By Karen Weintraub When the device first came off, her skin was red and raw. It looked like there was a frozen stick of butter stuffed under her flesh. The 57-year-old had just completed an hourlong fat reduction treatment on her abdomen in a Chestnut Hill dermatologist’s office. (Photos, facing page.) For a few minutes, it distended her belly, with the fat beneath frozen and weirdly hard. As her flesh rapidly defrosted, the lumpiness and redness faded. It would be weeks before she knew whether the procedure had made a difference. Such “body contouring’’ is one of the latest trends in dermatology, aimed at getting rid of small pockets of fat without the pain, price, or recovery time of liposuction or other weight-loss surgery. But also without their dramatic results. The suburban Boston patient said an earlier round of treatment had helped her clothes fit better. “Some days you’re good, some days you’re not,’’ she said. The first treatment left her “feeling like the good days,’’ she said. (While insisting she wasn’t embarrassed about getting the procedure, the woman did not want to be identified by name. “A lot of friends do know’’ about it, she said, looking up from a copy of Women’s Health magazine about 45 minutes into the treatment. “My husband knows. I just don’t want 200 friends to know.’’) © 2010 NY Times Co

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By AMY HARMON When President Obama nominated Ari Ne’eman to the National Council on Disability, many families touched by autism took it as a positive sign. Mr. Ne’eman would be the first person with the disorder to serve on the council. Kent Adams Ari Ne'eman would be the first person with autism on the National Council on Disability. But he has since become the focus of criticism from other advocates who disagree with his view that society ought to concentrate on accepting autistic people, not curing them. A hold has been placed on Mr. Ne’eman’s nomination, which requires Senate confirmation. Whether the hold is related to the criticism of Mr. Ne’eman (pronounced NAY-men) and what it might take to lift it is unclear. But Mr. Ne’eman, the 22-year-old founder of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, seems to be a lightning rod for a struggle over how autism will be perceived at a time when an estimated 1 in 100 American children and teenagers are given such a diagnosis. Mr. Ne’eman is at the forefront of a growing movement that describes autism as a form of “neurodiversity” that should be embraced and accommodated, just as physical disabilities have led to the construction of ramps and stalls in public restrooms for people with disabilities. Autism, he and others say, is a part of their identity. But that viewpoint, critics say, represents only those on the autism spectrum who at least have basic communication skills and are able to care of themselves. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13912 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Like many people, rats are happy to gorge themselves on tasty, high-fat treats. Bacon, sausage, chocolate and even cheesecake quickly became favorites of laboratory rats that recently were given access to these human indulgences—so much so that the animals came to depend on high quantities to feel good, like drug users who need to up their intake to get high. A new study, published online March 28 in Nature Neuroscience, describes these rats' indulgent tribulations, adding to research literature on the how excess food intake can trigger changes in the brain, alterations that seem to create a neurochemical dependency in the eater—or user. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Preliminary findings from the work were presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in October 2009. Like many pleasurable behaviors—including sex and drug use—eating can trigger the release of dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain. This internal chemical reward, in turn, increases the likelihood that the associated action will eventually become habitual through positive reinforcement conditioning. If activated by overeating, these neurochemical patterns can make the behavior tough to shake—a result seen in many human cases, notes Paul Kenny, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., and co-author of the new study. "Most people who are overweight would say, 'I would like to control my weight and my eating,' but they find it very hard to control their feeding behavior," he says. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Obesity; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13911 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Larry O'Hanlon There's a reason why bees can see you while you're still searching for the source of that buzzing noise: Their color vision is five times faster than human vision and among the fastest color vision yet clocked in the animal world. The lightning-fast color vision enables bees to zip through bushes and trees, escape predators, spot each other and otherwise deal with their world in fast forward. The trick to their fast vision is how many "snap shots" per second the color-detecting cells in bumblebees' eyes take and send to their brains. "The limiting factor is how fast the photo receptors can register a change," explained bee vision researcher Peter Skorupski of Queen Mary, University of London. "So we measured the speed directly from the receptor." In a human eye the receptors are the cells in the retina at the back of the eye. "When we see something it seems instantaneous," said Skorupski. "But there's a lot of processing going on under the bonnet. In our case there can be a delay of tenth of a second before you register what you are seeing." The fastest vision known belongs to flies, but that is not color vision, Skorupski explained. "A lot of this has been worked out in flies. Our work was inspired by classic work on flies. That work focused also on finding the connection between the speed of fly vision to the cost of having such amped-up sight, Skorupski explained. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 13910 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Scientists are discovering how tiny clocks inside each cell can march to the beat of a master drummer in the brain. Chuwy/iStockphoto, illustration by T. Dube Timing is everything. Just ask a comedian, trapeze artist, Romeo and Juliet — or nearly any cell in your body. Ticking away inside almost all cells are tiny clocks composed of protein gears. Scientists have known that these molecular clocks govern the daily rhythms of life, from mealtimes and bedtimes to the rise and fall of hormone levels, body temperature and blood pressure. New research shows that circadian clocks, as the daily timekeepers are known, do more than just control day-to-day schedules. Such clocks, some scientists say, have the potential to play a role in nearly every biological function. Studies of bacteria, rodents and fruit flies suggest that circadian clocks may time processes as diverse as cellular division and aging. “When you start asking, ‘what does the clock control?’ you have to say, ‘everything,’” says Erik Herzog, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Some of the new insights come from studying the brain’s master clock, a pair of structures known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, that set the body’s daily rhythms. Other work, meanwhile, suggests that the SCN is not a single monolithic clock but more a set of interrelated nodes that help coordinate clocks throughout the body. And still other researchers have found that the SCN may not even be the ultimate arbiter of the body’s time, and that other organs control biological rhythms on their own without much, if any, help from the SCN. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 13909 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Holly Anderson, contributor IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg's new book. In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you? Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000 practising neuroscientists, it isn't hard to find juicy quotes dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to characterise this as the general attitude of the field. Sternberg addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious sensory input, am I employing free will? © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13908 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Andrea Thompson Many pregnant women report being more forgetful as their pregnancy progresses, and new research suggests it could be caused by elevated hormone levels affecting the brain. Previous studies haven't turned up a solid link that could explain maternal memory problems, widely reported on an anecdotal basis. "I think women are interested and sometimes worried about their memory, and whether they're going to get it back if they feel that they've lost some of their cognitive function during pregnancy," said researcher Diane Farrar of the University of Bradford and Bradford Institute for Health Research in England. Farrar and her colleagues set out to test the spatial memory of pregnant women — that's the memory that tells us where we parked the car or set down the keys. The researchers also measured the levels of a set of sex hormones in the pregnant women and had them fill out a questionnaire to judge their mood and level of anxiety. The results for the 23 pregnant women in the study were compared with 24 non-pregnant women. During their second and third trimesters, the pregnant women performed significantly worse than the non-pregnant women on spatial memory tests, the study found. The memory effect still held at three months after birth. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13907 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Horgan Of all scientific fields, neuroscience has the greatest potential for revolutionary advances, philosophical and practical. Someday, brain researchers may figure out how precisely the brain encodes thoughts like the ones I’m thinking now. Cracking the neural code could help solve the mind-body problem, ending millennia of pointless metaphysical chitchat. We may finally understand how brains work and why sometimes they don’t. We might even discover truly effective treatments for depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and dementia and chuck our current quasi-therapies. It is because I have such high hopes for neuroscience that I’m so upset by two trends in financing of the field. One involves neuroscience’s growing dependence on the Pentagon, which is seeking new ways to help our soldiers and harm our enemies. For a still-timely overview of neuroweapons research, check out the 2006 book Mind Wars by bioethicist Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania. (PR disclosure: I brought Moreno to my school to give a talk on March 10.) Potential neuroweapons include drugs, transcranial magnetic stimulators and implanted brain chips that soup up the sensory capacities and memories of soldiers, as well as brain-scanners and electromagnetic beams that read, control or scramble the thoughts of bad guys. When Moreno was writing his book, neuroscientists were reluctant to talk about their affair with the Pentagon and seemed embarrassed by it. No longer. Last year the National Academy of Sciences published a 136-page report, Opportunities in Neuroscience for Future Army Applications, that makes an unabashed pitch for militarizing brain research. The authors include the neuroluminaries Floyd Bloom of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and editor-in-chief of Science; and Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Both are members of the U.S. Council on Bioethics.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13906 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy "I THINK therefore I am," said Descartes. Perhaps he should have added: "I act, therefore I think." Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. This includes thinking up random numbers or deciding whether to recount positive or negative experiences. "Advocates of traditional accounts of cognition would be surprised," says Tobias Loetscher at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia. "They generally consider human reasoning to involve abstract cognitive processes devoid of any connection to body or space." Until recently, the assumption has been that our bodies contribute only to our most basic interactions with the environment, namely sensory and motor processes. The new results suggest that our bodies are also exploited to produce abstract thought, and that even seemingly inconsequential activities have the power to influence our thinking. Clues that our bodies may play a role in thought can be found in the metaphors we use to describe situations, such as "I was given the cold shoulder" or "she has an excellent grasp of relativity". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13905 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Dave Munger The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated, and how should that possibility influence decisions on the animal’s future treatment? Orcas, like their close relatives, dolphins, certainly seem smart, though researchers debate just how intelligent these cetaceans are and how similar their cognition is to humans. Should we ever treat such creatures like people? For centuries it seemed obvious to most people what separated them from other animals: Humans have language, they use tools, they plan for the future, and do any number of things that other animals don’t seem to do. But gradually the line between “animal” and “human” has blurred. Some animals do use tools; others solve complicated problems. Some can even be taught to communicate using sign language or other systems. Could it be that there isn’t a clear difference separating humans from other life forms? Last week, Brian Switek, a science writer who blogs about biology and paleontology, found a study demonstrating that tool use in chimpanzees isn’t a new phenomenon. For decades, scientists have been observing chimps using sticks and other objects as tools. They have even seen chimps modifying these tools and transporting them for anticipated use in the future. But until recently, there had been no evidence that tool use among chimps had a very long history. Wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park in Côte d’Ivoire have been observed using stones as hammers and anvils for cracking large nuts. A team led by archaeologist Julio Mercador found evidence that these tools were being used as long as 4300 years ago: Ancient stones shaped similarly to those being used today as tools. Their research was published in PNAS in 2007. ©2005-2009 Seed Media Group LLC

Keyword: Animal Rights; Aggression
Link ID: 13904 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Claudia Wallis Up until 20 years ago, scientists believed that the human brain was largely mature by puberty. Apparently, they had failed to notice the irrational behavior and flaky thinking of teenagers. Now, of course, we know that the human brain continues to undergo serious restructuring well into the 20s. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.) Sophisticated brain-scan studies by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown dramatic changes throughout the teenage years as excess gray matter is pruned from the prefrontal cortex — the seat of higher-order thinking and making judgments (like not smoking weed right before your chemistry exam). Meanwhile, behavioral studies have shown what every parent already knows: teens have poor control over impulses and a tendency toward risk taking. Still, relatively little is known about how such changes affect learning or what happens at a biochemical level in the brain as teens go through their addled adolescence. A fascinating study published in the current issue of Science helps fill in a bit of the picture, drawing evidence from that research-friendly fellow mammal, the mouse. The authors, a team from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, wanted to look at whether the ability to learn is affected by changes in brain chemistry that occur at puberty. They devised a task that was relatively complex (at least for a mouse) and required learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivered a very mild shock. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.) "This is higher-order learning, and it takes multiple trials to learn," explains Sheryl Smith, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Downstate. Prepubescent mice mastered the task quickly. Postpubescent mice also did quite well. But mice in the throes of puberty, which occurs at age 5 weeks, couldn't seem to get it through their furry little heads. © 2010 Time Inc.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13903 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Carl Zimmer One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind. The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read. Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a “reverberation” in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness. Worried, MX paid a visit to Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England. Zeman was so intrigued by the case that he teamed up with Sergio Della Sala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh who specializes in how the brain handles visual information. Neither Zeman nor Della Sala could offer MX a cure for his condition, unfortunately, but they recognized a rare chance to study how the mind’s eye works. Della Sala proposed running a series of exams. MX gave his consent.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 13902 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nathan Seppa Ultraviolet radiation from sunshine seems to thwart multiple sclerosis, but perhaps not the way most researchers had assumed, a new study in mice suggests. If validated in further research, the finding could add a twist to a hypothesis that has gained credence in recent decades. The report appears online March 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have hypothesized that MS is rare in the tropics because people synthesize ample vitamin D from exposure to the UV radiation in equatorial sunlight. What’s more, MS is more common in the high latitudes of northern parts of Europe and North America than in regions farther south. That pattern has led to the assumption that higher levels of vitamin D might prevent people from developing MS, what became known as the latitude hypothesis. But a direct cause-and-effect relationship between vitamin D deficiency and MS has never been established. In past experiments, giving vitamin D supplements to mice with an MS-like disease required giving the animals harmful amounts of the nutrient, notes Hector DeLuca, a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It just didn’t add up,” he says. “We decided to go back and see if maybe UV light by itself was doing something.” In MS, the fatty myelin sheaths that insulate nerves in the central nervous system are damaged by attacks by the immune system. In a series of experiments in mice, DeLuca and his team induced a condition comparable to human MS by injecting the animals with proteins that instigate similar myelin damage. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13901 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JONAH LEHRER When I can’t sleep, I think about what I’m missing. I glance over at my wife and watch her eyelids flutter. I listen to the steady rhythm of her breath. I wonder if she’s dreaming and, if so, what story she’s telling to herself to pass the time. (The mind is like a shark — it can’t ever stop swimming in thought.) And then my eyes return to the ceiling and I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep. Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our dreams are meaningless narratives, a series of bad B-movies invented by the mind. I find solace in the theory that all those inexplicable plot twists are just random noise from the brain stem, an arbitrary montage of images and characters and anxieties. This suggests that I’m not missing anything when I lie awake at night — there are no insights to be wrung from our R.E.M. reveries. While we’re fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget. Unfortunately for me, there’s increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible — why was I running through the airport in my underwear? — are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13900 - Posted: 06.24.2010

WASHINGTON - Under intense pressure from patients, some U.S. doctors are cautiously testing a provocative theory that abnormal blood drainage from the brain may play a role in multiple sclerosis — and that a surgical vein fix might help. If it pans out, the approach suggested by a researcher in Italy could mark a vast change for MS, a disabling neurological disease long blamed on an immune system gone awry. But many patients frustrated by today’s limited therapies say they don’t have time to await the carefully controlled studies needed to prove if it really works and are searching out vein-opening treatment now — undeterred by one report of a dangerous complication. “This made sense and I was hell-bent on doing it,” says Nicole Kane Gurland of Bethesda, Md., the first to receive the experimental treatment at Washington’s Georgetown University Hospital, which is set to closely track how a small number of patients fare before and after using a balloon to widen blocked veins. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here In Buffalo, N.Y., more than 1,000 people applied for 30 slots in a soon-to-start study of that same angioplasty procedure. When the Buffalo General Hospital team started a larger study a few months ago just to compare if bad veins are more common in MS patients than in healthy people — not to treat them — more than 13,000 patients applied. The demand worries Georgetown neurologist Dr. Carlo Tornatore, who teamed with vascular surgeon Dr. Richard Neville in hopes of getting some evidence to guide his own patients’ care. © 2010 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 13899 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RONI CARYN RABIN Schools have banned cupcakes, issued obesity report cards and cleared space in cafeterias for salad bars. Just last month, Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood obesity promised to get young people moving more and revamp school lunch, and beverage makers said they had cut the sheer number of liquid calories shipped to schools by almost 90 percent in the past five years. But new research suggests that interventions aimed at school-aged children may be, if not too little, too late. More and more evidence points to pivotal events very early in life — during the toddler years, infancy and even before birth, in the womb — that can set young children on an obesity trajectory that is hard to alter by the time they’re in kindergarten. The evidence is not ironclad, but it suggests that prevention efforts should start very early. Among the findings are these: ¶The chubby cherub-like baby who is growing so nicely may be growing too much for his or her own good, research suggests. ¶Babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy are at risk of becoming obese, even though the babies are usually small at birth. ¶Babies who sleep less than 12 hours are at increased risk for obesity later. If they don’t sleep enough and also watch two hours or more of TV a day, they are at even greater risk. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13898 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Daniel Lametti “Memory”, wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the diary that we all carry about with us”. Perhaps, but if memory is like a diary, it’s one filled with torn-out pages and fabricated passages. In January, a group of New York University neuroscientists led by Daniela Schiller reported in the journal Nature that they had created fearful memories in people and then erased them. Besides being rather cool, the result provides new insight into how to treat traumatic memories in people. The research was based on the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, a coauthor on the paper. Ten years ago, while experimenting with rats, Ledoux made a discovery that changed the way neuroscientists view memory from that of Wilde’s tidy diary to something more along the lines of a James Frey memoir. In that experiment, Ledoux conditioned rats to fear a bell by ringing it in time with an electric shock until the rats froze in fear at the mere sound of the bell. Then, at the moment when the fear memory was being recalled, he injected the rats with anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections. Remarkably, the next time he rang the bell the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory, it seemed, had vanished. Poof! Ledoux concluded that the neural connections in which memories are stored have to be rebuilt each time a memory is recalled. And during rebuilding—or reconsolidation, as he termed it—memories can be altered or even erased. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 13897 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Gill Monkeys pay more attention to females than to males, according to research. Scientists studying wild vervet monkeys in South Africa found that the animals were better able to learn a task when it was demonstrated by a female. The team compared animals' responses to demonstrations of a simple box-opening task, which was demonstrated either by a dominant male or female monkey. Their findings are described in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biologist Erica van de Waal, from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, and her team, studied six neighbouring groups of wild vervet monkeys in South Africa's Loskop Dam Nature Reserve. They gave the monkeys boxes containing fruit, which had doors on each differently coloured end. During an initial demonstration, the researchers blocked one of the doors, so there was only one correct way to solve the box-opening puzzle and access the fruit reward. For three of the groups, a dominant male monkey was selected as a "model" to demonstrate the task and for the other three a dominant female was chosen. "The models learned by trial and error how to open the box," explained Ms van de Waal. "Once they understood how to pull or slide the door open we let them perform 25 demonstrations." After this "demonstration phase", the other monkeys were far more likely to try - and to succeed in - opening the fruit box if their demonstrator was a female. "We found that bystanders paid significantly more attention to female than male models," said Ms van de Waal. "[This] seemed to be the only factor influencing this social learning." (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 13896 - Posted: 03.22.2010

by Anil Ananthaswamy STEVEN LAUREYS will always remember the 21-year-old woman who had had a stroke. She had been taken to a hospital in Liège, Belgium, where her condition worsened rapidly. She soon lost all motor movement, even the ability to open her eyes. Her prognosis looked bleak, so her doctors turned to Laureys, a neurologist, for a final opinion before turning off her ventilator. By recording her brain activity as she was asked to respond to simple tasks, such as counting the number of times her name was spoken in a random string of first names, Laureys confirmed that the woman was aware of her surroundings, and so she remained on life support (Neurocase, vol 15, p 271). Clearly that was the right decision: a year later she had recovered enough to be discharged from hospital. "It was only technology that permitted us to show that she was conscious," says Laureys of the University of Liège. There had, however, been another clue to the patient's active mental state - too tentative to hold any weight in the diagnosis, but nevertheless significant. Laureys had observed a signature of coordinated neural activity, present in the resting patient, which seems to appear in the brain of anyone who is conscious. While such readings may one day provide a better diagnosis of coma patients, their ultimate implications may be even more profound, providing evidence for a 30-year-old theory that claims to explain consciousness itself. Consciousness is one of neuroscience's long-standing mysteries. At its most basic, it is the simple question of why we become aware of some thoughts or feelings, while others lurk unnoticed below conscious perception. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13895 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Justin Nobel Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity. "The suicide was what turned me around," says O'Barry. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide." (See the top 10 animal stories of 2009.) Animal suicide may seem absurd, yet the concept is as old as philosophy. Aristotle told a story about a stallion that leaped into an abyss after realizing it was duped into mating with its mother, and the topic was discussed by early Christian theologians and Victorian academics. "The questioning of animal suicide is essentially people looking at what it means to be human," says Duncan Wilson, a medical historian at the University of Manchester and co-author of a study in the March issue of the British journal Endeavour on the history of self-destructive animals. "The people talking about animal suicide today seem to be using it as a way to evoke sympathy for the plight of mistreated and captive animals." © 2010 Time Inc.

Keyword: Depression; Evolution
Link ID: 13894 - Posted: 06.24.2010