BrainBlog

From today's Philadelphia Inquirer : Mental gymnastics to maintain the brain Boomers try games and gadgets to ease minds about aging By Lini S. Kadaba Inquirer Staff Writer [snip] As more baby boomers enter their 60s and others witness their elderly parents descend into senility, say experts, they're chasing after cognitive fitness with the same vigor they've had while pursuing wrinkle-free skin and erectile function. By holding out the promise of sharper, longer-lasting brain cells, a plethora of gadgets, classes and computer games has captured the attention of forever-youngs - despite thin scientific proof that any of this will keep their minds humming. Nintendo's popular Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day (1.3 million copies sold, according to the NPD Group) is more about fun than an assessment of mental acuity. But others - such as MindFit from Cognifit Ltd. and Brain Fitness, with object identifications, geometric puzzles and list recitations - have s...

From today's New York Times : Living With Alzheimer’s Before a Window Closes By JANE GROSS The New York Times 29 March 2007 Mary Blake Carver gazes from the cover of a neurology magazine this month, under the headline “I’m Still Here!” She often feels like shouting the message to her friends, her children, her husband. Ms. Carver, 55, is among the growing ranks of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when short-term memory is patchy, organizational skills fail, attention wanders and initiative comes and goes. But there is still a window of opportunity — maybe one year, maybe five — to reason, communicate and go about her life with a bit of help from those around her. Yet Ms. Carver is often lonely and bored. Her husband leaves her out of many dinner table conversations, both say, because she cannot keep up with the normal patter. He insists on buttoning her coat when she fumbles at the task. She was fired as a massage therapist because she lost track of time. So Ms. C...

From nytimes.com : Paul C. Lauterbur, 77, Dies; Won Nobel Prize for M.R.I. By KENNETH CHANG Published: March 28, 2007 Paul C. Lauterbur, who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for developing magnetic resonance imaging into a way to look inside living organisms, died yesterday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 77. [snip] In his initial experiments, Dr. Lauterbur produced simple pictures that could differentiate tubes of ordinary water from those containing water made of deuterium atoms, a heavier version of hydrogen. He also took an N.M.R. picture of a clam. “Which looked pretty much like a clam,” said David Hanson, a colleague at Stony Brook. “Some people thought it was sort of wacky.” The pictures were blurry and not particularly impressive. When Dr. Lauterbur submitted his findings to the journal Nature , it rejected the article. But he persisted, Dr. Hanson said. “Paul had the vision and the understanding that these were just proof-of-principle experiments,” he said, “and t...

Thanks to The Washington Post and ABC News , treatment issues related to TBI and other war-related injuries have been at the forefront of a healthy dose public attention over the past month. From the New York Times and International Herald Tribune : For the war's many brain-wounded, a challenge to find the right care By Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez The New York Times and International Herald Tribune Published: March 12, 2007 [snip] "We have been let down by a system that is so bungling and bureaucratic that it doesn't know what it can and cannot do and just says no as a matter of course," said Debra Schulz of Friendswood, Texas. Her son, Lance Corporal Steven Schulz, 22, of the Marines, suffered a severe brain injury during his second tour in Iraq. [snip] [ ... Read the full article ... ]

From today's New York Times : Scent Activates Memory During Sleep, Study Says By BENEDICT CAREY The New York Times Published: March 8, 2007 Scientists studying how sleep affects memory have found that the whiff of a familiar scent can help a slumbering brain better remember things that it learned the evening before. A rose bouquet — delivered to people’s nostrils as they studied and, later, as they slept — improved their performance on a memory test by almost 15 percent. The new study, appearing Friday in the journal Science , is the first rigorous test of odor on human memory during sleep. The results — whether or not they can help students cram for tests — clarify the picture of what the sleeping brain does with newly studied material, and of what it takes for this process to succeed. [ ... Read the full article ... ]

I just learned that Daniel Tammet has a blog, which is located at: www.optimnem.co.uk/blog/index.php .

Sixth Annual Clinical Neurosciences lecture: Dr. Peter St George (University of Toronto) "Alzheimer's centennial legacy: Prospects for treatment." See webpage for details .

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 ...