By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO - Pilfered fruit brazenly plucked under the farmer's gaze may be the secret to stolen love, at least for wild male chimpanzees and their consorts, British researchers said Tuesday. Wild chimps in West Africa pinch fruits from local farms to impress the lady chimps, and it seems to pay off, said Dr. Kimberley Hockings of the University of Stirling's department of psychology. "The adult male who shared most with this female engaged in more consortships with her and received more grooming from her than the other adult males, even the alpha male," said Hockings, whose study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One. "Such daring behavior may be considered an attractive trait," Hockings said in comments e-mailed to Reuters. She and colleagues studied crop-raids made by wild male chimpanzees in the West African village of Bossou in the Republic of Guinea. The study is the only recorded example of routine sharing of plant foods by chimps who are not related, the researchers said. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10721 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ker Than Like memory, human intelligence is probably not confined to a single area in the brain, but is instead the result of multiple brain areas working in concert, a new review of research suggests. The review by Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico proposes a new theory that identifies areas in the brain that work together to determine a person's intelligence. "Genetic research has demonstrated that intelligence levels can be inherited, and since genes work through biology, there must be a biological basis for intelligence," Haier said. The review of 37 imaging studies, detailed online in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, suggests that intelligence is related not so much to brain size or a particular brain structure, but to how efficiently information travels through the brain. "Our review of imaging studies identifies the stations along the routes intelligence information processing takes," Haier said. "Once we know where the stations are, we can study how they relate to intelligence." The new theory might eventually lead to treatments for low IQ, the researchers say, or to ways of boosting the IQ of people with normal intelligence. © 2007 MSNBC.com © 2007 Microsoft

Keyword: Intelligence
Link ID: 10720 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mary Muers Researchers who having been tracking a group of children since birth have found that the level of testosterone they were exposed to in the womb is linked to whether they show autistic traits throughout childhood. The children are now 8 years old. Questionnaires filled out by their parents show that those who had experienced higher levels of testosterone in the womb generally have better pattern recognition and numerical skills, such as remembering car number plates, but are less keen on socialising. None have been diagnosed with autism, but these are traits which, when taken to an extreme, are often present in autistic children. The researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, measured the level of testosterone in samples of amniotic fluid from 235 women who had tests for other clinical reasons, and have been following how some of the children develop ever since. When 12 months old, babies who had experienced higher levels of testosterone in the womb tended to look at their mother less often, and at 18 months, they were more likely to have a smaller vocabulary than the others, the team has previously reported. This latest update on their progress, presented by Simon Baron-Cohen and Bonnie Auyeung at the British Association's Festival of Science in York today, shows that the correlation between foetal hormone levels and autistic-trait behaviour continues as the children grow up. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10719 - Posted: 06.24.2010

London, : A US company has demonstrated a motorized wheelchair that moves when the operator thinks of particular words. The wheelchair works by intercepting signals sent from the brain to the voice box, even when no sound is actually produced. Ambient, the company behind the wheelchair says, the gadget could prove a boon for people with spinal injuries or neurological problems like cerebral palsy or motor neurone disease. It could also help people operate computers and other equipment despite having serious problems with muscle control, it said. However, it added, the system would only work if a person is able to control his/her larynx, or voice box. Ambient co-founders Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman said the system worked via a sensor-laden neckband, which eavesdropped on electrical impulses sent to larynx muscles. It then relayed the signals, via an encrypted wireless link, to a nearby computer, which decoded them, matching them to a series of pre-recorded “words” determined during training exercises, they said. These “words” could then be used to direct the motorised wheelchair, they added. © Zee News Limited.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 10718 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Seward Yawning may reveal more about a person than their boredom threshold, according to research. A susceptibility to contagious yawning may actually be a sign of a high-level of social empathy. Although many species yawn, only some humans and possibly their close animal relatives find yawning infectious, suggesting the reason is psychological. The University of Leeds research was presented at the British Association's Festival of Science in York. "Contagious yawning is a very interesting behaviour," said Dr Catriona Morrison, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Leeds, who is leading the work. "You don't need a visual cue, you don't even need an auditory cue - you can just read about it or think about it and it gets you going. We believe that contagious yawning indicates empathy. It indicates an appreciation of other people's behavioural and physiological state," she added. Recent neuro-imaging has shown that the same area of the brain is involved when reacting to yawning and when considering others. The University of Leeds team carried out an experiment on students studying psychology and engineering to test this concept. Each student was shown to an occupied waiting room where their companion was actually a researcher who yawned 10 times in 10 minutes. The scientists recorded how often the students yawned in response. Each participant was then asked to complete a test of their empathetic skills, in which they analysed pictures of eyes and recorded the emotions shown. The results showed that those who had succumbed to the most contagious yawning also scored higher on the empathy tests. (C)BBC

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10717 - Posted: 09.11.2007

The Canadian Press An antidepressant appears to work as well as the most commonly prescribed antipsychotic drug in treating agitation and aggressive behaviour in people with Alzheimer's — minus the severe side-effects, a Canadian study suggests. Researchers at Toronto's Baycrest geriatric centre and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health teamed up to conduct a head-to-head trial of the antidepressant citalopram (Celexa) and the antipsychotic risperidone (Risperdal) in non-depressed patients with dementia. During the 12-week study, 53 patients were treated with citalopram, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor or SSRI, and 50 received risperidone. Researchers found that the two medications were almost equally effective in controlling psychotic behaviour in patients. Yet citalopram did not cause the often-severe adverse effects of risperidone, which can include unwanted sedation, increased confusion and the development of Parkinson's-like symptoms. "But the thing that was the biggest surprise to us was that we didn't hypothesize this," said principal researcher Dr. Bruce Pollock, a geriatric psychiatrist at Baycrest. © CBC 2007

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 10716 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAURA NOVAK As an infant, Raea Gragg was withdrawn and could not make eye contact. By preschool she needed to smell and squeeze every object she saw. “She touched faces and would bring everything to mouth,” said her mother, Kara Gragg, of Lafayette, Calif. “She would go up to people, sniff them and touch their cheeks.” Specialists conducted a battery of tests. The possible diagnoses mounted: autism spectrum disorder, neurofibromatosis, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorder. A behavioral pediatrician prescribed three drugs for attention deficit and depression. The only constant was that Raea, now 9, did anything she could to avoid reading and writing. Though she had already had two eye exams, finding her vision was 20/20, this year a school reading specialist suggested another. And this time the ophthalmologist did what no one else had: he put his finger on Raea’s nose and moved it in and out. Her eyes jumped all over the place. Within minutes he had the diagnosis: convergence insufficiency, in which the patient sees double because the eyes cannot work together at close range. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Autism
Link ID: 10715 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CAROL W. BERMAN, M.D. My patient, a 37-year-old homemaker, gazed at the man in the red plaid shirt as he sat on the couch in her living room. “Who are you?” she asked. There was something familiar about him. He wore her husband’s boots, but the shirt made him look like a truck driver. “Yeah, and who are you?” the man replied with a laugh. “Come here and give me a kiss.” She gave the man a peck on the cheek, but she felt guilty, fearing that her husband would arrive at any moment and admonish her. Not only did the man want a kiss — he also wanted sex! Discouraging him, she sat down to talk. The man spoke just like her husband and knew personal facts about her. It occurred to her that her husband had been mysteriously replaced by this fellow. How it happened she had no idea; she knew only that it had. My patient had a history of schizoaffective disorder, similar to schizophrenia, but with more emotional range. And when she told me of this incident at her weekly visit the next day, I worried that her psychosis was recurring. “Have you been taking your medicine?” I asked. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10714 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words, and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world’s most famous talking bird. But last week Alex, an African gray parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of his life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31. Scientists have long debated whether any other species can develop the ability to learn human language. Alex’s language facility was, in some ways, more surprising than the feats of primates that have been taught American Sign Language, like Koko the gorilla, trained by Penny Patterson at the Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org in Woodside, Calif., or Washoe the chimpanzee, studied by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner at the University of Nevada in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977, when Dr. Pepperberg, then a doctoral student in chemistry at Harvard, bought Alex from a pet store, scientists had little expectation that any bird could learn to communicate with humans, as opposed to just mimicking words and sounds. Research in other birds had been not promising. But by using novel methods of teaching, Dr. Pepperberg prompted Alex to learn scores of words, which he could put into categories, and to count small numbers of items, as well as recognize colors and shapes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 10713 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ELISSA ELY, M.D. BOSTON — The patient’s decline was ruthless. He became forgetful in his early 50s. By the time he saw a neurologist a few years later, he could not recall how to write in cursive, and confused pictures of a cookie and a whistle, a bed and a sandbox. A few years after that, he could no longer dress himself or speak fluently, and had developed muscle jerks that required medication to control. Diagnostically, he showed symptoms of several types of dementia, but no hallmarks that would narrow the cause to only one. He died in his early 60s. On a Friday morning a week later, Dr. Jeffrey T. Joseph, a pathologist, was gazing at the patient’s brain, waiting for neurology residents to arrive and gaze with him. He pondered whether to begin the dissection with a traditional vertical slice down the height of the brain. “I might cut coronally, might cut horizontally,” he said, thoughtfully. “I haven’t decided yet.” From a distance, brain autopsies seem an afterthought on life. Insurance does not cover them. They serve no lucrative purpose, so hospitals have a financial disincentive to do them. As a result, the field of neuropathology is shrinking, and its atrophy may diminish the entire field of neurology. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10712 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erin Allday, A word of warning: This article might be a little irritating. It'll start with a small itch on your nose, perhaps. Then the itch might move to the top of your foot, behind your knee or in that unreachable spot in the middle of your back. The power of suggestion is a funny thing when it comes to itch. Like a yawn, sometimes just looking at someone else scratching - or thinking about an itch - can make us itchy all over. But itch can be a lot more than a pesky annoyance. It can be a symptom of major illness, and it can become so debilitating that it nearly ruins lives. Several hundred experts in itch from all over the world are meeting in San Francisco this week to talk about everything from that little itch on your back to chronic itchiness that leaves sufferers unable to sleep. "We want to help people realize that itching can be really severe and a terrible problem, almost as bad as chronic pain," said Earl Carstens, a professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis who is organizing the Fourth International Workshop for the Study of Itch, which began Sunday at the Hilton San Francisco. "It's not usually life threatening, but it can be. I've read about cases of people who have such severe chronic itching that it drives them to suicide." © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10711 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JEFFREY KLUGER It's harder than you think to say hello to your mother--at least in terms of the work your brain has to do. A glimpse of Mom must first register on your occipital lobes as a pattern of light and shadow. From there it is relayed to your memory center, where it is identified by comparison with every other face you've ever seen. You must then summon the speech centers in your frontal lobes, which recruit your breath and muscles and at last allow you to utter the words Hi, Mom. The fact that recognizing and acknowledging a familiar person is such a complex thing made it all the more remarkable in early August when scientists announced that a 38-year-old man had managed to pull it off. The man, whose identity was withheld, had suffered severe brain damage in a 1999 mugging and spent the past eight years in the dark cognitive well that neuroscientists call a minimally conscious state. Improbably, however, he can now greet both his parents. He can identify objects, hold very brief conversations and watch movies, and he recently recited the first 16 words of the Pledge of Allegiance. "I told him to say the pledge, and he did," says neuropsychologist Joseph Giacino of the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute and the New Jersey Neuroscience Institute. "I didn't have to cue him." None of this is the stuff of functioning adulthood, but all of it is huge for a person who was never supposed to manage anything like it again. And all of it is a result of the growing therapeutic science of deep-brain stimulation (DBS). Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic inserted a pair of fine wires into the mugging victim's brain last year, threading them down to the thalamus, a deep, intact structure that could, in theory, jump- start the surviving circuits in the damaged cerebral cortex above. © 2007 Time Inc

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 10710 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Seward The mystery of how we read a sentence has been unlocked by scientists. Previously, researchers thought that, when reading, both eyes focused on the same letter of a word. But a UK team has found this is not always the case. In fact, almost 50% of the time, each of our eyes locks on to different letters simultaneously. At the BA Festival of Science in York, the researchers also revealed that our brain can fuse two separate images to obtain a clear view of a page. Sophisticated eye-tracking equipment allowed the team to pinpoint which letter a volunteer's eyes focused on, when reading 14-point font from one metre away. Rather than the eyes moving smoothly over text, they make small jerky movements, focusing on a particular word for an instant and then moving along the sentence. Periods when the eyes are still are called fixations. Professor Simon Liversedge, from the University of Southampton, said: "We found that in a very substantial number of fixations that people make when they read, they aren't looking at the same letter." Instead, the eyes often focussed on different letters in the same word, about two characters apart, he said. "They could be uncrossed, in the sense that the two lines of sight are not crossed when you look at a word, or alternatively the two lines of sight may be crossed," he added. (C)BBC

Keyword: Language; Vision
Link ID: 10709 - Posted: 09.10.2007

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. WATERLOO, Sierra Leone — Although the rainy season was coming on fast, Zainabu Sesay was in no shape to help her husband. Ditches had to be dug to protect their cassava and peanuts, and their mud hut’s palm roof was sliding off. But Mrs. Sesay was sick. She had breast cancer in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the tumor had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges. “It bone! It booonnnne lie de fi-yuh!” she said of the pain — it burns like fire — in Krio, the blended language spoken in this country where British colonizers resettled freed slaves. No one had directly told her yet, but there was no hope — the cancer was also in her lymph glands and ribs. Like millions of others in the world’s poorest countries, she is destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs — one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10708 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The war in Iraq is not over, but one legacy is already here in this city and others across America: an epidemic of brain-damaged soldiers. Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science. "I've been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they're saying to me, 'We're seeing things we've never seen before,'" said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University's brain injury rehabilitation program. Doctors also are realizing that symptoms overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that both must be treated. Odd as it may seem, brain injury can protect against PTSD by blurring awareness of what happened. But as memory improves, emotional problems can emerge: One of the first "graduates" of Vanderbilt's program committed suicide three weeks later. "Of all the ones here, he would not have been the one we would have thought," Schneider said. "They called him the Michelangelo of Fort Campbell" _ a guy who planned to go to art school. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 10707 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Could people one day evolve to eat rich food while remaining perfectly slim and svelte? This may not be so wild a fantasy. It is becoming clear that the human genome does respond to changes in diet, even though it takes many generations to do so. Researchers studying the enzyme that converts starch to simple sugars like glucose have found that people living in countries with a high-starch diet produce considerably more of the enzyme than people who eat a low-starch diet. The reason is an evolutionary one. People in high-starch countries have many extra copies of the amylase gene which makes the starch-converting enzyme, a group led by George H. Perry of Arizona State University and Nathaniel J. Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported yesterday in the journal Nature Genetics. The production of the extra copies seems to have been favored by natural selection, according to a genetic test, the authors say. If so, the selective pressure could have occurred when people first started to grow cereals like wheat and barley at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, or even much earlier. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10706 - Posted: 09.10.2007

Roxanne Khamsi A brain scan might one day predict your voting patterns. That is the implication of a study that found different brain activity among liberals and conservatives asked to carry out a simple button-pushing test. The study implies that our political diversity may be the result of neurological differences. Researchers have long known that conservatives and liberals score differently in psychological profiling tests. Now they are beginning to gather evidence about why this might be. David Amodio of New York University, US, and his colleagues recruited 43 subjects for their test. They asked the participants to rate their political persuasion on a scale of -5 to 5, with the lowest number representing the most liberal extreme and the highest number representing the most conservative score. The participants then had to sit before a computer screen and press one of two buttons depending on whether they saw an "M" or a "W". They had half a second to make each response, so there was a great deal of pressure to react quickly. Out of the 500 trials that each subject completed, he or she was presented with the same letter 80% of the time. This meant that the participants felt compelled to press the same button repeatedly. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10705 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ewen Callaway Spit might have helped human evolution by enabling our ancestors to harvest more energy from starch than their primate cousins. Compared with chimpanzees, humans boast many more copies of the gene that makes salivary amylase — a saliva enzyme that breaks down starch into digestible sugars. And carbohydrate-loving societies carry more copies of the gene than those that follow low-carbohydrate diets, claims a new study in Nature Genetics1. This strongly implies that people have adapted to their local environment. "High starch foods and a high starch diet have been an important evolutionary force for humans," says George Perry, an anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who led the new analysis. The change could possibly have supported the growth in hominin brains that occurred some two million years ago, says Nate Dominy, an anthropologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz involved in the study. "Our diet must have had some shift to feed that brain," says Dominy, who thinks root vegetables like African tubers allowed large-brained humans to flourish. Starch, which helps to make a baked potato mushy, is an important source of food for modern humans. But without amylase in the saliva, man can make little use of such complex carbohydrates - enzymes elsewhere in the body are not as good at breaking the compounds down. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 10704 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ARTHUR MAX VENLO, Netherlands -- Do you find your fingers drifting into your mouth when you're nervous, anxious or just bored? Are your nails chewed to splinters or your cuticles gnawed to bleeding pulp? Nail biting is more than a bad habit. Doctors say it is one of the most common symptoms of stress or of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially for teenagers or younger children, and can lead to disfigurement and serious infection. Alain-Raymond van Abbe, a former health industry and cosmetics promoter, estimates the world's pathological nail biters number 600 million or more. He saw that onychophagy was so widespread that he has opened a business devoted to a cure. A car carrying an advertisement of the nail biting clinic with a slogan saying: "Stop nail biting now!" drives in front of the nail biting clinic, O-Centrum, in Venlo, Netherlands, Monday, Aug. 20, 2007. Alain-Raymond van Abbe, a former health industry and cosmetics promoter, estimates the world's pathological nail biters number 600 million or more. He saw that onychophagy was so widespread that he has opened a clinic devoted to curing nail biters. "In four weeks nail biting can be over, and over forever," he says. (AP Photo/Ermindo Armino) (Ermindo Armino - Associated Press) Studies show around 45 percent of adolescents nibble their nails. That drops to about 20 percent as young adults learn to cope with their anxieties or become too embarrassed by their self-inflicted deformity. © 2007 The Associated Press

Keyword: Stress; OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 10703 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matthew Swulinski was steps from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 when he managed to take a series of haunting photographs. "It was too late for me to run away, it was too late for me to hide anywhere," he recalls. "I was actually standing and waiting for this to be over." His photos are a physical record of what he experienced that day, but neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps at New York University and graduate student Tali Sharot, now a post doctoral fellow at University College London, studied people like Swulinski to learn about a different kind of snapshot: the so-called "flashbulb memory," a vivid moment in time that we seem to remember as if it were a photograph. Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “flashbulb memory” in 1977 to describe people’s uncanny ability to recount where they were and what they were doing on November 22, 1963, the moment they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Swulinksi describes his September 11, 2001 experience with extra intensity because he was at Ground Zero. “I remember parts of the building falling around me everywhere. And I was just basically hit by glass– it’s kind of a miracle. And later – that’s the moment I realized that I’m in danger– and after the second plane, I left the area. I was still involved because of the falling towers and the cloud that appeared after that. The clouds actually covered me.” © ScienCentral, 2000-2007

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Stress
Link ID: 10702 - Posted: 06.24.2010