Eye movements reveal unconscious memory retrieval : Neurophilosophy Neurostress: How Stress May Fuel Neurodegenerative Diseases In 2007, James Watson eyed his genome for the very first time. Through more than 50 years of scientific and technological advancement, Watson saw the chemical structure he once helped unravel now fused into a personal genetic landscape laid out before him. Yet there was a small stretch of nucleic acids on chromosome 19 that he preferred to leave uncovered, a region that coded the apolipoprotein E gene. APOE, as it’s called, has been a telling genetic landmark of Alzheimer’s risk, strongly correlated to the disease since the early 90s. Watson’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and without any reasonable treatments or suitable preventive strategies, the father of DNA decided the information was too volatile, its revelation creating more potential harm than good. Watson’s apprehension was warranted. When studying identical twins, researchers can sift through such questions, says Plassman. More or less, all of the primates raised in normal size cages had the same amount of plaque.
ADHD in Adults - Symptoms, Causes, Types, Treatments, and More Why do I need to register or sign in for WebMD to save? We will provide you with a dropdown of all your saved articles when you are registered and signed in. What is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)? Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most well-recognized childhood developmental problems. This condition is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Recommended Related to ADD-ADHD ADHD and Risky Behavior in Adults When Amanda, 30, was diagnosed with ADHD five years ago, she began to understand the risk-taking that had marked her teens and twenties: the drug abuse, binge drinking, and casual sex with numerous men who had flirted with her in bars. Read the ADHD and Risky Behavior in Adults article > > ADHD in Adults Adults with ADHD may have difficulty following directions, remembering information, concentrating, organizing tasks, or completing work within time limits. Adult ADHD Statistics Common Behaviors and Problems of Adult ADHD
Sexual orientation – wired that way In a recent post, I presented the evidence that sexual preference is strongly influenced by genetic variation. Here, I discuss the neurobiological evidence that shows that the brains of homosexual men and women are wired differently from those of their heterosexual counterparts. First, we must consider the differences between the brains of heterosexual males and females. These differences are extensive and arise mainly due to the influence of testosterone during a critical period of early development (see Wired for Sex). They include, not surprisingly, differences in the number of neurons in specific regions of the brain involved in reproductive or sexual behaviours as well as differences in the number of nerve fibres connecting these areas. It should be emphasized that all of these differences are apparent only in group averages and there is very substantial overlap in the distributions of the measures of different brain regions in males and females. Savic I, & Lindström P (2008).
Mini-strokes leave 'hidden' brain damage Each year, approximately 150,000 Canadians have a transient ischemic attack (TIA), sometimes known as a mini-stroke. New research published January 28 in Stroke, the journal of the American Heart Association shows these attacks may not be transient at all. They in fact create lasting damage to the brain. The stroke research team, led by Dr. "What we found has never been seen before," says Dr. In the TIA group, brain cells on the affected side of the brain showed changes in their excitability -- making it harder for both excitatory and inhibitory neurons to respond as compared to the undamaged side and to a group of people with healthy brains. A transient ischemic attack is characterized as a brief episode of blood loss to the brain, creating symptoms such as numbness or tingling, temporary loss of vision, difficulty speaking, or weakness on one side of the body. "These findings are very important," says Dr.
The depression map: genes, culture, serotonin, and a side of pathogens | Wired Science Maps can tell surprising stories. About a year ago, Northwestern University psychologist Joan Chiao pondered a set of global maps that confounded conventional notions of what depression is, why we get it, and how genes — the so-called “depression gene” in particular — interact with environment and culture. So she gathered it. Chiao and one of her grad students, Katherine Blizinsky, found all the papers they could that studied serotonin or depression in East Asian populations. These papers, along with similar studies in other countries and some World Health Organization data on mental health, painted a pretty good picture of short-SERT variant and depression rates not just in North American and Europe, but in East Asia. A pretty good picture — but seemingly twisted in the middle. You can see it in the maps. Fig 1. Fig 2. You can chart the data in other ways too, and it still looks weird. Squaring two maps with a third As Chiao recognized, several possibilities offered themselves.
Cognitive Enhancement Versus Drug War Cognitive enhancement is not about future generations playing video games via neural implants and thought interfaces. Presently, it is about a large fraction of the worlds scientist shortening their lives (speak about lifespan enhancement) via caffeine, nicotine, and sugar intake that leads to diabetes and cardio vascular illnesses via hypertension with high blood pressure and heart troubles, teeth grinding, frequent urination, and so on. Coffee is a must at all conferences. No brew, no chance of surviving afternoon talks in a fully conscious state. The irony should be obvious: In a world with Modafinil and methylphenidate and where the cardio-toxic problems from caffeine are well known, exactly those who should know best, the scientists, are collectively ignorant. Why? Paul Erdös created mathematics with the help of Ritalin and amphetamines without becoming addicted over 25 years. Jewish Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös Or do we need special citizen science?
A stranger in half your body An amazing study has just been published online in Consciousness and Cognition about a patient with epilepsy who felt the left half of his body was being “invaded by a stranger” when he had a seizure. As a result, he felt he existed in one side of his body only. The research is from the same Swiss team who made headlines with their study that used virtual reality to make participants feel they were in someone else’s body, and one where brain stimulation triggered the sensation of having an offset ‘shadow body’ in patients undergoing neurosurgery. The researchers suggest that having an integrated sense of our own bodies involves three types of perception: self-location – the area where we experience the self to be located; first-person perspective – the perceived centre of the conscious experience; and self-identification – the degree to which we identify sensations with our own bodies. Patient 1 is a 55 year old, left-handed male patient suffering from epilepsy since the age of 14 years.
Think Different: How Perception Reveals Brain Differences PERCEPTUAL PSYCHOLOGY and the brain sciences emphasize the communality in the way that people experience reality. Leaving aside cases of brain damage or mental disease, we all see the sun rise in the east, enjoy the scent of a rose and experience a jolt of fear when we are woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. This is a reflection of the great similarities of our brains compared with the brains of our close cousins on the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Laboratory science reinforces this bias by lumping together the performance of its subjects on any one experiment and reporting only the average and the variation around this mean. This conflation is also true for the telltale hot spots that show up in functional magnetic resonance brain images that we are used to seeing in newspapers, in magazines such as this one, on television and in the movies. Yet as we know from our own life, each one of us has his or her own preferences, likes and dislikes.
Music, Mind, and Meaning This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Have we the tools for such work? Certainly we know a bit about the obvious processes of reason–the ways we organize and represent ideas we get. The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. Much of what we now know of the mind emerged in this century from other subjects once considered just as personal and inaccessible but which were explored, for example, by Freud in his work on adults' dreams and jokes, and by Piaget in his work on children's thought and play. Why do we like music? I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals. Sonata as Teaching Machine Compare a sonata to a teacher. Cadence. What Use Is Music?
SEX ADDS YEARS TO YOUR LIFE ... The Flashing Images above are designed to provide a "Mental Image" of what takes place when your brain's Pleasure Pathway is stimulated by activities associated with feeling good. Science now believes positive stimulation of your built in reward system can add many quality years to your life. Few activities stimulate our pleasure pathway more than Sexual Intercourse........... Science has concluded our Pleasure Pathway plays a much greater role in our lives than just the survival of the species. Regular sexual activity is so beneficial to our health it is amazing how seldom it is discussed within this context. The intimacy and bonding you receive from remaining sexually active are more vital to your long term health than most people think.