010 ScienceDaily LLC

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15102 - Posted: 03.15.2011

Tiffany O'Callaghan A miniaturized positron emission tomography (PET) scanner has opened a fresh window for research into behaviour and brain function simultaneously. The 'wearable' PET, known as the RatCAP, was developed by a team of researchers led by physicist Paul Vaska at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and allows scans on animals that are awake and moving around. The findings are published online today in Nature Methods. PET uses radioactive tracers to show the metabolism of chemicals in the body in real time. It is a key tool for examining organ function, evaluating blood flow, diagnosing cancer early and researching neurological conditions from Alzheimer's disease to epilepsy. But PET use for behavioural research in animals has been limited — whereas humans can lie still during a PET scan, enabling analysis while they are awake, it is a lot trickier to get animals to do as they're told. That largely limits the use of PET to anaesthetized animals, ruling out simultaneous behavioural studies. The tiny PET developed by the team attaches to the rat's head using a bracket screwed onto the skull, has an inner diameter of 38 mm and weighs just 250 g. For a rat, that is still pretty heavy — nearly the weight of an adult male rat — so to optimize the rat's movement while wearing the RatCAP, the team attached the device to a system of long springs and motion stabilisers fastened to the top of the observation chamber to reduce the weight and allow rat movement. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15101 - Posted: 03.14.2011

Like a car crash, many of us have been absorbed watching as actor Charlie Sheen descends into a sad spectacle of madness and drug abuse. Earlier this week, we learned from that august web site TMZ.com that a species of pot has been named after the putatively insane actor. Click here to get the scoop from TMZ. Canada has one of the highest rates of marijuana use in the world. According to a 2007 report by the United Nations, nearly 17% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 64 smoke pot or ingest one of its derivatives. Many people think of cannabis as a harmless drug. Now, a new study may change that view. Researchers from the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the UK found a side effect of using marijuana that should give parents pause for concern. The study - which was published in the British Medical Journal - tracked more than 1,900 young people age 14 to 24 over a period of 10 years. Researchers found that 13 percent of the participants reported using cannabis at least five times at some point during their lives. That figure rose to 20 percent by the three and half year mark of the study. They concluded that those teens and young adults who use cannabis were nearly twice as likely to exhibit psychotic behaviour at some point compared to those who didn't use the substance. Other studies have found an association between psychotic behaviour and marijuana use. This study was the first to demonstrate that marijuana use precedes the onset of psychotic symptoms. The researchers excluded anyone who reported cannabis use or pre-existing psychotic symptoms prior to the start of the study. The study controlled for factors like social status or wealth and the use of other illicit drugs like crystal methamphetamine and cocaine - factors that independently increase the risk of psychosis - as well as other psychiatric conditions (for example, depression). © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 15100 - Posted: 03.14.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter Start watching the video above and you may not believe that it features an ordinary (albeit oversized) chessboard. The board seems to contort inwards but that's because the corners of some of the squares are highlighted with tiny pieces of paper. Once they're blown away, a regular pattern of parallel squares is revealed. This video was created by Greg Ross, an illusion fanatic with his own YouTube page dedicated to the cause. He constructed the illusion after he was baffled by a similar trick. "The one I saw looked as if the black and white squares were warped and bulging outwards towards me. I had to actually use a ruler to prove to myself that they were parallel," he says. To re-create the brain trick, he had to figure out exactly where to place the paper dots to achieve the perception of inward distortion. Then, it took four hours to painstakingly lay out 200 hand-cut paper squares onto a custom-printed board. "Placing the squares on the pattern was one of the most tedious things I've ever done in my life," says Ross. "I had to use tweezers to maneuver them and static electricity repeatedly thwarted my efforts." If you think you know why we perceive this illusion, let us know in the comment thread below and we'll let you know what the experts say next week. (If you're wondering what the blue shape in the video is, it's Ross's hat. He forgot he was wearing it during filming but there was no way he was going to do a re-take.) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15099 - Posted: 03.14.2011

Scientists say they have discovered a "maintenance" protein that helps keep nerve fibres that transmit messages in the brain operating smoothly. The University of Edinburgh team says the finding could improve understanding of disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, MS and stroke. In such neurodegenerative disorders, electrical impulses from the brain are disrupted. This leads to an inability to control movement, and muscles wasting away. The brain works like an electrical circuit, sending impulses along nerve fibres in the same way that current is sent through wires. These fibres can measure up to a metre, but the area covered by the segment of nerve that controls transmission of messages is no bigger than the width of a human hair. Signal failure The scientists discovered that the protein Nfasc186 is crucial for maintaining the health and function of the segment of nerve fibres - called the axon initial segment (AIS) - that controls transmission of messages within the brain. They found that the AIS and the protein within it are important in ensuring the nerve impulse has the right properties to convey the message as it should. Professor Peter Brophy, director of the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Neuroregeneration, said: "Knowing more about how signals in the brain work will help us better understand neurodegenerative disorders and why, when these illnesses strike, the brain can no longer send signals to parts of the body." BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Epilepsy; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15098 - Posted: 03.14.2011

An oral drug for multiple sclerosis has been approved for some MS patients in Canada. Until Thursday's announcement, drug treatment options for MS patients in this country were limited to medications taken regularly by injection or infusion. Gilenya, also called fingolimod, is a capsule taken once a day for people with the relapsing-remitting form of MS. These patients have relapses that continue to worsen in severity, disability level, or who are unable to tolerate injections. "It's a very long awaited type of medication for our patients," said Dr. Heather MacLean, a neurologist at the Ottawa Hospital who specializes in MS. Needle injections under the skin are painful and are associated with itching and lumpy skin reactions, and the weekly intramuscular medication can also cause muscle pain, noted MacLean, who has treated patients with the new drug as part of early clinical trials. From her experience, MacLean estimated that 10 to 20 per cent of relapsing-remitting MS patients currently on treatment stand to benefit from Gilenya. "It always surprises me how patients really require different modalities of treatment based on their own personal disease course and their own treatment goals. To have another available option for them, I think they'll be thrilled." Gilenya's manufacturer, Novartis, submitted clinical trial data to Health Canada to get the approval. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 15097 - Posted: 03.11.2011

By JAMIE STENGLE DALLAS — Women who enjoy a daily dose of coffee may like this perk: It might lower their risk of stroke. Women in a Swedish study who drank at least a cup of coffee everyday had a 22 to 25 percent lower risk of stroke, compared to those who drank less coffee or none at all. "Coffee drinkers should rejoice," said Dr. Sharonne N. Hayes, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "Coffee is often made out to be potentially bad for your heart. There really hasn't been any study that convincingly said coffee is bad." "If you are drinking coffee now, you may be doing some good and you are likely not doing harm," she added. But Hayes and other doctors say the study shouldn't send non-coffee drinkers running to their local coffee shop. The study doesn't prove that coffee lowers stroke risk, only that coffee drinkers tend to have a lower stroke risk. "These sorts of epidemiological studies are compelling but they don't prove cause," said Dr. David S. Seres, director of medical nutrition at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. The findings were published online Thursday in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. Copyright 2011 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stroke; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15096 - Posted: 03.11.2011

By CELIA WATSON SEUPEL When I got up, Mom was already awake. I could hear her rummaging in the kitchen. Through the glass doors in the living room, sunlight flared so brightly off the hillocks of snow that I had to shield my eyes. It was my birthday, and I was afraid. What if my husband had neglected to take Mom shopping for a card? Once Mom found out it was my birthday, she would be devastated that she had forgotten and had nothing to give me. Little matter that she has dementia and can’t remember what we did two hours ago. Birthdays are a big deal to Mom. Birthdays are not a big deal to me. I hate growing older. I don’t mind if Mom forgets my birthday as long as she still remembers me. That someday she might not recognize me has been my biggest fear ever since Mom got dementia. I can’t imagine anything more devastating than being forgotten by your own mother. When Mom was diagnosed with vascular dementia seven years ago, I was told she did not have Alzheimer’s disease. I hoped that meant she would never forget her family. But as Mom’s dementia progressed, I realized that I had no idea whether vascular dementia could be as bad as Alzheimer’s. I really didn’t understand the difference. Recently I decided to find out, and the answers were not very reassuring. Although vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are hardly the same, with time the differences start to blur. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15095 - Posted: 03.11.2011

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter This overlapping rainbow of connecting cells represents new insights into how mammalian brains work. The techniques used to create this three-dimensional map of a tiny chunk of mouse brain could help neuroscientists understand the connections that make up our own brains. To create this map - which shows the neurons in a piece of mouse visual cortex just 8 thousandths of a cubic millimetre in volume - Clay Reid and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston combined two imaging techniques. First, the group measured the activity of neurons in the visual cortex of a living mouse in order to spot the cells that were excited by visual information. They then killed the mouse and cut the visual cortex into 1215 slices, before using an electron microscope to capture more than 3 million images of the slices. Finally they stitched the pictures together to form this 3D image using a computer capable of handling the 30 to 40 terabytes of information. That was the relatively easy part. Next, Reid's team painstakingly traced all of the connections made by 10 of the neurons that were active in the first stage of the study. That involved tracing 240 axons and dendrites through the tangled mess created by other axons and dendrites in the 3D image. The results are already shedding light on the detailed behaviour of the brain. The team found that neurons that inhibit brain activity received input from all the excitatory neurons in the chunk. That finding offers new insight into the debate over whether these neurons receive specific or random inputs, and may inform research into conditions characterised by a lack of brain activity inhibition, such as epilepsy, says Reid. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 15094 - Posted: 03.10.2011

Brain imaging techniques to find out more about patients in a coma are being developed by University of Aberdeen scientists. The new Aberdeen Coma Science Group - believed to be the first of its kind in Scotland - hopes to provide greater insights into coma patient awareness. This would be used to help guide treatment and provide information for relatives and clinicians. North east of Scotland patients will initially assist the research. The scanning technique is called functional MRI - fMRI. Prof Christian Schwarzbauer is leading the work, which will involve patients being given fMRI scans while exposed to stimuli such as pictures, sounds, smell and touch. He said: "Thanks to advances in medical care our chances of surviving a severe accident are much higher than they used to be. "Doctors can save the lives of many patients who suffer brain injury, but, if the injury is severe, the patient may not regain consciousness and slip into a coma. "Some will regain consciousness but others will remain in a so-called vegetative state. With their eyes open and possibly even wandering, these patients appear to be awake but show no signs of awareness of themselves or their environment." BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 15093 - Posted: 03.10.2011

By PAM BELLUCK A federal panel will meet on Thursday to evaluate growing concerns about whether anesthesia in young children, used in millions of surgical procedures, can in some cases lead to cognitive problems or learning disabilities. The meeting was prompted by a growing body of research, so far primarily in animals, that suggests a correlation between anesthesia exposure and brain cell death or learning problems, said Dr. Bob Rappaport, the Food and Drug Administration’s director of the division of anesthesia and analgesia products, who wrote about the issue in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine. The F.D.A. advisory panel will evaluate the research, suggest further studies and discuss whether parents whose children are facing surgery should be informed of possible cognitive or behavioral risks. “We don’t know what this means for children at this time,” Dr. Rappaport said, adding, “That’s exactly why it’s so critical that we get all of the necessary information.” In the meantime, he said, “how do we communicate what we do know at this point without causing undue concern in parents and in physicians?” Medical advances are allowing more fragile and premature infants to survive birth, often to require critical surgical procedures. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15092 - Posted: 03.10.2011

Analysis by Marianne English To every nap lover's delight, it turns out that sleeping may play a larger role in learning than previously thought, according to a new study featured in the journal Current Biology. Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley studied 44 college-aged participants at two different times of day -- once at noon and again at 6 p.m. Half the group was allowed to take a nap from 2 p.m. to 3:40 p.m., while the rest stayed awake throughout the day. At noon and 6 p.m., researchers measured how both groups performed in facial memory tests, finger tapping memory tests and an alertness test. The "Nap" group performed significantly better at learning tasks when tested later in the day in comparison to subjects who did not take a lengthy nap. The team also measured brain activity while subjects napped using an electroencephalogram. They found that success in learning correlated with the amount of stage-2 non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the stage preceding deep rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The research is unique because it points to a mechanism that may reveal sleep's importance for encoding new information -- sleep spindles, or short bursts of cell activity between areas of the brain during NREM. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15091 - Posted: 03.10.2011

Analysis by Amy Dusto For people with spinal injuries or other conditions that impair use of the arms or vocal cords -- or for the curious who just think it's cool -- the intendiX spells words based on brain waves. A skullcap along with a computer interface, the system is in development by Austrian company Guger Technologies. It was demonstrated at CeBIT, an annual worldwide digital industry event, held this year in Hanover, Germany, from March 1 to 5. To pick up brain activity, the skullcap is covered in electroencephalographic (EEG) electrodes. Unfortunately, this early model requires that the user put gel between his and her head and the EEG electrodes to function properly (though a dry version is forthcoming). The wearer stares at a computer screen, which flashes highlights over different rows in a matrix of letters and symbols set up like a keyboard on the screen. Simply by paying attention to the desired letter for a few seconds, the program can determine what the user intended to pick. According to Guger Technologies, most people become competent thought-communicators after 10 minutes of training on the system and are able to spell out five to 10 characters a minute. Designed for use by the severely handicapped in the home or with caregivers, intendiX can do more than just write out a text message. The user can also make it read the message out loud in digitized prose, print the text, or send it in email or via another electronic messaging system -- intendiX is Bluetooth-ready. The only ability needed to use the system, besides a few seconds of concentration, is eyesight. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15090 - Posted: 03.10.2011