BrainBlog

From a report in The New York Times about the neuroscience of smoking: Scientists Tie Part of Brain to Urge to Smoke By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: January 25, 2007 [snip] The insula, for years a wallflower of brain anatomy, has emerged as region of interest based in part on recent work by Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute. The insula has widely distributed connections, both in the thinking cortex above, and down below in subcortical areas, like the brain stem, that maintain heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the body’s primal survival systems. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ]

From today's New York Times : January 23, 2007 Amnesiacs May Be Cut Off From Past and Future Alike By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times In the movies amnesia is bizarre, and thrilling. The star is usually a former assassin or government agent whose future depends on retrieving the bloody, jigsaw fragments that restore identity and explain the past. Yet in the real world, people with amnesia live in a mental universe at least as strange as fiction: new research suggests that they are marooned in the present, as helpless at imagining future experiences as they are at retrieving old ones. The new study, reported last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , is the first rigorous test of how brain-injured people with amnesia mentally inhabit imaginary scenes. The results suggest that to the brain, remembered experience and imagined experience are reflections from the same mirror, rich inner worlds animated by almost identical neural networks. The findings provide ...

From The Daily Iowan : UI mourns death of renowned professor emeritus Matt Nelson - The Daily Iowan Issue date: 1/15/07 Section: Metro Remembered both for his dedication to the mind and to music and noted for his charm and wit, Arthur Benton, one of the founding fathers of neuropsychology and the founder of the UI's neuropsychology laboratory, died of emphysema at the age of 97 in Glenview, Ill., on Dec. 27. "Today, we have one of the most advanced neuropsychology departments, both clinical and research, in the country," said neurology Professor Robert Rodnitzky, who had worked with the UI professor emeritus of psychology and neurology both as a student and a colleague. "That's his legacy." Born in New York City, Benton received a bachelor's and master's from Oberlin College, then received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1935, training as a psychologist at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in the New York Hospital. In early...

Ekaterina Rogaeva, Yan Meng, Joseph H Lee, Yongjun Gu, Toshitaka Kawarai, et al. (2007). The neuronal sortilin-related receptor SORL1 is genetically associated with Alzheimer disease. Nature Genetics , Published online: 14 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/ng1943. The recycling of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) from the cell surface via the endocytic pathways plays a key role in the generation of amyloid peptide (A) in Alzheimer disease. We report here that inherited variants in the SORL1 neuronal sorting receptor are associated with late-onset Alzheimer disease. These variants, which occur in at least two different clusters of intronic sequences within the SORL1 gene (also known as LR11 or SORLA) may regulate tissue-specific expression of SORL1. We also show that SORL1 directs trafficking of APP into recycling pathways and that when SORL1 is underexpressed, APP is sorted into A-generating compartments. These data suggest that inherited or acquired changes in SORL1 expression or fun...

Djordjevic J, Jones-Gotman M, De Sousa K, & Chertkow H. (2007). Olfaction in patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Neurobiology and Aging [epub ahead of print.] Montreal Neurological Institute, 3801 University Street, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 2B4, Quebec, Canada. Understanding of olfactory dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains limited. In particular, it is not known how early in the course of the disease olfactory deficits occur, and whether they are restricted to identification or involve other aspects of olfaction. We studied olfactory (odor detection thresholds, quality discrimination, and identification) and cognitive (attention, reasoning, memory, naming and fluency) functioning in patients with AD, with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and in normal elderly control (NEC) participants. MCI patients were impaired in olfactory sensitivity and identification, while a discrimination de...

The following New England Journal of Medicine case study in the current issue of the journal is available for full-text access [ Link ]: Ropper, A.H., and Gorson, K.C. (2007). Concussion. New England Journal of Medicine , 356, 166-172. A 64-year-old woman slipped on an icy walk, falling forward and striking her forehead. She had a brief convulsion immediately after the fall, was unresponsive for less than 1 minute, and awakened with a severe generalized headache and nausea but no vomiting. In addition to being perplexed about the circumstances of the fall, she could not recall the previous few hours. She was awake and oriented and had no abnormalities on neurologic examination. Tenderness and a scalp contusion were apparent at the site of the impact, and there were abrasions on her right cheek. What is the expected course, and how should her case be managed?

From this month's APA Monitor : Phantom pain and the brain An actual touch, or an imaginary one? It’s all the same to (some parts of) your brain By Sadie F. Dingfelder Monitor Staff The APA Monitor January 2007 Print version: page 22 Scientists have long conceptualized the part of the brain known as the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) as where it first registers touch sensations. Prick your finger and S1 springs into action, sending raw information about the injury’s location to higher brain areas for further interpretation, according to most neuroscience textbooks. Those textbooks may need new editions. S1 doesn’t simply catalogue physical sensations: It also registers sensory illusions that are generated elsewhere in the brain, according to a recent study in PLOS Biology (Vol. 4, No. 3, pages 459–466). In fact, as far as S1 is concerned, there’s no difference between a real or imaginary touch, says lead author Felix Blankenburg, PhD, a neuroscience researcher at University Co...