by Ewen Callaway Women might swoon over Barry White's deep bass, yet when looking for a provider, they find Justin Timberlake's falsetto sounds sexier. A new study among African hunter-gatherers found that women who were nursing a child prefer higher-pitched male voices than fertile women who had not recently given birth. The Hadza - hunter-gatherers native to northern Tanzania - have limited exposure to the mass media. Cut off from the daily bombardment of advertisements, pop songs and newscasts that's typical in much of the world, they were an ideal population in which to study innate sexual preferences, says Coren Apicella, an anthropologist at Harvard University and leader of the study. "They're also an evolutionarily relevant population - they live like we lived 200,000 years ago," she says. "Most of our psychological preferences probably evolved when we were hunter-gatherers." For her dissertation, Apicella spent six months studying vocal preferences among Hadza men and women. In a previous study, she and colleagues found that deep-voiced men sire more childrenSpeaker than tenors. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 12296 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Erica Westly In the 1960s, the heyday of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists often saw their patients five days a week. But the number of psychiatrists today who focus on talk therapy is dwindling, according to a recent study that analyzed trends in psychiatry offices across the U.S. The study’s authors determined that between 1996 and 2005 the percentage of psychiatry office visits involving psychotherapy decreased from about 44.4 percent—already a significant decline from the 1980s—to 28.9 percent. One of the main causes for this 35 percent reduction in psychotherapy, the study’s authors say, is the increasing availability of psychiatric medications with few adverse effects. As patient demand for these medications has increased over the years, they argue, many psychiatrists have had their hands full managing patients’ prescriptions, leaving the talk therapy—if it happens at all—to nonmedical therapists, such as psychologists and social workers. The authors suggest that insurance companies may encourage this arrangement by reimbursing less for psychotherapy sessions and more for medication management sessions, which tend to be shorter. All these changes, the authors point out, have left psychiatrists wondering what their place is in the mental health field. “I think what these data show is a profession in transition,” says Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at Columbia University and co-author of the study. “The role of the psychiatrist is changing, and the impact of that on patient outcomes is really an open question.” © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12295 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Lindsey Tanner -- Unique brain wave patterns, spotted for the first time in autistic children, may help explain why they have so much trouble communicating. Using an imaging helmet that resembles a big salon hair dryer, researchers discovered what they believe are "signatures of autism" that show a delay in processing individual sounds. That delay is only a fraction of a second, but when it's for every sound, the lag time can cascade into a major obstacle in speaking and understanding people, the researchers said. Imagine if it took a tiny bit longer than normal to understand each syllable. By the end of a whole sentence, you'd be pretty confused. The study authors believe that's what happens with autistic children, based on the brain wave patterns detected in school-age children in their study. The preliminary results need to be confirmed in younger children, but the researchers hope this technique could be used to help diagnose autism in children as young as age 1. That's at least a year earlier than usual, and it could mean behavior treatment much sooner. © 2008 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12294 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Rachel Zelkowitz To get a drug to market, pharmaceutical companies have to show that it works better than a placebo. But sometimes the placebo is just as powerful as the real thing. Just why our bodies respond so strongly to fake medicine has long been a mystery, but researchers are a step closer to solving that riddle, having picked out a particular gene that may be responsible for one type of placebo effect. The placebo effect works because patients believe they are actually receiving treatment. Expecting treatment is similar to anticipating reward, studies have shown, and reward anticipation triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain, which can help alleviate symptoms of chronic pain and depression. But what about placebo effects for other conditions? Tomas Furmark, a psychologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, suspected that a different neurotransmitter plays a role in placebo responses to social anxiety disorder (SAD)--an abnormal fear of being judged by others. Brain imaging studies have shown that the amygdala, an area of the brain that regulates the fear response, is unusually active in patients with SAD. What's more, healthy people with certain variations of two genes that regulate the neurotransmitter serotonin have more active amygdalas. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Emotions
Link ID: 12293 - Posted: 06.24.2010

BERKELEY, Calif. (KCBS) -- Researchers at UC Berkeley have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of kids from high-income families. In a study published by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity. Electrodes on the scalp and held in place by a cap to measure underlying brain activity were used to measure brain function on electroencephalograph , said cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, one of the researchers. "This is a wake-up call," Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology said. "It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums." © MMVIII CBS Radio Stations Inc.,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Attention
Link ID: 12292 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Sunita Reed If you’re tired of hearing about memory loss, there’s some encouraging research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://web.mit.edu/ about how good people’s visual memory really is. Psychologist Aude Oliva and graduate student Timothy Brady found inspiration for their study in Lionel Standing’s famous research conducted in the early 1970s. Standing’s study demonstrated that after viewing 10,000 images, people could look at pairs of images and remember which one they had seen with 83-percent accuracy. While it proved that people could recall large numbers of images, the study did not test how much detail within the pictures people could retain. That’s what Oliva wanted to test. Her team asked volunteers, aged 18 to 35, to participate in a grueling memory test. Over the course of five hours, each volunteer watched a monitor as approximately 3,000 images of common objects–like corkscrews, donuts, and cell phones–appeared for just three seconds each. The researchers told volunteers to try to remember as many details as they could. After a 20-minute break, they were shown pairs of images and had to determine if they had seen them before. However there was more to it than in Standing’s study. Volunteers had to remember very specific details of the images to get the answer correct. For example they had to determine not only whether they had seen a cell phone, but also whether it was open or closed. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12291 - Posted: 06.24.2010

CHICAGO - Older people who are depressed are much more likely to develop a dangerous type of internal body fat — the kind that can lead to diabetes and heart disease — than people who are not depressed, a disturbing new study found. The connection goes beyond obesity and suggests some biological link between a person's mental state and fat that collects around the internal organs, scientists said. "For the depressed public, it should be another reason to take one's symptoms seriously and look for treatment," said study co-author Stephen Kritchevsky, director of the Sticht Center on Aging at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. People with depression were twice as likely as others to gain visceral fat — the kind that surrounds internal organs and often shows up as belly fat. It raises the risk for heart disease and diabetes. Previous research has linked depression with those same health problems. Some researchers believe depression triggers high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which promotes visceral fat. The cortisol connection may explain the findings, Kritchevsky said. © 2008 The Associated Press.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 12290 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A new cure for jet lag could be on the market in the next few years after trials show a pill can reset the body's natural sleep rhythms. Tasimelteon works by shifting the natural ebb and flow of the body's sleep hormone melatonin. In trials, published in The Lancet, the drug helped troubled sleepers nod off quicker and stay asleep for longer. Experts said the drug would be a welcome alternative to addictive sedatives like benzodiazepines. Commenting on the work, Dr Daniel Cardinali from the University of Buenos Aires said the findings would be welcomed by millions of people - "shift-workers, airline crew, tourists, football teams, and many others." The hope is that if you have shifted your body clock and you've slept well, then you should perform well the next day, said lead researcher Dr Elizabeth Klerman at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston. In trials on 450 people kept awake for five hours longer than normal to replicate crossing into a different time zone, those who took the drug enjoyed between 30 minutes and nearly two hours more sleep than volunteers who received a dummy pill. Natural melatonin - the darkness hormone which peaks at night - is a popular treatment for patients with body clock-related sleep disorders. (C)BBC

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 12289 - Posted: 12.02.2008

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR In an age of high-definition television and vivid cinematography, it might seem peculiar to think that anyone would experience colorless dreams. For many people, the dream state can be the most turbulent, emotionally intense part of the day. Falling, flying, failing exams and being chased are among the most frequently reported themes when people are asked in studies to describe their dreams. And yet for a small segment of the population, drifting off at night means reverting to a world of monochromatic hues. Childhood exposure to black-and-white television seems to be the common denominator. A study published this year, for example, found that people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time. Over all, 12 percent of people dream entirely in black and white. Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12288 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Dr. Patrick J. Kelly, the head of neurosurgery at New York University, folded his arms hard against his chest, radiating skepticism. “I have a neurological problem that I’ve never told anyone about — not a soul,” he recalls saying to his colleague Dr. Rodolfo Llinás before an auditorium packed with neurosurgeons. “You listen to my brain and tell me what it is. If you do, I will believe you.” So it was that Dr. Kelly allowed his brain to be scanned in a MEG machine, a device that measures tiny magnetic signals reflecting changes in brain rhythms. After analyzing his colleague’s brain activity, Dr. Llinás announced: “You have tinnitus. Right brain. The phantom sound ringing in your ears must be very loud. It is low frequency, a rumbling noise.” Dr. Kelly was stunned, he said later. He had been hearing that noise ever since he served at a station hospital in Danang during the Vietnam War. The roar of helicopters dropping off casualties had permanently warped his hearing. Dr. Llinás, the chairman of neuroscience and physiology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, believes that abnormal brain rhythms help account for a variety of serious disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, tinnitus and depression. His theory may explain why the technique called deep brain stimulation — implanting electrodes into particular regions of the brain — often alleviates the symptoms of movement disorders like Parkinson’s. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 12287 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY From the outside, psychotherapy can look like an exercise in self-absorption. In fact, though, therapists often work to pull people out of themselves: to see their behavior from the perspective of a loved one, for example, or to observe their own thinking habits from a neutral distance. Marriage counselors have couples role-play, each one taking the other spouse’s part. Psychologists have rapists and other criminals describe their crime from the point of view of the victim. Like novelists or moviemakers, their purpose is to transport people, mentally, into the mind of another. Now, neuroscientists have shown that they can make this experience physical, creating a “body swapping” illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own. “You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa,” said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who with his colleague Valeria Petkova described the work to other scientists at the meeting. Their full study is to appear online this week in the journal PLoS One. . Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12286 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Devin Powell, Washington DC REMEMBER your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical "caps" on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories. To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery. Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation - the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA. Many genes are already coated with methyl groups. When a cell divides, this "cellular memory" is passed on and tells the new cell what type it is - a kidney cell, for example. Miller and Sweatt argue that in neurons, methyl groups also help to control the exact pattern of protein expression needed to maintain the synapses that make up memories. They started by looking at short-term memories. When caged mice are given a small electric shock, they normally freeze in fear when returned to the cage. However, then injecting them with a drug to inhibit methylation seemed to erase any memory of the shock. The researchers also showed that in untreated mice, gene methylation changed rapidly in the hippocampus region of the brain for an hour following the shock. But a day later, it had returned to normal, suggesting that methylation was involved in creating short-term memories in the hippocampus (Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.02.022). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12285 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Communication problems associated with autism may be explained by the discovery that the brains of autistic children are a fraction of a second slower to react to sounds than those of normal children. According to Timothy Roberts of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, speaking on Monday at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, the finding "provides strong supporting evidence for the emerging theory that autism is a problem of connectivity in the brain". Roberts and his colleagues played a battery of sounds and syllables to 30 autistic children aged 6 to 15, while the team monitored the magnetic fields produced by electrical impulses from the children's brains. The test employed a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), in which a helmet-like device is used to detect and locate brain activity. MEG has previously been used to show how the brain can filter out background chat at parties in order to focus on a single thread of conversationSpeaker. In comparison to normal children in the study, whose response time was around one-tenth of a second, the autistic children had a response time anywhere from 20% to 50% longer. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism; Hearing
Link ID: 12284 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer Can Googling delay the onset of dementia? A new UCLA study, part of the growing research into the effects of technology on the brain, shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile - it's like taking your brain for a walk. It's too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer's disease, but "our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively," said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center. The new study, which will be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer's cases will quadruple by 2050. In response to such projections, "brain-gyms" and memory-building computer programs have proliferated. The subjects in Small's nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels. They were assigned two tasks: to read book-like text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Intelligence
Link ID: 12283 - Posted: 06.24.2010

LONDON - Four genetic variations appear to determine the speed at which people burn up food, researchers say, a finding that could one day see doctors offer their patients more individual care. Differences in metabolism can make some people more susceptible to diseases such as diabetes and explain why response to diet, exercise and drugs to treat certain conditions varies from person to person. Knowing right away how a person's body will break down molecules in the blood that build up muscle and cells and provide energy could lead to better care, said Karsten Suhre, a researcher at the Helmholtz Center in Munich. The researchers scanned the genes of 284 people and found four — FADS1, LIPC, SCAD and MCAD — linked to determining metabolic rates. "These genes appear to be involved or play a key role in metabolism," Suhre said in a telephone interview. This potentially paves the way for more personalized health care in which doctors could use knowledge of a patient's metabolism gleaned from their genetic make-up to determine treatment, he said. This could prove particularly useful for treating conditions strongly linked to metabolism such as coronary artery disease and obesity, he added. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12282 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Chris Rollins What color is the number 7? How does a symphony taste? What temperature is a muted television? A synesthete could tell you, with great certainty and consistency, the answers to the above questions, and describe many more sensory associations that seem irrelevant to most people. Approximately 1 in 1000 people experience synesthesia - the elicitation of a sensory response independent of the stimulus itself. For instance, viewing a number or hearing a phonetic sound may elicit a colored response in the visual field, or a certain visual stimulus may elicit an auditory response. "I realized that to make an 'R', all I had to do was first write a 'P' and draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line," reports Patricia Duffy in her book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, which describes many such experiences. Duffy has the most common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia -- where individual letters or numbers are shaded specific colors. © 2008 ION Publications LLC

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12281 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Hamm When Lloyd Watts was growing up in Kingston, Ont., in the 1970s he had a knack for listening to songs by Billy Joel and Elton John and plunking out the melodies on the family piano. But he wondered, wouldn't it be great to have a machine that could "listen" to songs and immediately transcribe them into musical notation? Watts never built the gizmo, but his decades-long quest to engineer such a machine has finally resulted in one of the first commercial technologies based on the biology of the brain. Microchips designed by Audience, the Silicon Valley company Watts launched, are now being used by mobile handset makers in Asia to improve dramatically the quality of conversations in noisy places. Even a truck passing right by someone using the technology won't be heard at the other end of the phone line. The chip is modeled on functions of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. "We have reverse-engineered this piece of the brain," declares Watts. The 47-year-old neuroscientist is on the leading edge of what some believe will be a fundamental shift in the way certain types of computers are designed. Today's computers are essentially really fast abacuses. They're good at math but can't process complex streams of information in real time, as humans do. Now, thanks to advances in our understanding of biology, scientists believe they can model a new generation of computers on how the brain actually works—the microscopic chemical interactions and electrical impulses that translate sensations into knowledge and knowledge into decisions and actions. It's a successor to the old ideas about artificial intelligence, and a handful of companies have initiatives under way, among them IBM (IBM) and Numenta, a Silicon Valley startup. Copyright 2000-2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.

Keyword: Robotics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 12280 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PARIS: Scientists have found a way to unlock the pain-relieving potential of one of the same proteins in the body activated by marijuana, says a new study. The complex human cannabinoid system is thought to hold great potential for the control of chronic pain, and could also prove useful in the treatment of anxiety, depression and even obesity (see, Marijuana: What science has to say). In experiments on mice, U.S. researchers have now found a chemical that prevents a naturally occurring enzyme from blocking a pain relieving cannabinoid receptor, called 2-arachidonoylgylcerol (2-AG). Once the enzyme, known as MAGL, is deactivated, the protein is more effective in dampening pain, say the team, led by Benjamin Cravatt of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Their research is published in the current issue of the British journal Nature Chemical Biology. In earlier research, Cravatt and colleagues decoded the chain of chemical reactions that acted on another cannabinoid receptor, AEA, paving the way for the development of pain-relieving medications. ©2007 Luna Media Pty Ltd,

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12279 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Brain scans of older people in a noisy lab machine give biological backing to the idea that distraction hampers memory with aging, researchers reported Wednesday. The finding bolsters a theory about one reason why memory weakens with age: older people have more trouble remembering some things because they’re more easily distracted when they try to learn them. The memory exercise reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience dealt with recognizing faces, but the findings apply to the more general task of trying to remember something a person sees or hears, said lead author Dale Stevens. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Stevens, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, did the work while at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto. Older people who have to learn something should do all they can to focus on that task and eliminate potential distractions, he advised. The study compared 10 healthy people in their 60s and 70s to a dozen younger volunteers, ages 22 to 36. Their brains were scanned while they looked at photographs of people they did not know. As each photograph was displayed for one second, the volunteers were asked if they’d seen it before in the study. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 12278 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brains of people with a chronic pain condition look like an inept cable worker rewired areas related to emotion, pain perception and skin temperature, a brain imaging study suggests. In Wednesday's issue of the journal Neuron, researchers reported using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look for the differences in the brains of 22 normal subjects and 22 subjects with a chronic pain condition called complex region pain syndrome. The brains of chronic pain patients showed changes in the brain's white matter, the cable-like network of fibres that deliver messages between neurons. "This is the first evidence of brain abnormality in these patients," said the study's lead investigator, Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "People didn't believe these patients. This is the first proof that there is a biological underpinning for the condition." The syndrome often begins with significant damage to a hand or foot. In five per cent of patients, the pain continues to rage long after the injury has healed. The cause is unknown. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12277 - Posted: 06.24.2010