Brain can quickly warn us of potential errors

Researchers have pinpointed an area in the brain that alerts us in less than a second of an impending mistake so we don’t repeat it.

Scientists have long known that mistakes are conducive to learning, suggesting the reason lies in the element of surprise upon finding out we are wrong. But how the brain manages to learn from mistakes and how quickly it does so have been unknowns.

“It's a bit of a cliché to say that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes,” said lead author of the study Andy Wills, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, “but for the first time we’ve established just how quickly the brain works to help us avoid repeating errors.”
The scientists monitored the brain activity of a group of volunteers as they made predictions based on information each read on a computer screen. Then, they were given new information that made many of the predictions incorrect. The participants had to learn from the mistake in order to repeat the error next time around.

The researchers measured activity in the lower temporal region of the brain, near the temples, which is responsible for processing visual information.

“By monitoring activity in the brain as it occurs, we were able to identify the moment at which this mechanism kicks in,” Wills said.

Activity increased immediately after the individual saw the new information flash onto the computer screen—within 0.1 seconds—before there was time for any conscious consideration.
Most previous research had focused on the brain’s frontal lobes, which are associated with complex thought processes, such as planning and conscious decision-making. This study, announced July 2 and published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, indicates the brain reacts to mistakes before information even gets processed consciously. The scientists call it an “early warning signal” from a lower region of the brain.

Source: Science World

Study: Difficulty Identifying Smells May Signal Alzheimer's

Difficulty identifying common smells such as lemon, banana and cinnamon may be the first sign of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study that could lead to scratch-and-sniff tests to determine a person's risk for the progressive brain disorder.

Such tests could be important if scientists find ways to slow or stop Alzheimer's and the severe memory loss associated with it. For now, there's no cure for the more than 5 million Americans with the disease.

Researchers have long known that microscopic lesions considered the hallmarks of Alzheimer's first appear in a brain region important to the sense of smell.

"Strictly on the basis of anatomy, yeah, this makes sense," said Robert Franks, an expert on odor perception and the brain at the University of Cincinnati. Franks was not involved in the new study, appearing in Monday's Archives of General Psychiatry.

Other studies have linked loss of smell to Alzheimer's, Franks said, but this is the first to measure healthy people's olfactory powers and follow them for five years, testing along the way for signs of mental decline.

In the study, 600 people between the ages of 54 and 100 were asked to identify a dozen familiar smells: onion, lemon, cinnamon, black pepper, chocolate, rose, banana, pineapple, soap, paint thinner, gasoline and smoke.

For each mystery scent, they heard and saw a choice of four answers. For cinnamon, they were asked aloud: "Fruit? Cinnamon? Woody? Or coconut?" while also seeing the choices in text.

A quarter of the people correctly identified all the odors or missed only one. Half of them knew at least nine of the 12. The lowest-scoring quarter of the people correctly identified eight or fewer of the odors.

The subjects took 21 cognitive tests annually over the next five years. About one-third of the people developed at least mild trouble with memory and thinking.

The people who made at least four errors on the odor test were 50 percent more likely to develop problems than people who made no more than one error. Difficulty identifying odors also was associated with a higher risk of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's.

The researchers took into account age, gender, education and a history of strokes or smoking, and still found lower scores predicted higher risk of cognitive decline.

Lead author Robert Wilson of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center said a diminishing sense of smell isn't cause for panic.

"Not all low scorers went on to have cognitive problems," Wilson said.

Older people should report a loss in smell to their doctors, said Claire Murphy, an Alzheimer's researcher at San Diego State University who was not involved in the new study. The problem could be caused by a polyp in the nose or infected sinuses, she said.

"If a person is old and has a very good sense of smell, that's a very good sign," Murphy said.

Source: Associated Press

Exercise can help fight depression and Grow New Brain Cells

BEIJING, June 29 (Xinhuanet) -- A new study of wheel-running rats reveals exercise not only fights depression, it also helps the brain grow new cells.

Astrid Bjornebekk of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and her colleagues studied rats that had been genetically altered to exhibit depressive behaviors, plus a second group of control rats. Some of the rats had free access to running wheels for 30 days and others did not.
Then the scientists used a standard "swim test" to find out if running turned depressed rats into cheerful rodents. They measured the amount of time the rats spent immobile in the water and the time they spent swimming around in active mode. When depressed, rats spend most of the time not moving.

"In the depressed rats, running had an antidepressant-like effect after running for 30 days," Bjornebekk told LiveScience.

The researchers also examined the hippocampus region of the brain, involved in learning and memory. Neurons there increased dramatically in the depressed rats after wheel-running.
Past studies have found the human brain's hippocampus shrinks in depressed individuals, a phenomenon thought to cause some of the mental problems often linked with depression.
"The hippocampus formation is one of the regions they have actually seen structural changes in depressed patients," Bjornebekk said.

Running had a similar effect as common antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on lifting depression.

The research is published in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.
(Agencies)

Source: www.chinaview.cn

Kids and the Outdoors

Parents need to let kids out from 'house arrest'

. -- In San Francisco, when was the last time you saw kids with grass stains on their jeans? The scales of fish on their hands?

In San Diego, 90 percent of youngsters do not know how to swim and 34 percent have never been to the ocean even though it is only 15, 20 minutes away from their homes, according to the organization, Aquatic Adventure, which is trying to change that.

Because kids don't bike much anymore, either for transportation or recreation, bicycle sales are down 31 percent in the past five years. The outdoors industry is surviving by selling high-end expensive equipment to adults rather than entry-level gear for kids. The lack of outdoors activity affects both urban and rural kids; child obesity is growing twice as fast in rural areas than in urban areas.

Of the many factors, parents are most to blame, says Richard Louv, parent and author of the landmark book, "Last Child in the Woods." He blames long hours in front of the television. To some extent, he blames video games and iPods. He blames the loss of neighborhood fields and the lack of free, easy-to-reach places for kids to catch fish.

But most of all, he blames parents and how they raise their children.

"We're raising a generation under house arrest," Louv said. "Kids are overscheduled by their parents. They're pressured to get into college, score well on SATs. It's become so much more competitive, so parents enroll their kids in everything, and there's no time for independent play. Their (kids') time, it's disappearing to the sense that there's no time for anything."

I met with Louv in Roanoke, Va., this past week at the national conference for the Outdoors Writers Association of America. Right off, I sensed that he's a kind man, and as he made his indictments, there was no meanness in his eyes; more like sorrow for what is occurring and yet hope for what is still possible. He's married and the father of two young men, 24 and 19. As a Californian, hiker and fly fisher, Louv has seen first-hand how demands on kids' time turn them away from the outdoors and toward indoor recreation like TV and video games.

"The underbelly of this issue is that parents are scared to death," Louv said. "Parents are terrified that some stranger is going to take their kids at the corner." He blamed the national media for taking a handful of terrible crimes against children, magnifying and repeating them over and over, to create a national state of fear.

"I will confess that as I raised my boys, I had the same fear, and my boys did not have the same free rein as I did in nature," Louv said. "I did take them fishing a lot, hiking a lot."
In far-ranging comments, Louv described how a child's outdoor adventures -- or lack of them -- can affect his or her development. He said that a promising future can still be shaped:

-- Youth health: "The increase in diabetes and heart disease is because kids are growing up not moving. When you look at discussions of child obesity, you never see nature mentioned. They (parents) send them to the gym, but you look at adults, and gyms are not doing the job that well for them either. The greatest increase in child obesity in history happened in the same two decades as the greatest increase in organized sports in history."

-- Child development: "How does nature shape child development? Take attention deficit disorder. Kids exposed to just a little bit of nature get better. The attention span seems to lengthen. Could it be that the huge increase in kids on anti-depressants is because we took away the calming effect of natural experience?"

-- The education bounce: "Schools with kids with nature testing do better across the board, 27 percent better in science testing, than a kid in a cubicle. If we really care about education reform in United States, we would have a campaign called 'No Child Left Inside.' "

-- Integrating outdoor education in schools: When I told Louv of my proposal to Gov. Schwarzenegger to require outdoor skills curriculum in schools, he responded: "In Denmark, outdoor education occurs year-round. Kids get fewer colds and flu, and academic scores are higher."

-- The video impact: "Video games are the new rock-and-roll. I don't think they are the spawn of the devil. There are other factors, but video games and television are seductive ...
There are two kinds of attention. One is focused attention, like directed in front of a computer. The other is immersion attention. When do you use all of your senses? When you are in nature. When kids sit in front of TV or a video game, their physical worlds atrophy and shrink. Their physical boundaries, once as far as a bike could take them, have shrunk to about the size of a TV screen.

Unlike television, nature does not steal time, it amplifies it. Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding a full use of the senses."

-- Independence: "In natural play areas, they play more creatively, invent own games, play cooperatively" and learn to work out conflict with others, "distant from the adult world."

-- Access to nature: "Access is important. We've got disappearing open space. We need to pay attention to nearby nature, even a clump of trees at the end of a cul-de-sac. An open field may not look important, but to a child, it is an entire universe."

-- Making the future great: "My son said, 'Dad, when I think about nature being destroyed, it's too painful to think about.' So kids tune out the environmental issues. We live, recently, in a culture of depression, addicted to despair. We need to talk differently about the future.

"I spoke to a group of kids in Ukiah. I mentioned that because of climate change, everything is the next 40 years will change: new kinds of agricultural, architectural design, energy. Everything must change. To a 16-year-old sitting in high school, this is good news. I couldn't believe how attentive they were.

"This is a different way of framing the future. We really do need a new civilization, and we need to build it with our young. When you talk about it that way, you see their eyes light up. We can turn this around. It won't happen accidentally. It must be intentional."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Study Links Mother's Diet to Child's Vulnerability for Disease

What a pregnant mother eats may make her child more vulnerable for diseases later on in life. That's what Duke University researchers have shown in a new study released late this afternoon.

This new study provides additional evidence that ingredients a pregnant woman sometimes consumes may make her offspring more susceptible to disease.

The process involves a gene that may do a certain thing, not because it's abnormal, but because it was influenced by something in the environment.

The science is called epigenetics, which means "above the gene." The gene is not mutated or defective necessarily. It simply gets an imprint, which might be subtle.

Dr. Lynn Jorde, of University of Utah human genetics, says, "There are a lot of interactions that occur between our genes and our environment that we have to take into account when we're doing genetics studies. We can't think of genes as something you inherit, that stay the same throughout your life. They can be modified."

While the University of Utah was not involved in the Duke study, it knows a lot about this science called epigenetics.

Duke researchers exposed pregnant mice to BPA, a chemical commonly found in plastics that can be detected in almost all humans. It produced changes in mice born with a yellow coat. Earlier studies show these mice, as they get older, are at much greater risk for developing diabetes, obesity and cancer.

Dr. Jorde talks about yet another example of epigenetics. "There is some evidence that babies that are born with low weight are more likely to develop type II diabetes."

Again, the process can switch a gene on or off excessively without altering the sequence of the gene itself.

In the Duke experiment, when pregnant mice were given folic acid the effect of that BPA chemical was counteracted. So researchers say the recommendation that expectant mothers take folic acid becomes even more important now.

Source: www.ksl.com

Reading ability protects brain from lead exposure

Lead smelter workers who are better readers have more protection against the effect of lead exposure on the brain than those who do not read as well, according to a study on the impact of cognitive reserve published in the July 31, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

It has long been known that occupational lead exposure has negative effects on nerves and a number of areas of brain functioning. Certain well-ingrained brain functions, however, seem resistant to the effects of lead exposure. One of these is reading ability, which is also an indicator of cognitive reserve, or the brain’s ability to maintain function in spite of damage. Genetics, education and childhood cognitive abilities are factors which may contribute to cognitive reserve.

The study involved 112 smelter workers in New Brunswick, Canada. The workers underwent several cognitive and motor speed tests and a measure of reading ability. The researchers calculated working lifetime lead exposure from historic blood lead levels obtained by the smelter. The workers were then divided into groups with high cognitive reserve, defined as a reading level of 12th grade or higher, and low cognitive reserve, a reading level of 11th grade or lower.

“Even though the two groups had similar lead exposure, the cognitive effects of lead were 2.5 times greater in workers with low reading ability. In contrast, the effect of lead on motor speed was comparable in both groups as cognitive reserve does not apply to motor speed,” said study author Margit L. Bleecker, MD, PhD, with the Center for Occupational and Environmental Neurology in Baltimore, MD, and member of the American Academy of Neurology. “This suggests that high cognitive reserve has a protective effect that allowed these workers to maintain their functioning, even though lead affected their nervous system as shown by its effect on their motor skills.”

Source: www.aan.com

Docs try to diagnose autism, other mental issues in babies

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Within days of their birth, healthy babies will look you in the eye. By 4 months, they will delight in others. And by 9 months, they will exchange smiles.
Jacob Day did none of those things.

"We used to say it was like it burned his eyes to look at you," said his mother, Tamie Day of Antelope, California. "It was like a physically painful thing for him. It wasn't just that he wasn't looking at us; he was purposefully looking away."

Day, who has a psychology degree, suspected her son might have autism. She enrolled him in a study, published in April, that found that babies like Jacob are indeed at high risk for autism if they do not respond to their names by 12 months of age.

At 18 months, his autism was formally diagnosed, about a year earlier than usual. Before he turned 2, Jacob began daily intensive behavior treatment designed to help him lead a more normal life.

He is part of a growing field in psychiatry called infant mental health. Doctors and scientists are increasingly looking for early signs in babies of autism, attention deficit disorder and other mental problems that just a generation ago, scarcely anyone thought could appear in children so young.

Some scientists even believe that intensive treatment in some susceptible babies can actually prevent autism, attention deficit disorder and other problems.

An influential Institute of Medicine report in 2000 helped energize this idea. The report emphasized the plasticity of babies' brains. It also explained how interacting with babies can change their brain wiring.

"We used to say 'nature versus nurture,' but now people really think it's 'nature through nurture,"' said the University of Chicago's Dr. Lawrence Gray.

Tamie Day noticed the first ominous clue the night she and her husband, Chris, brought Jacob home after his birth.

"We walked in the door and he wouldn't stop looking at our ceiling fan," she said. "The next day, that's all he would look at."

Babies typically begin making eye contact soon after birth, and "understand at a basic, perhaps hardwired level, that eyes are special -- they look more at eyes than at other parts of the face," said Sally Ozonoff, an autism specialist at the University of California at Davis' MIND Institute.

When his mother expressed her autism concerns at Jacob's 6-month checkup, the doctor said "we were being a little overzealous," Day said.

Still, there was no pointing, no clapping, no shared smiles, and when Jacob would laugh, it seemed like his own private joke. So his parents sought out UC-Davis specialists, who gave them the heartbreaking diagnosis.

Making meaningful progress

Jacob, now 3½, has made meaningful progress thanks to treatment, his mother said, including a breakthrough moment at age 2. It still makes her cry to recall it.

She was giving Jacob a bath, playing the "itsy bitsy spider" finger game, when he looked up and really gazed into her eyes. "He was smiling up at me and I realized that was the first time he had done that," she said. "He has gorgeous blue eyes, and I was like, 'My God, your eyes are so beautiful."'

Interest in infant mental health has been boosted by awareness of the prevalence of attention deficit disorders and autism, which government officials said in February affects 1 in 150 U.S. children and may be more common than previously thought.

In April, researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders presented a report emphasizing earlier diagnosis and treatment.

The report said that about 17 percent of U.S. children have a developmental disability such as autism, mental retardation and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, but that the disorders are diagnosed in fewer than half before starting school.

The authors say warning signs include failure to:

• focus on sights and sounds by 2 months.

• initiate joyful behavior with parents by 4 months.

• exchange smiles and sounds with parents by 8 to 9 months.

• take a parent's hand to find a toy and point to objects by 12 to 16 months.

Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that pediatricians routinely evaluate children for developmental problems such as autism starting in infancy, and begin testing at age 9 months.

"Waiting until a young child misses a major milestone such as walking or talking may result in late rather than early recognition ... depriving the child and family of the benefits of early identification and intervention," the academy said.

Some critics worry that the trend will trigger needless diagnoses in children with normal variations in behavior.

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, a London, England, physician, said that while early recognition and treatment of true disorders are important, "the extension of these categories to include 20 to 30 percent of all children reflects a social trend of pathologizing and medicalizing children's lives, which seems to reflect difficulties of parents and teachers in dealing with familiar problems of childhood development."

Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a psychiatry professor at George Washington University and a co-author of the CDC-Interdisciplinary group report, said the idea is not to slap a label on babies and give them medication. Greenspan said the goal is to raise awareness about early warning signs and to encourage treatment to increase the chances that children can develop normally.

Source: Associated Press

Soda Poses Serious Health Risks

You may want to put that soda can down.

A common preservative found in drinks such as Coca-Cola, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, Fanta and Diet Pepsi and may cause serious cell damage, according to a report in Britain's The Independent.
Sodium benzoate has the ability to switch off vital parts of a person's DNA, according to research from a British university.

The problem is usually associated with aging and alcohol abuse, but new findings show that drinking soda with the preservative can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.

Sodium benzoate, which derives from benzoic acid, has been used for years by the carbonated drinks industry to prevent mold from developing in soft drinks. The ingredient has been the subject of concern on cancer, because when mixed with Vitamin C, it turns into a carcinogenic substance called benzene, the Independent reported.

Last year, a Food Standards Agency survey of benzene in drinks found high levels in four brands that were removed from store shelves.

"These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether," said Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology.

Source: Fox News

Babies Have Amazing Abilities Adults Lack

Babies might seem a bit dim in their first six months of life, but researchers are getting smarter about what babies know — and the results are surprising.

The word "infant" comes from the Latin, meaning "unable to speak," but babies are building the foundations for babbling and language before they are even born, responding to muffled sounds that travel through amniotic fluid.

Soon after birth, infants are keen and sophisticated generalists, capable of seeing details in the world that are visible to some other animals but invisible to adults, older children and even slightly older infants.

Recently, scientists have learned the following:

• At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongues from foreign ones.

• At 4 or 5 months, infants can lip-read, matching faces on silent videos to "ee" and "ah" sounds.

• Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages on Earth, and they can hear the difference between sounds in foreign languages that elude most adults.

• Infants in their first six months can tell the difference between two monkey faces that an older person would say are identical, and they can match calls that monkeys make with pictures of their faces.

• Infants are rhythm experts, capable of differentiating between the beats of their culture and another.

The latest finding, presented in the May 25 issue of the journal Science, is that infants just 4 months old can tell whether someone is speaking in their native tongue or not — without any sound, just by watching a silent movie of the adults' speech.

This ability disappears by the age of 8 months, however, unless the child grows up in a bilingual environment and therefore needs to use the skill.

In fact, all the skills outlined above decline somewhere around the time infants pass the 6-month mark and learn to ignore information that bears little on their immediate environment.

Astounding babies

The new study involved showing videos to 36 infants of three bilingual French-English speakers reciting sentences.

After being trained to become comfortable with a speaker reciting a sentence in one language, babies aged 4 and 6 months spent more time looking at a speaker reciting a sentence in a different language — demonstrating that they could tell the difference.

"In everything that we do in our research, babies seem to come out with these amazing capabilities," said Whitney M. Weikum, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia whose work is overseen by language-processing specialist Janet F. Werker. "As young infants, they come set with abilities to make a lot of fine discriminations, and they continue to astound us."

The research also serves as a reminder that language is a multimedia experience, said psychologist George Hollich of Purdue University.

"We don't just see a rose," Hollich explained. "We feel the softness of its petals and we smell its perfume. Likewise, language isn't just hearing or seeing a word 'rose.' We immediately relate that word to a rose's sight, touch and smell, even the sight of a person saying that word. Ben Franklin noted that he could 'understand French better by the help of his spectacles.' This work shows that infants too can recognize some languages solely by looking on the face."

Infant intelligence

Weikum's study adds to mounting evidence showing how infants move from being "universal perceivers," equally capable of learning any of the world's languages, to being specialists in the sounds, meanings and structure of their own native tongue over the first year of life, said Hollich, who studies infant language.

The findings raise questions about what is meant by intelligence when speaking of young children.

"Newborns can be said to be 'intelligent' in that they have the ability to almost effortlessly learn any of the world's languages," Hollich told LiveScience.

Some of Hollich's research shows that babies start to understand grammar by the age of 15 months, processing grammar and words simultaneously.

"We scientists consider infants more intelligent when they begin to notice and respond to familiar things. Of course, figuring out how exactly to best respond to familiar sights and sounds is something children will spend the rest of their lives learning to do, and that is the hallmark of what most would consider true 'intelligence.'"

Source: Live Science

Adult Mouse Brains Still Make Youthful Cells

The brains of adult mammals are slowly, constantly churning out new brain cells. Previously scientists assumed the fresh neurons acted simply as replacements for old and dying cells.
But recent research suggests that these new adult neurons may help old cells adapt to new experiences and could someday be used to rejuvenate aging brains.

The study, detailed in the May 24 issue of the journal Neuron, shows new brain cells act just as youthfully in adult mammals as those generated in young ones.

Hongjun Song at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues tagged cells in the brains of mice so that brand new nerve cells glowed green and were easy to track.

At 1 to 2 months old, the cells showed the ability to alter chemical inputs from nerves nearby, an indicator of youthfulness in cells that is often referred to as plasticity.

Not only were the novel cells acting young and agile, but they were able to reinvigorate their elderly neighbors too.

Teaching Old Mammals New Tricks

It's no secret that young children learn most anything, including language, more quickly than adults. This is in part due to the plasticity of their brain circuitry.

"The brief heightened activity we saw [in the mouse cells] may help explain how adults continue to adapt to new experiences even though adult brains are more hardwired than children's brains," said Song, a neurobiologist and stem cell scientist.

Young neurons are generated in two areas of the brain: the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb.

The hippocampus, in particular, appears almost like a fountain of youth. The new cells produced in the area, said Song, make the whole system younger.

In previous studies, new brain cells have also been shown to play a role in memory and mood regulation.

Song's research could prove helpful in regenerating brain circuitry after injury, such as spinal cord injury, or ailments like Parkinson's disease.

"The early thinking was to use stem cells to replace damaged circuitry, but that sounded very difficult to achieve and was a very daunting task," Song told LiveScience. "Now, this looks more possible. We don't need to replace the circuitry completely. An injection of a new force of neurons can make the old ones more flexible."

Source: Live Science

Brain Gets a Thrill From Charity

Knowing your money is going to a good cause can activate some of the same pleasure centers in your brain as food and sex, U.S. researchers said Thursday.

People who participated in a study got a charge knowing that their money went to a charity -- even when the contribution was mandatory, like a tax. They felt even better when they voluntarily made a donation, researchers found.

Ulrich Mayr, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, said the research sheds light on the nature of altruism and could help people feel better about being taxed.

"It shows that in an ideal world you could have a tax situation where you could be a satisfied taxpayer," said Mayr, whose study appeared in the journal Science.

The women were shown their money automatically being transferred from their account to a local food bank.

When the money reached the food bank account, it activated portions of the brain -- the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens -- known for pleasure. The effect was even greater when the people got to choose to give the money away.

"What is interesting is that these pleasure areas are for really basic needs, like food, sex, sweets, shelter and social connection," Ulrich said in a telephone interview. "It's the area that tells the brain what is good for us."

As it turns out, "That very same brain area not only tracks what is good for us, but what is good for others," he said.

He and colleagues were hoping to find out whether there was something in the act of giving itself -- and not just the social and egotistical reward of being a philanthropist -- that offers satisfaction.

"The fact that we find pleasurable activity in those mandatory tax-like situations strongly suggests the existence of pure altruism," he said.

Of course, simulating a tax is quite different from paying taxes to a government with policies you may or may not support, he noted.

"What it shows is that, in principle, we are capable of feeling good about doing our share," he said.

"The question is, 'Why is it that so often we feel bad about filling out our taxes?' Our study shows it is worth looking for an answer."

Source: Reuters

Are you suffering from brain mold?

Whether you're one of those hot, exhausted people cleaning up after a flood or just fighting the good fight to keep that dark, dank film off the grout in the shower -- mold could affect your mood.

In what's being hailed as a first, a public health study led by Brown University finds a link between regular old household mold and depression.

The study included data from the World Health Organization of nearly 6,000 people in Europe.
Some of the science is intuitive - sure, if you have a moldy home, you're likely to feel out of control - and perceptions of control are linked to depression.

And yes, if you're depressed, you might not be the best housekeeper.

Exposure to mold can produce physical symptoms that are well-documented: For those with allergies, asthma or suppressed immune systems, mold can make you sick- and if you're sick from mold, that could certainly affect your mental state.

But researchers hypothesize there may be another possible pathway: mold on the brain. Molds are toxins - and researchers suspect (but haven't proven) these toxins may impede the function of the frontal cortex, that touchy-feely part of our brain that rules emotion.

As someone slightly household-chore-challenged, I wondered - just how much mold might it take to affect my mood?

It's hard to quantify, says lead researcher and Brown University epidemiologist Ed Shenassa, adding that while a little mold in the bath won't do it, the more mold your have, the more likely it is to impact emotion.

Let's be clear: What we have here is an association between mold and mood-- more research is needed to see whether mold does indeed directly cause depression.

But Shenassa says there is a clear takeaway from this study: "Healthy homes promote healthy lives." That means not letting carpets, wallpaper or ceiling tiles to get wet, and stay wet for more than 48 hours, and giving leaks in the roof, walls and plumbing the immediate attention they deserve, because they're all sources of mold.

The study appears in the October edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Study finds emotional trauma can alter size of a child's brain

Hoping to unlock some of the mysteries of post-traumatic stress disorder in children, a Stanford University researcher looked inside their heads.

What Dr. Victor Carrion found was startling: Children with PTSD and exposure to severe trauma had smaller brains.

Carrion found a nearly 9 percent reduction in the size of the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped sheet of neurons that deals with memory and emotions.

The study, released earlier this year, was just a first step toward understanding the physical effects of trauma and why some children have a greater ability to ward off physical and mental reactions.

The disorder is relatively new to the psychiatric community. PTSD was officially included in the list of mental disorders in 1980, but only for adults. Children were added in 1987. Early PTSD studies focused on Vietnam War vets and rape victims.

More recent research shows the rates in children depend on the type of trauma:

• Parental homicide or sexual assault: nearly 100 percent.

• Sexual abuse: 90 percent.

• School shooting: 77 percent.

• Ongoing community violence: 35 percent.

In Los Angeles, school officials and researchers wanted to know if the rate of PTSD quoted by experts and the federal government held true in their hallways.

They wondered if it were possible that up to 35 percent of "urban youth exposed to community violence" had PTSD, a statistic cited by the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, part of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

In 2000, they joined UCLA researchers in screening students from 20 schools in violence-prone parts of the city.

Of the 1,000 students randomly selected, 90 percent were a victim of or a witness to community violence, and 27 to 34 percent had PTSD, said Marleen Wong, director of the district's Crisis Counseling and Intervention Services.

"PTSD is a hidden disorder," she said. "But it's hidden in plain sight."

Few districts in the country address PTSD and similar conditions related to ongoing community violence, said Alan Steinberg, associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress in Los Angeles.

However, Los Angeles school officials did recognize the problem, identified children with PTSD, developed and tested a treatment, and created a step-by-step process for schools to use. Yet implementation has come in fits and starts, with a school here and there embracing the group-counseling program only to see it die for lack of staff or monetary support, Wong said.

"To take it to scale, it means funding," she said.

This year, the California Department of Education's Safe and Healthy Kids Program Office will try to identify mental health needs in the schools with $633,000 from the state bond measure. But it's not enough, school officials and researchers say.

"Part of a real public investment in enhancing public education is the need for school-based programs to help these kids recover from the experiences," Steinberg said.

Source: CNN

Eardrum Damage

WASHINGTON — Eardrum damage resulting from the blast waves of explosions could be a sign of undetected traumatic brain injury among troops, according to new research unveiled last week.

One of the authors of the study, which tracked 662 blast injury survivors, said the data should serve as a warning to physicians and troops to watch for long-term neurological damage even after what seems to be a minor ear injury.

“A lot of troops, they get knocked unconscious or lose some hearing after an explosion, but they laugh about it,” said Air Force Dr. (Lt. Col.) Michael Xydakis, an assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “They just don’t see it as a potentially serious injury. But it can be.”

The research, done while Xydakis and his colleagues were stationed at Iraq’s Balad Air Base in late 2005, shows a troop whose eardrums were damaged by the blast waves of roadside bomb explosions were significantly more likely to also be knocked unconscious in those attacks.

A blow that renders servicemembers unconscious could cause brain trauma even if they come to quickly, and show no immediate signs of trouble.

Nearly 61 percent of patients who had perforation or tears in their eardrums blacked out in the blasts. Only about 22 percent of those whose eardrums were unharmed were hit hard enough to lose consciousness.

Xydakis said the relationship isn’t a major surprise; Other studies his team has worked on shows similar connections between retinal bleeding and loss of smell after explosions and subsequent blackouts.

But the force needed to damage these more obvious functions is also enough to cause potentially long-term cognitive problems, especially if patients aren’t given time to recover, he said.

“The idea is always triage, to deal with patients right away and then to quickly return them to their unit,” Xydakis said. “But this may be a sign there is more damage, and that they need more time.

“For troops who know their hearing is down or their (eardrum) was perforated, they should have a higher index of suspicion about how healthy they are.”

Researchers could not pinpoint exactly how much of a blast wave was needed to knock troops unconscious, but Xydakis warned that the equivalent of twice atmospheric pressure is enough to cause damage to the inner ear — a measurement easy to achieve in a sizeable explosion.
The research was published in the Aug. 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

Right Brain, Left Brain??

As high schools reopen and college admissions are announced, those of us with an interest in brain development and behaviour are witness to, yet again, a stream of anxious parents and their wards seeking advice and support. Course and career choices that young people are about to embark on challenge the best of families and provoke considerable debate (and conflict). What is apparent is that both parents and their wards, have not in most cases, prepared themselves adequately for these unique milestones.

We live in an aspirational society, one where higher standards of achievement are generally, constantly, being set as the norm. Also one where success has acquired many a new connotation! This has its effects on both parents and their wards. Many people set as targets for their children, all those goals they wanted to achieve (or wish they had achieved) but couldn’t. What gets easily forgotten in the midst of these parental aspirations is whether their child shares these goals, or indeed has the aptitude and ability to pursue them.

Youngsters too, influenced as they are by a changing society, sometimes set unreasonable targets for themselves; targets for which they may not necessarily have the ability, aptitude or at a pragmatic level, wherewithal. Peer pressure also plays on both parents and their wards. One often encounters otherwise relaxed parents, who have degenerated into a state of panic, at the thought of admissions and career choices. The bottom line is that the scenario usually results in much mental confusion and distress to all parties concerned.

One question that is not asked often enough is whether there is a science that will help us approach all this in a more logical manner. Today, neurological and behavioural scientists have a sophisticated understanding of human brain development and behaviour. Application of even working knowledge in these fields can help both parents and their wards. The concept of hemispheric dominance, i.e. which side of the brain has a more dominant effect in the concerned individual, is one example of how brain function may influence aptitude, learning and consequently success.

From a learning perspective, people who are left brain dominant have a better verbal memory, better linguistic abilities, reasoning and logical skills and better vocabulary! From a behavioural perspective these left brain dominant individuals tend to be more ideational and philosophical in their approach; and more motivated by social and pragmatic rather than emotional concerns; more diligent, capable of greater tenacity and driven more often by a sense of duty. On the other hand, people with right brain dominance have a better visual memory, better perception of space, better appreciation of art and music and greater creative abilities. They also tend to be more mood and emotion driven in how they make their choices. As a consequence they may work with bursts of energy, with these being confined to areas of interest rather than being a mere reflection of duty or workplace ethic alone. In common parlance it may be said that left brain dominant individuals think with their heads; those who are right brain dominant, with their hearts!

Can these concepts be of use in making a career choice? Depending on brain dominance a person has a choice of careers that may suit him well; careers that will leverage on his natural aptitude and abilities. Pre-eminent among these for the left brain dominant individual are careers that demand literary learning and memory as well as logical reasoning and diligence; medicine, law, business studies, accountancy and finance, computing, research, some humanity disciplines (philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, economics etc), teaching conventional subjects, to name a few important choices. On the other hand a right brain dominant person may choose the arts, theatre, cinema, music, architecture, design, advertising & media, and a range of other careers that demand creative endeavour.

Indeed, it may not be just in the choice of careers that brain dominance plays a role. Even within these professions, brain dominance may help define specialisation, role or abilities. Within medicine for example, the doctor who develops designs for medical appliances or develops new surgical approaches is quite different, temperamentally and otherwise, from one who administers a hospital effectively or specialises in medico-legal work.

Parents and their wards may therefore do well to consider these factors in making decisions about courses, careers and the future. The rapid strides that we have made in economic and social development in India have engendered a certain egalitarian ethos in our work places and across professions. No longer does one have to be a doctor, lawyer, accountant or MBA in order to “succeed”. While these career choices remain rather more secure and acceptable across social strata, the career buffet that the young person is presented with today, accommodates a range of aptitudes and abilities, with differences in qualification or educational endowment not really being reflected in the pay cheque, in the grossly discriminatory manner so familiar even a decade ago. Quite contrastingly, the young person has a choice today of starting work rather early, with few formal qualifications, and being paid better for these efforts than older, more experienced and perhaps better qualified people, in his own family. When such glasnost has percolated into the workplace, then pray why this angst and obsession about traditional and safe career choices? Why not just allow young people the choices their brains are dominant for?

Source: MSN

Research May Unlock Mystery Of Autism's Origin In The Brain

Science Daily — In the first study of its kind, researchers have discovered that in autistic individuals, connections between brain cells may be deficient within single regions, and not just between regions, as was previously believed.

Tony Wilson, Ph.D., lead researcher and assistant professor of neurology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, said he hopes this study will eventually lead to earlier diagnosis and more targeted medications for autism.

Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging technology to measure brain electrical activity, the researchers administered a test called the 40 hertz (cycles per second) auditory steady-state response test. The test measures electromagnetic wave cycles and indicates brain cell discharges at the 40 hertz frequency.

"This test measures the brain's capacity to mimic what it's hearing. A healthy brain's cells will fire back at 40 hertz," said Wilson. "We chose this test because it is a robust metric of how well individual circuits are functioning."

A group of 10 children and adolescents with autism, and 10 without autism, listened to a series of clicks occurring every 25 milliseconds (ms) for a duration of 500 ms. The MEG measured the brain's responses to these clicks.

In the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls attention and spatial processing, there was no significant difference in the groups. But the results showed a considerable discrepancy between the two groups in the left hemisphere, the area of the brain that controls language and logic.

In the auditory area of the left hemisphere, the group without autism delivered a brain response to the 40 hertz stimulation 200 ms after it began. However, the group with autism failed to respond entirely at the same 40 hertz frequency.

"Our results made sense. Both anecdotal and behavioral evidence suggest children with autism have significantly disturbed brain circuits on the local-level within an individual brain area," said Wilson. "For example, they tend to restrict their visual gaze to a part of someone's face, like a nose or an eye, but not the person's whole face."

The results also support previous research that showed disconnections between two or more brain regions, known as long-range connectivity. This new study supports the idea that the network as a whole is broken, but shows the disconnection in long-range connectivity may actually start within individual brain regions, known as local connectivity.

Wilson explains the difference between local and long-range connectivity using vision as an example. "With vision, one part of your brain identifies color, another perceives motion. Within each of these areas of your brain, there is local connectivity between brain cells that allow the region to do its job. When you see a red ball flying across the room, both of these areas of your brain start communicating with each other and put together flying and red as qualities of the same ball. That's long-range connectivity."

Wilson conducted the autism research while at the University of Colorado, but says he hopes to continue his autism research at Wake Forest.

"I chose Wake Forest because it has one of the most advanced MEGs in the country. Here, we can study the brain at a very precise level," said Wilson.

The results were reported in this month's issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Co-authors on this study were Donald Rojas, Ph.D., Martin Reite, M.D., and Peter Teale, M.S.E.E., with University of Colorado, and Sally Rogers, Ph.D., with University of California-Davis

Source: Science Daily

Exercise and the Brain

The Morris water maze is the rodent equivalent of an I.Q. test: mice are placed in a tank filled with water dyed an opaque color. Beneath a small area of the surface is a platform, which the mice can't see. Despite what you've heard about rodents and sinking ships, mice hate water; those that blunder upon the platform climb onto it immediately. Scientists have long agreed that a mouse's spatial memory can be inferred by how quickly the animal finds its way in subsequent dunkings. A "smart" mouse remembers the platform and swims right to it.

In the late 1990s, one group of mice at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, near San Diego, blew away the others in the Morris maze. The difference between the smart mice and those that floundered? Exercise. The brainy mice had running wheels in their cages, and the others didn't.

Scientists have suspected for decades that exercise, particularly regular aerobic exercise, can affect the brain. But they could only speculate as to how. Now an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain.

This theory emerged from those mouse studies at the Salk Institute. After conducting maze tests, the neuroscientist Fred H. Gage and his colleagues examined brain samples from the mice. Conventional wisdom had long held that animal (and human) brains weren't malleable: after a brief window early in life, the brain could no longer grow or renew itself. The supply of neurons — the brain cells that enable us to think — was believed to be fixed almost from birth. As the cells died through aging, mental function declined. The damage couldn't be staved off or repaired.

Gage's mice proved otherwise. Before being euthanized, the animals had been injected with a chemical compound that incorporates itself into actively dividing cells. During autopsy, those cells could be identified by using a dye. Gage and his team presumed they wouldn't find such cells in the mice's brain tissue, but to their astonishment, they did. Up until the point of death, the mice were creating fresh neurons. Their brains were regenerating themselves.

All of the mice showed this vivid proof of what's known as "neurogenesis," or the creation of new neurons. But the brains of the athletic mice in particular showed many more. These mice, the ones that scampered on running wheels, were producing two to three times as many new neurons as the mice that didn't exercise.

But did neurogenesis also happen in the human brain? To find out, Gage and his colleagues had obtained brain tissue from deceased cancer patients who had donated their bodies to research. While still living, these people were injected with the same type of compound used on Gage's mice. (Pathologists were hoping to learn more about how quickly the patients' tumor cells were growing.) When Gage dyed their brain samples, he again saw new neurons. Like the mice, the humans showed evidence of neurogenesis.

Gage's discovery hit the world of neurological research like a thunderclap. Since then, scientists have been finding more evidence that the human brain is not only capable of renewing itself but that exercise speeds the process.

"We've always known that our brains control our behavior," Gage says, "but not that our behavior could control and change the structure of our brains."

The human brain is extremely difficult to study, especially when a person is still alive. Without euthanizing their subjects, the closest that researchers can get to seeing what goes on in there is through a functional M.R.I. machine, which measures the size and shape of the brain and, unlike a standard M.R.I. machine, tracks blood flow and electrical activity.

This spring, neuroscientists at Columbia University in New York City published a study in which a group of men and women, ranging in age from 21 to 45, began working out for one hour four times a week. After 12 weeks, the test subjects, predictably, became more fit. Their VO2 max, the standard measure of how much oxygen a person takes in while exercising, rose significantly.

But something else happened as a result of all those workouts: blood flowed at a much higher volume to a part of the brain responsible for neurogenesis. Functional M.R.I.'s showed that a portion of each person's hippocampus received almost twice the blood volume as it did before. Scientists suspect that the blood pumping into that part of the brain was helping to produce fresh neurons.

The hippocampus plays a large role in how mammals create and process memories; it also plays a role in cognition. If your hippocampus is damaged, you most likely have trouble learning facts and forming new memories. Age plays a factor, too. As you get older, your brain gets smaller, and one of the areas most prone to this shrinkage is the hippocampus. (This can start depressingly early, in your 30's.) Many neurologists believe that the loss of neurons in the hippocampus may be a primary cause of the cognitive decay associated with aging. A number of studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia tend to have smaller-than-normal hippocampi.

The Columbia study suggests that shrinkage to parts of the hippocampus can be slowed via exercise. The subjects showed significant improvements in memory, as measured by a word-recall test. Those with the biggest increases in VO2 max had the best scores of all.
"It's reasonable to infer, though we're not yet certain, that neurogenesis was happening in the people's hippocampi," says Scott A. Small, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia and the senior author of the study, "and that working out was driving the neurogenesis."
Other recent studies support this theory. At the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, a group of elderly sedentary people were assigned to either an aerobic exercise program or a regimen of stretching. (The aerobic group walked for at least one hour three times a week.) After six months, their brains were scanned using an M.R.I. Those who had been doing aerobic exercise showed significant growth in several areas of the brain. These results raise the hope that the human brain has the capacity not only to produce new cells but also to add new blood vessels and strengthen neural connections, allowing young neurons to integrate themselves into the wider neural network. "The current findings are the first, to our knowledge, to confirm the benefits of exercise training on brain volume in aging humans," the authors concluded.
And the benefits aren't limited to adults. Other University of Illinois scientists have studied school-age children and found that those who have a higher level of aerobic fitness processed information more efficiently; they were quicker on a battery of computerized flashcard tests. The researchers also found that higher levels of aerobic fitness corresponded to better standardized test scores among a set of Illinois public school students. The scientists next plan to study how students' scores change as their fitness improves.

What is it about exercise that prompts the brain to remake itself? Different scientists have pet theories. One popular hypothesis credits insulin-like growth factor 1, a protein that circulates in the blood and is produced in greater amounts in response to exercise. IGF-1 has trouble entering the brain — it stops at what's called the "blood-brain barrier" — but exercise is thought to help it to do so, possibly sparking neurogenesis.

Other researchers are looking at the role of serotonin, a hormone that influences mood. Exercise speeds the brain's production of serotonin, which could, in turn, prompt new neurons to grow. Abnormally low levels of serotonin have been associated with clinical depression, as has a strikingly shrunken hippocampus. Many antidepressant medications, like Prozac, increase the effectiveness of serotonin. Interestingly, these drugs take three to four weeks to begin working — about the same time required for new neurons to form and mature. Part of the reason these drugs are effective, then, could be that they're increasing neurogenesis. "Just as exercise does,"Gage says.

Gage, by the way, exercises just about every day, as do most colleagues in his field. Scott Small at Columbia, for instance , likes nothing better than a strenuous game of tennis. "As a neurologist," he explains, "I constantly get asked at cocktail parties what someone can do to protect their mental functioning. I tell them, 'Put down that glass and go for a run.' " .

Source: www.sharpbrains.com