By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO — Although first approved to treat schizophrenia, new antipsychotic medications are increasingly being prescribed for a host of other uses, even when there is little evidence they work, U.S. researchers said on Friday. The drugs, known as "atypical antipsychotics," have quickly eclipsed older-generation or "typical" antipsychotics and are increasingly used to treat conditions like bipolar disorder, depression and even autism. "What we see is wide adoption for the use of these medications far beyond the evidence base to support it," said Dr. Caleb Alexander of the University of Chicago and a consultant for IMS Health, a company that collects data on prescription drugs. He said more than half of all atypical antipsychotic prescriptions written in 2008 were based on flimsy evidence. "We're talking millions of prescriptions a year for antipsychotics in settings where there is uncertain evidence to support them," said Alexander, whose study appears in the journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. The drugs are not harmless, Alexander said in a telephone interview. They can cause weight gain, diabetes and heart disease and are far more costly than the older antipsychotics, which cause disorders such as involuntary movements. Atypical antipsychotics accounted for more than $10 billion in U.S. retail pharmacy drug costs in 2008 — nearly 5 percent of all prescription drug spending. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14849 - Posted: 01.10.2011

By RONI CARYN RABIN Antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil are widely used to treat depression, but a much less costly alternative called bright light therapy, in which a patient sits under an artificial light for a set period of time each day, is not. Light therapy is typically recommended for seasonal affective disorder, the “winter blues” brought on by shorter days and limited sun. Some psychiatrists prescribe it for this condition, often as a last resort when patients fail to respond to drugs. One reason light therapy hasn’t been used in more people with depression is that there aren’t many good clinical trials of the therapy in depressed patients without seasonal affective disorder. There isn’t much money to be made from the treatment — all it involves is a one-time purchase of a special lamp. The upside is that it has few, if any, side effects (though, doctors note, it should always be done in consultation with a physician). Now a new, carefully designed randomized controlled trial — of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine — suggests bright light therapy deserves a closer look. The study was small, involving only 89 patients ages 60 and older, but the results were remarkable. Compared with a placebo, light therapy improved mood just as well as conventional antidepressant medications, said Dr. Ritsaert Lieverse, the paper’s lead author and a psychiatrist at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 14848 - Posted: 01.10.2011

By Marissa Cevallos A quantum effect known as entanglement may be part of the compass that birds use to sense Earth’s magnetic field, researchers report in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. Critters from bacteria to mole rats use tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, but exactly how they sense the magnetism is a mystery. One idea is that magnetic fields disrupt pairs of entangled electrons in a light-sensitive protein in the retina. In quantum entanglement, particles are linked to each other so that one always knows instantly what the other is doing, even if they get separated. In the new research, physicists at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore calculated that quantum entanglement in a bird’s eye could last more than 100 microseconds — longer than the 80 microseconds achieved in physicists’ experiments at temperatures just above absolute zero, says Elisabeth Rieper, a physicist at the National University of Singapore. That would be a surprising feat for a bird warbling at room temperature, which people thought was too hot to see quantum effects. “It may all be right, but I would personally like to be cautious about this,” says Thorsten Ritz, a biophysicist at University of California, Irvine, who is a proponent of the model but wasn’t involved in this research. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 14847 - Posted: 01.10.2011

by Debora MacKenzie Hands up everyone whose new year's resolution is to lose weight. Wouldn't it be great if we could just take a pill to shed fat? Time and again "diet pills" have turned out to be useless, dangerous or both – but now there may finally be a safe one that works. Zafgen, a start-up drug company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has announced that its first human test of a drug named ZGN-433 caused 24 obese women to lose, on average, a kilogram a week for a month – with no harmful side effects. The trial could not be extended past a month without initial safety tests at a range of doses – which was the purpose of this trial. The detailed results will be reported next week at a conference on obesity in Keystone, Colorado. This is a stunning rate of weight loss, especially as the women ate normally and were not given exercise advice. It is almost the maximum rate considered safe, and nearly as effective as surgery to reduce stomach sizeMovie Camera. Many companies are searching for drugs to combat the rich world's obesity epidemic, but the researchers say no other tested so far has worked as well. It isn't all your fault that it is so hard to lose weight. When you initially become fat, your body adapts in ways that make it harder to lose that fat. Some involve the brain's control of appetite, but others involve the molecular controls that determine how much of that food you turn into fat, or whether you burn fat for energy. "We believe we are overcoming these adaptations," says Zafgen CEO Tom Hughes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14846 - Posted: 01.10.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter First you see it, then suddenly it's gone. A new illusion (see video, above) shows how our perception of objects changes as soon as they start moving. At first, the ring of dots is motionless and it's easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, however, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. The faster the ring moves, the less the colours appear to change. But in reality, they were changing the whole time, at the same rate. As the video shows, the illusion also works for brightness, shape and size. The phenomenon - change blindness - by which observers don't notice that an image is changing in front of their eyes, isn't new. Nor is the notion that motion affects the way we see objects - watch our video special on moving illusions for lots of other cool examples - this new illusion designed by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez at Harvard University demonstrates the principle especially well. The pair believe the illusion occurs because the areas of the brain responsible for detecting these changes are organised locally - each part of the visual field is monitored by a specific part of the brain. Because a fast moving object spends little time at any one location, a local detector only has a small window of time in which to assess the changing object - and therefore fails to detect the change. Journal Reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.019 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14845 - Posted: 01.10.2011

Ewen Callaway A new blood test diagnoses Alzheimer's disease by sensing molecules produced by the immune systems of people with the neurodegenerative condition. So far, the test has been applied to just a small number of blood samples, but if proven on a larger scale, the assay could help diagnose Alzheimer's disease in combination with other tests, says Thomas Kodadek, a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. It could also be used to identify patients for trials of experimental Alzheimer's drugs, he adds. His team published its results online today in Cell1. Currently, the only way to conclusively distinguish Alzheimer's from other dementias by examining the gnarled plaques and tangles of protein found in the brains of those with the condition. This can only be done after death. A furious search is under way for earlier, less-invasive tests using brain scans, blood draws and spinal taps, for instance. Globally, over 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's. There are no effective treatments for the disease or proven means of preventing it. Most trawls for blood biomarkers typically whittle down a list of potential molecules to a few that differ between people with a condition and healthy people. For instance, Tony Wyss-Coray's team at Stanford University in California screened 120 proteins involved in cell communication and found 18 of the proteins present at higher levels in the blood of people with Alzheimer's disease than others2. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14844 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Susan Milius SALT LAKE CITY — When pairs of young comb-footed spiders engage in an arachnid version of heavy petting, the males gain experience that appears to pay off later. A male spider that repeatedly courts and mock-mates with a not-quite-mature female ends up reaping benefits later, said Jonathan Pruitt of the University of California, Davis. Speaking January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, he proposed that such seemingly pointless spider encounters, which can’t produce offspring, may resemble other young animals’ racing and wrestling by providing practice for life’s future tasks. “I thought it would sound silly if I called my talk ‘Spider Sex Play,’” Pruitt said, “but that’s essentially what it is.” And he ranked it as the first example of any kind of play behavior demonstrated in spiders. Among the Anelosimus studiosus spiders, which live and spin webs along rivers and under bridges from Maine to Patagonia, females don’t develop an opening to their reproductive tract until their final molt. Males mature faster and hang around not-quite-mature females, often going through most of the mating routine. During almost-sex, the male doesn’t load his sex organs with sperm but performs a courtship display by drumming the female’s web with his legs and sex organs. If she assumes a cooperative posture, he approximates a mating position too. He then taps her body where the reproductive tract will eventually open. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14843 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Bruce Bower Crying women may literally turn men off. Odorless chemical signals in a woman’s waterworks lessen any stirrings of sexual interest in a guy who whiffs her tear-stained cheeks, a new study suggests. In a paper published online January 6 in Science, a team led by neuroscientists Shani Gelstein and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, presents the first evidence that human tears contain pheromones, substances that influence behavior via smell. “Our experiments suggest that women’s emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men,” Sobel says. Chemical compounds in tears that douse men’s desire have yet to be identified. “This new report makes a strong case for pheromones in women’s tears, but the results clearly warrant replication,” comments neuroscientist Robert Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The reasons why people, but not any other animal, cry at sad thoughts or events remain poorly understood. Tears provide key visual cues to a person’s inner emotional distress, Provine says. In a 2009 study that he directed, men and women rated the faces of crying people with visible tears as much sadder than the same faces digitally altered to remove tears. Tear removal made faces appear emotionally ambiguous, with participants saying that awe, concern or puzzlement often outweighed sadness. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14842 - Posted: 01.07.2011

by Greg Miller A small study of 30 people with the most common inherited form of mental retardation has found encouraging evidence that some symptoms of the disorder can be alleviated with drugs. Some patients with Fragile X syndrome who received an experimental drug showed reductions in repetitive behaviors, hyperactivity, inappropriate speech, and social withdrawal. However, the drug affected only patients with a particular genetic alteration—a discouraging sign, perhaps, for those without that marker, but a potentially useful tool for identifying the patients most likely to respond to treatment. As recently as 10 years ago, the idea of reversing mental retardation was unthinkable. That's because many of these conditions result from genetic glitches that derail brain development even before birth. But recent studies with mice and other animals have given researchers hope that it may be possible to develop treatments that improve cognition and behavior in conditions like Fragile X syndrome, in which a mutation to a gene on the X chromosome makes part of the chromosome look unusually thin, and Rett syndrome, another common cause of mental retardation. One of the hottest prospects to emerge for treating Fragile X syndrome is a class of drugs that block a receptor in the brain called metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5). This receptor plays a role in protein synthesis at the junctions between nerve cells, and it becomes hyperactive as a result of the gene mutation that causes Fragile X. Blocking this receptor, the thinking goes, helps restore its activity to a normal level. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14841 - Posted: 01.07.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter Andrew Wakefield has been called many things since publishing his paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism in 1998. Now, he can add "'fraud" to the list, as BMJ this week publishes a series of papers claiming that the work was not only misleading, but also fraudulent. In his BMJ blog post, the journalist responsible for investigating Wakefield's claims - The Sunday Times's Brian Deer - goes as far as to say the research, which "triggered a decade-long health scare" was a "fix". Deer compared it to the "Piltdown Man", a famous scientific hoax in which archaeologist Charles Dawson combined the jaw of an orang-utan with the skull of a modern man, claiming it to be the fossilised remains of early man. In 1998, Wakefield, who worked at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a controversial paper linking the MMR vaccine with autism. The paper was retracted from The Lancet in February 2010 because it turned out that, among other things, Wakefield had undisclosed conflict of interests and that the children in the study had been preselected. The British General Medical Council ruled later in the year that Wakefield should be banned from practising medicine. In the BMJ papers, Deer claims that Wakefield doctored details of the patients used in the study. He compared the medical records from the patients, which were presented at a General Medical Council hearing, with the paper's findings and found major discrepancies. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14840 - Posted: 01.07.2011

by Deborah Kotz No question that a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's disease -- as former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci announced Thursday -- is devastating. The disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, targets the brain and spine, causing muscle weakness that progresses to complete paralysis. There's no cure, and it's always fatal, usually within a decade of diagnosis. Yet Cellucci, who's currently the US ambassador to Canada, says his ALS is progressing slowly: "I've had symptoms for four years," the 62-year-old told the Associated Press. He said he has some muscle weakness, but other than that, he's "feeling quite well." Of course, one of the most famous ALS sufferers, besides Lou Gehrig himself, is physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with the disease more than 45 years ago and is still living despite decades of complete paralysis. Some experts, though, say Hawking doesn't have true ALS but a similar type of motor neuron disease that progresses much more slowly. Unfortunately, no test can provide a definitive diagnosis of ALS, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Doctors make the diagnosis based on symptoms by looking at loss of nerve function in the limbs and ruling out other more common diseases.They also look for progression of symptoms over time. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 14839 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Susan Milius Parasitic worms may be saving their own little hides when they induce the caterpillars they infest to glow a little and blush a furious red. As the parasitic nematode Heterorhabditis bacteriophora infects caterpillars of the greater wax moth, the normally pale caterpillars temporarily bioluminesce and also turn persistently pink-red. In outdoor taste tests with 16 European robins, birds overall preferred uninfected waxmoth caterpillars to ones that had been infected for at least three days. By day seven of infection, odd-colored caterpillars barely even got tentatively picked up by the birds, Fenton and his colleagues report in an upcoming paper in Animal Behaviour. “I think the cool thing is that it’s the first example, to our knowledge, of a parasite manipulating its host to avoid being eaten,” says Andy Fenton of the University of Liverpool in England. It’s to the parasite’s advantage not to be eaten, Fenton explains, because these nematodes don’t infect vertebrates. So if a bird happens to eat a parasitized caterpillar, it’s bye-bye wormy. Biologists have already uncovered weird examples of the opposite approach, in which other parasites change the appearance or behavior of hosts in ways that attract predators. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14838 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Jessica Marshall Maggots. Rotten meat. Pus-oozing sores. Grossed out yet? Probably. The emotion of disgust is universal, strong and easy to invoke. A single disgusting photo is all it takes to make most of us say, "Ick." And that's for a good reason. Just as fear protects us from a lion that would eat us, "disgust is quite similar. It keeps us away from tiny little animals that would eat us up from the inside," said Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the lead author of a paper published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . "We evolved to stay away from poo, from bodily fluids, from mucous, from foods that have gone off, from worms in the garden." It's not just humans that have this reaction. Even nematode worms can recognize parasitic bacteria in a petri dish and crawl the other away, Curtis said. "It's a simple animal with only 302 neurons and it's got a disgust reaction." While the emotion is universal, it is flexible -- we can learn to be disgusted by new things -- and its intensity varies from person to person and depending on the circumstances. Individual differences can be measured by tests of "disgust sensitivity," which scores how disgusted people are by typical gross things like feces or rotten meat. Disgust may have evolved to protect us from pathogens, but it can go too far. Types of obsessive-compulsive disorders are thought to result from disgust sensitivity taken to the extreme, Curtis said, such as obsessive hand washing or boiling tea water multiple times before drinking. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14837 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Catching up with e-mail while you eat lunch? Watching television? You may end the day eating more than you think. Researchers had 22 volunteers eat a meal while playing computer solitaire and 22 others eat the same meal in the same amount of time while undistracted. They told the subjects it was a test of the effect of food on memory, but actually they were testing how full people felt after a meal, how much they ate at a “taste test” 30 minutes later, and how successfully they could recall exactly what they ate. Their results appear online in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Not only were distracted eaters worse at remembering what they had eaten, but they felt significantly less full just after lunch, even after the researchers controlled for height and weight. And at the taste-test session a half-hour later, they ate about twice as many cookies as those who had lunch without playing games. “If you can avoid eating in front of a computer screen or any other activity that distracts you, that might temper the tendency to snack later in the day,” said Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, the senior author. Dr. Brunstrom, a researcher in behavioral nutrition at the University of Bristol in England, said the problem lay in recalling what one has eaten. “Memory plays an important role in the regulation of food intake,” he said, “and distractions during eating disrupt that.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 14836 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By NATALIE ANGIER In his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him. Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats are what Mr. Monson describes as the “bad kid calls,” like the one from a mother who had put her 18-month-old son down in his crib right next to a window with a Venetian blind and its old-fashioned cord. “The kid had grabbed the cord and gotten it twisted around his neck, and the mother came in and found him hanging there,” said Mr. Monson. “I’m the first one in the door, she’s in a panic, and she shoves the kid into my arms, crying, ‘Please save him, please save him!’ ” The child’s body was blue, but Mr. Monson and his fellows met parental despair with professional focus and did everything they could. “We worked on him for over an hour,” said Mr. Monson. “It’s like a state of calm. You’re so tuned in to what you’re doing, you’re not thinking about the reality of the situation.” Their best was not enough, however, and later, at the hospital, the terrible sadness settled in. As Mr. Monson filled out his report, the mother sat in the trauma room’s designated “bereavement rocking chair,” rocking her dead son, saying her goodbyes, while family members filed in and wailed at the sight. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14835 - Posted: 01.04.2011

This would be a whole lot easier—this quest for ways to improve our brain—if scientists understood the mechanisms of intelligence even half as well as they do the mechanisms of, say, muscular strength. If we had the neuronal version of how lifting weights increases strength (chemical and electrical signals increase the number of filament bundles inside muscle cells), we’d be good to go. For starters, we could dismiss claims for the brain versions of eight-second abs—claims that if we use this brain-training website or practice that form of meditation or eat blueberries or chew gum or have lots of friends, we will be smarter and more creative, able to figure out whether to do a Roth conversion, remember who gave us that fruitcake (the better to retaliate next year), and actually understand the NFL’s wild-card tiebreaker system. But what neuroscientists don’t know about the mechanisms of cognition—about what is physically different between a dumb brain and a smart one and how to make the first more like the second—could fill volumes. Actually, it does. Whether you go neuro-slumming (Googling “brain training”) or keep to the high road (searching PubMed, the database of biomedical journals, for “cognitive enhancement”), you will find no dearth of advice. But it is rife with problems. Many of the suggestions come from observational studies, which take people who do X and ask, are they smarter (by some measure) than people who do not do X? Just because the answer is yes doesn’t mean X makes you smart. People who use their gym locker tend to be fitter than those who don’t, but it is not using a gym locker that raises your aerobic capacity. Knowing the mechanisms of exercise physiology averts that error. Not knowing the mechanism of cognitive enhancement makes us sitting ducks for dubious claims, since few studies claiming that X makes people smarter invoke any plausible mechanism by which that might happen. “There are lots of quick and dirty studies of cognitive enhancement that make the news, but the number of rigorous, well-designed studies that will stand the test of time is much smaller,” says neuroscientist Peter Snyder of Brown University Medical School. “We’re sort of in the Wild West.” © 2011 Harman Newsweek LLC

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14834 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Emily Sohn Signs of impending obesity are showing up in babies as young as nine months, found one of the first studies to look at weight concerns in the first two years of life. About a third of barely crawling infants are overweight or at risk for being obese, according to the study. And weighing too much at nine months increases the chances of weighing too much in the child's early years. While no one is suggesting that parents put their infants on diets to get rid of those adorable rolls, the findings might help researchers identify kids at risk for obesity as early in life as possible. "I don't think anyone is willing to say that if your kids are overweight at nine months, they're doomed to be obese adults," said Brian Moss, a sociologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. "One of the things we're looking at is whether there are maybe life circumstances between nine months and two years that can influence the odds of a child becoming an undesirable weight." "It could be the time when people introduce table foods, the quality or quantity of table foods, or the types of things they're exposed to," he said. "It could be the type of childcare or changes in their parents' employment status. Maybe certain types of foods are more expensive. Or there might be cultural differences that we didn't look into. It's pretty complex." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14833 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Randy Dotinga -- Doctors can learn more about anesthesia, sleep and coma by paying attention to what the three have in common, a new report suggests. "This is an effort to try to create a common discussion across the fields," said review co-author Dr. Emery N. Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relationship between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce new sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?" The researchers, who compared the physical signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, report their findings in the Dec. 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. They acknowledged that anesthesia, sleep and coma are very different states in many ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of sleep resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but lapse into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, general anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians prefer to tell patients that they're "going to sleep." "They say 'sleep' because they don't want to scare patients by using the word 'coma,'" Brown said. But even anesthesiologists use the term without understanding that it's not quite accurate, he said. "On one level, we truly don't have it clear in our minds from a neurological standpoint what we're doing." © 2010 HealthDay.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14832 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Steven E. Hyman It can fairly be said that modern psychiatric diagnosis was “born” in a 1970 paper on schizophrenia. The authors, Washington University psychiatry professors Eli Robins and Samuel B. Guze, rejected the murky psychoanalytic diagnostic formulations of their time. Instead, they embraced a medical model inspired by the careful 19th-century observational work of Emil Kraepelin, long overlooked during the mid-20th-century dominance of Freudian theory. Mental disorders were now to be seen as distinct categories, much as different bacterial and viral infections produce characteristic diseases that can be seen as distinct “natural kinds.” Disorders, Robins and Guze argued, should be defined based on phenomenology: clinical descriptions validated by long-term follow-up to demonstrate the stability of the diagnosis over time. With scientific progress, they expected fuller validation of mental disorders to derive from laboratory findings and studies of familial transmission. This descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis -- based on lists of symptoms, their timing of onset, and the duration of illness -- undergirded the American Psychiatric Association’s widely disseminated and highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1980. Since then, the original “DSM-III” has yielded two relatively conservative revisions, and right now, the DSM-5 is under construction. Sadly, it is clear that the optimistic predictions of Robins and Guze have not been realized. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14831 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By Joe Churcher, Neuroscientists are examining whether political allegiances are hard-wired into people after finding evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of left-wingers. Scans of 90 students' brains at University College London (UCL) uncovered a "strong correlation" between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual's views. Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates. The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was "very surprised" by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year. It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view. Professor Rees said that although it was not precise enough to be able to predict someone's stance simply from a scan, there was "a strong correlation that reaches all our scientific tests of significance". ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14830 - Posted: 12.29.2010