She's working productively now, but Cynthia, who prefers not to reveal her last name, struggled for much of her adult life with schizophrenia, a mental illness that can cause confusion, paranoia, and hallucinations. She says one of the scariest symptoms was hearing voices. "Because sometimes the voices could have you to act out, you know in a certain behavior, you know, be explosive, yelling at somebody." Technically, her illness is called schizoaffective disorder because it also includes symptoms of bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia can run in families, as it does in Cynthia's family, but most cases seem to come out of the blue. Psychiatrist Jon McClellan of Seattle Children's Hospital says that's one reason finding a genetic cause of the illness is difficult. "Typically the way it works now–and it's common sense–you start with everybody that has the same syndrome, whether it's schizophrenia or autism or bipolar disorder, and then you try to see what genetic markers they share, with the assumption that because they have the same illness, they must share some similar genetic cause" But schizophrenia does not fit that model. So far, a single genetic cause has been elusive. McClellan and colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle published a paper in the journal Science explaining a different approach. They examined the entire genome of 150 people with schizophrenia and 268 controls, looking for repeats or deletions–called copy number variants–in small stretches of subjects' DNA. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11658 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Rachel Courtland Does the body make sure we're awake when it's time to eat?PunchstockYour stomach may truly have a mind of its own. A tiny area of the brain may switch sleep schedules to match up with mealtimes. It's been known for a long time that nocturnal creatures such as mice and bats flip their sleep schedules if food is only available during the day. But finding the parts of the brain responsible for the switch has proved difficult. In a paper published today in Science 1, a team led by Clifford Saper from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts suggests they have found the region of the brain responsible for the sleep-rhythm adjustment — a clump of cells known as the dorsomedial hypothalamic nucleus (DMH). This region sits close to the area of the brain that manages ordinary circadian responses to light and dark. The study shows that mice lacking a particular gene that acts in the DMH do not adjust to changes in feeding schedule. Reinstating the gene restored the behaviour. But some researchers in the field have serious concerns about the work. “On the face of it, it’s almost the final nail in saying DMH is the pacemaker, but under the surface there are people who strongly disagree,” says neuroscientist Masashi Yanagisawa of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who was not involved in the work. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 11657 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway It can be irritating to get a catchy song stuck in your head. Imagine if the music sounded so real that you were sure it was coming from a stereo, and the tune never went away. This is what it's like to suffer from musical hallucinosis, a mysterious condition that usually strikes elderly people with poor hearing. Ramon Mocellin, a psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia who treats patients with the disorder, tells New Scientist about the condition. Are people with the condition mentally ill? Hallucinations, which simply put are perceptions without a stimulus, can be symptoms of mental illness. Auditory hallucinations, in particular hearing voices, are one of the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia. It is, however, the nature of the hallucinations and the patient's understanding of them that point to the underlying problem. In this group of patients, the experience of hearing music when there is no external source of music is often accompanied by some degree of understanding that these experiences are not "real", that they originate from their own mind. In schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses, hallucinations are experienced as real, in the external world. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 11656 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Katharine Sanderson If you thought a high-pitched growl would come only from a tiny dog, you could be in for a nasty surprise. Researchers have shown that it isn’t the fundamental frequency, or pitch, of a growl that humans use to gauge a dog’s size — it’s another acoustic property related to the length of the vocal tract. It was known that within species, the formant — a property of a sound wave related to the length of the vocal tract — is used by animals to assess the size of other animals. But it had never been shown to happen between species. Anna Taylor, a doctoral student at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, set out to show that the formant is used between species as a cue for size by seeing how humans respond to growls from different-sized dogs. Her results are published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .1 Taylor visited the homes of more than 100 dogs, armed with nothing but a microphone, a steely stare, and the dog owners' consent. Taylor made the dogs growl defensively by invading the dog's space and staring it in the eyes. She recorded these snarly responses, 30 of which she went to on to manipulate for her experiment. That might sound like an unwise experiment for anyone who values their personal safety. But Taylor says that, as an experienced animal behaviourist, she managed to diffuse any encounters before they turned violent. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11655 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GINA KOLATA For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision. Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit. The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends. It was a time when the percentage of adult smokers in the United States fell to 21 percent from 45 percent. As the investigators watched the smokers and their social networks, they saw what they said was a striking effect — smokers had formed little social clusters and, as the years went by, entire clusters of smokers were stopping en masse. So were clusters of clusters that were only loosely connected. Dr. Christakis described watching the vanishing clusters as like lying on your back in a field, looking up at stars that were burning out. “It’s not like one little star turning off at a time,” he said. “Whole constellations are blinking off at once.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11654 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Feeling sad and bad about ourselves is not only unpleasant — it can also be hard on our wallets. Psychology researchers have found that these emotions can cost you three times more for the same item than being in a better mood, as this ScienCentral News video reports. Getting the blues could cost you more of the green. Psychology researchers have found that feeling sad and bad about ourselves can drive us to spend more on purchases. "There are these general hypotheses that if you're just in a negative mood, that that negativity will generalize to everything. But we see that that's not true with sadness," explains Cynthia Cryder, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. "Sad people tend to feel negative about themselves and then increase value of things that aren't associated with themselves like these commodities that they're buying," she says. Cryder and colleagues offered volunteers ten dollars to participate in what were presented as separate experiments that were combined for convenience. Participants first watched either a sad or an unemotional video and wrote an essay designed to reveal how they were feeling about themselves. Then they were asked how much a sports water bottle was worth and to name their price to buy it. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Motluk The way humans are conditioned by fearful stimuli is to some extent damped down by the body's own pain-relief system, a study suggests. The finding may shine light on the neural mechanisms behind anxieties, phobias and even post-traumatic stress disorder. Scientists have known for a long time that if you pair an innocuous stimulus (such as a tone) with something aversive (such as a shock to the feet), animals, including humans, will learn to show a "conditioned fear" response. With repetition, the innocuous stimulus alone brings on the fear response. Both the learning and the initiation of this response take place in a part of the brain known as the amygdala. One of the more perplexing features of the conditioned fear response is that, when the dreaded stimulus is something painful, people actually tend to experience less pain the more they are exposed to it. Work in rodents has revealed that this is because opioids – chemicals that have a morphine-like effect on the body – are called into operation during the conditioning and they end up blunting the pain. Blocking the opioids not only stops the pain from being lessened, but also intensifies the learning process. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11652 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mitchell Trust forms the foundation of healthy relationships, and now scientists are zeroing in on how the feeling is triggered by chemicals in the brain. A new study shows that the hormone oxytocin may spur us to trust others even after they have betrayed us by suppressing a region of the brain that signals fear. The findings could lead to a better understanding of social phobias and related disorders. Previous research has shown that oxytocin increases our feelings of trust and plays an important role in bonding with others (ScienceNOW, 1 June 2005). But the areas of the brain it acts on to produce that effect have remained a mystery. To get a better handle on how the hormone affects our noggins, Thomas Baumgartner, a neuroscientist at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and colleagues monitored the brain activity of 49 men while they engaged in a game involving trust and betrayal. In the game, the men were given money that they could share with another person who might increase the funds through investments and split the profits or betray them and keep all the money. When volunteers got a whiff of oxytocin via a nasal spray, their trust did not diminish even when the second player kept the money to himself half the time. In contrast, men who received a placebo spray reduced the amount of money they forked over. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11651 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Barbara Axt It may not be able to catch mice yet, but software developed in the US can perceive moving images in much the same way a cat's brain does. The researchers hope the work will one day lead to implants that make it possible for people to see without an optic nerve. Researchers at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, were motivated by the fact that, until now, models of the way brains respond to visual input used simple images like dots, bars and grids. They are typically unable to cope with the complex scenes a human would usually see. To try and develop a more sophisticated model, the team recorded the responses of 49 individual neurons in a part of a cat's brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). The LGN receives and processes visual information from the retina, via the optic nerve, before sending it on to the cerebral cortex. Using a mixture of simple stimuli, like dots and bars, and building up to more complex moving artificial scenes, the team tried to work out the basics of the LGN's response to visual features. Call in the catcamThe data made it possible to build a software model of the LGN that can approximate how the neurons would respond to real scenes. The model was tested against scenes recorded from a "catcam" camera attached to a cat's head. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 11650 - Posted: 06.24.2010

HealthDay News) -- Sleep deprivation can affect your ability to make sense of what you see, a study by neuroscience researchers at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore shows. Using MRI to measure blood flow in the brains of volunteers, the researchers found that even after sleep deprivation, participants had periods of near-normal brain function in which they were able to complete tasks quickly. However, periods of slow response and severe declines in visual processing were mixed in with these periods of normalcy. "Interestingly, the team found that a sleep-deprived brain can normally process simple visuals, like flashing checkerboards. But the 'higher visual areas' -- those that are responsible for making sense of what we see -- didn't function well. Herein lies the peril of sleep deprivation," study author Dr. Michael Chee, a professor of the neurobehavioral disorders program at Duke-NUS, said in a prepared statement. During these slow visual responses, the volunteers showed significant reductions in their higher visual cortex activity. At the same time, their frontal and parietal "control regions" were less able to make their usual connections. The mixture of sleep deprivation-related cognitive lapses and near normalcy demonstrate the competing effects of trying to remain awake while the brain is trying to power down for sleep, when it ordinarily becomes less responsive to sensory stimuli, Chee said. © 2008 U.S. News & World Report, L.P.

Keyword: Sleep; Vision
Link ID: 11649 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SARA REISTAD-LONG When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.” Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. “It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.” For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11648 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By DAVID DOBBS IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients. “If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.” Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication. But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly. Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that. He recently published a provocative paper suggesting that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 11647 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JOHN TIERNEY The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays. In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu. But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets — not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.) Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Obesity
Link ID: 11646 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Marco Iacoboni WHAT DO PEOPLE REALLY DO all day, every day? We “read” the world. And much of the world consists of other people. When a tennis player raises his racquet, for example, you know instantly whether he’s going to take a practice swing or throw his racket across the court in anger. We all make dozens—hundreds—of such distinctions every day. It is, quite literally, what we do, usually without a second thought. It all seems so ordinary. In fact, it’s extraordinary—and even more extraordinary that it feels ordinary! We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. They are at the core of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally. Mirror neurons are incredibly powerful; “vicarious” would not be a strong enough word to describe their effects. When we watch movie stars kiss onscreen, some of the cells firing in our brains are the same ones that fire when we kiss our lovers. And when we see someone else suffering or experiencing pain, mirror neurons help us to read her or his facial expression and make us viscerally feel the suffering or the pain of the other person. Those moments, I will argue, are the foundation of empathy (and possibly of morality). Research on mirror neurons gives anyone interested in how we understand one another some remarkable food for thought. © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2008

Keyword: Vision; Autism
Link ID: 11645 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don't really know what death is, as the last page of Max's will made clear: "If I'm still alive when I have grandchildren," it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer. On a recent Monday afternoon, Max, now 10, was supposed to come home on the schoolbus, but a counselor summoned his mother at 2:15. When Amy Blake arrived at school, her son gave her the note that had prompted the call. "Dear Mommy & Daddy," it read, "I am really feeling sad and depressed and lousy about myself. I love you but I still feel like I want to kill myself. I am really sad but I just want help to feel happy again. The reason I feel so bad is because I can't sleep at night. And dad yells at me to just sleep at night. But, I can't control it. It is not me that does control it. I don't know what controls it, but it is not me. I really really need some help, love Max!!!!! I Love you Mommy I Love you Daddy." This is the story of a family: a mother, a father and a son. It is, in many ways, a horror story. Terrible things happen. People scream and cry and hurt each other; they say and do things that they later wish they hadn't. The source of their pain is bipolar disorder, a mental illness that results in recurring bouts of mania and depression. It is an elusive disease that no parent fully understands, that some doctors do not believe exists in children, that almost everyone stigmatizes. But this is also a love story. Good things happen. A couple sticks together, a child tries to do better, teachers and doctors and friends help out. Max Blake and his parents may not have much in common with other families. They are a family nonetheless. That is what has mattered most to Amy and Richie Blake since Oct. 31, 1997, the day their son took his first ragged breath. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 11644 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A mutated gene has been discovered as the key behind epilepsy and mental retardation specific to women, thanks to new research at Adelaide’s Women’s & Children’s Hospital and the University of Adelaide, Australia. The world-first discovery, published today in Nature Genetics, shows that although men carry the ‘bad’ gene, only women are affected. The research has been led by Dr Leanne Dibbens and Associate Professor Jozef Gecz from the Department of Genetic Medicine, Women’s & Children’s Hospital, and the Discipline of Paediatrics at the University of Adelaide. The discovery is a result of a major international collaboration involving the Sanger Institute in Cambridge (UK), Wellcome Trust (UK) and many other collaborators in Australia, the United States, Ireland and Israel. Their work has linked, for the first time, a large family of genes known as protocadherins with a condition known as “epilepsy and mental retardation limited to females” (EFMR). Although a relatively uncommon disorder, the condition is hereditary, with successive generations of women affected. In just one of seven families studied across the world, 23 women were affected by the disorder across five generations. This discovery will now enable such families to benefit from genetic counselling, including screening for the genetic mutation at pregnancy. © 2008 Eureka! Science News

Keyword: Epilepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11643 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Monkeys genetically engineered to get the deadly neurological disease Huntington's could provide a unique way to test potential treatments because of their cognitive and genetic similarities to humans. "Monkey models may have a privilege over other animal models," says Anthony Chan, a biologist at Yerkes National Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, whose team engineered five rhesus macaque monkeys to churn out the mutant protein that causes Huntington's. Researchers routinely splice human genes in and out of mice to give them diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. But mice are of limited use when investigating brain diseases such as Huntington's: people who have it can't control their movement, speech or swallowing and their cognitive abilities deteriorate. But mice engineered to express the Huntington's protein don't jerk their muscles like humans do and it can be tough to gauge their cognitive decline. To see if primates might offer more insight, Chan's team used a virus to insert the Huntingon's gene into the DNA of 130 macaque eggs, along with a gene that makes a fluorescent green jellyfish protein. The researchers then fertilised the eggs and implanted them into eight mothers. All the monkeys born expressed the green protein, indicating that gene transfer was successful, and some already appear to have the monkey equivalent of Huntington's. The brains of one set of twins, who died a day after birth, were littered with clumps of a mutant protein found in humans with Huntington's, while the lone animal, who died a month after birth, jerked involuntarily. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Huntingtons; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11642 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A small molecule may have a big role in making the body clock tick, say Cambridge University researchers. Studies in mice have shown cAMP - a common signalling molecule - is involved in keeping the body clock "rhythms" going. The team hope to develop drugs that target cAMP to help shift workers, frequent flyers or those with sleep disorders reset their body clocks. But the research, published in Science, is still a long way from the clinic. The body's internal clock is a highly sensitive mechanism able to anticipate changes in the environment and regulate a host of body functions, from sleep patterns to metabolism and behaviour. Disruption of these "circadian" rhythms have been shown to be linked with insomnia, depression, heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. At the beginning of the circadian day, genes are switched on which then produce proteins which in turn go on to switch off the same genes at the end of the day. The proteins are broken down over the circadian night and the process starts all over again in the morning. Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology discovered that cAMP not only helps regulate the production of these proteins but that its own rhythm is also regulated by this "loop". In laboratory experiments in cells the proteins were engineered to light up so the researchers could easily monitor the circadian rhythms depending on how much protein was present dependent on the activity of cAMP. Study leader Dr Michael Hastings said in mice who by a quirk of genetics had a 20-hr body clock, they were able to reset the clock to 24 hours by using known compounds that are known to slow down the action of cAMP. "What's neat about cAMP is that it is very easily controlled by different medicines and compounds." (C)BBC

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 11641 - Posted: 05.17.2008

We humans have the ability to learn, to reason and solve problems. We're self-aware, and we’re also conscious of the presence, thoughts and feelings of others. We make tools and practice the art of deception. We're creative. We think abstractly. We have language and use it to express complex ideas. All of these are arguably signs of intelligence. Scientists may not agree on the best and fullest definition of intelligence – but they generally agree that humans are highly intelligent. Other members of the animal kingdom exhibit signs of intelligence as well, and some scientists might say the definition of animal vs. human intelligence is merely a matter of degree – a point that was brought home in 2005 when the London Zoo put “Homo sapiens” on display in the exhibit pictured here. Click the "Next" arrow above to learn about nine other species that stand out for their smarts. © 2008 MicrosoftMSN

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 11640 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALIYAH BARUCHIN The first thing you notice about 13-year-old Nora Leitner is the dark circles under her eyes. They stand in stark contrast to the rest of her appearance. At a glance she might be any petite, pretty tween girl, with her blond ponytail, elfin frame and thousand-watt smile, but the circles tell a different story. Nora looks as if she hasn’t slept in a month. In a sense, she hasn’t. Nora has epilepsy, and as with 30 percent of those with the disorder, her seizures are not controlled by existing treatments. She often has more than one seizure a day, mostly at night. Her seizures, called tonic-clonic (what used to be known as grand mal), cause her to lose consciousness for a full minute while her body convulses. While some people feel an “aura” of symptoms before a seizure, Nora’s seizures happen entirely without warning. When she seized at the top of a staircase in her home in Yardley, Pa., it was plain luck that her parents were at the bottom and caught her as she fell. Though she is on the brink of adolescence, she is rarely, if ever, left alone. Epilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide and more than 2.7 million people in the United States; half of all patients are children. Especially in its intractable form, also called refractory epilepsy, the disorder — and the side effects of epilepsy medications — can cause problems in learning, memory and behavior, and indelibly alter development. Epilepsy can also consume families, monopolizing their time, money and energy. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11639 - Posted: 06.24.2010