Jessica Marshall A man lies in a brain scanner, with his foot in one end of a long, narrow box, which is divided into six compartments of equal size. On a screen he watches a tarantula crawling in one of the compartments. A hand reaches in and moves the spider into another compartment, first one further away from the man's foot, then one closer. Although the subject was led to believe he was viewing the scene unfold in real-time, the man was actually watching a previously recorded video of the tarantula creeping through the boxes, nowhere near the subject. His fear, however, was real. The scanner -- a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) -- allowed researchers to capture that fear by recording the activity in his brain as he watched the spider, illuminating the hallmarks of the human fear response in the man's brain. In a study of 20 individuals who watched the same video, researchers report today that our brains evaluate fear in a nuanced way, drawing on several different regions depending on the proximity, trajectory and our expectations of the feared object -- in this case a Brazilian salmon pink tarantula. By better understanding which of these brain regions fail to function normally when confronted with fear, the authors hope their findings could one day help treat people with phobias. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14645 - Posted: 11.09.2010

By Barnabe Geisweiller Which do you like better, Coke or Pepsi? You may be surprised by the answer. The Pepsi Challenge TV commercials from the ’70s and ’80s featured people blind-tasting Pepsi or Coke. Not surprisingly, people chose Pepsi. Yet Coke continued to outsell Pepsi. In 2003, neuroscientist Read Montague decided to repeat the Pepsi Challenge with subjects lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, which tracks changes in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain. Most subjects in Montague’s study chose the Pepsi sample as better tasting, and Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response in the brain’s ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. But in a second test when subjects were told which brand they were drinking, more said they preferred Coke. Montague observed that their brain activity also changed. The knowledge that they were drinking Coke increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with thinking and judging. This seemed to validate the claims of marketers that they can influence consumers’ decisions. Neuro-marketing was born. Marketing is only one field in which neuro-imaging is applied. Studies done in labs across the world provide researchers with new insight into how our brains work. This knowledge could help in the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, say neuroscientists. ©2008 New York Press.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14642 - Posted: 11.09.2010

by Karen Heyman One-third of stroke survivors never recover enough brain function to live on their own. Now scientists think they know why. Once a stroke kills a swath of brain cells, a neurotransmitter known as GABA impairs the surviving, apparently healthy, brain tissue. Targeting GABA could help a stroke-afflicted brain better overcome its damage, the researchers suggest. When a stroke hits, physicians have few options. If they catch it early enough, they can administer the clot-busting drug tPA to keep even more brain cells from dying—but tPA is not appropriate for all types of stroke. Physicians can also prescribe physical therapy, which can occasionally help recover impaired motor function. Yet there are no approved drugs that help the brain heal. For its part, the brain appears to try a sort of natural drug therapy to limit the spread of damage. It releases extra amounts of GABA, which reduces the firing of neurons. GABA initially prevents stroke-damaged brain tissue from becoming overexcited and dying. But University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), investigators led by Thomas Carmichael, a specialist in stroke, and Istvan Mody, an expert in inhibition, wondered whether GABA might also interfere with the brain's plasticity, the ability of healthy regions to take over for injured ones. Previous studies had tried to address this question, but they produced confusing results. The UCLA team hypothesized that others had failed to distinguish between two types of inhibition—phasic, in which GABA acts upon specific receptors at nerve cell sites called synapses, and tonic, in which the neurotransmitter acts on other receptors elsewhere on the nerve cell. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stroke; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14626 - Posted: 11.04.2010

By Nathan Seppa MRI scans of stroke patients can indicate when the stroke occurred, a revelation that could allow more aggressive treatment to limit brain damage, French researchers report online November 2 in Radiology. For a person arriving at a hospital with a stroke, the clock is ticking. When a clot obstructs an artery in the brain, millions of neurons are lost with each passing minute as tissue is starved of blood and oxygen. A clot-busting drug called tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator, can often dissolve the clot and free up the vessel. But the drug is generally considered safe to administer only in the first three to 4½ hours after a stroke begins (SN: 10/25/08, p. 16). Stoke patients typically get a CT scan, which enables doctors to discern whether the stroke results from a blood clot or, less commonly, from a hemorrhage, which shows up as a dark mass on the CT, says neurologist Andrew Barreto of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, is used much less often and usually only at large medical centers. Unfortunately, a CT scan cannot pinpoint when a stroke began. Neither can many patients, either because they can’t recall exactly when their symptoms first appeared or because they woke up already in the throes of a stroke. In such cases, doctors “guesstimate” the stroke’s onset, Barreto says, but hesitate to give tPA if too many hours might have passed. Giving tPA too late won’t help tissue that’s already dead and risks causing a brain bleed. After the tPA window closes there is little doctors can do but monitor the patient. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Stroke; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14625 - Posted: 11.04.2010

Ben Goldacre When the BBC tells you, in a headline, that libido problems are in the brain and not in the mind, you might find yourself wondering what the difference between the two is supposed to be, and whether a science article can really be assuming – in 2010 – that its readers buy into a strange Cartesian dualism in which the self is contained by a funny little spirit entity in constant and elaborate pneumatic connection with the corporeal realm. But first let's consider the experiment they're reporting on. As far as we know (because this experiment has not yet been published, only presented at a conference), some researchers took seven women with a "normal" sex drive, and 19 women diagnosed with "hypoactive sexual desire disorder". Participants watched a series of erotic films in a scanner while an MRI machine took images of blood flow in their brains: the women with a normal sex drive had an increased flow of blood to some parts of their brain associated with emotion, while those with low libido did not. Dr Michael Diamond, one of the researchers, tells the Mail: "Being able to identify physiological changes, to me provides significant evidence that it's a true disorder as opposed to a societal construct". In the Metro, he goes further: "Researcher Dr Michael Diamond said the findings offer 'significant evidence' that persistent low sex drive – known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) – is a genuine physiological disorder and not made up." © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Keyword: Brain imaging; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14617 - Posted: 11.02.2010

By Pallab Ghosh A US researcher has said he plans to electronically record and interpret dreams. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said they have developed a system capable of recording higher-level brain activity. "We would like to read people's dreams," says the lead scientist Dr Moran Cerf. The aim is not to interlope, but to extend our understanding of how and why people dream. For centuries, people have been fascinated by dreams and what they might mean; in ancient Egypt for example, they were thought to be messages from the gods. More recently, dream analysis has been used by psychologists as a tool to understand the unconscious mind. But the only way to interpret dreams was to ask people about the subject of their dreams after they had woken up. The eventual aim of Dr Cerf's project is to develop a system that would enable psychologists to corroborate people's recollections of their dream with an electronic visualisation of their brain activity. "There's no clear answer as to why humans dream," according to Dr Cerf. "And one of the questions we would like to answer is when do we actually create this dream?" BBC © MMX

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14602 - Posted: 10.28.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman Right away, Lori White knew that something was very wrong. The 44-year-old legal assistant at a Northern Virginia law firm had been working out with a personal trainer at her gym, executing a demanding and unfamiliar move. As she pulled down on a bar equipped with weights while simultaneously lunging forward, she felt an explosive pop in her head, immediately followed by a headache more crushing than any she had previously experienced. For the next 10 minutes, White recalled, she sat on the floor, clutching her head and fearing she would throw up or pass out. To her relief, the pain receded within a few hours. "I figured I'd just strained something," she recalled. But within weeks of the 2005 episode, an alarming new problem surfaced: stabbing pains lasting five to 30 seconds in the front of her head, similar to the "brain freeze" that people sometimes experience while eating ice cream. It took White three years to discover what had happened that day in the gym and two more to sort out what should be done about it - a confusing and sometimes contradictory process that involved specialists in the Washington area as well as Baltimore and Charlottesville. Two weeks ago at Georgetown University Hospital, White underwent treatment that doctors hope will cure her problem. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14588 - Posted: 10.26.2010

By Carolyn Y. Johnson The black-and-white brain scans that have become a routine part of medicine reveal a curved gray structure folded around large lakes of white — a map that helps doctors diagnose, treat, and understand disease. But to some scientists, these images are crude and incomplete, akin to medieval maps of the world in which unexplored regions were filled in with sea monsters or dragons. “It’s like there’s a continent there, and we are nibbling along the shores,’’ said Dr. Van Wedeen, a physicist and radiologist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is helping to lead an effort to develop a superscanner that can reveal that unknown territory and provide new insight into the brain. On a recent morning, Wedeen pulled up images created with the new technology, in which the lakes of white were crisscrossed by colorful, ropy bundles of fibers, revealing an elegant, three-dimensional architecture. Looking more like art than anatomy, these strands form the connections in the brain — the “connectome.’’ They are neural highways crucial for brain function, including thoughts, movements, and sensations. “This isn’t just statistical stuff, or mush, or steel wool, or chaotic spaghetti,’’ Wedeen said. “This is as important a structure as you’re ever going to meet, and this thing had to be designed by evolution.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 14578 - Posted: 10.21.2010

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent The popular belief that women's minds turn to mush during pregnancy and birth is completely wrong and their grey matter actually increases, they say. Research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up as they coped with the steep learning curve of dealing with a newborn. Mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the brain, it was found. The researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland scanned the brains of 19 women who gave birth to 10 to boys and nine to girls. A comparison of images taken two to four weeks and three to four months after the women gave birth showed that grey matter volume increased by a small but significant amount in various parts of the brain. In adults, grey matter does not ordinarily change over a few months without significant learning, brain injury or illness, or major environmental change. The authors speculated that hormone levels and the need to cope with the challenges of a baby led to the increase in brain cells. The areas affected are involved with motivation – the hypothalamus -, reward and emotion processing – the amygdala – senses – parietal lobe – and reasoning and judgment – the prefrontal cortex. The findings were published in the journal Behavioural Neuroscience. © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14572 - Posted: 10.21.2010

By Rachel Ehrenberg Of all the body’s organs, the brain is the most like Area 51: Entry to the region is severely restricted, thanks to a barricade of cells and molecules known collectively as the blood-brain barrier. Increased surveillance by scientists has now pinpointed the barrier’s senior operatives, cells that are tasked with monitoring the razor wire–like barricade that keeps all but a select few from entering the brain. In two papers published online October 13 in Nature, scientists report that specialized cells called perictyes are crucial in the blood-brain barrier’s development and its maintenance in adulthood. A better understanding of how these pericytes function could help elucidate why some people fare especially poorly after traumatic brain injury or get particular neurological diseases such as cerebral palsy, scientists say. And new research could also lead to tricks for selectively opening or closing the blood-brain barrier, letting in medications that might combat diseases such as Alzheimer’s. One of the new studies demonstrates that pericytes are necessary for cementing the barrier’s cells into a nearly impenetrable wall surrounding blood vessels in the central nervous system. The work also establishes a timeline: In mice, the blood-brain barrier develops well before birth, researchers from Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco report. Pericytes also appear to keep the barrier’s cells on lockdown, dialing down the activity of genes that, if left to their own devices, would spur the transport of molecules across the barrier and into the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14552 - Posted: 10.14.2010

Rebecca Adler, a freelance writer in Sacramento, has lived with Harlequin Syndrome for 29 years. Rebecca Adler writes: My game face has been known to cause genuine panic on the field -- mostly among race officials and umpires worried they've got some kind of medical emergency on their hands. Either they think I've somehow been severely sunburned on just one side of my face or they worry that I'm on my way to having heat stroke. I have a condition called Harlequin Syndrome, which causes me to sweat and flush red on only on the left side of my body. I got it the day after I was born, in the same way that anyone gets it -- by sustaining an injury to the sympathetic nervous system (the part of the nervous system that reacts to stress and flight-or-fight circumstances), according to Peter Drummond, a professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. (FYI, it was Drummond who first researched the condition and coined the catchy term "Harlequin Syndrome" in 1988 after researching others who have it.) But it isn't just general trauma to the sympathetic nervous system. It occurs at a very specific area of that system: the space right between the shoulder blades where the sympathetic nerves leave the spinal cord. © 2010 msnbc.com

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14527 - Posted: 10.05.2010

By Emily Singer A massive new project to scan the brains of 1,200 volunteers could finally give scientists a picture of the neural architecture of the human brain and help them understand the causes of certain neurological and psychological diseases. The National Institutes of Health announced $40 million in funding this month for the five-year effort, dubbed the Human Connectome Project. Scientists will use new imaging technologies, some still under development, to create both structural and functional maps of the human brain. The project is novel in its size; most brain-imaging studies have looked at tens to hundreds of brains. Scanning so many people will shed light on the normal variability within the brain structure of healthy adults, which will in turn provide a basis for examining how neural "wiring" differs in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia. The researchers also plan to collect genetic and behavioral data, testing participants' sensory and motor skills, memory, and other cognitive functions, and deposit this information along with brain scans in a public database (although the patients' personal information will be stripped out). Scientists around the world can then use the database to search for the genetic and environmental factors that influence the structure of the brain. © 2010 Technology Review.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14521 - Posted: 10.04.2010

By Laura Sanders Researchers have created a growth curve for the brain, similar to the height and weight charts pediatricians use to monitor their patients’ development. Scientists came up with the new developmental milestones by aggregating the results of brain scans that reveal active connections throughout the organ. Published September 10 in Science, the study reveals how a typical brain’s connections evolve with age, information that could help doctors detect a variety of disorders — many of which are marked by disordered neural connections — earlier. “It’s really remarkable how much information can be gleaned with just a five-minute resting-state scan,” says neuroscientist Olaf Sporns of Indiana University in Bloomington. “The techniques they’ve developed here may be very powerful in making predictions for individual patients.” Researchers led by Nico Dosenbach and Bradley Schlaggar, both of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, constructed the brain maturity curve using data from 238 volunteers of ages 7 to 30. Each subject spent about five minutes quietly resting while an MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, machine recorded patterns of blood movement in over a hundred different brain regions. Because no tasks are required of the patient, the quick scan can be used on infants or patients who are unable to respond to directions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14443 - Posted: 09.11.2010

by Jessica Hamzelou CRASH! A deafening roar and the cinema screen explodes with light. The scene is certainly startling, but is this movie stirring up the right emotional reactions deep down? Rather than ask your opinion, it's now possible to cut out the middleman and go straight to your brain for the verdict. This new approach, known as neurocinematics, is beginning to make itself felt in movie-making and could one day help regulatory bodies implement appropriate age restrictions on films. Neurocinematics is a term coined by Uri Hasson at Princeton University, who was among the first to investigate how the brain responds to movies using an fMRI brain scanner. His team looked at the similarity in the brain responses of a group of viewers to different types of films. When volunteers watched a section of Alfred Hitchcock's Bang! You're Dead, for example, they found that about 65 per cent of the frontal cortex - the part of the brain involved in attention and perception - was responding in the same way in all the viewers. Only 18 per cent of the cortex showed a similar response when the participants watched more free-form footage, of sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm (Projections, DOI: 10.3167/proj.2008.020102). The level of correlation between people indicates how much control the director has over the audience's experience, Hasson claims. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14432 - Posted: 09.09.2010

By Katherine Harmon Marine worms might seem like lowly, slow-witted creatures, but new gene mapping shows that we might share an ancient brainy ancestor with them. Human cognition is largely rooted in the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that enables consciousness, language and other higher-level functions. We share the basic evolutionary underpinnings of our big brains with other vertebrates, which have a structure known as the pallium. Although lacking palliums, many invertebrates, such as insects, spiders and some worms, instead have what are know as mushroom bodies—sections of the brain so called because their shape resembles mushrooms. Mushroom bodies and vertebrate palliums are both responsible for some sensory integration and memory, and they have "long been noted and interpreted as convergent acquisitions," noted a team of researchers in a new study, published online September 2 in Cell. In other words, the thinking has been that these two kinds of brains evolved from independent paths. The team, however, has proposed instead that these two brain structures do share a single common ancestor, one that likely lived some 600 million years ago. The group based their conclusions on new gene expression maps—"molecular fingerprints"— gathered from the mushroom bodies in developing marine ragworms (Platynereis dumerilii) that could be compared with gene expression patterns of developing vertebrate palliums. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14415 - Posted: 09.03.2010

By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN, M.D. NEW HAVEN — Two floors below the main level of Yale’s medical school library is a room full of brains. No, not the students. These brains, more than 500 of them, are in glass jars. They are part of an extraordinary collection that might never have come to light if not for a curious medical student and an encouraging and persistent doctor. The cancerous brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing, who was one of America’s first neurosurgeons. They were donated to Yale on his death in 1939 — along with meticulous medical records, before-and-after photographs of patients, and anatomical illustrations. (Dr. Cushing was also an accomplished artist.) His belongings, a treasure trove of medical history, became a jumble of cracked jars and dusty records shoved in various crannies at the hospital and medical school. Until now. In June 2010, after a colossal effort to clean and organize the material — 500 of 650 jars have been restored — the brains found their final resting place behind glass cases around the perimeter of the Cushing Center, a room designed solely for them. These chunks of brains floating in formaldehyde bring to life a dramatic chapter in American medical history. They exemplify the rise of neurosurgery and the evolution of 20th-century American medicine — from a slipshod trial-and-error trade to a prominent, highly organized profession. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14396 - Posted: 08.24.2010

Regions of the brain are known to differ in people with autism. Red and orange show areas that are thicker or larger, while the blue shows a reduction in size compared with a non-autistic brain. Regions of the brain are known to differ in people with autism. Red and orange show areas that are thicker or larger, while the blue shows a reduction in size compared with a non-autistic brain. (MRC) Autism in adults can be diagnosed using MRI brain scans, British scientists have found. The 15-minute scans were used to identify autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with an accuracy of 90 per cent in 20 people who were previously diagnosed. "Our study offers a 'proof of concept' for describing the complex multidimensional grey matter differences in ASD," Dr. Christine Ecker, a lecturer in forensic and neurodevelopmental sciences at London's Institute of Psychiatry and her co-authors concluded in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. In the experiment, magnetic resonance imaging scans were reconstructed into 3-D images and analyzed using computer software programmed to spot structural changes in the brain's grey matter by measuring areas that relate to behaviour, language and vision. Changes in shape and thickness point to the disorder. A capability to diagnose ASD based on objective biological tests rather than the current method of relying on personality traits could help identify patients more quickly who need treatment, Ecker said. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14352 - Posted: 08.12.2010

By Jason Palmer The brain appears to be a vastly interconnected network much like the Internet, according to new research. That runs counter to the 19th-Century "top-down" view of brain structure. A novel technique to track signals across tiny brain regions has revealed connections between regions associated with stress, depression and appetite. The research, which has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, may lead to a full map of the nervous system. Larry Swanson and Richard Thompson from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, US, isolated a small section of a rat's brain in the nucleus accumbens - a brain region long associated with pleasure and reward. Their technique hinges on the injection of "tracers" at precise points in the brain tissue. These are molecules that do not interfere with the movement of signals across the tissue, but can be illuminated and identified using a microscope. What is new is that the researchers injected two tracers at the same point at the same time: one that showed where signals were going, and one that showed where they were coming from. The approach can show up to four levels of connection. If the brain has a hierarchichal structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the "to" and "from" diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company's boss. (C)BBC

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14346 - Posted: 08.12.2010

by Graham Lawton and Clare Wilson Why ask people what they think of a product when you can just scan their brains instead? New Scientist explores the brave new world of neuromarketing TAKE A look at the cover of this week's New Scientist magazine (right). Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner. In what we suspect is a world first, this week's cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people's heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But neuromarketing, once dismissed as a fad, is becoming part and parcel of modern consumer society. So we decided to take a good look at it - and try it out ourselves. That is how several New Scientist readers ended up in a darkened room in London, wired up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine and being shown various magazine cover designs. Our aim - with the help of the European arm of neuromarketing company NeuroFocus, based in Berkeley, California - was to observe their reactions on a level that would not normally be possible. "I've been involved in market research for about 25 years," says Thom Noble, managing director of NeuroFocus Europe. "Every few years a new methodology comes out. Frankly, they're incrementally different. This is transformationally different." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Emotions
Link ID: 14336 - Posted: 08.09.2010

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY If something offers easy answers for not-so-easy questions, you might be reading a popular science book. Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, centers around the idea of practicing anything for 10,000 hours to be a genius. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance discovers that economics explains terrorism and climate change. Sex at Dawn suggests evolution explains straying spouses. And then there's Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. A research associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics at Australia's Macquarie University, Fine turns the popular science book formula on its head. Chapter-by-chapter, she introduces ideas about the innate differences between the sexes — "it's all fetal hormones" or "men have better-wired brains" or "brain scans show men's brains light up differently" — and then tartly smacks around the studies supposedly supporting them. In particular, Fine joins critics, such as Nikos Logothetis of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, to argue that brain images constructed from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, often on just a few dozen people at most, have become the latest way to slap a scientific-sounding paint job on old ideas about women being intrinsically dumber than men. "The main message of the book is that our comforting beliefs about gender — that everything's fair now, that sex inequality should be blamed on 'hardwired' differences between the sexes, and that our failure to rear unisex children just points the same way — just don't bear up to scrutiny," Fine says, by e-mail. Copyright 2010 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14335 - Posted: 08.09.2010