BrainBlog

ABC News reporter Bob Woodruff looks at wartime traumatic brain injuries and the process of recovery in a special report this evening at 10:00 pm ET. Additional information available on the webpage devoted to the special: Bob Woodruff - To Iraq and Back .

A feature article in today's New York Times on coping with epilepsy in one's everyday life.

Daniel Tammet, author of "Born on a Blue Day," featured on 60 Minutes several weeks ago and a British documentary film last year, makes an appearance in today's House & Home section of The New York Times : Brainman, At Rest in His Oasis .

From today's New York Times : Faces, faces everywhere By ELIZABETH SVOBODA Published: February 13, 2007 [snip] Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun? Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ]

Neuropsychologists are beginning to stream into town for the INS meeting that kicks off tomorrow. The conference takes place just a couple of blocks from the iconic Portland Building by Michael Graves, one of the first of the post-modernist structures from the turn of the 1980s. Outsized Portlandia is still a sight to be seen from street level. As to the conference, I'm very pleased to see the surprising number of presentations about verbal fluency (a favorite topic of mine) and what are likely to be some very good presentations about Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Thematically, the conference deals with rehabilitation issues this time around, with a number of presentations on that broad topic. (And plenty of good coffeehouses, too!) Room space is tight. The conference hotel sold out a while ago. The hotel I am staying at (a half-dozen blocks from the conference) is sold out. I am guessing that folks are spread out over the entire FreeZone. (Someone just rolled down the street on...

From today's New York Times A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects By SANDRA BLAKESLEE [snip] According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human. They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music. Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ]

From today's San Diego Union-Tribune : Pioneering Alzheimer's scientist at UCSD dies Thal led efforts to find therapies for the disease By Cheryl Clark and Sandra Dibble UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS San Diego Union-Tribune February 5, 2007 Dr. Leon J. Thal, a Cardiff neuroscientist and international pioneer in Alzheimer's disease, died Saturday after his small plane crashed in the mountains southwest of Borrego Springs. Thal's plane had taken off from San Diego's Montgomery Field at 6:15 p.m. Saturday and was headed for Borrego Springs, said Bruce Nelson, a Federal Aviation Administration official in Lawndale. The airplane, with only the pilot on board, crashed under unknown circumstances, Nelson said. Thal was chairman of the neurosciences department at the University of California San Diego. Leslie Franz, a spokeswoman for the university, confirmed late yesterday that Thal died in the crash. “This is a huge blow to UCSD,” Dr. Henry Powell, a professor of pathology ...

Devinsky J. A diary of epilepsy in the early 1800s. Epilepsy and Behavior , 2007 Jan 29; [Epub ahead of print]. 97 Westview Road, Short Hills, NJ 07078, USA. This article describes the diary of a man from 19th-century England (1829-1834) that documents the onset and course of his wife's epilepsy after a stroke. Her stroke produced aphasia and right hemiparesis, but her epilepsy was the diary's focus and caused the greatest concern. The diary documents the history of her epilepsy in detail. In addition to tonic-clonic seizures, she experienced frequent bouts of status epilepticus and complex partial seizures. The diary contains some of the earliest recorded descriptions of status epilepticus and its aftermath of delirium, mood disorder, and hysteria. It also offers some of the earliest and most detailed accounts of complex partial seizures. Bleeding by cupping was the only symptomatic or prophylactic treatment recorded. These aspects of the diary are presented, as are the histo...

"The cognitive neuroscience of remote memory: implication for theories of hippocampal neocortal interaction." Continuation of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Talk Series, presented by Dr. Morris Moscovitch, University of Toronto. Time: 12 pm - 1:15 pm Location: 3401 Walnut Street, A Tower 400A School: Univerity of Pennsylvania, School of Arts and Sciences More information: webpage

I recently noticed a press release about a new entrant in the Game Brain game: Sharp Brains .

The 35th Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society (INS) will be held next week in Portland, Oregon. The theme of the conference this year is Neuropsychological Rehabilitation: Theory, Therapy, and Outcomes. Details about the conference can be found on its webpage.

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...

risser_pic_31dec06_neuropsychology_tuscany Originally uploaded by rissera . Interesting piece in today's New York Times about music and the brain and work by Daniel Levitin [ link ]. Curious neuro readers are directed to some classical papers by Macdonald Critchley on this topic.

photograph by anthony risser, 1985 Originally uploaded by rissera . Dr. Arthur L. Benton, Neuropsychologist 1909-2006 Obituary printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen: Friday, December 29, 2006 Arthur Benton, 97 Arthur Benton, beloved husband of the late Rita, died December 27, 2006 from complications of emphysema, in Glenview, Illinois. Loving father of Raymond Benton (Nina), Abigail Sivan (Milton Harris), and Daniel Benton (Nancy Hauserman). Devoted grandfather of Jeffrey Benton, Ori Sivan (Claudia Regojo), and Ofer Sivan (Amber Neville). Fond brother-in-law of Joan Rogers. He was born October 16, 1909 in New York City. Dr. Benton received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1935. He acquired his training as a psychologist at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital. Early in 1941, Benton volunteered for service in the U.S. Navy and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the medical department. ...