by Celeste Biever CLAD in a dark suit and sunglasses, Derek Paravicini makes a beeline for the sound of my voice and links his arm into mine. "Hello, Celeste. Where have you come from today?" I reply and his response is immediate: "From Holborn?" He repeats the word several times, savouring each syllable. "Hol-born, Hol-born, Hooool-bbooorn. Where's Hoollll-booorn?" As our conversation continues, the substance of much of what I say doesn't seem to sink in, but the sounds themselves certainly do, with Paravicini lingering over and repeating particularly delightful syllables. "Meewww-zick. The pi-aan-o." Such touching and immediate friendliness is not quite what I expected from my first meeting with the 29-year-old, blind musical savant, but his obsession with reproducing sounds certainly makes sense, given his talent. Paravicini can play just about any piece of music you request, entirely from memory, with formidable technical ability, despite having severe learning difficulties that mean he needs constant support in everyday life. And as I find out an hour later, he constantly improvises the pieces he has learned by ear, rather than simply copying as you might expect. Paravicini is a prodigious savant - someone with a dazzling talent in one or two fields, normally music, maths, art or memory, but who also has some kind of a disability, such as autism. Psychologists have puzzled long and hard over savant skills, which confound their traditional understanding of intelligence. "What makes savants so interesting is this jarring juxtaposition of ability and disability in the same person," says Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist based in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin who was also a consultant for the film Rain Man. "We are used to seeing skills that are consistent with each other." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Autism
Link ID: 12913 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway A rare and mysterious syndrome that causes people to sound foreign has become even more baffling. Until now, the condition has been linked with damage in certain brain areas, but researchers have found two people with no trace of brain damage who have nevertheless sounded foreign since childhood. This could prompt neurologists and linguists to rethink the origins of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) and may even point toward a genetic cause, says Peter Mariën, a neurologist at Middelheim General Hospital and the University of Antwerp, Belgium, who led the study. "There is no such thing as one simple recipe that explains what happens to a person who has foreign accent syndrome," he says. Brain damage or developmental problems could occur in brain circuits responsible for the timing, tone and pronunciation of speech, causing accents to sound foreign. "They know perfectly what to say," Mariën says. "They have the idea, they have the concept, but the organisation of the articulation patterns is disrupted." People with FAS aren't reverting to a childhood accent or one they picked up from others, says Sheila Blumstein, a cognitive linguist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. They just sound foreign. "A lot of us have concluded that foreign accent syndrome is in the ears of the beholder," she says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 12912 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Anna Ehrlund Do you covet your neighbor's candy? Create a diversion, and that chocolate bar could be yours. Capuchin monkeys may know this trick as well: New observations reveal that they falsely make predator alarm calls and, in so doing, grab food abandoned by those they've scared off. If this deceptive behavior is deliberate, the monkeys have evolved a highly complex mode of thinking. Tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella nigritus) are relatively small primates living in South America. They feed mainly on fruits and insects, and live in groups of about seven to 40 animals. When feeling threatened by a snake or a predator cat such as an ocelot, the monkeys give off warning calls that sound like hiccups to alert other members of the group, who then respond by fleeing or becoming more alert. But these calls may not always serve as a real warning. Brandon Wheeler, a biological anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York state was studying a group of capuchins eating food left on platforms constructed in trees, when he noticed some of the monkeys made the calls when predators weren't around. "They were giving the same calls that they give for cats extremely frequently," he says. "When they do, other individuals often run out off the platform, which potentially leaves [the platform] available for whoever called to jump in to get some food." Researchers have noted deceptive behavior in primates and other species, but Wheeler pursued his anecdotal observations more systematically. In a series of experiments, he used the treetop platforms to offer food such as bananas to the monkeys in their natural habitat in Iguazú National Park in Argentina. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 12911 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Every visual illusion - from the way that simple lines drawn on paper seem to form a cube, to the logic-defying labyrinths of M. C. Escher - works exactly the same way: they expose discrepancies between physical reality and our perception of that reality. That makes visual illusions appealing objects of study for neuroscientists: they offer clues to how our brains handle the information we receive about the outside world, in particular how we process visual images. "In most cases, we don't know how they work or why they work in neural terms," says Susana Martinez-Conde, a perceptual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. That's why a panel of scientists - of whom Martinez-Conde is one - organise the Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. Now in its fifth year, it features dozens of illusions created by scientists, artists, computer programmers and even the occasional magician. New illusions offer potentially new insights on the workings of the human mind: but they're fun, too. You can try out some of the winning entries for yourself below. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12910 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brooke Adams The mice at the top of a column of stacked plastic bins at Q Therapeutics are shivering so hard they seem to be jumping. Their nonstop shivering and seizures are caused by a genetic defect that robs the mice of the crucial myelin sheath that surrounds nerve cells and helps them send signals. Because of the defect, the mice are soon paralyzed and die prematurely. It is a related problem -- loss of this myelin sheath -- that in humans causes the progressive loss of function in multiple sclerosis and several other diseases that can cause paralysis in humans. And that's why what has happened to the mice is so promising: After being treated with an adult stem cell therapy developed at Q Therapeutics, they are no longer shivering. The product, called Q-Cells, also may be applicable to such neurodegenerative diseases as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS -- better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Now, the National Institutes of Health have awarded a $5 million grant to Q Therapeutics, the University of Utah's Cell Therapy Facility and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which as a team has had success in animal models of ALS.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Stem Cells
Link ID: 12909 - Posted: 06.04.2009

By Laura Sanders Exposure to cigarette smoke in the womb may dampen a baby’s fight-or-flight responses, leaving the newborn vulnerable to sudden infant death syndrome, a study in rats suggests. It has been known that babies exposed to the smoke have a higher risk of the syndrome, in which seemingly healthy infants inexplicably die. The new study, appearing June 3 in The Journal of Neuroscience, may explain why, the researchers report. “SIDS is a complicated disease, and this is why you need these kinds of studies,” comments Ernest Cutz, a pediatric pathologist at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Researchers led by Colin Nurse, a neurobiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, studied chromaffin cells, which are located in the adrenal gland of both rats and humans. In alarming situations — like when a baby is, for any number of reasons, not getting enough oxygen — these cells flood the body with chemical signals called catecholamines. These signals, which include adrenaline, stimulate the fight-or-flight response. “Catecholamines are very important alarm mechanisms that wake a baby up,” Nurse says. The chromaffin cells of newborn rats that were exposed to nicotine while in their mothers’ womb produced more of a protein that dampens the cells’ responses. This protein, called a potassium ATP channel, normally acts as a brake by preventing the cells from releasing the fight-or-flight signals in nonthreatening situations, Nurse says. For the rats that have been exposed to nicotine, he says, “the brake has become too strong.” Fetal nicotine exposure prevented the cells from later sounding the alarm and releasing catecholamines when the researchers deprived the rats of oxygen, Nurse and his colleagues found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12908 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey A new strain of fruit flies bred to have trouble getting shut-eye may open researchers eyes to the genetic causes of insomnia. Not so long after scientists discovered that fruit flies sleep, Paul Shaw of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues bred a strain of Drosophila melanogaster to have many of the characteristics, and complications, of insomnia in people. Shaw’s team bred 60 generations of fruit flies, selecting for flies that slept the shortest amount of time. The resulting insomniac fruit flies may help scientists find genetic roots of the sleep disorder, the team reports in the June 3 Journal of Neuroscience. There is a fine line between insomnia and sleep deprivation, says Thomas Roth, a sleep researcher at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Insomniacs lack the ability to fall asleep and sleep well (though Shaw and his colleagues think such people may be protected from many of the negative effects of sleeplessness). Sleep deprived people, however, simply stay up too late, not getting the sleep they need to function properly. Most attempts to mimic insomnia in animals fail to match some hallmarks of the disorder in humans, especially hypersensitivity to light, sound and other stresses. “Was I ready to blow this paper off before I read it? Yeah. I thought it was just another guy doing sleep deprivation and calling it insomnia,” Roth says. But the fruit flies “show real characteristics of insomnia.… They aren’t just short sleepers.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12907 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO - A persistent decline in the rate of Americans, especially children, newly diagnosed with depression followed the first federal warning on risks connected with antidepressant drugs, a study suggests. In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration first warned about the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in young people taking the drugs. That action may have helped reverse a five-year trend of rising rates of diagnosis for depression, the researchers found. The findings, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, are based on an analysis of eight years of data from nearly 100 managed care plans and more than 55 million patients. It was already known that antidepressant use among young people had fallen since the drugs began carrying a so-called “black box” warning about risks. But the data showing an extended decline in the level of depression diagnoses are new. In some cases, untreated depression can be more dangerous than suicidal feelings when starting antidepressants and a spike in teenage suicides in 2004 worried some experts that could be another unintended result of the FDA warnings. Then, teen suicides fell slightly the following year, offering hope that the suicide increase was just a blip. The new research can’t explain why diagnosis rates have declined, said lead author Anne Libby of the University of Colorado Denver. Diagnosis rates for anxiety and bipolar disorder, also sometimes treated with antidepressants, also fell. © 2009 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12906 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jackie Christensen When people first meet me, they may not be able to tell that I have Parkinson's disease. I'm 45, and the average age at diagnosis is 55 to 60. (I was 34 when my case was diagnosed.) I don't really have a tremor, and in 2006, I underwent deep brain stimulation, a procedure that controls most of the wriggling and writhing movements that I had been experiencing. But once I open my mouth to speak, it often becomes apparent that there is something going on. It may be that the rigidity of my throat and chest muscles has made my voice soft and lacking inflection. Stiffness in my facial muscles can give me a blank expression or, even worse, make me seem angry or aloof. I may sound like I am trying to talk with a mouthful of marbles. The problem that bothers me the most -- because it seems to be especially disconcerting to others -- is the halting quality that my voice frequently takes on, especially if I'm nervous or upset. It's . . . as . . . if . . . what . . . I . . . want . . . to . . . say . . . has . . . to . . . be . . . squeezed . . . from . . . my . . . brain . . . to . . . come . . . out . . . of . . . my . . . mouth . . . as . . . individual . . . word . . . bubbles. If reading that was annoying to you or made you want to finish the sentence for me, you are not alone. Many of my friends, colleagues and family members feel the same way. I have a theory about what bothers them. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 12905 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY A. Grinding the teeth while asleep is just one kind of bruxism, a disorder that also includes daytime grinding and clenching of the jaws; it is often called night bruxism. Many explanations have been offered for why night bruxism occurs and who is at risk, without conclusive proof. A 2000 review article in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews notes that most people will suffer from grinding or clenching at least some time in their lives. Night bruxism becomes a serious problem when it causes pain, damages teeth or disrupts sleep, but many bruxists are sound sleepers, not even aware of the grinding. It seems to be equally prevalent in both sexes, but more common in younger people. Some of the many factors studied for their association with bruxism include teeth that do not meet properly, psychosocial and environmental factors, and problems with neurotransmitters in the brain or malfunction of centers in the brain called basal ganglia. Some studies find sleep apnea, stress and the heavy use of tobacco, alcohol, drugs and caffeine to be associated with higher risks of bruxism, without showing them to be actual causes. Many kinds of treatment for bruxism have been tried as well, with widely varying rates of success, including dental appliances that keep the teeth apart; various kinds of psychotherapy and behavioral therapy; drugs; and even nutritional supplements, on the theory that a mineral or vitamin deficiency may be responsible. Relaxation exercises and warm compresses before sleep are noninvasive steps suggested by some authorities. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12904 - Posted: 06.02.2009

By JOHN TIERNEY If you own a dog, especially a dog that has anointed your favorite rug, you know that an animal is capable of apologizing. He can whimper and slouch and tuck his tail and look positively mortified — “I don’t know what possessed me.” But is he really feeling sorry? Could any animal feel true pangs of regret? Scientists once scorned this notion as silly anthropomorphism, and I used to side with the skeptics who dismissed these displays of contrition as variations of crocodile tears. Animals seemed too in-the-moment, too busy chasing the next meal, to indulge in much self-recrimination. If old animals had a song, it would be “My Way.” Yet as new reports keep appearing — moping coyotes, rueful monkeys, tigers that cover their eyes in remorse, chimpanzees that second-guess their choices — the more I wonder if animals do indulge in a little paw-wringing. Your dog may not share Hamlet’s dithering melancholia, but he might have something in common with Woody Allen. The latest data comes from brain scans of monkeys trying to win a large prize of juice by guessing where it was hidden. When the monkeys picked wrongly and were shown the location of the prize, the neurons in their brain clearly registered what might have been, according to the Duke University neurobiologists who recently reported the experiment in Science. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 12903 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Citalopram, a medication commonly prescribed to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), was no more effective than a placebo at reducing repetitive behaviors, according to researchers funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and other NIH institutes. The study was published in the June 2009 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. The researchers say their findings do not support using citalopram to treat repetitive behaviors in children with ASD. Also, the greater frequency of side effects from this particular medication compared to placebo illustrates the importance of placebo-controlled trials in evaluating medications currently prescribed to this population. Citalopram is in a class of antidepressant medications called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that is sometimes prescribed for children with ASD to reduce repetitive behaviors. These behaviors, a hallmark of ASD, include stereotypical hand flapping, repetitive complex whole body movements (such as spinning, swaying, or rocking over and over, with no clear purpose), repetitive play, and inflexible daily routines. Past research suggested that some children with ASD have abnormalities in the brain system that makes serotonin, a brain chemical that, among many other functions, plays an important role in early brain development. Children with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) may also have serotonin abnormalities and have repetitive or inflexible behaviors. OCD is effectively treated with SSRIs, leading some researchers to wonder whether similar treatment may reduce repetitive behaviors in children with ASD. So far, studies have produced mixed results, but SSRIs remain among the most frequently prescribed medications for children with ASD.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12902 - Posted: 06.02.2009

Eric Bland -- Synthetic fibers can now be embedded with three, and possibly more, drugs or proteins. The new fibers could be woven into a variety of materials that have unique and novel properties -- such as reversing blindness. "The ultimate idea is to implant this material into the eye," said Bin Dong, a scientist from Drexel University who, along with Gary Wnek and Meghan Smith of Case Western University, detailed their work in the journal Small. "One protein will eat the scar tissue away, and the other will help induce the differentiation of retinal progenitor cells," said Dong. Previously scientists were only able to include one drug or protein inside an electrospun fiber because the two would often interact with each other in ways that would negate or modify their effects. To get around this limitation, the Drexel and Case Western scientists put the drugs and proteins inside tiny capsules, which stop the molecules from interacting with each other until they break apart. space station For their first tests, the scientists incorporated both bovine albumin serum (BAS) and epidermal growth factor (EGF) into the same electrospun fiber. Each molecule was also linked to a particular fluorescent dye that appears under special light. Red for BAS, green for EGF. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 12901 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Joyce Gramza Are men naturally better at math than women or is that just an out-dated stereotype? When former Harvard president Larry Summers said publicly in 2005 that men are innately better at math, many women were outraged. So a couple of women scientists decided to research it. "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong." That disclaimer didn’t keep then-Harvard president and current National Economics Council director Lawrence Summers from sparking a firestorm of controversy with his 2005 take on the reasons for women’s under representation in math and science leadership. But it did lead some researchers to take up the challenge of proving or disproving Summers’ contention that inherent differences in ability might be more important than discrimination or stereotyping in accounting for the gender gap. University of Wisconsin-Madison psychiatry professor Janet Hyde and her colleague, oncology professor Janet Mertz say their research documenting female ability at the highest levels of mathematical performance was directly "inspired" by Summers. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers specifically targeted the "greater male variability hypothesis" invoked by Summers as evidence of possible innate differences in male and female math ability. ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 12900 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A significant number of children with autism and related disorders could be undiagnosed, a study has suggested. A Cambridge University team looked at existing diagnoses - and carried out recognised tests to assess other children. Of the 20,000 studied, 1% had an autistic spectrum disorder, 12 times higher than the rate 30 years ago. Autism experts said it was crucial to have accurate data on how many children were affected by the disorder. The research, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, was carried out in three parts. The scientists first looked at cases of autism and Asperger syndrome among 8,824 children on the Special Educational Needs registers in 79 schools in East Anglia. A total of 83 cases were reported, giving a prevalence of 94 in 10,000, or 1 in 106 children. The team then sent a diagnosis survey to parents of 11,700 children in the area. From 3,373 completed surveys, 41 cases of autism-spectrum conditions were reported, corresponding to prevalence of 1 in 101. This 1% rate confirms estimates from previous research. They then sent the Childhood Autism Screening Test (CAST) to the same parents to help identify any undiagnosed cases of autism-spectrum conditions. All those with high scores, plus some who had medium and low scores, were called in for further assessment. The team found an additional 11 children who met the criteria for an autism spectrum condition, but had not yet been diagnosed. The researchers say that, if these findings were extrapolated to the wider population, for every three known cases of autism spectrum, there may be a further two cases that are undiagnosed. Professor Baron-Cohen said: "In terms of providing services, if we want to be prepared for the maximum numbers that might come through, these undiagnosed cases might be significant." (C)BBC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12899 - Posted: 05.30.2009

Electrodes inserted into certain parts of the brain — in a technique known as deep brain stimulation — can stimulate the growth of new neurons that are used in memory formation, according to research in mice. The findings show that artificially created neurons can be fully functional — a topic of hot debate in the neuroscience community. Knowing that the cells are functional, rather than just useless growths, is a boost for those seeking to use the treatment against Alzheimer's disease and other memory-degeneration disorders. "I'm hoping to help people who have difficulty remembering things," says Scellig Stone, a neurosurgery resident and PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. One of Stone's supervisors, Paul Frankland of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, presented the results at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience in Vancouver, Canada, on 25 May. In his study, Stone electrically stimulated part of the limbic system in the brains of mice for an hour. Rodent brains normally produce thousands of new neurons a day; by 3–5 days after the procedure, the electrical stimulation had doubled that. During this time of high neuron growth, the team injected the mice with iododeoxyuridine to label the newly formed cells. Six weeks after the stimulation, the mice were trained to find a platform hidden underwater in a swimming tank. Once the researchers were convinced the mice had learned the task, they examined their brains, looking for a protein called Fos. Fos is produced only by active cells, and takes around 90 minutes to form, so the team could time their examination to pinpoint neurons that had been used explicitly in the memory task. They found that the new neurons had the same level of Fos and were therefore just as active as other, older neurons. "These new neurons aren't just sitting around doing nothing," says Stone. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12898 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror." -opening line from "The Depressed Person" by David Foster Wallace Though an excerpt from a work of fiction, that sentiment is all too real for people like 69-year-old artist Cynthia Amberg. Like her mother, Amberg experienced her first episode of depression after her second child was born. Normally exuberant, she says in that dark time she could barely get herself out of bed. “It was a hell worse than anything I could ever adequately describe to someone who hasn’t suffered from it,” says Amberg. Depression is a subject many people are reluctant to talk about openly, but Amberg wants people to know that they don’t need to be ashamed that they have it. She got counseling and medication, and is better able to deal with the depression that she learned often runs in families. She now only checks in periodically with Patrick McGrath, a psychiatrist with affiliations at both Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute who monitors her health and her medication. Since the ’90s Amberg has rarely been depressed. Now McGrath’s colleague, child psychiatrist Bradley Peterson, has found new clues as to why people with a family history of depression are at high risk for developing it themselves. Together with epidemiologist Myrna Weissman, they led a brain study of people with and without a family history of depression. ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12897 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Chimpanzees living in central Africa’s dense forests have no access to a hardware store, but that doesn’t stop them from assembling their own brand of toolkits. These apes use as many as five homemade tools in set sequences to obtain honey from beehives located at least 20 meters high in the trees, in fallen tree trunks and up to 1 meter underground, according to two new studies. Chimps living in Gabon’s Loango National Park modify tree branches of various lengths and widths to make complex tool sets for removing honey from the hives of different bee species, anthropologist Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues report online May 19 in the Journal of Human Evolution. In other parts of Africa, chimps use only one or two tools at a time to obtain honey from hives, crack nuts or hunt small animals. Near Loango, in a forested region of the Congo Basin called the Goualougo Triangle, another group of chimps also makes and uses different types of tools to open beehives and gather honey, say Crickette Sanz, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and David Morgan of Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Chimps across Africa have developed regional tool-using traditions in honey gathering, Sanz and Morgan propose in the June International Journal of Primatology. In central African forests, hard-to-reach hives and competition for food with nearby gorillas have elicited complex forms of tool use by chimps, the researchers contend. That proposal challenges the traditional idea that advanced behaviors among human ancestors emerged only after they left the forest for wide-open savannas. Forest-dwelling ancestors could have achieved chimplike advances in tool-making as well, in Sanz and Morgan’s view. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12896 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Michael Le Page, Copenhagen For women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off, reveals a brain scanning study. It shows that many areas of the brain switch off during the female orgasm - including those involved with emotion. "At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings," says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner's fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm. The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in Copenhagen on Monday. In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," he explains. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12895 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sharon Begley There must be something deep in the human soul that makes us blame fate, birth, our parents and all sorts of other things beyond our control for how we turn out, and scientists are no less guilty of this. Case in point: a study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience this week concludes that something about the way the brain develops from birth (or earlier) leads some of us to be people persons—socially gregarious, enjoying the company of others—and some of us to be more aloof. True, the scientists hedge their bets by making the requisite acknowledgement that people's experience and behavior might act to alter their brain structure, something for which there is ample (and growing) evidence. (My favorites: London taxicab drivers develop a larger hippocampus (that's the site of spatial memory, a good thing to have to navigate London streets) and violin players develop larger somatosensory cortexes in regions devoted to the digits of their fingering hand. But the title of this latest bit of research tells it all: "The brain structural disposition to social interaction." Translation: brain structure comes first, and the result is that you are either a warm, friendly people person who delights in the company of others or a detached, independent, antisocial loner. The study itself was straightforward. Scientists led by Maël Lebreton and Graham Murray of the University of Cambridge had 4,349 men born in Finland in 1966 fill out a questionnaire that assesses sociability. (The men rated themselves on such points as whether such statements as "I make a warm personal connection with most people" and "I like to please other people as much as I can" describe them.) A high score means a high disposition to social relationships, emotional warmth and sociability called social reward dependence—a people person. A low score indicates a tendency to be socially insensitive and aloof. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Emotions
Link ID: 12894 - Posted: 06.24.2010