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AP Science Writer Monkeys taught to play a computer game were able to overcome wrist paralysis with an experimental device that might lead to new treatments for patients with stroke and spinal cord injury. Remarkably, the monkeys regained use of paralyzed muscles by learning to control the activity of just a single brain cell. The result is "an important step forward," said Dawn Taylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who studies the concept of using brain signals to overcome paralysis. She wasn't involved in the new work. The device monitored the activity of a brain cell and used...

Enlarge ImageAltered perceptions? Minimally conscious patients may have a greater capacity to feel pain than do those in a vegetative state (such as Terri Schiavo, above).Credit: Reuters Most of the time, doctors have a simple way to determine if a patient needs pain medication: They ask. But when a brain injury renders someone unable to respond to questions, the right course of action becomes murkier. Now a study finds that the brains of some patients with brain injuries respond to an unpleasant electrical shock much as do the brains of healthy people, suggesting that these patients may feel pain...

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal...

Human brains appear to come in at least two flavours: male and female. Now variations in the density of the synapses that connect neurons may help to explain differences in how men and women think. Even when intelligence levels are equal, women and men excel at different cognitive tasks. But although brain size and neuron density differ between the sexes, these don't seem to correlate with cognitive differences. So, Javier DeFelipe at Complutense University in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues counted the number of synapses instead. The brain tissue they analysed came from the left temporal cortex, a region of the...

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it. The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence. Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the...

Former Staff Sgt. Kevin Owsley is not quite sure what rattled his brain in 2004: the roadside bomb that exploded about a yard from his Humvee or the rocket-propelled grenade that flung him across a road as he walked to a Porta Potti on base six weeks later. After each attack, he did what so many soldiers do in Iraq. He shrugged off his ailments — headaches, dizzy spells, persistent ringing in his ears and numbness in his right arm — chalking them up to fatigue or dehydration. Given that he never lost consciousness, he figured the discomfort would work...

Researchers have spent decades probing the causes of depression, schizophrenia and insomnia in humans. But a new study may have uncovered key insights into the origins of these and other conditions by examining a most unlikely research subject: worms. The project, which was led by Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation scientist Kenneth Miller, Ph.D., examined the way eye-less microscopic worms known as C. elegans shy away from certain kinds of light. The researchers made several key findings, chief among them that exposing paralyzed C. elegans to ultraviolet light restored normal levels of movement in the worms. Miller's group at OMRF traced...

The outer layer of the brain, the reasoning, planning and self-aware region known as the cerebral cortex, has a central clearinghouse of activity below the crown of the head that is widely connected to more-specialized regions in a large network similar to a subway map, scientists reported Monday. The new report, published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology, provides the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior. The paper also provides a striking demonstration of how new imaging techniques focused on the...

About 10,000 Americans are diagnosed each year with malignant gliomas, the kind of tumor that Sen. Edward Kennedy is fighting, according to the National Cancer Institute. Only about half are alive a year after being diagnosed, and only about 25 percent survive two years, said Robert Laureno, chief of neurology at the Washington Hospital Center. "In general, it's a very grim kind of prognosis," he said.

Coffee or tea with lunch? Which pants to wear to work? Which movie to watch? Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. In the 1980s, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San Francisco, caught people's brains jumping the gun on consciousness. A few hundred milliseconds before a person thought he or she decided to press a button, brain areas related to movement were already active. The result was hard for some to stomach...

All dyslexics are not alike. According to new research, Chinese- and English-speaking people with the disorder have impairments in different regions of their brains. The findings shed light on the neurological basis of dyslexia and reveal fundamental differences in how brains process the two languages. Dyslexics, about 5% to 10% of the population in both the United States and China, have trouble making the connection between the sight and sound of a word. In English, this results in word distortions or transpositions of letters. "Dyslexia," for example, might be read as "Lysdexia." In Chinese, the problem can affect how a...

DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts. Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the...

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice...

Vets Focus On Neurological Disorders In Dogs, HumansParkinson's disease and epilepsy strike millions of people each year. They also affect countless dogs. (Credit: iStockphoto/Greg Henry) ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2008) — Parkinson's disease and epilepsy strike millions of people each year. They also affect countless dogs, and veterinarians at the University of Missouri are working to find ways to treat these and other neurological diseases in both species. Dennis O'Brien, professor of veterinary medicine and surgery and director of the comparative neurology program in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and a team of researchers are investigating the causes and potential treatments...

NEW Year’s Eve tends to be the day of the year with the most binge drinking (based on drunken driving fatalities), followed closely by Super Bowl Sunday. Likewise, colleges have come to expect that the most alcohol-filled day of their students’ lives is their 21st birthday. So, some words of caution for those who continue to binge and even for those who have stopped: just as the news is not so great for former cigarette smokers, there is equally bad news for recovering binge-drinkers who have achieved a sobriety that has lasted years. The more we have binged — and...

Modern brain science is confirming an 18th century philosopher's moral theories"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation," observed British philosopher and economist Adam Smith in the first chapter of his magisterial The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). "Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator." Smith's argument...

Berkeley -- It has long been assumed that sleep deprivation can play havoc with our emotions. This is notably apparent in soldiers in combat zones, medical residents and even new parents. Now there's a neurological basis for this theory, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School. In the first neural investigation into what happens to the emotional brain without sleep, results from a brain imaging study suggest that while a good night's rest can regulate your mood and help you cope with the next day's emotional challenges, sleep deprivation does the opposite by...

AP SCIENCE WRITER NEW YORK -- An experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease seemed to improve symptoms - dramatically so, for one 59-year-old man - without causing side effects in an early study of a dozen patients. The gene therapy treatment involved slipping billions of copies of a gene into the brain to calm overactive brain circuitry. The small study focused on testing the safety of the procedure rather than its effectiveness, and experts cautioned it's too soon to draw conclusions about how well it works. But they called the results promising and said the approach merits further studies. "We still...

I have two easy questions for you. For some background, I had a brainstem tumor removed 6 years ago. In those first scans they also saw two "lesions", one in each frontal lobe. Those lesions never changed all these years until now.

I. Mr. Weinstein’s Cyst When historians of the future try to identify the moment that neuroscience began to transform the American legal system, they may point to a little-noticed case from the early 1990s. The case involved Herbert Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive who was charged with strangling his wife, Barbara, to death and then, in an effort to make the murder look like a suicide, throwing her body out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Before the trial began, Weinstein’s lawyer suggested that his client should not be held responsible for his actions...

MONDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Neurological disorders have struck millions of people, young and old alike, in the United States, new estimates show. Some 67 per 1,000 elderly Americans now have Alzheimer's disease, up substantially from past estimates, and nearly one out of every 1,000 people have multiple sclerosis (MS), a rate that is about 50 percent higher than earlier estimates. It's not clear if that represents improvements in diagnosis or an actual increase in incidence of MS. The numbers form part of a review article appearing in the Jan. 30 issue of Neurology. "These kinds of accurate numbers...

Crave no more. Some smokers with damage to the insula (red) suddenly lose the urge to smoke. Credit: Naqvi et al., Science Cigarette smokers who suffer damage to a particular brain region often lose the urge to smoke, according to a new study. Although brain damage is hardly a recommended treatment for smokers who want to quit, researchers say the findings provide important insight into the biological basis of addictive behaviors. Previous research on addiction has implicated the insula, a brain region tucked into a deep fold in the cerebral cortex. In brain scans of cocaine addicts, for example, the...

Magnetic brain scans reveal patients are not imagining numbness that conventional diagnosis cannot pin down. Is a person hysterical if he or she complains of numbness in a limb but conventional tests reveal no underlying cause? A new study argues yes. While the term hysteria has fallen out of favor--replaced by the more reasonable sounding "conversion disorder," after Freud's explanation of such symptoms as the conversion of intolerable emotional impulses into physical manifestations--the condition has not disappeared. Recent fMRI scans of three women insisting they had no feeling in either a hand or a foot revealed that their brains really...

The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was...

ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — A team of neuroscientists reported Sunday that they had restored some movement and speech to a severely brain-damaged man by stimulating his brain with pulses of electric current. The 38-year-old man, who had been barely conscious for six years, gradually regained the use of his left arm and began to utter coherent words for the first time since his injury in an assault, the doctors said. Before surgery to implant two wire electrodes deep in his brain, he could respond to questions and commands occasionally, by moving his thumb or nodding, but was otherwise virtually mute...

A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary. My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home. Though...

Ainge targeted for grid stardom at very early age Tuesday, September 12, 2006 The Hillsboro Argus Stardom was predicted for Erik Ainge even before he touched a football. And at one point, there was consideration for Ainge to achieve his prep feats at another high school rather than Glencoe. A sports scientist named Jonathan P. Niednagel got the ball rolling when he told Ainge's parents that Erik had the realistic potential to be a National Football League star quarterback. Erik Ainge was a frail 10-year-old fifth grader when the story began, and Niednagel was working for Danny Ainge and...

In another experiment, published this year in the journal Neuroscience, Dr. Crews found that even a single high dose of alcohol temporarily prevented the creation of new nerve cells from progenitor stem cells in the forebrain that appear to be involved in brain development. The damage, far more serious in adolescent rats than in adult rats, began at a level equivalent to two drinks in humans and increased steadily as the dosage was increased to the equivalent of 10 beers, when it stopped the production of almost all new nerve cells. Dr. Crews added, however, that adult alcoholics who stop...

For the first time, scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich coupled living brain tissue to a chip equivalent to the chips that run computers. The researchers under Peter Fromherz have reported this news in the online edition of the Journal of Neurophysiology (May 10, 2006). A thin tissue slice of a rat hippocampus region (top) is cultivated on a semiconductor chip with 16.384 sensory transistors per square millimetre (center, dark coloured square). Following excitation the chip maps the electrical activity of the neurons (bottom), caused by activity of synapses (red: positive, blue: negative). (Copyright: Max...

15 Apr 2006 A five-year-old girl, Kai Leigh Harriott, wheelchair bound after a bullet paralyzed her three years ago, forgave the man who shot her and told him what he had done to her was wrong. She did this to his face, in court. After breaking down and crying, the girl picked up a glass of water, took a sip, and said to Anthony Warren ‘What you done to me was wrong…..but I still forgive him.' Anthony Warren had pleaded guilty to shooting her, shots that paralyzed the girl. Kai Lee Harriot used to be able to walk. She had...

Many players on the field Hailed multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri is in FDA limbo, but researchers continue to attack the disease from all angles. By Mary Beckman Special to The Times March 27, 2006 STEPHANIE YELLIN-MEDNICK got through last year without the tingling in her hands that causes her to drop things or the weakness in her legs that knocks her off balance. Then the Food and Drug Administration pulled the drug that was helping her — Tysabri — off the market because of rare cases of brain infection in a few people taking it. "It was like a rug...

Protein Fragment May Generate First Simple Test For Multiple Sclerosis Johns Hopkins scientists report the discovery of a protein found only in cerebrospinal fluid that they say might be useful in identifying a subgroup of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) or identifying those at risk for the debilitating autoimmune disorder. MS strikes over 10,000 Americans each year, most of whom are women, and causes weakness, numbness, a loss of muscle coordination, and problems with vision, speech, and bladder control. It is a disorder in which the immune system destroys myelin, the covering of nerves that helps transmit signals. Cerebrospinal fluid...

On June 13th, I will have been a physician for twenty five years. Twenty four of those years, exactly one half of my life, will have been spent as a neurologist. I would like, therefore, to state for the record, how grateful I am to have been allowed to practice as a neurologist, during this, the profession’s best of times.When I first began my neurology residency 24 years ago, the practice of neurology was described to me in the phrase “diagnose and adios”. Neurologists were great at diagnosing, based on history and physical examination, where precisely a lesion in the...

"An apple a day" now has new meaning for those who want to maintain mental dexterity as they age. New research from the University of Massachusetts Lowell suggests that consuming apple juice may protect against cell damage that contributes to age-related memory loss, even in test animals that were not prone to developing Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. "This new study suggests that eating and drinking apples and apple juice, in conjunction with a balanced diet, can protect the brain from the effects of oxidative stress – and that we should eat such antioxidant-rich foods," notes lead researcher Thomas B....

Stroke Brain Fix Stroke Hope If Ariel Sharon wakes up from his coma, he could still face a long and hard recovery from his stroke. With the help of extensive therapy, stroke sufferers can sometimes regain lost speech and movement. But research led by neurologist Wendy Kartje could spur stroke recovery by blocking a natural inhibitor of nerve cell re-growth. When a stroke occurs, blood flow to part of the brain is interrupted when a blood vessel becomes damaged or blocked. The blood normally brings oxygen and nutrients that the brain cells in the immediate area need to survive. Without...

Associated Press WASHINGTON — The difference between the sexes has long been a rich source of humor. Now, it turns out, humor is one of the differences. A new study concludes that women seem more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny. "The long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently," a research team led by Dr. Allan Reiss of the Stanford University School of Medicine reports in today's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of...

The brains of pathological liars have structural abnormalities that could make fibbing come naturally. “Some people have an edge up on others in their ability to tell lies,” says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They are better wired for the complex computations involved in sophisticated lies.” He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less grey matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while grey matter mediates...

Dyslexia, the learning disability thought to affect one in 10 Britons, does not exist and is no more than an emotional construct, education experts will claim in a television documentary to be aired next week. In the programme, which looks at the causes and treatment of poor reading, at least three academics call into question the value of separating those with difficulty in reading into dyslexics and "ordinary poor readers", when the treatment is the same for both groups. Experts say many children are being diagnosed with the condition to save embarrassment over their reading skills and in order to...

Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics, edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler, Chicago: Open Court, 450 pages, $36.95 paper In 1980 Thomas Szasz testified for the prosecution in the trial of Darlin June Cromer, a 34-year-old white woman charged with kidnapping and murdering Reginald Williams, a 5-year-old black boy. There was no question that Cromer, who attracted suspicion because she had a history of talking about “killing niggers” and trying to lure black children into her car, had abducted Reginald from an Oakland, California, supermarket, strangled him, and buried his body near her home. She had told police...

TAMPA - A team of Finnish researchers working with Tampa's Johnnie B. Byrd Sr. Alzheimer's Center and Research Institute has developed a drug that could be a major advancement for people with spinal cord injuries and degenerative diseases including Alzheimer's. The researchers, led by Paivi Liesi, at the University of Helsinki, isolated a combination of amino acids known as tripeptide lysine-aspartic acid isoleucine. When tested in rats, the combination prevented neurotoxins from destroying neurons in the rats' brains. The therapy could slow or even reverse the effects of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said. It could be a boon for the...

NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER NO sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes. To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business." He didn't care. "The thing about A.D.D. is how much it affects your self-esteem,'' Mr. Harper said....

The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain. The finding surprises researchers who assumed this aspect of our intelligence would be distributed over many parts of the brain. Instead, the area appears to form a bottleneck that might limit our cognitive abilities, researchers say."This is a striking discovery," says John Duncan, an intelligence researcher at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.Most people can hold three or four things in their minds at once when given a quick glimpse of an image such...