BrainBlog

From tomorrow's New York Times : Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect By SANDRA BLAKESLEE The New York Times Published: February 1, 2005 Birdbrain has long been a colloquial term of ridicule. The common notion is that birds' brains are simple, or so scientists thought and taught for many years. But that notion has increasingly been called into question as crows and parrots, among other birds, have shown what appears to be behavior as intelligent as that of chimpanzees. The clash of simple brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of the avian brain. Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews , an international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto. Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate nomenclature that reflec...

Nanomedicine's Promise Is Anything but Tiny By Rick Weiss The Washington Post Monday, January 31, 2005; Page A08 [ ... Read the full article ... ] Qdots and amphiphiles and other possibilities... [snip] Injured nerves do not regenerate easily, and the little healing that does occur is often inhibited by scar tissue formation. Samuel Stupp and John Kessler at Northwestern University in Chicago are using nanotechnology to overcome those hurdles. They made tiny rod-like molecules called amphiphiles, each of which is capped by a cluster of amino acids known to spur the growth of neurons and prevent scar tissue formation. The molecules are designed to remain suspended in a few drops of liquid until they come in contact with living cells. At that point they spontaneously arrange themselves like spokes in a wheel, and then further assemble into spaghetti-like nanofibers a few thousandths the thickness of a human hair. The nerve-healing amino acids end up arranged ni...

"Reid Lab Movies" of cat and rat visual cortex during visual stimulation, at: http://neuro.med.harvard.edu/site/reidweb/movies.html

From the BBC: Doctors Make Eye Cells See Light Scientists have found how to make eye cells sensitive to light, opening new ways to treat some forms of blindness. Experts at Imperial College London teamed up with colleagues at the University of Manchester to study a protein, melanopsin. Activating melanopsin in cells that do not normally use it made them sensitive to light, they told [the scientific journal] Nature. [snip] But experiments on mice which have had their rods and cones destroyed, reveals that other cells in the retina also have some form of light response. Scientists have suspected that melanopsin is important to all of these 'light sensitive' cells. The London-Manchester team set out to study melanopsin in more detail. In mice, they found turning on a gene for melanopsin caused nerve cells to work like photoreceptors. Although making cells in the eye responsive to light is not a cure for blindness, the researchers are working wit...

From tomorrow's New York Times , a book review of two new nonfiction books about the brain: The Brain: False Assumptions and Cruel Operations By WILLIAM GRIMES The New York Times Published: January 26, 2005 Reviews of these two books: POSTCARDS FROM THE BRAIN MUSEUM The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds By Brian Burrell Illustrated. 356 pages. Broadway Books. $24.95. THE LOBOTOMIST A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness By Jack El-Hai Illustrated. 362 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $27.95 Read the book review (free registration required)

The following study (see press release below and obtain the free full-text content of the research paper at full text ) has received a good deal of media attention over the past couple of days. Date: January 23, 2005 Contact: Public Affairs Office American Psychological Association (202) 336-5700 OLDER PEOPLE WITH THE “ALZHEIMER’S GENE” FIND IT HARDER TO “REMEMBER TO REMEMBER” EVEN IF THEY’RE HEALTHY New Mexico study finds surprisingly strong impact of genetic variation Washington — Carrying the higher-risk genotype for Alzheimer’s disease appears to render even healthy older people subject to major problems with prospective memory, the ability to remember what to do in the future. For the group studied, this could affect important behaviors such as remembering to take medicine at a certain time or getting to a doctor’s appointment. The research appears in the January issue of Neuropsychology , which is published by the American Psychological Asso...

The January 2005 newsletter of the American Psychological Association's Division 40 (Clinical Neuropsychology) is devoted to several papers exploring functional neuroimaging. The newsletter is available in .pdf format at http://www.div40.org/newsletter.html .

Safety Concerns Reported on J.& J. Alzheimer's Drug By ANDREW POLLACK New York Times Published: January 22, 2005 Regulators are reviewing the safety of the Alzheimer's disease drug Reminyl after data from two clinical trials indicated that people taking the drug had a much higher death rate than those taking a placebo. The review was announced yesterday by Johnson & Johnson, which said it was in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration and regulators in Europe and Canada. The trials, which involved about 2,000 patients in 16 countries, were looking at whether Reminyl could be used to treat mild cognitive impairment, a form of memory loss that is often a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. Reminyl is approved in 69 countries as a treatment for mild to moderate Alzheimer's but not for mild cognitive impairment. In the trials, which lasted two years, 15 patients taking Reminyl died compared with 5 taking the placebo. There were various ...

The Sunday Book Review in tomorrow's New York Times includes a review of a recently translated graphic memoir about a family of a person with epilepsy in the 1960s: 'Epileptic': Disorder in the House by David B. (pseudonym Pierre-Francois Beauchard) By RICK MOODY New York Times 23 January 2005 [snip] Historians of the graphic form will observe that Spiegelman, Sacco and others (one stunning example is the recent prose/graphic hybrid ''Diary of a Teenage Girl'' by Phoebe Gloeckner) have all experimented with autobiography in their work, but in the case of ''Epileptic'' the autobiographical impulse has, in my view, more to do with what's happening in French writing these days, namely l'autofiction. If, against the advice of conservatives, you should travel to the Paris of 2005, you would find that the traditional roman a clef of French literature has lately given way to a cottage industry of remorselessly literary accoun...

From the New York Times : Johnson & Johnson Reports Reminyl Deaths By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 21, 2005 Filed at 5:08 p.m. ET RARITAN, N.J. (AP) -- Patients taking Alzheimer's drug Reminyl in a test for another use had higher death rates than those taking a placebo, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development LLC announced Friday. The patients had mild cognitive impairment, and the J&J company is no longer pursuing Reminyl as a treatment for the condition and has not submitted any applications for such use, spokeswoman Carol Goodrich said. Reminyl was approved in 2001 as a treatment for mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. The higher death rate was not observed in Alzheimer's trials, Goodrich said. [ ... Read the full article ...] (free registration required)

The 33rd Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) will be held from the 2nd of February 2005 through the 5th at the Adam's Mark Hotel, located in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. Information about the conference can be found on the meeting's homepage .

How we choose A new branch of brain science tries to understand human decision-making, but also may have the power to influence our actions By Carolyn Y. Johnson Boston Globe January 18, 2005 Human life is a string of seemingly straightforward choices -- getting dressed, picking up a newspaper, and beginning to read this article -- that are surprisingly hard to predict. What sweater will people pull on, which newspaper will they choose, and what will they read first? As advertisers, financial analysts, and scientists have long known, it's hard to say. Human inconsistency rules. Now, a budding field called "neuroeconomics" seeks to explain exactly how people make up their minds by using the latest imaging technologies to examine the grayish lump of brain tissue where each decision begins. The researchers, migrs [sic] from fields like psychology, neuroscience, and economics, hope to build a theory of human behavior that starts at the level of single nerve...

From the BBC: Target found for Parkinson's test A gene mutation which could be behind one in 25 cases of Parkinson's disease has been discovered by scientists. It is hoped the findings could lead to the earlier detection of the disease and the development of treatments. Three separate studies by US, UK and Dutch research teams are published in The Lancet medical journal. Parkinson's, for which there is no cure, is a degenerative disease in the part of the brain controlling movement and affects 3% of people over 75. Read the full report ~ Here is a link to the 15 January 2005 issue of The Lancet , which includes citations and abstracts of the aforementioned studies, as well as editorial comment.

An interesting piece on what's about to hit consumers: the marketing of Lunesta (eszopiclone): You May Want to Sleep on It Enter the Next 'Miracle' Drug: A Sleeping Pill You Can Take Long-Term. Ads for Lunesta Won't Likely Give That Theme a Rest. This Time Will Consumers Be More Leery? By Sandra G. Boodman Washington Post Tuesday, January 18, 2005; Page HE01 Read the full article (free registration required)

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink , is now available. Today's New York Times Book Review features a review of the book, written by David Brooks. The review is available here (free registration required). Previous discussion of Blink and Gladwell's thoughts about cognition and so-called "thin-slicing" can be found in an 02 October 2004 BrainBlog entry ( October archives ). ~ Malcolm Gladwell's website is www.gladwell.com

This research study noted below been reported today in some media, in terms of potential implications for the diagnosis of Alzheimer disease. Here is the study's abstract, which is more technical in content and less speculative in nature: Chattopadhyay S, Xue B, Collins D, Pichika R, Bagnera R, Leslie FM, Christian BT, Shi B, Narayanan TK, Potkin SG, Mukherjee J. Synthesis and Evaluation of Nicotine {alpha}4{beta}2 Receptor Radioligand, 5-(3'-18F-Fluoropropyl)-3-(2-(S)-Pyrrolidinylmethoxy)Pyridine, in Rodents and PET in Nonhuman Primate. Journal of Nuclear Medicine. 2005 Jan; 46(1): 130-140. Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. Brain Imaging Center, University of California, Irvine, California. Nicotine alpha(4)beta(2) receptor subtypes are implicated in the study of Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, substance abuse, lung cancer, and other disorders. We report the development and evaluation of a putative antagonist, 5-(3'-fluoropropyl)-3-(2-(S)-py...

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam on Tom Wolfe's new novel: Escaping the wrath of Wolfe By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist January 11, 2005 Is Dartmouth cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga in line to become the new Epictetus? Anything is possible. Epictetus is the Greek Stoic philosopher who enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity in 1998, when Tom Wolfe published his best-selling novel ''A Man in Full." One of Wolfe's characters improbably converted to the teachings of Mr. E., ''a philosopher who had been stripped of everything, imprisoned, tortured, enslaved, and threatened with death," per Wolfe. Now, as first noted by Professor Gazzaniga's local paper, the Lebanon, N.H., Valley News, Mr. G. is just about the only academic to emerge unscathed in Wolfe's latest satirical outing, ''I Am Charlotte Simmons," which purports to be an expos of contemporary college life. The mention of Gazzaniga is ''notew...

You've probably read the news story which has received a good deal of press over the past day about a psychological investigation into language-patterning abilities in rats. The full-text reprint of this paper is available at this time on the website of the American Psychological Association, along with the original press release. The link for the full-text article is: http://www.apa.org/releases/speech_article.pdf Date: January 9, 2005 Contact: Public Affairs Office American Psychological Association (APA) (202) 336-5700 RATS CAN TELL TWO LANGUAGES APART FROM SPEECH CUES, SHARING AN ABILITY WITH HUMANS AND MONKEYS They’re the third type of mammal shown to have this skill WASHINGTON — Mammals other than humans can distinguish between different speech patterns. Neuroscientists in Barcelona report that rats, like humans (newborn and adult) and Tamarin monkeys, can extract regular patterns in language from speech (prosodic) cues. The report appear...

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Amygdala: Word as Earworm By JAMES GORMAN The New York Times Published: January 11, 2005 My infatuation with the amygdala has led me to wonder where aphasia and amusia overlap, a subject that neurologists have been investigating for many years. Damage to the brain can interfere with spoken language - aphasia. But it can also harm the ability to hear and produce melody. [ ... Read the full article ... ] (free registration required).

Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies: British Medical Journal 08 January 2005 Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by Etminan, Takkouche, Isorna, & Samii. New England Journal of Medicine 06 January 2005 Neurologic and developmental disability at six years of age after extremely preterm birth by Marlow and colleagues. The issue also has editorial commentary on this research paper. Limiting stroke-induced damage by targeting an acid channel by Benveniste & Dingledine. Nature 06 January 2005 A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage by Adolphs and colleagues. Excerpt: Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing inf...