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New Atlas May Help Solve Mysteries of the Human Brain

Charles Choi
LiveScience
Wed, 19 Sep 2012 12:01 UTC
Brain Atlas
© Allen Institute for Brain ScienceA 3D rendering showing the expression a single gene across the human brain, revealing areas with higher (red) and lower (blue) expression.
The genetic differences between normal and abnormal human brains may be determined one day from a "brain atlas" scientists are refining.

The scientists have compiled high-resolution maps of genetic activity in the adult human brain based on the complete brains of two men as well as a hemisphere from a third man's brain, all of the tissue healthy when the men died. The researchers are making their data freely accessible online to aid in studies of normal and abnormal human brain function.

"By themselves these data do not hold all of the answers for understanding how the brain works or what are the genetic underpinnings of disease," researcher Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, told LiveScience.

"However, we hope they serve as a catalyst in human brain research for understanding the brain's complex chemistry and cellular makeup, what goes awry in disease, and how best to design and test treatments for disease."

Identifying where and when genes are active or expressed within the brain is a titanic endeavor. In fact, ever since the human genome was completely sequenced nearly a decade ago, researchers have strived to identify what exactly each gene might do, with great interest focused on any genes related to the brain.

The main challenge when it comes to understanding the human brain is the fact that it is the most powerful computer known. It consists of approximately 100 billion neurons with roughly 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) connections wiring these cells together, and each connection or synapse typically fires about 10 times per second.
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Magic Wand

Music underlies language acquisition

B.J. Almond
Rice University
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:58 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.

"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music."

Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab.

"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language - "the most musical aspects of speech."
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People

Why women speak less when they're outnumbered


Brigham Young University
Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:44 UTC
Research shows how to improve group discussions & decisions.

New experiments in group decision making show that having a seat at the table is very different than having a voice.

Scholars at Brigham Young University and Princeton examined whether women speak less than men when a group collaborates to solve a problem. In most groups that they studied, the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation - amounting to less than 75 percent of the time that men spoke.

The new study is published by the top academic journal in political science, American Political Science Review.

"Women have something unique and important to add to the group, and that's being lost at least under some circumstances," said Chris Karpowitz, the lead study author and a political scientist at BYU.
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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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Info

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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Info

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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