Bruce Bower It would come as no surprise to the late saxophonist and improvisational master John Coltrane, but when accomplished jazz musicians play free-form, their brain activity suggests a release of self-expression from conscious monitoring and self-censorship. Such neural activity may lie at the heart of musical improvisation and perhaps other improvisational feats, propose auditory scientist Charles J. Limb of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and neurologist Allen R. Braun of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md. "What we think is happening is that when you're telling your own musical story, you're shutting down neural impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas," says Limb, himself a trained jazz saxophonist. Moreover, jazz musicians immersed in improvisation display heightened brain activity in all sensory areas and in adjacent motor regions, the researchers say. Improvisers' brains "ramped up" to translate incoming sensations into novel musical performances, Limb suggests. ©2008 Society for Science & the Public.

Keyword: Hearing; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11391 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Eric Bland -- Imagine controlling a video game by thought alone. Two weeks ago at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Emotiv Systems showcased a new device, the Epoc, designed to help you do just that. While Emotiv's futuristic, dueling-octopus looking headset will initially be developed for video games, it could eventually be used in medicine, virtual reality, robotics, education and many other areas. The technology is based on electroencephalography, more commonly known as EEG. EEG has been around for over 100 years and is currently used to study sleep patterns and epilepsy by analyzing electrical activity in the brain. Until recently, though, EEG readings were regarded as too broad for most applications. The breakthrough, notes Emotiv Systems' President Tan Le, is in the software algorithm that decodes a person's thoughts by analyzing the electrical impulses in the brain. Many brain signals originate deep inside the brain and radiate outward. By time the signal reaches the outside of the brain, or cerebral cortex, the brain can appear to be firing randomly. According to Le, Emotiv's software algorithm "unfolds the cortex and takes us closer to the source of the signal." © 2008 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 11390 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Adolescent males and females appear to use somewhat different brain areas when processing language tasks, according to a study appearing this week in Neuropsychologia. The finding could lend support to different educational approaches for boys and girls. It's well established that girls score higher than boys in most tests involving language, such as verbal fluency and word memory. So cognitive scientists Douglas Burman and James Booth at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, sought to see if there are differences in brain activity that underlie these sex differences. The researchers administered several word tests to about 50 children aged 9 to 15, half of them girls. Paired words were either flashed on a screen or spoken, and subjects had to judge whether they rhymed, for example. Subjects' brain activity in response to each task was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures blood flow to various parts of the brain. The researchers found that girls showed significantly greater activation of the language areas of the brain than did boys. The boys showed greater activation of the specific sensory brain areas--visual or auditory--required by the task. The researchers conclude that girls rely more on universal language-processing machinery that operates regardless of how they receive the information, whereas boys process information depending on the sensory mode. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11389 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Michael Marshall Talk about getting under someone's skin. Impressionists seem to use visual images to "become" the people they are imitating, according to a brain-scanning study that started as a public demonstration and is now being expanded. Sophie Scott, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, asked impressionist Duncan Wisbey to lie in an fMRI brain scanner and repeat phrases in a variety of different voices – including the actor Cary Grant and the British TV chef Anthony Worrall Thompson. Other accents Wisbey impersonated included "baleful Cockney" and "tired Australian". As a control, he repeated the same phrases in his own voice. When Wisbey was imitating others, there was higher activity in his parietal lobe, sensory motor strip and supplementary motor areas of the brain. These areas are respectively involved in visual imagery, body representation and vocalisation. "For basic speech production, his results are normal," says Scott. "The extra activities [when doing impressions] are in very plausible areas. These areas are known to be active in mental imagery tasks." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11388 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Scurrying mice would seem to have little to do with human language, but new research has found that a slightly different version of a gene associated with human speech also governs movement in rodents. The finding gives new meaning to the phrase "loose lips," since the researchers who conducted the study believe that the human ability to speak evolved, in part, from the capacity to move the lips around efficiently. Scientists first began to zero in on the gene, called Foxp2, when they noticed that people with defects in it had trouble speaking. "Foxp2 is the only gene thus far to be linked to human speech and language," co-author Simon Fisher explained to Discovery News. "In humans who carry a [defect] in the gene, it leads to them having problems with learning to make rapid sequences of mouth movements." Fisher is a Royal Society research fellow and head of the Molecular Neuroscience group at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. Since Foxp2 in healthy humans is just a mutated form of a gene present in all vertebrates, including rodents, Fisher and his team introduced a defective form of the gene into mouse brains to see what would happen. © 2008 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11387 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ALEX BERENSON ANCHORAGE — Eli Lilly, the drug maker, systematically hid the risks and side effects of Zyprexa, its best-selling schizophrenia medicine, a lawyer for the State of Alaska said Wednesday in opening arguments in a lawsuit that contends the drug caused many schizophrenic patients to develop diabetes. The lawyer, Scott Allen, said that memorandums from Lilly executives showed that the company knew of Zyprexa’s dangers soon after the drug was introduced in 1996. But Lilly deliberately played down the side effects, Mr. Allen said, so that sales of Zyprexa would not be hurt. Lilly’s conduct was “reprehensible,” Mr. Allen said. In the suit, which is being heard in Alaska state court before Judge Mark Rindner, the state is asking Lilly to pay for the medical expenses of Medicaid patients who have contracted diabetes or other diseases after taking Zyprexa. The Alaska case is the first Zyprexa-related lawsuit to reach a jury trial and is being closely watched by other states and by federal prosecutors who are investigating Lilly for the way it marketed Zyprexa. A jury of seven women and five men is hearing the case in Anchorage. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 11386 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By KENNETH CHANG A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the scientists could not reproduce their original findings. The Harvard Medical School, where the researchers worked when the findings were published in the journal Nature in 2001, has begun a review of the research to determine if there is any evidence of misconduct. In the paper, the researchers described how they produced genetically engineered mice that produced a plant protein in certain smell-related neurons. The researchers had claimed that as the plant protein traveled between neurons, they could map out which neurons in the cortex of the brain received information from which smell receptors in the nose. In the retraction, published by Nature on Thursday, the researchers said, “Moreover, we have found inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data. We have therefore lost confidence in the reported conclusions.” “It’s disappointing,” Dr. Buck, who is now at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told the journal Nature in a news article about the retraction. “The important thing is to correct the literature.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11385 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MIKE STOBBE ATLANTA -- The parents of a girl who won a government settlement described how their hearts were broken as they watched their healthy, red-haired toddler transformed into an irritable, odd-behaving child after she got several childhood shots. "Suddenly my daughter was no longer there," said Terry Poling, the girl's mother, in a news conference Thursday. She and her husband Jon said their daughter Hannah, now 9, has been diagnosed with autism. The government has agreed to pay the Polings from a federal fund that compensates people injured by vaccines. The amount of the settlement hasn't been set yet. U.S. officials reject the idea that vaccines cause autism, but they say that in this case the shots worsened an underlying disorder that led to autism-like symptoms. The Polings said five simultaneous vaccinations in July 2000 led to Hannah's autistic behavior. She was about 18 months at the time. U.S. health officials have consistently maintained that vaccines are safe, and the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that there was no change in that position. "Nothing in any of this is going to change any of our recommendations" about the importance of vaccines for children, said Dr. Julie Gerberding. "Our message to parents is that immunization is lifesaving." © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11384 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Arran Frood Scientists have discovered that a drug already used to control a type of epileptic seizure can also prevent future seizures in rats. Although many medications are used to control the symptoms of epilepsy, this is the first time that a drug has successfully halted progression of the disease. Epilepsy is a chronic disease characterized by sudden, recurring seizures that can occur at any time. The condition manifests in many different ways. About 17% of children with epilepsy have 'absence seizures', or petit mal — short periods of vacant staring during which they are unresponsive to the outside world. This type of epilepsy is often inherited, and although it eventually disappears in many children, others go on to develop more severe forms of the disease. Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine in Connecticut looked at rats that had been genetically engineered to develop absence seizures and an anticonvulsant drug already approved to treat this condition, called ethosuximide. They gave one group of rats ethosuximide from the age of 21 days, before any epileptic symptoms had started, until the rats were 8 months old; a second group received the drug until the rats were only five months old; and a third control group received unmedicated water. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 11383 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Jonah Lehrer • Posted March 3, 2008 05:50 AM In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there." Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of 2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism. Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they argued; it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch." © Copyright 2005-2008 Seed Media Group, LLC.

Keyword: Robotics; Intelligence
Link ID: 11382 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan File this under futuristic (and perhaps a little scary): In a step toward one day perhaps deciphering visions and dreams, new research unveils an algorithm that can translate the activity in the minds of humans. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, report in Nature today that they have developed a method capable of decoding the patterns in visual areas of the brain to determine what someone has seen. Needless to say, the potential implications for society are sweeping. "This general visual decoder would have great scientific and practical use," the researchers say. "We could use the decoder to investigate differences in perception across people, to study covert mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even to access the visual content of purely mental phenomena such as dreams and imagery." The scientists say that previous attempts to extract "mental content from brain activity" only allowed them to decode a finite number of patterns. Researchers would feed image to an individual (or ask them to think about an object) one at a time and then look for a corresponding brain activity pattern. "You would need to know [beforehand], for each thought you want to read out, what kind of pattern of activity goes with it," says John-Dylan Haynes, a professor at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences that was not affiliated with the new work. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Vision
Link ID: 11381 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Our level of happiness throughout life is strongly influenced by the genes with which we were born, say experts. An Edinburgh University study of identical and non-identical twins suggests genes may control half the personality traits keeping us happy. The other half is linked to lifestyle, career and relationships. However, another expert said despite the research in the journal Psychological Science, we can still train ourselves to be more content. Psychologists have developed several methods to assess a person's personality type - and even their level of happiness. The Edinburgh study, in conjunction with researchers at the Institute for Medical Research in Queensland, Australia, looked at results from 900 pairs of twins. The idea behind twin studies is that, because identical twins are genetically exactly the same, while fraternal twins are not, it is possible, by comparing the results from the two groups to calculate how strongly influenced a particular trait is by genetics. In this case, the researchers looked for people who tended not to worry, and who were sociable and conscientious. All three of these separate characteristics have been linked by other research to an overall sense of happiness or well-being. The differences between the results from the identical and fraternal twins suggested that these traits were influenced up to 50% by genetic factors. Dr Alexander Weiss, from Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, who led the research, said: "Together with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is a core human desire. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11380 - Posted: 03.06.2008

By Nikhil Swaminathan Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now. Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise. The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method. The team was able to pinpoint the differences between the sexes by monitoring brain activity in a group of children (31 boys and 31 girls, ranging in age from nine to 15) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the kids tackled language tasks. In the exercises, two words were either flashed in front of, or spoken to them; they had to determine whether the pair was spelled similarly (omitting the first consonant, as in "pine" and "line") and whether the words rhymed, such as "gate" and "hate" or "pint" and "mint." In some cases, the words fit neither criterion: "jazz" and "list" being an example. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Language; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11379 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Devin Powell The butterfly has become a favorite cliché for a fresh start in life. Despite the drastic metamorphosis, however, scientists have disagreed about whether a butterfly makes a clean break with its caterpillar past. New research suggests that butterflies and moths come with mental baggage, painful memories left over from their lives as larvae. The tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) is a green caterpillar that eats the leaves of tobacco plants across the United States. After 3 weeks of feeding, the larva secretes a hard brown shell around itself--a pupa--and spends 18 to 24 hours as anatomical soup, breaking down and remodeling everything from its digestive tract to its central nervous system. The brown-and-yellow moth that finally emerges is seemingly brand-new inside and out, with wings, complex eyes, and a taste for flowers. Studies in fruit flies--which also spend their youth as larvae--have shown that the memories and neural connections of some insects can survive such a dramatic physical overhaul. It's not so clear-cut in the hornworm. Efforts to demonstrate persistent memory in M. sexta have relied on showing that adult moths retain a preference for the food they ate as larvae. Skeptics suggest that the moths are influenced not by their memories but by traces of food that cling to the pupae and come into contact with the emerging adults. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11378 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jennifer Viegas -- Human parents may worry about the effects of TV violence on their kids, but among male crayfish, watching a fight appears to actually chill aggression. That finding adds to the growing body of evidence that individuals, particularly males, of many species watch competitive encounters. Viewing such events either seems to stimulate further aggression, or lessen it. "Think about the problems some countries have during soccer matches," said Paul Moore, who co-authored the crayfish study. "Observing the competition, especially if there are a lot of fouls, tends to [intensify] the aggression in the audience." "The concept of watching fights and having this experience change the potential outcome of the next encounter is something that matches with both studies and anecdotal evidence," added Moore, who is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Bowling Green State University. Moore and colleagues Thomas Zuland and Rebecca Zuland-Schneider chose to study crayfish because the aggressive shellfish form dominance hierarchies and engage in ritualized fighting. © 2008 Discovery Communications

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 11377 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jim Giles JUST as the dispute over whether vaccines cause autism was dying down at last, a US government decision has added fresh fuel to the fire. Last week it emerged that the federal government is to compensate a couple who say that the regular childhood vaccines, given to their baby daughter in 2000, caused her to develop autism. Damages have not yet been set, but could exceed $1 million. Significantly, the government's decision says nothing about whether vaccines cause autism. Instead, government lawyers concluded only that vaccines aggravated a pre-existing cellular disorder in the child, causing brain damage that included features of autism. Nonetheless, anti-vaccination campaigners are claiming vindication. "It's official," wrote one autism blogger. "The sky has fallen. The fat lady has sung. Pigs are flying." Autism experts say it is unclear why compensation is being paid. Almost 5000 other families have lodged similar claims which are being considered by the court, but decades of research have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism and few experts thought that the government would pay up. “It's unclear why compensation is being paid. Decades of research have failed to find any link between vaccines and autism”Scientists say there is nothing in the medical history of the child in question to change that thinking. "I'm stunned that they decided to settle," says Jay Gargus, a paediatrician at the University of California, Irvine. Exactly why the US government did so is still being debated, as details of the decision have been sealed and the Department of Health and Human Services won't comment. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11376 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith Scientists have developed a way of ‘decoding’ someone’s brain activity to determine what they are looking at. “The problem is analogous to the classic ‘pick a card, any card’ magic trick,” says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, who led the study. But while a magician uses a ploy to pretend to ‘read the mind’ of the subject staring at a card, now researchers can do it for real using brain-scanning instruments. “When the deck of cards, or photographs, has about 120 images, we can do better than 90% correct,” says Gallant. The technique is a step towards being able to see the contents of someone’s visual experiences. “You can imagine using this for dream analysis, or psychotherapy,” says Gallant. Already the results are helping to provide neuroscientists with a more accurate model of how the human visual system works. If the work can be broadened to developing more general models of how the brain responds to things beyond visual stimuli, such brain scans could help to diagnose disease or monitor the effects of therapy. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging; Vision
Link ID: 11375 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JULIA MOSKIN IN 1968 a Chinese-American physician wrote a rather lighthearted letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. He had experienced numbness, palpitations and weakness after eating in Chinese restaurants in the United States, and wondered whether the monosodium glutamate used by cooks here (and then rarely used by cooks in China) might be to blame. The consequences for the restaurant business, the food industry and American consumers were immediate and enormous. MSG, a common flavor enhancer and preservative used since the 1950s, was tagged as a toxin, removed from commercial baby food and generally driven underground by a new movement toward natural, whole foods. “It was a nightmare for my family,” said Jennifer Hsu, a graphic designer whose parents owned several Chinese restaurants in New York City in the 1970s. “Not because we used that much MSG — although of course we used some — but because it meant that Americans came into the restaurant with these suspicious, hostile feelings.” Even now, after “Chinese restaurant syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people), the ingredient has a stigma that will not go away. But then, neither will MSG. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 11374 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY In marketing as in medicine, perception can be everything. A higher price can create the impression of higher value, just as a placebo pill can reduce pain. Now researchers have combined the two effects. A $2.50 placebo, they have found, works better one that costs 10 cents. The finding may explain the popularity of some high-cost drugs over cheaper alternatives, the authors conclude. It may also help account for patients’ reports that generic drugs are less effective than brand-name ones, though their active ingredients are identical. The research is being published on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. The investigators had 82 men and women rate the pain caused by electric shocks applied to their wrist, before and after taking a pill. Half the participants had read that the pill, described as a newly approved prescription pain reliever, was regularly priced at $2.50 per dose. The other half read that it had been discounted to 10 cents. In fact, both were dummy pills. The pills had a strong placebo effect in both groups. But 85 percent of those using the expensive pills reported significant pain relief, compared with 61 percent on the cheaper pills. The investigators corrected for each person’s individual level of pain tolerance. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11373 - Posted: 06.24.2010

JERUSALEM - When Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, he may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor. Writing in the British philosophy journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared. The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness,” Shanon hypothesized. “In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings,” Shanon wrote. “On such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God.” © 2008 Microsoft

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11372 - Posted: 06.24.2010