Science of the SpiritS


Magic Wand

Songbirds shed light on brain circuits and learning

Julie Rhodes
Duke University Medical Center
Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:51 UTC
By studying how birds master songs used in courtship, scientists at Duke University have found that regions of the brain involved in planning and controlling complex vocal sequences may also be necessary for memorizing sounds that serve as models for vocal imitation.

In a paper appearing in the September 2012 issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers at Duke and Harvard universities observed the imitative vocal learning habits of male zebra finches to pinpoint which circuits in the birds' brains are necessary for learning their songs.

Knowing which brain circuits are involved in learning by imitation could have broader implications for diagnosing and treating human developmental disorders, the researchers said. The finding shows that the same circuitry used for vocal control also participates in auditory learning, raising the possibility that vocal circuits in our own brain also help encode auditory experience important to speech and language learning.

"Birds learn their songs early in life by listening to and memorizing the song of their parent or other adult bird tutor, in a process similar to how humans learn to speak," said Todd Roberts, Ph.D., the study's first author and postdoctoral associate in neurobiology at Duke University. "They shape their vocalizations to match or copy the tutor's song."
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Just Thinking About Interacting With a Woman Is Enough to Cloud Men's Thinking Ability, Study Confirms

Makini Brice
Medical Daily
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:57 UTC
Jessica Rabbit
© Medical Daily
It's a pretty common trope in sitcoms: man thinks something, man meets woman, man is unable to continue thinking. But, like all good comedy, the cliché has its roots in human nature. It, in fact, has roots in science as well. Researchers found that, for men, even the thought of interacting with a woman was enough to cause cognitive impairment.

In 2009, a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that, after interacting with an attractive woman for a short period of time, heterosexual men's cognitive ability declined. More recently, a team of Dutch researchers attempted to see if they could take that correlation one step further. They conducted two experiments using male and female college students.

Both tests started with the Stroop test. The test shows participants the name of a color, like "orange." The color is written in a different color, like blue. Participants need to quickly identify the color in which the word is written, rather than what the word is. The test is pretty difficult because participants naturally read the word, confusing their brains.
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Brain Function is Different in Anorexic Women, Study Says

Nikki Tucker
Medical Daily
Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:21 UTC
Brain
© Activist Post
Researchers from the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, Dallas and University of Texas, Southwestern, discovered brain-based differences in women suffering from anorexia.

Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that causes an individual to obsess about his or her weight. Many individuals suffering from anorexia may starve themselves in order to prevent weight gain.

Researchers used fMRI to observe the brain function in participants. Women were instructed to evaluate their own characteristics compared to a friend. The study tasks included self-evaluation, friend evaluation and reflected evaluation, which assessed an attribute about one's self as perceived by a friend.

The stduy was led by researchers Dr. Dan Krawczyk, associate professor at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and psychiatry at UT Southwestern, and Dr. Carrie McAdams, assistant psychiatry professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center,

According to Dr.Krawczyk, women who are suffering from anorexia demonstrated different types of brain activation compared to non-anorexic women.
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Health

Improving Memory for Specific Events Can Alleviate Symptoms of Depression


ScienceDaily
Mon, 17 Sep 2012 14:39 UTC
Hear the word "party" and memories of your 8th birthday sleepover or the big bash you attended last New Year's may come rushing to mind. But it's exactly these kinds of memories, embedded in a specific place and time, that people with depression have difficulty recalling.

Research has shown that people who suffer from, or are at risk of, depression have difficulty tapping into specific memories from their own past, an impairment that affects their ability to solve problems and leads them to focus on feelings of distress.

In a study forthcoming in Clinical Psychological Science, a new journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Hamid Neshat-Doost of the University of Isfahan, Iran, Laura Jobson of the University of East Anglia, Tim Dalgleish of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge and colleagues investigated whether a particular training program, Memory Specificity Training, might improve people's memory for past events and ameliorate their symptoms of depression.
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Link found between reversible 'epigenetic' marks and behavior patterns


RedOrbit
Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:52 UTC
Bee Hive
© Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock
Genetic analysis of different types of worker bees has for the first time demonstrated a link between reversible chemical tags on an organism's DNA and their behavioral patterns.

Andy Feinberg, a professor of molecular medicine and the director of the Center for Epigenetics at Hopkins' Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, and colleagues used a method they called CHARM (comprehensive high-throughput arrays for relative methylation) to investigate the location of the DNA methylation biochemical process in the brains of both "nurse" bees and "forager" bees.

They chose 21 of each type of worker bee, all approximately the same age, and discovered 155 regions of DNA that had different tag patterns in each of the two bee types, the researchers explained in a Sunday statement. The bulk of those were genes that have been known to affect the status of other genes, they said, and once the differences were identified, Feinberg and his colleagues set out to discover whether or not they were permanent.

Knowing that nurses can switch jobs, so to speak, if there are a lack of foragers in a hive (and vice-versa), they removed all of the nurses and observed for several weeks while the hive restored the balance. Once that was completed, they again studied the DNA methylation patterns to determine whether or not the tags had changed in the foragers that became nurses.
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Stop

Male Stroke Survivors Dogged More By Depression Than Females: Study

Roxanne Palmer
International Business Times
Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:37 UTC
Image
© Flickr via Creative Commons / shazwanResearchers speculated that male stroke survivors may be more susceptible to feelings of loss of control due to infirmity.
People that are lucky enough to survive strokes often have another hurdle to clear once they're discharged: depression, which affects about a third of stroke survivors.

Now a small study of 36 stroke survivors suggests that men are more likely to be stalked by the black dog than women. Researchers measured the participants for signs of depression, and found that male subjects were more likely to feel depressed by their precarious health than the female participants.

"Male stroke survivors in the US who subscribe to traditional health-related beliefs may be accustomed to, and value highly, being in control of their health," lead author and University of Cincinnati researcher Michael J. McCarthy said in a statement Wednesday. "For these individuals, loss of control due to infirmity caused by stroke could be perceived as a loss of power and prestige. These losses, in turn, may result in more distress and greater depressive syndromes."

Tackling the problem of male stroke survivor depression is a tricky one. One study from a group of Kent State University researchers found that Web-based intervention methods were helpful for the wives and caregivers of male stroke victims, but had little effect on the survivors themselves.

McCarthy acknowledged that his group's study is a bit limited by its small, non-diverse sample size.
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Bulb

Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides

Maia Szalavitz
Time
Tue, 04 Sep 2012 10:33 UTC
Image
© Tony Anderson / Getty Images
Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor - from whether to eat that decadent chocolate cupcake to when to pursue a new romantic relationship or to change careers. How does the brain decide? A new study suggests that it relies on two separate networks to do so: one that determines the overall value - the risk versus reward - of individual choices and another that guides how you ultimately behave.

"Cognitive control and value-based decision-making tasks appear to depend on different brain regions within the prefrontal cortex," says Jan Glascher, lead author of the study and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, referring to the seat of higher-level reasoning in the brain.

Study co-author Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology at Caltech, explains the distinction by way of a grocery shopping example: "Your valuation network is always providing you with information about what's rewarding around you - the things you want to buy - but also lots of distracting things like junk food and other items popping into your vision off the shelves."

Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. "To be able to get to the checkout counter with what you planned, you need to maintain a goal in mind, such as perhaps only buying the salad you needed for dinner," says Adolphs. "That's your cognitive control network maintaining an overall goal despite lots of distractions."
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People

Feeling stressed by your job? Don't blame your employer, study shows


University of Notre Dame
Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:22 UTC
Work stress, job satisfaction and health problems due to high stress have more to do with genes than you might think, according to research by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.

The lead author of "Genetic influences on core self-evaluations, job satisfaction, work stress, and employee health: A behavioral genetics mediated model," published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Judge studied nearly 600 twins - some identical, some fraternal - who were raised together and reared apart. He found that being raised in the same environment had very little effect on personality, stress and health. Shared genes turned out to be about four times as important as shared environment.

"Assume James and Sandy both work in the same organization," Judge says. "James reports more stress than Sandy. Does it mean that James' job is objectively more stressful than Sandy's? Not necessarily. Our study suggests strong heritabilities to work stress and the outcomes of stress. This means that stress may have less to do with the objective features of the environment than to the genetic 'code' of the individual."
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Mystery of How Social Isolation Messes with Brain Solved

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Thu, 13 Sep 2012 13:01 UTC
Lonely Boy
© Suzanne Tucker | ShutterstockSocial isolation during critical years of maturation can wreak havoc on the brain, scientists report in the Sept. 13, 2012, issue of the journal Science.
Social isolation in youth may wreak havoc on the brain by disrupting a protein crucial to the development of the nervous system's support cells, new research finds.

A new study in mice finds that when the animals are isolated during a crucial early period, brain cells called oligodendrocytes fail to mature properly. Oligodendrocytes build the fatty, insulating sheathes that cushion neurons, and their dysfunction seems to cause long-lasting behavioral changes.

Research in rhesus monkeys and humans has shown that social isolation during childhood has an array of nasty and lifelong effects, from cognitive and social problems in neglected children to working memory troubles in isolated monkeys. These children and monkeys also show abnormalities in the white matter of the brain, which includes support cells such as oligodendrocytes as well as the fat-covered neural projections that act as the brain's communication system.

But while previous studies had noted a correlation between white matter problems and cognitive struggles after isolation, they could not prove one caused the other. Gabriel Corfas, a professor of neurology and otolaryngology at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues wanted to understand how the relationship works.

They took baby mice from their mothers at 21 days of age, right after weaning. Some of the young mice were put in typical laboratory conditions, living in a cage with three other mice. Another group was given an enriched environment, with lots of mousey company and an ever-changing array of toys. The final group of mice was put in individual isolation for two weeks, never seeing another rodent.
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Magnify

Have Scientists Defined Consciousness?

Darioingach
Speaking of Research
Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:31 UTC
Image
A group of scientists recently gathered at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference and issued the following declaration which as been widely covered in the media:
The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
Their good intentions duly noted, this is not a declaration of a scientific fact.
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