By Bruce Bower Medications frequently prescribed for depression may not lighten a person’s mood until they brighten his or her personality. A new study suggests that the antidepressant medication paroxetine, or Paxil, fights depression most effectively when it first modifies two personality traits that predispose people to this mood disorder. The two traits, high neuroticism and low extraversion, have already been linked to depression. Depressed patients taking Paxil reported much greater change in these traits, as assessed via scores on personality tests, than patients given placebo pills. The difference was notable even after accounting for the extent to which each treatment diminished standard measures of depression, says psychologist Tony Tang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Patients who experienced especially pronounced personality change during four months of Paxil treatment displayed a particularly low depression relapse rate over the next year of treatment, Tang’s team reports in the December Archives of General Psychiatry. “We propose that modern antidepressants work partly by correcting the long-term personality risk factors for depression,” Tang says. Like many other researchers and clinicians, Tang’s group initially suspected that personality changes observed during treatment with SSRIs (short for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) such as Paxil occur as a result of alleviating depression. But the new findings suggest that Paxil exerts an independent effect on personality that contributes to the lessening of depression. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13551 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Chris Tachibana Ron Brix’s longtime job as a computer systems developer for Wrigley, the gum and candy maker, required intense attention to detail, single-minded focus and a willingness to work on something repetitively until perfect. The secret he credits to his success? Autism. Brix, age 54, was diagnosed in 2001 with Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism often marked by the exact traits that help make him an ideal employee. "My career would not have existed at all without the autism," says Brix. The developmental condition, which strikes about 1 in 150 U.S. children, is considered a "spectrum disorder" because it affects people in many different ways to varying degrees, from mild social troubles to a severe inability to communicate. It's often seen as a heartbreaking diagnosis, but now some revolutionary companies see autism as something else: a resource. A quiet movement is growing around the globe to help transform the unique attributes of high-functioning autistic adults into sought-after job skills. In Denmark, the company Specialisterne (the name means "the specialists"), trains people with autism as specially skilled employees who are sent out as hourly consultants to companies to do data entry, assembly work and other jobs that many workers would find tedious and repetitive. Founded in 2004 by businessman Thorkil Sonne, the father of an autistic son, the company has 50 employees, 75 percent of whom are autistic. © 2009 msnbc.com.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13550 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott The popular idea that testosterone always makes people more aggressive has been debunked by researchers. A team based in Switzerland has shown that the hormone can make people behave more fairly in an effort to defend their social status. Ernst Fehr, an experimental economist at the University of Zurich, and his colleagues used the 'ultimatum bargaining' game to test how testosterone would affect behaviour in a group of 121 women. Counter-intuitively, women who were given testosterone bargained more fairly. But the idea that testosterone causes aggression in humans, as it clearly does in rodents, is so firmly ingrained in the human psyche that women who believed they had been given testosterone — whether or not they had — bargained much less fairly. Women, not men, were tested because they have less variable 'baseline' blood testosterone levels. The study is published in Nature1. "It is a folk hypothesis that testosterone causes aggression," says Fehr. "But human society is more complex than this." Fair play Several studies in humans have shown positive correlations between high blood testosterone levels and confrontational behaviour. But it has been hard to determine experimentally whether the aggression is caused by testosterone or is instead a consequence of a challenge to a person's social status. The ultimatum game makes it possible to distinguish between these possibilities. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 13549 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou A diet of chicken, fish and protein shakes might do wonders for people with brain injuries. Akiva Cohen of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues mimicked brain injury in mice by injecting fluid through a hole drilled in their skull. After seven days, the brain-injured mice had much lower levels of three branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), leucine, isoleucine and valine, compared with control mice. These are found in protein-rich food and are known for their ability to build muscle. The team then fed another set of brain-injured mice either plain water or water enriched with BCAAs. Five days later, those that had taken BCAAs had normal levels of the amino acids and performed better on a learning task. Excitation disturbance Cohen's team reckon they might have figured out how the BCAAs are having this effect. In the hippocampus of a person with a brain injury, the delicate balance of neuronal excitation and inhibition is disturbed, says Cohen. The BCAAs may help restore the balance by making more neurotransmitters, he suggests. The findings complement observations made by a group of Italian biochemists last year. Simona Viglio of the University of Pavia and colleagues found that minimally conscious patients who were given BCAAs intravenously improved in their "feeding, grooming and toileting" abilities. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 13548 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Katherine Harmon Many people living with HIV report having memory loss or other cognitive problems that can sound a lot like early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Unlike their senior counterparts, however, cognitively impaired people with HIV are often in their 40s and 50s—and the early decline can make it difficult to hold jobs and maintain personal lives. Researchers have been looking for similarities between the two diseases for years. And new findings, published online today in the journal Neurology, have confirmed a key commonality: abnormal distribution of a protein known as amyloid beta. "I really did not expect the biology of HIV cognitive dysfunction to be related to Alzheimer's," David Clifford, a professor of neurology and medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and lead study author, said in a prepared statement. But that is just what his team found, backing up results from smaller studies that had posited the link a few years ago. Sampling brain and spinal fluid from Alzheimer's, HIV-infected and control volunteers, researchers found that both people with HIV showing cognitive decline and people with Alzheimer's have strikingly low amounts of amyloid beta protein in their spinal fluid compared to the healthy, control volunteers and those with HIV who had normal cognitive function. (In those with Alzheimer's, amyloid beta levels dip in the spinal fluid as they increase in the brain, where it is suspected to contribute to some of the physical damage seen in post-mortem studies.) © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 13547 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have identified three principal factors linked to whether caregivers place infants to sleep on their backs. Those three factors are: whether they received a physician's recommendation to place infants only on their backs for sleep, fear that the infant might choke while sleeping on the back, and concerns for an infant’s comfort while sleeping on the back. A large body of research has shown that placing infants on their backs to sleep reduces the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the leading cause of death during the first year of life in the United States. "Placing infants on their backs for sleep remains the single most effective means we know to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome," said Marian Willinger, Ph.D., Special Assistant for SIDS research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), which funded the analysis. "For the vast majority of infants, concerns about choking while back sleeping are unfounded." Dr. Willinger noted that certain conditions might prompt a physician to consider recommending against back placement. However, such recommendations are arrived at only after careful deliberation and after taking into account all the potential risks and benefits for the infant involved. The survey also found that after increasing steadily, the proportion of infants placed to sleep on their backs leveled off in the years since 2001.

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13546 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR George Huntington first described the devastating neurological illness that bears his name in 1872, but The New York Times did not mention it until 1913 — when “Huntington’s chorea” was listed as an item on the agenda of a medical convention in Washington. The name came up again in 1929, but again only in a list of subjects to be discussed at a doctors’ meeting. In 1936, Huntington’s chorea appeared twice, once in each of two 1,000-word letters to the editor whose central subject was eugenics, improving the species by regulating human reproduction. Huntington’s chorea was listed as one of five diseases whose sufferers might be considered candidates for voluntary sterilization. (The others were feeblemindedness of the familial type, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and epilepsy.) No details about Huntington’s were offered in either letter, and in one of them, written by a doctor in Montclair, N.J., the subheads “Many Defectives” and “Stemming Racial Decay” reveal a sensibility quite different from today’s. Sterilization, the doctor concluded, was “an indispensable part of any farsighted and humanitarian program for dealing with society’s great burden of mental disease, deficiency and dependency.” The first description of the illness appeared on Aug. 9, 1959, in an unsigned article headlined “Report on a Hereditary Illness.” The article described a study of Huntington’s chorea that had been published that month in Psychiatric Bulletin, a British medical journal. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 13545 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY “Essential” usually means vital, necessary, indispensable. But in medicine, the word can assume a different cast, meaning inherent or intrinsic, not symptomatic of anything else, lacking a known cause. Since the mid-19th century, “essential tremor” has been the diagnosis for a disorder of uncontrollable shaking — usually of the hands but sometimes of the head and other body parts, or the voice — that is not due to some other condition. And without knowing what causes it, doctors have been slow to come up with treatments to subdue it. As a result, millions of individuals suffer to varying degrees with embarrassment and humiliation, social isolation and difficulties holding down a job or performing the tasks of daily life. When you cannot drink a glass of water or eat soup without spilling it because your hand shakes violently, you are unlikely to join others for a dinner out. When you have to depend on someone else to button your shirt or zip your jacket, you may not go out at all. Wherever those with essential tremor go, people are likely to stare at them and assume they have a drug or alcohol problem, said Catherine Rice, executive director of the International Essential Tremor Foundation in Lenexa, Kan. (Call it at 888-387-3667 or visit its Web site: www.essentialtremor.org.) Now, thanks to the devoted efforts of a few researchers here and abroad, all this may change. Recent studies have begun to unravel the mysteries of essential tremor, and “essential” may someday be dropped from its name. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 13544 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Boom boom! (I’m here, come to me!) Krak krak! (Watch out, a leopard!) Hok hok hok! (Hey, crowned eagle!) Very good — you have already mastered half the basic vocabulary of the Campbell’s monkey, a fellow primate that lives in the forests of the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. The adult males have six types of call, each with a specific meaning, but they can string two or more calls together into a message with a different meaning. Having spent months recording the monkeys’ calls in response to both natural and artificial stimuli, a group led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland argues that the Campbell’s monkeys have a primitive form of syntax. This is likely to be a controversial claim because despite extensive efforts to teach chimpanzees language, the subjects showed little or no ability to combine the sounds they learned into a sentence with a larger meaning. Syntax, basic to the structure of language, seemed be a uniquely human faculty. Still, species like gibbons and whales make complex vocalizations in which the order of the sounds seems to have some effect on their meaning, though it is hard to say what. Dr. Zuberbühler’s team reports deciphering some of the Campbell’s monkey’s communication system in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 13543 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SARAH KERSHAW WASHINGTON — His son had been dead from an overdose only three months when A. Thomas McLellan, among the nation’s leading researchers on addiction, got a call from the office of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Would he accept the nomination to be the government’s No. 2 drug-control official? Dr. McLellan, 61, makes no secret of his cynicism about government — “I hate Washington,” as he put it in an interview — and he had no intention of leaving his job as a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and scientific director of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia. But the loss of his younger son, who overdosed on anti-anxiety medication and Scotch last year at age 30 while his older son was in residential treatment for alcoholism and cocaine addiction, changed his perspective. “That’s why I took this job,” said Dr. McLellan, who was sworn in as the deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in August. “I thought it was some kind of sign, you know. I would never have done it. I loved all the people I’ve worked with, I loved my life. But I thought maybe there’s a way where what I know plus what I feel could make a difference.” Married to a recovering cocaine addict, Dr. McLellan has been engulfed by addiction in life and work. His own family has been a personal battleground for one of the country’s most complex and entrenched problems, while as an expert he has been a leading voice for the idea that addiction is a chronic illness and not a moral issue. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13542 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Kate Douglas NOT long ago, the news was full of reports about two male Humboldt penguins at a zoo in Germany that adopted an egg, hatched it and reared the chick together. It seems like every time you turn around, the media spotlight has fallen on another example of same-sex liaisons in the animal kingdom. In the past few years, the ubiquity of such behaviour has become apparent. This summer evolutionary biologists Marlene Zuk and Nathan Bailey from the University of California, Riverside, published a paper on the subject that included examples from dozens of species ranging from dung flies and woodpeckers to bison and macaques. That is just the beginning of the story. The burning question is why same-sex behaviour would evolve at all when it runs counter to evolutionary principles. But does it? In fact there are many good reasons for same-sex sexual behaviour. What's more, Zuk and Bailey suggest that in a species where it is common, it is an important driving force in evolution. Although terms such as homosexual, gay and transgender are commonly used by the mass media, and even by some ethologists, Bailey and Zuk believe you shouldn't extend these descriptors of human sexuality to animals. "It's not simply that they are burdened with the weight of social, moral and political implications, which can obscure objective scientific study," says Bailey. "The problem is that while we can observe the sexual behaviour of animals, we often have little inkling about what motivates it." Besides, as far as we know animals do not form sexual self-identities in the way humans do, he adds. That is why he and Zuk prefer to use the more objective term "same-sex sexual behaviour", which they define as behaviours found in two animals of the same sex that you would find in opposite-sex pairs during courtship, copulation or parenting. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13541 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have discovered what they believe is a genetic cause of severe obesity in children. The team concluded that the loss of a key segment of DNA can be to blame. It said the findings might improve diagnosis of severe obesity - which on occasion has been wrongly attributed to abusive overfeeding. The study, of 300 children with severe obesity by the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, appears in Nature. Some of the children in the study had been formally placed on the social services 'at risk' register on the assumption that their parents were deliberately overfeeding them. They have now been removed from the register. Obesity is increasing throughout the world and is recognised as a major global public health concern. Although much of the problem is due to lifestyle factors such as an unhealthy diet, and lack of exercise, some cases are thought to be down to genetics. The latest study examined each child's entire genome, looking for deletions or duplications of DNA, known as copy number variants (CNVs). Experts increasingly believe these CNVs play an important role in genetic disease. By comparing the DNA profile of obese children with others of a normal weight they found certain parts of the genome were missing in the obese group. In particular they zeroed in on a missing part of chromosome 16 which seemed to have a strong link to severe obesity. Researcher Dr Sadaf Farooqi said: "Our results suggest that one particular gene on chromosome 16 called SH2B1 plays a key role in regulating weight and also in handling blood sugar levels. People with deletions involving this gene had a strong drive to eat and gained weight very easily." (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13540 - Posted: 12.07.2009

By Michael Torrice If you watch enough television, you'll witness what psychologists describe as birth order stereotypes. Take Alex P. Keaton of the 1980s U.S. sitcom Family Ties. Firstborn Alex was far more brash and competitive than his younger sisters, reading The Wall Street Journal while in high school, for example. Now scientists report that the stereotype is valid: eldest children are less cooperative, trusting, and reciprocating than their siblings. Psychologists have been debating the importance of birth order since the days of Sigmund Freud. Those that argue that it plays a strong role in personality say, for instance, that middleborn children are more social than their youngest or oldest siblings because they get the least amount of attention from their parents and thus must make friends outside of their family. Psychologists base their findings on self-questionnaires and interviews with friends and family. Evolutionary biologist Alexandre Courtiol of the University of Montpellier 2 in France and colleagues wanted a more objective test. So they asked 510 unrelated college students to play a two-person investment game. The game worked like this: Both players started with €3. Player A, the investor, could send any amount of her money to player B, the banker, who would triple that money. Then player B could return any amount of his now larger pool of cash to player A. Because player B didn't have to send any money back, the amount player A sends to him is a measure of trust. And the sum player B returns to player A is therefore a measure of reciprocity. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13539 - Posted: 06.24.2010

There has been no substantial change in the number of adult brain tumours since mobile phone usage sharply increased in the mid-1990s, Danish scientists say. The Danish Cancer Society looked at the rates of brain tumours among 20 to 79 year olds from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. They found that trends in cancer rates had not altered from the period before mobiles were introduced. But they say longer follow-up studies are needed. The research, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, says radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted from mobile phones have been proposed as a risk factor for brain tumours, but a biological mechanism that could explain the potential effects has not been identified. The study was based on 59,684 brain tumour cases diagnosed over 30 years from 1974 to 2003 among 16 million adults. During this time, the incidence rate of cancers known as gliomas increased gradually by 0.5% per year among men and by 0.2% per year among women. For cancers known as meningioma, the incidence rate increased by 0.8% among men and, after the early 1990's, by 3.8% among women. This more rapid change for women was driven, the researchers say, by the 60-79 year age group. Isabelle Deltour, of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen who led the study said the lack of a detectable increase in tumour rates up to 2003 may suggest that the time it takes for cancer to develop from mobile phone use is longer than 10 years of exposure or that the number of tumours it promotes is too small to be detected. She said: "Our results extend those of previous studies of time trends up to 1998 by adding five years of follow-up. Because of the high prevalence of mobile phone exposure in this population and worldwide, longer follow-up of time trends in brain tumour incidence is warranted." (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13538 - Posted: 12.05.2009

Nicola Nosengo To the dock workers and sailors at the port of Catania, in Eastern Sicily, it all looked very suspicious. About once a month during 2005 and 2006, two strangers would walk out to a large wooden cabin at the end of a pier, unlock the door, and remove a small box. Then they would lock up again and disappear until the next month. The locals had to question what the two men were up to. But when asked, the strangers reassured them that there was nothing to worry about. They were scientists. And the boxes they were retrieving were computer hard drives containing hours of sound data relayed by an underwater cable from microphones — or, more accurately, hydrophones — placed on the Mediterranean sea floor 28 kilometres offshore. Giorgio Riccobene, a particle physicist at the Southern Laboratories of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Catania, was hoping to show that the hydrophones could be used to detect subatomic particles called neutrinos that had come from deep space. Giovanni Pavan, a marine biologist from the University of Pavia in Northern Italy, was there to help Riccobene deal with background noise in the recordings. But what Riccobene and Pavan discovered as they listened to their data will bring them back to the port next year with their roles reversed. Then, the physicist will be helping the biologist, and their quarry will not be neutrinos, but sperm whales. The road to this unexpected destination began nearly a decade ago with Riccobene's involvement in the Neutrino Mediterranean Observatory (NEMO), a collaboration of around 100 researchers from the INFN and other Italian institutes who are hoping to study neutrinos in the ocean. Cosmological neutrinos are constantly streaming through Earth, carrying invaluable information about distant sources such as supernovae. But these fundamental particles have no electric charge and have masses close to zero; they interact with matter so rarely that studying them requires gigantic detectors — the bigger, the better. Hence the NEMO design calls for thousands of optical detectors distributed over 2 cubic kilometres of water, 3,500 metres under the sea at a site off Capo Passero in southern Sicily. The idea is that an incoming neutrino will very occasionally interact with a water molecule, producing a pulse of light that the detectors will capture. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13537 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Daniel Cressey Female fish often entrust males with eggs for safekeeping — but how can they be sure that the males are up to the task? An ecologist has now come up with evidence to support a 17-year-old hypothesis suggesting that some females try out potential mates with a small batch of 'test' eggs before breeding with them. Males may fail as fathers for a number of reasons. They may be unable to defend eggs left in their care, for example, or even decide that the eggs would make a tasty snack. Andrea Manica, of the University of Cambridge, UK, was studying the latter — a behaviour called filial cannibalism — in scissortail sergeants (Abudefduf sexfasciatus) in Malaysia when he noticed that some females would approach a male's nest, deposit a small number of eggs, then skedaddle. Manica wondered whether the females were testing the males. So he provided males with ceramic tiles to use as nest sites and patiently waited for females to lay small clutches of eggs on the tiles. Then Manica — who spent up to six hours at a time underwater watching the fish — either left the tiles alone, or rotated them to move the eggs. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 13536 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders The 18-inch-long Atlantic salmon lay perfectly still for its brain scan. Emotional pictures —a triumphant young girl just out of a somersault, a distressed waiter who had just dropped a plate — flashed in front of the fish as a scientist read the standard instruction script aloud. The hulking machine clunked and whirred, capturing minute changes in the salmon’s brain as it assessed the images. Millions of data points capturing the fluctuations in brain activity streamed into a powerful computer, which performed herculean number crunching, sorting out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore. By the end of the experiment, neuroscientist Craig Bennett and his colleagues at Dartmouth College could clearly discern in the scan of the salmon’s brain a beautiful, red-hot area of activity that lit up during emotional scenes. An Atlantic salmon that responded to human emotions would have been an astounding discovery, guaranteeing publication in a top-tier journal and a life of scientific glory for the researchers. Except for one thing. The fish was dead. The scanning technique used on the salmon — called functional magnetic resonance imaging — allows scientists to view the innards of a working brain, presumably reading the ebbs and flows of activity that underlie almost everything the brain does. Over the last two decades, fMRI has transformed neuroscience, enabling experiments that researchers once could only dream of. With fMRI, scientists claim to have found the brain regions responsible for musical ability, schadenfreude, Coca-Cola or Pepsi preference, fairness and even tennis skill, among many other highly publicized conclusions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 13535 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Janelle Weaver It's not quite Shakespearean wordplay, but a species of African monkey can modify individual warning calls to produce novel meanings, according to new research. And because the wild monkeys tack the same sound onto the end of their calls, the authors speculate that they could resemble suffixes. But it's debatable whether the sounds serve a grammatical purpose like that in human language. Campbell's monkeys, noted for their grizzled faces and tuft of orange fur on top of their heads, live in the dense rainforest of Western Africa. Like many species of monkeys, they use various warning calls: "Hok" is for eagles, "krak" is for leopards, and "boom" is for nonpredatory disturbances, such as a branch falling from a tree. The monkeys can even combine different calls to form new messages. For example, to signal less-dangerous situations, Campbell's monkeys holler "boom-boom" followed by "krak" or "hok." This tells other monkeys that the predator is far away, so there is no immediate need to flee. But scientists were skeptical that monkeys could modify individual calls, because the primates appear to lack the appropriate anatomy for sophisticated vocalization. To find out how rich the vocal repertoire of monkeys really is, Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes 1 in France, and his colleagues traveled to the Ivory Coast and monitored the alarm calls of Campbell's monkeys for 2 years. They found that monkeys have six alarm calls, twice as many as previously thought. The primates doubled their call repertoire by adding "oo" to their specific predator calls. "Hok-oo" and "wak-oo" became a general alert for a canopy disturbance, whether an eagle or a flying squirrel, and "krak-oo" signaled almost any disturbance. This trick allows monkeys to sidestep their limited vocal range and produce more messages, the team reported last month in PLoS ONE. "The monkeys used a suffix system to create new calls," Lemasson says. "To my knowledge, this has never been shown before in animal communication." © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 13534 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Humans wonder, anybody home? By Susan Gaidos One afternoon while participating in studies in a University of Oxford lab, Abel snatched a hook away from Betty, leaving her without a tool to complete a task. Spying a piece of straight wire nearby, she picked it up, bent one end into a hook and used it to finish the job. Nothing about this story was remarkable, except for the fact that Betty was a New Caledonian crow. Betty isn’t the only crow with such conceptual ingenuity. Nor are crows the only members of the animal kingdom to exhibit similar mental powers. Animals can do all sorts of clever things: Studies of chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and birds have found that some can add, subtract, create sentences, plan ahead or deceive others. To carry out such tasks, these animals must be drawing on past experiences and then using them along with immediate perceptions to make sense of it all. In other words, some scientists would say, these animals are thinking consciously. Many people (some scientists among them) would like to believe that consciousness sets the human mind apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But whether in humans or other creatures, behavioral signs of cognizance all arise from the tangled interactions of neurons in the brain. So a growing number of scientists contend that animals with brain structures and neural circuitry similar to humans’ might experience something like human awareness, even if a bit less sophisticated. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13533 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Lucas Laursen They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different brain areas than following. This could help unravel the brain activity underlying the process of "joint attention", thought to be key to complex, human social interactions. It could also offer insights into why social interactions can break down for people with autism. Joint attention – the ability and motivation to both guide and follow someone else's gaze – develops early in infants. It is considered necessary for complex social interactions, the learning of language and co-operation. For example, an eye signal from one person to another can indicate a potential meal, mate or menace. In people with autism, joint attention seems to be abnormal, which may underpin some of the social difficulties they experience. Previously researchers have studied brain activity in people watching a video designed to engender a feeling of joint attention in the viewer. The new study is the first to separate out the processes of following and initiating joint attention. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 13532 - Posted: 06.24.2010