By Richard Warry A drug developed to treat leukaemia may be a powerful new weapon against multiple sclerosis, researchers say. Alemtuzumab appears to stop progression of the disease in patients with early stage active relapsing-remitting MS - the most common form of the condition. The University of Cambridge study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests the drug may enable repair of previous damage. However, it can produce potentially serious side-effects, they warn. And the researchers stress their work is still at an early stage. Alemtuzumab - a type of drug known as a monoclonal antibody - was created at Cambridge in the late 1970s, and has long been used to treat leukaemia by killing off the cancerous white cells of the immune system. The latest three-year study, of 334 patients with relapsing-remitting MS which had yet to be treated, found that the drug cut the number of attacks of disease by 74% more than the reduction achieved by conventional interferon-beta therapy. Alemtuzumab also reduced the risk of sustained accumulation of disability by 71% compared to beta-interferon. People on the trial who received the drug also recovered some function that had been thought to be permanently lost, and as a result were less disabled after three years than at the beginning of the study. In contrast, people given beta-interferon showed signs of progressively worsening disability. This was confirmed by brain scans in which alemtuzumab patients showed signs that their brains had actually increased in size, while the beta-interferon patients' brains shrank over time. The researchers said the findings suggested that alemtuzumab may allow damaged brain tissue to repair itself. (C)BBC

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12162 - Posted: 10.23.2008

By JULIE CONNELLY HEARING aids provide many benefits, but they do not restore hearing to normal, and that is a tough lesson to learn for many people who use them. “Regardless of how good they are, they never match the quality of your hearing at its best,” said William McKenna, a lawyer and former deputy district attorney in Westchester County, N.Y., who has been wearing hearing aids in both ears for nearly 20 years. “Recently my audiologist asked me how good my hearing was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said, 8 ˝.” People who use hearing aids, on average, live with hearing loss for seven years before resigning themselves, usually around age 70, to using a device, according to the Hearing Loss Association of America. “You are in a position where you’ve been struggling, and you get tired of asking people to repeat themselves,” Mr. McKenna said. Most people with hearing loss eventually acknowledge that “the standard becomes hearing better than you heard before,” said Eduardo Bravo, an audiologist with Audio Help Associates in Manhattan. Today, baby boomers account for 10 million of the 31.5 million Americans with hearing loss, according to the Better Hearing Institute, a nonprofit educational organization, and many hearing experts attribute this to listening to overly loud rock music. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 12161 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mirsky Why am I so hungry after writing one of these columns? I have often wondered. Now comes an answer. A study in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine contends that intellectual work—that’s right, I’m calling writing this stuff, ya know, intellectual—induces a big increase in caloric intake. The research had 14 Canadian students do three things at different times: sit and relax; complete a series of memory and attention tests; and read and summarize a text. (It was that last activity that disqualified rodents and U.S. students as study subjects.) After 45 minutes at each task, the kids were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch. Because Canada has a truly advanced code of human-subject research ethics. Each session of intellectual work required the burning of only three more calories than relaxing did. But when the students hit the buffet table after the text summation, they took in an additional 203 calories. And after the memory and attention tests, the subjects consumed another 253 calories. Blood samples taken before, during and after the activities found that all that thinking causes big fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels. And because glucose fuels the neurons, a transitory low level in the brain may signal the stomach to get the hands to fill up the mouth, even though the energy actually spent has gone up just a hair. The researchers note that such “caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic.” Think about that—unless you’re on a diet. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12160 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Joyce Gramza With the obesity epidemic in full force, researchers have been puzzled and concerned at the sheer pace of its spread. "This is puzzling because a lot of people have focused on genetics for so many years," says Rob Waterland, assistant professor of pediatrics at the USDA Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "But obviously, the genetic background hasn’t changed dramatically enough in such a short period of time to explain this increase in the prevalence of obesity." So Waterland and others have looked for another explanation of how obesity is inherited. They’ve suggested that obesity isn’t merely genetic — it is somehow triggered in the womb during development. Now Waterland and his team’s latest study in mice shows that mom’s obesity not only generates obesity in her offspring but also magnifies it. “They were actually fatter than their mothers, so we saw a population shift in the distribution of body weight,” Waterland explains. “We saw a shift in this distribution toward heavier and heavier body weight with each generation.” The researchers were able to show that these inherited changes are not due to genetic changes. Instead, they attributed to them to epigenetic changes, which control the way genes are expressed during development. If human obesity through the generations is triggered by epigenetics, it’s possible that a mother’s obesity before and during her pregnancy can permanently affect the development of her baby’s weight regulatory mechanisms. “So-called epigenetic mechanisms could be playing an important role in determining your body weight regulation throughout your life," Waterland says. ©2008 ScienCentral

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12159 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amanda Gefter "YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality." His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war". Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12158 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brandon Keim What if people are biologically unsuited for the American dream? The man posing that troubling question isn't just another lefty activist. It's Peter Whybrow, head of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA. "We've been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want," said Whybrow, a 2008 PopTech Fellow and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. "We've set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to get what you want immediately." He paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don't fit the social and economic world we've constructed. Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can't actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed. That individual weakness is reflected at the social level, in markets that have outgrown their agrarian roots and no longer constrain our excesses — resulting in the current economic crisis, in which America's unpaid bills came due with shocking speed. © 2008 CondéNet, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12157 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Going to university, then choosing a mentally demanding job may help protect the brain from the devastating effects of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists compared people with the same degree of memory loss, and found those with this background had significantly more brain damage. Mentally tough work, or genes which help people achieve such careers, may help the brain compensate for disease. The Italian research was published in the journal Neurology. While there are a number of studies which, based on age and symptoms, suggest that mental stimulation can ward off Alzheimer's, there are fewer which look directly at the damage wreaked by the illness on the brain. The team from the San Raffaele University in Milan used brain scanners to look for the distinctive "tangles" and protein deposits characteristic of Alzheimer's in 242 older people, 72 who had mild cognitive impairment, and 144 with no memory problems. Over a 14-month period, 21 of the people with mild impairment went on to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. However, when the MRI scans of people with the same level of memory problems were compared, the damage was significantly more extensive in those who had been university educated, then progressed to mentally-tough careers. According to the researchers, this meant that, somehow, the brain was managing to cope better with the disease, perhaps by creating a "cognitive reserve" which buffered against its effects. Dr Valentina Garibotta, who led the research, said: "The brains are able to compensate for the damage and allow them to maintain functioning in spite of damage. There are two possible explanations - the brain could be made stronger through education and occupational challenges, or, genetic factors that enabled people to achieve higher education and occupational achievement might determine the amount of brain reserve." (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12156 - Posted: 10.21.2008

PHILADELPHIA — Antonio Vasquez was just 60 when Alzheimer’s disease derailed him. He lost his job at a Queens bakery because he kept burning chocolate chip cookies, forgetting he had put them in the oven. Then he got lost going to job interviews, walking his neighborhood in circles. Teresa Mojica of Philadelphia was 59 when she got Alzheimer’s, making her so argumentative and delusional that she sometimes hits her husband. And Ida J. Lawrence was 57 when she started misplacing things and making mistakes in her Boston dental school job. Besides being young Alzheimer’s patients — most Americans who develop it are at least 65, and it becomes more common among people in their 70s or 80s — the three are Hispanic, a group that Alzheimer’s doctors are increasingly concerned about, and not just because it is the country’s largest, fastest-growing minority. Studies suggest that many Hispanics may have more risk factors for developing dementia than other groups, and a significant number appear to be getting Alzheimer’s earlier. And surveys indicate that Latinos, less likely to see doctors because of financial and language barriers, more often mistake dementia symptoms for normal aging, delaying diagnosis. “This is the tip of the iceberg of a huge public health challenge,” said Yanira L. Cruz, president of the National Hispanic Council on Aging. “We really need to do more research in this population to really understand why is it that we’re developing these conditions much earlier.”

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12155 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER With his soft voice and friar’s manner, Louis Sorkin hardly seems the type to flout the sensible advice of a nursery rhyme. Yet on a recent afternoon at the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. Sorkin, a renowned entomologist, did precisely, luridly that. He took a glass jar swarming with thousands of hungry specimens of Cimex lectularius, better known as bedbugs. The small, roachy-looking bloodsuckers have been spreading through the nation’s homes and hotels at such a hyperventilated pace that by next year they are expected to displace cockroaches and termites as America’s leading domestic pest insect. To better understand their habits, Mr. Sorkin has cultivated a personal bedbug colony — very personal. “You see this mesh here?” he said, pointing to a circlet of wiry material taped over the top of his little jam jar of horrors. The weave is dense enough to keep even newborns from escaping, he explained, but porous enough to allow the bedbugs’ stylets, their piercing mouthparts, to poke through. Mr. Sorkin pushed up his shirt sleeve and pressed the mesh end of the jar against the inside of his right arm. Roused to a frenzy by the twin cues of heat and carbon dioxide that “in evolution equal host,” said Mr. Sorkin, the insects scrambled toward the lid, thrust out their stylets and began to feed. For a good 10 minutes, Mr. Sorkin sat there with the proud placidity of a donor at a blood bank. He did not budge. He held the jar. He let the bedbugs bite. “I can hardly feel it,” he said matter-of-factly, “and they do need to eat.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 12154 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DENISE GRADY On a recent Wednesday, Karleen Perez lay unconscious on an operating table in Upper Manhattan while her surgeons and two consultants from a medical device company peered at an overhead monitor that displayed images from inside her digestive tract. The surgeons, Dr. Marc Bessler and Dr. Daniel Davis, had just stapled her stomach to form a thumb-sized tube that would hold only a small amount of food. The operation resembled others done for weight loss, with one huge difference. In Ms. Perez’s case, there was no cutting. Instead, the surgeons had passed the stapler down her throat and stapled her stomach from the inside. Inspecting their handiwork, Dr. Bessler said, “I don’t think you’ll get much better than that.” The operation, meant to make people feel full after eating very little, is strictly experimental. Only a few patients have tried it in this country, as part of a study paid for by Satiety Inc., which makes the staplers and hopes the Food and Drug Administration will approve them. Ms. Perez, a 25-year-old graduate student in social work, was the second patient at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia to enter the study. Satiety employees advised her surgeons throughout the operation.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12153 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Alan S. Brown Eight years ago, when Erik Ramsey was 16, a car accident triggered a brain stem stroke that left him paralyzed. Though fully conscious, Ramsey was completely paralyzed, essentially “locked in,” unable to move or talk. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, thereby answering questions with a yes or a no. Ramsey’s doctors recommended sending him to a nursing facility. Instead his parents brought him home. In 2004 they met neurologist Philip R. Kennedy, chief scientist at Neural Signals in Duluth, Ga. He offered Ramsey the chance to take part in an unusual experiment. Surgeons would implant a high-tech device called a neural prosthesis into Ramsey’s brain, enabling him to communicate his thoughts to a computer that would translate them into spoken words. Today Ramsey sports a small metal electrode in his brain. Its thin wires penetrate a fraction of an inch into his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, including the motion of his vocal muscles. When Ramsey thinks of saying a sound, the implant captures the electrical firing of nearby neurons and transmits their impulses to a computer, which decodes them and produces the sounds. So far Ramsey can only say a few simple vowels, but Kennedy believes that he will recover his full range of speech by 2010. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12152 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway A mole that can no longer open its eyelids, thanks to its adaptation to an underground lifestyle, retains the basics of vision, research suggests. "What we think we're seeing in the mole is the very start of a breakdown in the eye," says Martin Collinson, a developmental biologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK. "I think the moles would have no problem seeing light and dark." The same genetic changes might also underlie congenital eye diseases in humans, he says. Collinson and colleague David Carmona studied eye development in Iberian moles, a species so adapted to subterranean life that its eyelids are glued shut. "They might occasionally need some visual ability, but they're also swimming through soil that would damage their eyes and cause infection," Collinson says. Few researchers had studied the cellular and molecular details of mole eye development, and Collinson's team expected to see eyes ravaged by the millions of years of evolution in a dark world. In cavefish, for example, the loss of lens cells creates a chain reaction that prevents the formation of other eye structures, such as the retina and light-sensing cells. Disrupted development However, "things that were going wrong with the moles' eyes were the opposite of things that were going wrong with the cavefish", Collinson says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution; Vision
Link ID: 12151 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Top mountaineers may be suffering subtle brain damage each time they reach the upper slopes of the world's highest peaks, say scientists. Italian researchers scanned "world-class" climbers before and after expeditions, publishing their results in the European Journal of Neurology. They found changes in brain tissue even though, outwardly, the climbers had no obvious new neurological problems. The most likely cause was a lack of oxygen at high altitudes, they said. At the summit of Everest, the world's highest mountain, the concentration of oxygen in the air is reckoned to be only a third of that found at sea level, more than 8,000m lower. All of the nine male climbers involved in the study, at the IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, had reached their summit without the use of a supply of extra oxygen, a frequent practice among leading mountaineers. Before the trip, they underwent MRI scans, and were checked for any neurological illnesses, then matched against "control subjects" of the same age and sex, who had never climbed above 3,000m. Three of the climbers reached the top of at least one 8,000m peak, while the remainder reached altitudes of at least 7,500m, spending in excess of 15 days above 6,500m. When they were scanned eight weeks after returning, compared with the "controls", there was a fall in the density and volume of brain tissue in two parts of the brain, the "left pyramidal tract" and the "angular gyrus". However, Dr Margherita Di Paola, who led the study, said that this reduction did not appear to have a direct impact on their neurological performance. "The climbers in our study did not suffer any significant neuropsychological changes after the expedition," she said. However, some abnormal results on both the "before" and "after" tests, she said, might be the result of small, progressive brain damage caused by repeated trips to high-altitude. (C)BBC

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 12150 - Posted: 10.20.2008

A University of B.C. epidemiologist says there is now evidence to support a heroin-assisted addictions therapy clinic in Vancouver. The North American Opiate Medication Initiative, or NAOMI, study was a Vancouver and Montreal-based clinical trial assessing how patients respond to heroin, methadone and other opiate treatment. The three-year study treated 251 of the most chronically addicted in both Vancouver and Montreal who have not responded well to other treatment options. "These people are out in the alleys, injecting heroin of unknown quality and quantity," said Dr. Martin Schechter, the study's principal investigator. "They're committing crimes, they're involved in sex work to pay for that, and they're certainly, in that situation, not going to get better." The study was funded by an $8.1-million research grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was approved by Health Canada. The study's participants received methadone, injected heroin or an opiate known as hydromorphone. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 12149 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Controlling the level of a fatty acid in the brain could help treat Alzheimer's disease, an American study has suggested. Tests on mice showed that reducing excess levels of the acid lessened animals' memory problems and behavioural changes. Writing in Nature Neuroscience, the team said fatty acid levels could be controlled through diet or drugs. A UK Alzheimer's expert called the work "robust and exciting". There are currently 700,000 people living with dementia in the UK, but that number is forecast to double within a generation. Scientists from Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease and the University of California looked at fatty acids in the brains of normal mice and compared them with those in mice genetically engineered to have an Alzheimer's-like condition. They identified raised levels of a fatty acid called arachidonic acid in the brains of the Alzheimer's mice. The scientists again used genetic engineering to lower PLA2 levels in the animals, and found that even a partial reduction halted memory deterioration and other impairments. Dr Rene Sanchez-Mejia, who worked on the study, said: "The most striking change we discovered in the Alzheimer's mice was an increase in arachidonic acid and related metabolites [products] in the hippocampus, a memory centre that is affected early and severely by Alzheimer's disease." He suggested too much arachidonic acid might over-stimulate brain cells, and that lowering levels allowed them to function normally. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12148 - Posted: 10.20.2008

David Robson The moment when Dorothy passes out in monochrome Kansas and awakes in Technicolor Oz may have been more significant than you'd ever imagined. A new study reveals that children exposed to black-and-white film and TV are more likely to dream in greyscale throughout their life. Opinions have been divided on the colour of dreams for almost a century. Studies from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white. But the tides turned in the 60s, and later results suggested that up to 83% of dreams contain some colour. Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects' dreams, but differences between the studies prevented the researchers from drawing any firm conclusions. Whereas the later studies asked subjects to complete dream diaries as soon as they awoke, the earlier research used questionnaires completed in the middle of the day, so the subjects may have simply forgotten colour elements to their dreams and assumed they were greyscale. To lay the debate to rest, Eva Murzyn from the University of Dundee, UK, has incorporated both methods into one study. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12147 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The brain's response to food is linked to future weight gain in women, US researchers report in Science. Brain imaging showed those who had the weakest response to drinking a chocolate milkshake were most likely to have put on weight a year later. Poor responses to food were also associated with a gene controlling the brain's response to dopamine - a chemical controlling pleasure. It backs previous work showing obese people may get less pleasure from food. Two separate studies, one in 43 female students aged 18 to 22 and another in 33 teenage girls aged 14 to 18, measured activation in a certain part of the brain (the dorsal striatum) when drinking chocolate milkshake or a tasteless drink. The researchers also tested for a particular genetic variant - TaqA1 - which is linked to fewer dopamine receptors in the brain. A year later, those with the "blunt" responses to the milkshake and the genetic variant were most likely to gain weight. Dr Eric Stice, from the Oregon Research Institute, said although recent studies had suggested that obese people may experience less pleasure when eating and eat more to compensate, this is the first study to link that with future weight gain. "The evidence that this relation is even stronger for individuals at genetic risk for compromised signalling in these brain regions points to an important biological factor that appears to increase risk for obesity onset." (C)BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 12146 - Posted: 10.18.2008

By MELISSA FAY GREENE On a typical Monday morning at an atypical high school, teenage boys yanked open the glass doors to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. Half-awake, iPod wires curling from their ears, their backpacks unbuckled and their jeans baggy, the guys headed for the elevator. Arriving at Morning Meeting in the third-floor conference room, Stephen, his face hidden under long black bangs, dropped into a chair, sprawled across the table and went back to sleep. The Community School, or T.C.S., is a small private school for teenage boys with autism or related disorders. Sleep disturbances are common in this student body of 10, so a boy’s staggering need for sleep is respected. Nick Boswell, a tall fellow with thick sideburns, arrived and began his usual pacing along the windows that overlook the church parking lot and baseball diamond. Edwick, with spiky brown hair and a few black whiskers, tumbled backward with a splat into a beanbag chair on the floor. “O.K., guys, let’s talk about your spring schedules,” said Dave Nelson, the 45-year-old founding director. He wore a green polo shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers and had a buzz haircut and an open, suntanned face. After his son Graham, 19, was given a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (A.S.D.) as a young child, Nelson left the business world and went into teaching and clinical and counseling work. On that Monday, he was instantly interrupted. “I had a very bad night!” Edwick yelled from the floor. “Nightmares all night!” “What was disturbing you, Edwick?” Nelson asked. “What do you think?” Edwick cried in exasperation. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day!” “What’s upsetting about that?” Nelson asked. Edwick dropped his shoulders to relay how tiring it was to have to explain every little thing. “Leprechauns,” he yelled. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12145 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Reyhan Harmanci -- Brain scans presented as evidence in courts have had mixed results on legal proceedings. Some juries and judges have been swayed by the images; others less so. Below is a short list of prominent cases in which neuroscience played a part. United States vs. John W. Hinckley Jr. (1982) - One of the very first appearances of brain scans in court occurred during one of the most famous trials of the last century. Lawyers defending John Hinckley, who in 1981 attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, presented a CT scan to buttress evidence of Hinckley's insanity. While the scan's role in the verdict isn't precisely known, Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. People of New York vs. Weinstein (1992) - Lawyers for Herbert Weinstein, a 64-year-old Manhattan advertising executive who admitted to strangling his wife and throwing her off a high-rise, successfully argued that a positron emission tomographic (PET) scan showing an arachnoid cyst should be admitted as evidence to explain that Weinstein could not be held criminally responsible for his actions. The prosecutors were reported to have been worried about a jury seeing the visual evidence and settled on a lesser charge, manslaughter, on the final day of jury selection. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 12144 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Reyhan Harmanci, Chronicle Staff Writer -- Science and the American legal system historically have had a complicated relationship. While good science has driven solid law, junk science like eugenics and phrenology have influenced due process with often terrible consequences. Over the past decade, researchers have made huge advances in neuroscience, developing brain-imaging techniques that show not just the structure of the brain but its inner workings. According to experts in a new field called neurolaw, the effect of these breakthroughs on the legal system could be revolutionary. "The law is mainly about brains or, at least, the mind," said Stanford law Professor Hank Greely, one of the directors of the year-old MacArthur Foundation-funded Law and Neuroscience Project. "If my fist hits your chin, what, if anything, I was thinking is crucial. If I was in an epileptic fit, if I was thrown from a car when I hit you, you don't convict me of a crime. ... If I'm mad at you, we do." The degree to which brain scans will be admissible in court remains unclear, but experts already are pointing to precedent-setting cases and warning that neuroscience could alter the law, creating new methods and new visual evidence to determine criminal intent and criminal responsibility. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 12143 - Posted: 06.24.2010