By Shankar Vedantam "You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves. As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!" The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable. Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good. Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 10338 - Posted: 06.24.2010

DURHAM, N.C. -- The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. The particular notes used in music sound right to our ears because of the way our vocal apparatus makes the sounds used in all human languages, said Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology. It's not something one can hear directly, but when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves said. The work appeared online May 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Download at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703140104v1) Purves and co-authors Deborah Ross and Jonathan Choi tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music.

Keyword: Hearing; Language
Link ID: 10337 - Posted: 05.26.2007

Drinking four or more cups of coffee a day may cut the risk of having a painful attack of gout, say Canadian scientists. A University of British Columbia team found blood uric acid levels - which are linked to the condition - were lower in people who drank more coffee. But tea had no measurable effect, suggesting that the active ingredient was not caffeine. The work is published in the journal Arthritis Care and Research. Gout affects about 600,000 people in the UK, with numbers thought to be increasing in recent years. Its symptoms, which are often joint pains in the lower limbs, happen when uric acid crystallises out of the blood into the joints. Drinking too much beer, or eating too much red meat are thought to be to blame for many cases. The main way to tackle the condition is to take anti-inflammatory pills, change diet and drink more water, or in more severe cases, to take more powerful drugs to reduce uric acid levels in the blood. The latest research looked at the eating habits of 14,000 men and women between 1988 and 1994. This information was compared with the results from blood tests for uric acid. The researchers found that those who drank four or more coffees a day were more likely to have a much lower uric acid level in the blood, compared with those who drank one or fewer cups. Tea had no measurable effect but decaffeinated coffee did, suggesting that the active ingredient was not caffeine. (C)BBC

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10336 - Posted: 05.26.2007

By Nikhil Swaminathan Without hearing a word, a new study asserts, a four-month-old child can tell when speakers switch to another language, simply by observing changes in facial contortions, such as shapes made by the mouth as well as mannerisms, like the head-bobbing rhythm that varies between different tongues. It has been well documented since the late 1980s that very young children can discriminate between languages when they are spoken, but researchers wanted to determine if they could also recognize changes based on a speaker's gestures. Toward that end, researchers from the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) in Vancouver separated 36 infants into three separate groups of four-, six- and eight-month-olds. They had the babies sit on their mothers' laps and watch bilingual speakers—all women—on a muted television screen read from a children's book in either English or French. Working first with babies from homes where only English was spoken, researchers began a video with a storyteller who read in one language, then switched to reading in the other tongue when the baby started to lose interest. After the transition, the two youngest sets of infants showed renewed interest, indicating they recognized that something had changed, piquing their curiosity. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10335 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Mohamad Hassoun Artificial neural networks are parallel computational models, comprising densely interconnected adaptive processing units. These networks are composed of many but simple processors (relative, say, to a PC, which generally has a single, powerful processor) acting in parallel to model nonlinear static or dynamic systems, where a complex relationship exists between an input and its corresponding output. A very important feature of these networks is their adaptive nature, in which "learning by example" replaces "programming" in solving problems. Here, "learning" refers to the automatic adjustment of the system's parameters so that the system can generate the correct output for a given input; this adaptation process is reminiscent of the way learning occurs in the brain via changes in the synaptic efficacies of neurons. This feature makes these models very appealing in application domains where one has little or an incomplete understanding of the problem to be solved, but where training data is available. One example would be to teach a neural network to convert printed text to speech. Here, one could pick several articles from a newspaper and generate hundreds of training pairs—an input and its associated, "desired" output sound—as follows: the input to the neural network would be a string of three consecutive letters from a given word in the text. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Robotics
Link ID: 10334 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Boys with the longest ring fingers relative to their index fingers tend to excel in math, according to a new study. In girls, shorter ring fingers predict better verbal skills. The link, according to the researchers, is that testosterone levels in the womb influence both finger length and brain development. Scientists have been interested for years in the observation that ratios of finger lengths differ in men and women. In men, the ring (fourth) finger is usually longer than the index (second); their so-called 2D:4D ratio is lower than 1. In females, the two fingers are more likely to be the same length. Because of this sex difference, some scientists believe that a low ratio could be a marker for higher prenatal testosterone levels, although it's not clear how the hormone might influence finger development. The 2D:4D ratio has also been fingered in connection with brain-related characteristics--most often in males--such as depression, left-handedness, musical ability, and homosexuality. In the latest such study, psychologist Mark Brosnan and colleagues at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom photocopied the hands of 74 boys and girls aged 6 and 7. They compared the measurements of the second and fourth fingers with the children's scores on a standard U.K. test of math and literacy. In boys, the lower the ratio, the better their math scores, the team reports in the May issue of the British Journal of Psychology. The boys with the lowest ratios also were the ones whose abilities were most skewed in the direction of math rather than literacy. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10333 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A popular stereotype that boys are better at mathematics than girls undermines girls' math performance because it causes worrying that erodes the mental resources needed for problem solving, new research at the University of Chicago shows. The scholars found that the worrying undermines women's working memory. Working memory is a short-term memory system involved in the control, regulation and active maintenance of limited information needed immediately to deal with problems at hand. They also showed for the first time that this threat to performance caused by stereotyping can also hinder success in other academic areas because mental abilities do not immediately rebound after being compromised by mathematics anxiety. "This may mean that if a girl takes a verbal portion of a standardized test after taking the mathematics portion, she may not do as well on the verbal portion as she might do if she had not been recently struggling with math-related worries and anxiety," said Sian Beilock, Assistant Professor in Psychology and lead investigator in the study. "Likewise, our work suggests that if a girl has a mathematics class first thing in the morning and experiences math-related worries in this class, these worries may carry implications for her performance in the class she attends next," she added. The results of the study appear in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 10332 - Posted: 05.25.2007

By Christopher Lee In the 43 years since the U.S. surgeon general warned of the dangers of cigarette smoking, the percentage of Americans who light up has been cut in half, tobacco companies have paid billions of dollars in legal settlements and smoking has come to be widely reviled as a nasty habit. But that is not enough -- not when there are 440,000 deaths a year from tobacco use and $89 billion annually in smoking-related health costs, the influential Institute of Medicine said yesterday in a report that called for several new measures to further drive down tobacco use. The institute is a branch of the National Academies, a scientific organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific and technical issues. "There are still 45 million cigarette smokers and another 9.7 million users of other tobacco products," said Richard J. Bonnie, a University of Virginia law professor who led the panel of 14 experts that produced the report. "Most of them regret having taken up the habit and struggle to quit. The nation's goal should be to reduce tobacco use so substantially that it is no longer a significant public health problem." To that end, the report calls for state and local governments to ban smoking in malls, restaurants and virtually all other public indoor settings, and for the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the marketing, packaging and sale of tobacco products. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10331 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Tierney There’s more encouraging scientific news on the use of marijuana to alleviate pain: a study has shown that effective doses of cannabis can be delivered with vaporizers, which enable patients to get the therapeutic benefits without inhaling harmful smoke. Meanwhile, though, researchers are still struggling against their biggest bureaucratic obstacle, the Drug Enforcement Administration. On Wednesday they made their case at a press conference on the sidewalk outside the headquarters of D.E.A., which still hasn’t followed the recommendation of its own administrative law judge in a medical-marijuana case. In February, as I noted, the judge concluded “that there is currently an inadequate supply of marijuana available for research purposes” and ruled that Lyle Craker, a professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Massachusetts, should be given permission by the D.E.A. to grow it for researchers. The ruling became final last week, but the D.E.A. still hasn’t acted and refuses to comment on the issue, as the A.P. and the Washington Post report in articles about the press conference. Marc Kaufman of the Post quotes a researcher who joined Dr. Craker on the sidewalk: “The D.E.A. has an opportunity here to live up to its rhetoric, which has been that marijuana advocates should work on conducting research rather than filing lawsuits,” said Richard Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has fought for years for access to government-controlled supplies to test possible medical uses of marijuana. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10330 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith Even before they begin to speak themselves, a young baby can tell when you're speaking a different language just by looking at your face. Canadian researchers came to these conclusions after studying videos of babies from monolingual and bilingual homes. But unless they are growing up in a bilingual home, babies lose this skill by the time they are eight months old. The study shows the importance of visual cues, such as the shape of the mouth, for babies in the early stages of acquiring language. Babies are good at linking certain bits of information about speech — such as the shape of the mouth and the sound that accompanies it — and can distinguish between mouths making 'ooh' and 'ee' sounds, for example. But this is the first time it's been shown that they can distinguish different languages from visual cues alone. But this ability soon disappears, however, if babies are exposed to only one language home. This came as a surprise to the researchers. "I really expected this ability to progressively get better over the first year of life," says Whitney Weikum of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 10329 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Genetics researchers have confirmed that people with a different form of a certain gene are more susceptible to drug and alcohol addiction. They hope the finding will help predict who might get hooked and what treatments will help those who do. Researchers led by Wolfgang Sadee, a scientist at the Ohio State University, have figured out how differences in one gene can make the brain more sensitive to alcohol, narcotics, or nicotine. The gene Sadee's team looked at has long been known to code for a kind of brain protein called an opioid receptor, which acts like a switch, turning on pleasure and blocking pain when triggered by certain addictive drugs. The surfaces of our brain cells are covered by different kinds of receptor proteins. These receptors act as chemical docking stations that allow individual brain cells to communicate with each other by sending and receiving small bursts of chemicals. Each type of receptor can only be activated by a certain class of chemicals, which makes the communication between brain cells specific and meaningful. However receptors can also respond to chemicals in the brain environment not sent by other cells, like things that we've ingested such as alcohol or particles from cigarette smoke. The mu-opioid receptor that Sadee's team looked at is the primary target for morphine, but it also plays a large part in responses to alcohol, nicotine, and narcotics such as cocaine. © ScienCentral, 2000-2007.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10328 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Linda Geddes Could magnets make the mind grow stronger? In mice at least, stimulating the brain with a magnetic coil appears to promote the growth of new neurons in areas associated with learning and memory. If the effect is confirmed in humans, it might open up new ways of treating age-related memory decline and diseases like Alzheimer's. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used experimentally to treat a range of brain disorders, including depression and schizophrenia, and to rehabilitate people after a stroke. TMS uses a magnetic coil to induce electric fields in the brain tissue - activating or deactivating groups of neurons, although the exact mechanism has remained unknown. One theory was that it aided learning and memory by strengthening brain circuits through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP). To investigate, Fortunato Battaglia at the City University of New York and his colleagues gave mice TMS for five days, then analysed their brains for evidence of LTP or cell proliferation. They confirmed that TMS enhanced LTP in all areas of the brain tested, by modifying key glutamate receptors so that they stayed active for longer. The team also saw large increases in the proliferation of stem cells in the dentate gyrus hippocampus. These cells divide throughout life and are now believed to play a crucial role in memory and mood regulation (See "Memories are made of this?"). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10327 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It's a scenario straight out of Gray's Anatomy – a paramedic or doctor plops a mask over the face of a person struggling to breathe and begins dispensing pure oxygen. Yet growing research suggests that inhaling straight oxygen can actually harm the brain. For the first time, a new UCLA brain-imaging study reveals why. Published in the May 22 edition of Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine, the findings fly in the face of national guidelines for medical practice and recommend a new approach adding carbon dioxide to the gas mix to preserve brain function in patients. "For decades, the medical community has championed 100 percent oxygen as the gold standard for resuscitation. But no one has reported what happens inside our brains when we inhale pure oxygen," explained Ronald Harper, distinguished professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "What we discovered adds to a compelling body of evidence for modifying a widely practiced standard of care in the United States." Harper's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture detailed pictures of what occurs inside the human brain during two different breathing scenarios. The technique detects subtle increases in blood flow triggered by the activation of different parts of the brain, causing these regions to glow or "light up" on the color scan.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 10326 - Posted: 06.24.2010

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Imagine if a naturally occurring chemical in your body could help make you feel more calm and relaxed – but it would only work during the long days of summer. The same chemical would, instead, make you aggressive and nasty when you were exposed to less daylight during the winter. That's exactly what occurs for a specific species of mouse, according to a new study at Ohio State University, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that the class of hormones called estrogens acts to increase aggression in the Oldfield Mouse (Peromyscus polionotus) during the short days of winter. However, when daylight increases in the summer, estrogen decreases aggression among male Oldfield mice, a species commonly found in the southeastern United States. The finding is significant because it is one of the first studies to show how a very simple environmental factor – in this case, the length of daylight – can have a powerful effect on how genes influence behavior, at least in some species. "We found that estrogen has totally opposite effects on behavior in these mice depending only on how much light they got each day," said Brian Trainor, co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 10325 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Roxanne Khamsi A drug which reduces the desire for marijuana and blocks its effect on the brain has been successfully tested in rats. Scientists say the findings may translate into better therapies for cannabis addiction in humans. Rodents given a compound derived from a plant in the buttercup family lose their hankering for a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the active compound in marijuana. The treatment also blocked a reward response in the animals' brains when they did receive synthetic THC. In the first part of the experiment, Steven Goldberg at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Maryland, US, and his colleagues placed rats in a cage with a lever the animals could push. Each time the rats leaned on the lever, they received a dose of the synthetic THC through a small tube running into their body. Over a period of three weeks the rats learned to enjoy the effects of synthetic THC and frequently self-administered the drug. By comparison, rats that received saline solution did not press the lever often. Goldberg's team then injected the rats with a compound derived from the seeds of the Delphinium brownii plant, which is in the buttercup family. The compound, known as methyllycaconitine (MLA), had a dramatic effect on the animals' behaviour. Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0027-07.2007) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10324 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Catherine Brahic And then there were four... Here's the scenario: three sharks are in a tank, all three are female and all were captured when they were sexually immature babies. They spend three years in the tank together without ever coming in contact with a male. Then, one day, a baby shark pops up. The sharks are hammerheads, living in an aquarium at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, in the US. The pup was born on 14 December 2001, and triggered a great deal of confusion, which has only now finally been cleared up: the pup was the result of a "virgin birth". For many years, different theories were argued over. Perhaps one of the females had been inseminated by a shark from another species? Or maybe she had been inseminated before she was captured? Female sharks do have an organ that allows them to store sperm, but a three-year storage would have been unprecedented. What is more, sex between sharks tends to be rather rough and females are usually left with marks as a result of this. But none of the three females from Florida Keys had any marks on them when they were captured. Still, the insemination theory was considered "because it was even more difficult to imagine asexual reproduction in a shark," says Paulo Prodöhl of Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0189) © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10323 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In older people with mild cognitive impairment, having a drink now and then -- up to an average of one drink of alcohol each day -- may delay progression to dementia, new research suggests. "While many studies have assessed alcohol consumption and cognitive function in the elderly, this is the first study to look at how alcohol consumption affects the rate of progression of mild cognitive impairment to dementia," study authors Dr. Vincenzo Solfrizzi and Dr. Francesco Panza, from the University of Bari in Italy, said in a statement. In the study, reported in the medical journal Neurology, the researchers assessed the occurrence of mild cognitive impairment in 1445 subjects and the progression to dementia in 121 patients with mild cognitive impairment. The participants were between 65 and 84 years of age at the start of the study, and they were followed for 3.5 years. Alcohol use was assessed starting the year before the survey. Drinking was not associated the development of mild cognitive impairment, according to the report. However, once mild impairment occurred, subjects who had up to one drink per day of alcohol had an 85 percent reduced risk of dementia compared with those who abstained. SOURCE: Neurology, May 22, 2007. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 10322 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sessions Stepp This just in, from a global study on sexual well-being released last month: More than half of Americans are unhappy with their sex lives. Or are they? Last year, another international survey reported that more than two out of three are quite satisfied. So it goes in the relatively new world of research on sexual satisfaction. For all that we know now about the problems associated with sex -- HIV/AIDS, erectile dysfunction and unwanted pregnancies, to name three -- we understand very little about how sex contributes to our quality of life. What is the connection between sex and emotions? How important is sex to happiness? Sixty years after Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey made sexuality a topic for serious study, we are still groping in the dark when it comes to how much we enjoy it. There are reasons for this. Religious leaders who founded this country viewed sex primarily as a means of procreation, not pleasure, and wanted it confined it to marriage -- the latter belief still championed in some quarters. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10321 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jerry Fodor Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences? © LRB Ltd, 1997-2007

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10320 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JANE E. BRODY Anyone who has flown across several time zones for business or pleasure has no doubt experienced jet lag — that days-long feeling that all body functions are out of sync with the new environment. And as soon as you become adjusted, you return home and have to go through it again. It’s enough to prompt some people to stay home. Fighting Jet Lab This is especially true for older people, who may finally have the time and money to travel far and wide but find themselves even more bothered by jet lag than when they were young. I just went through the jet lag experience twice, when I flew from New York to Australia and back to New York three weeks later. And I’m writing this column the morning after arriving in California for a grandson’s birthday. Though I was sleepy by 8 p.m., I went to bed on California time, 11 p.m., but awoke at 2:30 a.m., which in New York is 5:30 a.m., when I normally wake up at home. I forced myself to go back to sleep for another hour and a half, but then my unadjusted body clock beckoned me to get up and start my day. Sleep is not the only function affected by jet lag. The digestive tract is off schedule, too. You become hungry at all the wrong times and may have trouble with waste disposal. Less obvious are the disrupted daily shifts in core body temperature and hormone secretions, which are no longer in tune with the day and night in the new environment. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 10319 - Posted: 06.24.2010