BrainBlog

The Charlie Rose show is airing episodes from Series 2 of its "Brain Series." Series 2 is a series of episodes that deal with brain disorders. Home page

A TEDtalk by University of Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert: TEDtalk From the webpage: "Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion."

ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN SCIENCE 2011 Annual Symposium: Open Questions in Neuroscience October 4-5, 2011 Seattle, WA "The second annual symposium, Open Questions in Neuroscience , offers a thought-provoking program that addresses key areas of neuroscience and looks to the future of the field. Bringing together a diverse group of leading scientists, the meeting will feature a mixture of talks and discussion to inspire innovative thinking and engage participants in exploring compelling avenues for advancing brain research." - from the webpage Visit the conference webpage

Taking a look this week at new texts in introductory neuroscience & neuropsychology and at new books about the brain written for a general audience. It is always a fun activity to see what's out there, and the selections just get better and better each year! What are your favs of 2011?

Untangling the brain by Nature Video 09 March 2011 Watch the YouTube video

Britain is bottom of Euro league table at diagnosing Alzheimer's Britons with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease take twice as long to be diagnosed as sufferers living in other European countries, research has found. By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent The Telegraph 9:00PM GMT 26 Feb 2011 Read the article

From The New York Times : F.D.A. Sees Promise in Alzheimer’s Imaging Drug By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 20, 2011 Filed at 5:40 p.m. EST WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal panel of medical experts said Thursday a first-of-a-kind imaging chemical designed to help screen for Alzheimer's disease could be useful pending additional study and training for physicians. The Food and Drug Administration panel of advisers voted 16-0 in favor of approval for Eli Lilly's Amyvid on the condition that the company demonstrates the images can be consistently interpreted by physicians who have received training in reading the scans. Without those requirements the panel voted 13-3 against approval for the injection in an earlier vote. The FDA is not required to follow the panel's advice, though it often does. Read the full report

Enjoy a brainy evening tonight on BBC4! Broken Brains

A very readable piece from Gina Kolata of the New York Times: Doubt on Tactic in Alzheimer’s Battle By GINA KOLATA The New York Times Published: August 18, 2010 "The failure of a promising Alzheimer’s drug highlights the gap between diagnosis and treatment." Read the full article

Available for viewing and downloading from the NIH: It Takes Tau to Tangle : Plaques, Tangles and Neurodegenerative Disease by Karen Duff 23 June 2010 link

From The Guardian : Maps of the mind: The Lion's Face How do you write an opera about dementia? Poet Glyn Maxwell on the moving journey that produced The Lion's Face Glyn Maxwell guardian.co.uk Tuesday 25 May 2010 21.46 BST "Three years earlier, I had been asked by the composer Elena Langer to write a libretto for an opera about Alzheimer's. My first thoughts about the disease were mostly wrong. Knowing nothing about the subject, I did what poets do: I tried out some verse-forms – villanelles, pantoums, ghazals. I was falling into the trap of substituting the patterned oddities of poetry for the dire incoherences of dementia, looking for lyricism by default. "The more I learned, the better the poems became. The Institute of Psychiatry in south London's Denmark Hill opened its doors to Elena and me. We talked to scientists and researchers, saw x-rays and brain scans. We met care-givers, psychologists, music and drama therapists. We saw good care homes where we...

A reminder that tomorrow (Monday) you can watch the conference online. Information, including the programme, can be found at http://consensus.nih.gov/2010/alz.htm . If you tweet, the hashtag for the conference is #NIHAlz

From the NIH: NIH State-of-the-Science Conference: Preventing Alzheimer's Disease and Cognitive Decline - Day 1 View event: You will be able to view the event at http://videocast.nih.gov when the event is live. Air date: Monday, April 26, 2010, 8:30:00 AM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local [snip] Description: For many older adults, cognitive health and performance remain stable, with only a gradual and slight decline in short-term memory and reaction times. Others, however, progress into a more serious state of cognitive impairment or into various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to investigating the causes and potential treatments for Alzheimer’s and other dementias, researchers are focused on finding ways to prevent cognitive decline. Many preventive measures for cognitive decline and for preventing Alzheimer’s have been suggested, but their value in delaying the onset and/or reducing the severity of decline or disease is unclear. B...

A news release from the NIH: Targeting the Blood-Brain Barrier May Delay Progression of Alzheimer's Disease 12 April 2010 Researchers may be one step closer to slowing the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease. An animal study supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, shows that by targeting the blood-brain barrier, researchers are able to slow the accumulation of a protein associated with the progression of the illness. The blood-brain barrier separates the brain from circulating blood, and it protects the brain by removing toxic metabolites and proteins formed in the brain and preventing entry of toxic chemicals from the blood. "This study may provide the experimental basis for new strategies that can be used to treat Alzheimer’s patients," said David S. Miller, Ph.D., chief of the Laboratory of Toxicology and Pharmacology at NIEHS and an author on the paper that appears in the May...

From the BPS Research Digest blog: BPS Research Digest: Is this the first ever direct evidence for human mirror neurons? The blog entry includes a link to the paper's abstract.

Chen Y, Li YS, Wang ZY, Xu Q, Shi GW, & Lin Y. [The efficacy of donepezil for post-stroke aphasia: a pilot case control study.] Zhonghua Nei Ke Za Zhi. 2010 Feb, 49(2), 115-118. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the efficacy of donepezil for post-stroke aphasia. METHODS: Sixty patients with acute post-stroke aphasia were divided into treatment group and a control group. All patients had been treated for secondary prevention according to the guideline. The treatment group received donepezil hydrochloride (5 mg/d) for 12 weeks. The efficacy of treatment was measured by comparing the changes of scores of Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) between baseline and 12 weeks later. RESULTS: Compared with the baseline, the changes of scores of all items of WAB and Aphasia Quotient (AQ) in both group after 12 weeks follow-up were great, however, the change of AQ was significantly greater in donepezil group (34.14 +/- 17.70)than that in control group (20.69 +/- 17.26)(P = 0.004). The patients in donepezil gr...

Goetz CG. Scales to evaluate psychosis in Parkinson's disease. Parkinsonism and Related Disorders. 2009 Dec; 15 Suppl 3, 38-341 Hallucinations and psychotic behaviors are a frequent non-motor aspect of Parkinson's disease and its treatment. These behaviors usually do not occur in the presence of the physician and are therefore difficult to rate. Further, because of their bizarre nature, hallucinations are frequently underreported by patients, and caregivers are often unaware of them until they become problematic. A number of scales have been developed for rating these behaviors, most of them borrowed or adapted from assessment tools used in other psychotic disorders like schizophrenia. In the latter disorders, however, hallucinations and psychosis are phenomenologically different than the typical hallucinations of Parkinson's disease. The Movement Disorder Society Task Force on Parkinson's Disease Rating Scales has completed a systematic critique of scales used in cl...

Tam F, Churchill NW, Strother SC, & Graham SJ. A new tablet for writing and drawing during functional MRI. Human Brain Mapping. 2010 Mar 24. Writing and drawing are understudied with fMRI, partly for lack of a device that approximates these behaviors well while supporting task feedback and quantitative behavioral logging in the confines of the magnet. Consequently, we developed a tablet based on touchscreen technology that is accurate, reliable, relatively inexpensive, and fMRI compatible. After confirming fMRI compatibility, we conducted preliminary fMRI experiments examining the neural correlates of a widely used pen-and-paper neuropsychological assessment, the trail making test. In two subjects, we found left hemisphere frontal lobe activations similar to the major results of a previous group study, and we also noted individual differences mostly in the right hemisphere. These results demonstrate the utility of the new tablet for adaptations of pen-and-paper tests and suggest p...

From today's Observer : Colin Blakemore: how the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution Oxford neurobiologist Colin Blakemore tells Robin McKie why he thinks a mutation in the human brain 200,000 years ago suddenly made us a super-intelligent species Robin McKie 28 March 2010 The Observer Read the article

Bueti D, Bahrami B, Walsh V, & Rees G. Encoding of temporal probabilities in the human brain. Journal of Neuroscience. 2010 Mar 24, 30(12), 4343-4352. Anticipating the timing of future events is a necessary precursor to preparing actions and allocating resources to sensory processing. This requires elapsed time to be represented in the brain and used to predict the temporal probability of upcoming events. While neuropsychological, imaging, magnetic stimulation studies, and single-unit recordings implicate the role of higher parietal and motor-related areas in temporal estimation, the role of earlier, purely sensory structures remains more controversial. Here we demonstrate that the temporal probability of expected visual events is encoded not by a single area but by a wide network that importantly includes neuronal populations at the very earliest cortical stages of visual processing. Moreover, we show that activity in those areas changes dynamically in a manner that closely acco...