Researchers at the University of North Carolina school of Medicine have found that certain brain patterns in adults with Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia and autism can also be seen in the brain scans of infants.

"These results suggest that prenatal brain development may be a very important influence on psychiatric risk later in life," said lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry at UNC, Rebecca C. Knickmeyer. In addition to early detection, the study may also lead to early intervention breakthroughs in the degenerative brain disorder.

According to the report on UNC's website:

The study included 272 infants who received MRI scans at UNC Hospitals shortly after birth. The DNA of each was tested for 10 common variations in 7 genes that have been linked to brain structure in adults. These genes have also been implicated in conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, Alzheimer's disease, anxiety disorders and depression.

For some polymorphisms - such as a variation in the APOE gene which is associated with Alzheimer's disease - the brain changes in infants looked very similar to brain changes found in adults with the same variants, Knickmeyer said. "This could stimulate an exciting new line of research focused on preventing onset of illness through very early intervention in at-risk individuals."

Just hours after they're born, babies seem to be able to tell the difference between sounds in their native tongue and a foreign one, according to a new study that suggests language learning begins in utero.

"The mother has first dibs on influencing the child's brain," researcher Patricia Kuhl, of the University of Washington, said in the statement. "The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them."

Researchers examined 40 babies (an even mix of girls and boys) in Tacoma, Wash., and Stockholm, Sweden. At about 30 hours old, the infants in the study listened to vowel sounds in their native language and in foreign languages. The babies' interest in the sounds was measured by how long they sucked on a pacifier wired to a computer.

The study found that, in both countries, the infants listening to unfamiliar sounds sucked on the pacifier for longer than they did when exposed to their native tongue, suggesting they could differentiate between the two. Lead author of the study, Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, said the results show that fetuses can learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother's language.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

If it is awakening or spiritual elevation we wish to attain, we must stop living only for ourselves and start living for others, work not only for our own pleasure, comfort, security, and self-image, but work for the liberation of all people from slavery and oppression.

There is no other work to be done, and all "spiritual work" done without this intention is inherently selfish and ultimately self-defeating.

Part of AIGA Talk in London, November 22, 2001

1. 
You can only work for people that you like.

This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn't particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience.

"We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and in people listening to music that they like," says Sarah Earp, who led the research as an undergraduate at Emory University.

For male birds listening to another male's song, it was a different story: They had an amygdala response that looks similar to that of people when they hear discordant, unpleasant music.

The study, co-authored by Emory neuroscientist Donna Maney, is the first to compare neural responses of listeners in the long-standing debate over whether birdsong is music.

"Scientists since the time of Darwin have wondered whether birdsong and music may serve similar purposes, or have the same evolutionary precursors," Earp notes. "But most attempts to compare the two have focused on the qualities of the sound themselves, such as melody and rhythm."

Earp's curiosity was sparked while an honors student at Emory, majoring in both neuroscience and music. She took "The Musical Brain" course developed by Paul Lennard, director of Emory's Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology program, which brought in guest lecturers from the fields of neuroscience and music.

"During one class, the guest speaker was a composer and he said that he thought that birdsong is like music, but Dr. Lennard thought it was not," Earp recalls. "It turned into this huge debate, and each of them seemed to define music differently. I thought it was interesting that you could take one question and have two conflicting answers that are both right, in a way, depending on your perspective and how you approach the question."

People who study or treat Alzheimer's disease and its earliest clinical stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), have focused attention on the obvious short-term memory problems. But a new study suggests that people on the road to Alzheimer's may actually have problems early on in processing semantic or knowledge-based information, which could have much broader implications for how patients function in their lives.

Terry Goldberg, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine and director of neurocognition at the Litwin Zucker Center for Research in Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, NY, said that clinicians have observed other types of cognitive problems in MCI patients but no one had ever studied it in a systematic way. Many experts had noted individuals who seemed perplexed by even the simplest task. In this latest study, published in this month's issue of theAmerican Journal of Psychiatry, investigators used a clever series of tests to measure a person's ability to process semantic information.

Do people with MCI have trouble accessing different types of knowledge? Are there obvious semantic impairments that have not been picked up before? The answer was "yes."

In setting out to test the semantic processing system, Dr. Goldberg and his colleagues needed a task that did not involve a verbal response. That would only confuse things and make it harder to interpret the results. They decided to use size to test a person's ability to use semantic information to make judgments between two competing sets of facts. "If you ask someone what is bigger, a key or an ant, they would be slower in their response than if you asked them what is bigger, a key or a house," explained Dr. Goldberg. The greater the difference in size between two objects, the faster a person -- normal or otherwise -- can recognize the difference and react to the question.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, by Kevin Dutton

Years ago, as a student, I attended some lectures by a prominent anthropologist who regaled his listeners with odd and engaging stories about a group of indigenous people he had lived among in a far-flung corner of the planet. The tales stuck in the mind. Indeed, some of them were so amazing that I came away from his talks sure that counterintuitive but vital truths about human behavior had just been revealed. Only during the final lecture was I granted an inkling that these truths might not bear much relationship to reality. Fairly gleeful in her disdain, one of his indentured graduate assistants whispered to me that, in the field, the anthropologist had offered his subjects chocolate bars in exchange for stories about themselves - the more fantastic the stories, the more plentiful the candy. Avidly scrawling notes, his audience had become an illustration of how easily the foreign and the fascinating can assume the aura of science.

Though I have no reason to think chocolate was involved, I am concerned that a similar phenomenon may occur among readers of The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton, a research psychologist at the University of Oxford. Dutton's eye-catching thesis is this: "Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one's demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life." Psychopathy, proposes Dutton, is "personality with a tan."

Children who make an effort to perform acts of kindness are happier and experience greater acceptance from their peers, suggests new research from the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Riverside.

Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a professor in UBC's Faculty of Education, and co-author Kristin Layous, of the University of California, Riverside, say that increasing peer acceptance is key to preventing bullying.

In the study, published December 26 by PLOS ONE, researchers examined how to boost happiness in students aged 9 to 11 years. Four hundred students from Vancouver elementary schools were asked to report on their happiness and to identify which of their classmates they would like to work with on school activities. Half of the students were asked by their teachers to perform acts of kindness -- like sharing their lunch or giving their mom a hug when she felt stressed -- and half were asked to keep track of pleasant places they visited -- like the playground or a grandparent's house.

Bullying may leave long-lasting scars on kids' DNA in addition to their psyche, new research suggests.

A small study found that bullied kids are more likely to have changes in the expression of a gene involved in mood regulation compared with their identical twin siblings who were not bullied.

"Since they were identical twins living in the same conditions, changes in the chemical structure surrounding the gene cannot be explained by genetics or family environment," researcher Isabelle Ouellet-Morin said in a statement. "Our results suggest that victimization experiences are the source of these changes."

Ouellet-Morin, who is affiliated with King's College London and the Université de Montréal, and her team looked at 28 pairs of identical twins born between 1994 and 1995. Data had been collected on these children through the British Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study. In each of these 28 pairs, one twin had been a victim of bullying while the other had not.

A monkey would probably never agree that it is better to give than to receive, but they do apparently get some reward from giving to another monkey.

During a task in which rhesus macaques had control over whether they or another monkey would receive a squirt of fruit juice, three distinct areas of the brain were found to be involved in weighing benefits to oneself against benefits to the other, according to new research by Duke University researchers.

The team used sensitive electrodes to detect the activity of individual neurons as the animals weighed different scenarios, such as whether to reward themselves, the other monkey or nobody at all. Three areas of the brain were seen to weigh the problem differently depending on the social context of the reward. The research appears Dec. 24 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Using a computer screen to allocate juice rewards, the monkeys preferred to reward themselves first and foremost. But they also chose to reward the other monkey when it was either that or nothing for either of them. They also were more likely to give the reward to a monkey they knew over one they didn't, preferred to give to lower status than higher status monkeys, and had almost no interest in giving the juice to an inanimate object.

Calculating the social aspects of the reward system seems to be a combination of action by two centers involved in calculating all sorts of rewards and a third center that adds the social dimension, according to lead researcher Michael Platt, director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

The orbital frontal cortex, right above the eyes, was activated when calculating rewards to the self. The anterior cingulate sulcus in the middle of the top of the brain seemed to calculate giving up a reward. But both centers appear "divorced from social context," Platt said. A third area, the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg), seemed to "care a lot about what happened to the other monkey," Platt said.