The ABC's of fear

George W Bush has made it clear that during his administration science should be producing tangible benefits for society. In simple terms, the culture has had to shift from a very basic science oriented approach inherited from the freewheeling 90's to an applied focus now. Often what that means is that the same scientists who were on top of basic research for so many years have to give lip service to clinical studies and trials.

A good example came out right before halloween. Here is a hodge podge of quotes from neuroscientists who study fear in the brain.

The first comes from Stephen Maren of Michigan, who is a reputable and good scientist.

"We're making a lot of progress," said University of Michigan psychology professor Stephen Maren. "We're taking all of what we learned from the basic studies of animals and bringing that into the clinical practices that help people. Things are starting to come together in a very important way."

The translation is: "Please don't cut my funding. Look this is all going to pan out clinically in a couple of years, we promise!"

That being said, some progress is being made in this field...so, uh, don't cut NIH funding!

The amygdala and face processing

A nifty imaging study shows that the human brain processes fear faster than any other emotion.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, which shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images, is responsible.

"The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on," Zald said.

When I interviewed for graduate school, I met Dr. Zald. All I remember was he played a weird instrument, like a zither, which he displayed in his office. It seems he made a CD which he kept in his office, too.

Experimental treatment for brain damaged patient

A pretty powerful story.

You May Not Have Rhythm, but Your Brain Does

YOU MAY NOT HAVE RHYTHM, BUT YOUR BRAIN DOES

New research begins to demystify communication between brain regions, potentially paving the way to treating disorders caused by crossed signals

A great set of studies by scientists I've corresponded with and respect. It's all about rhythm.

©

Slow wave sleep and race

A blurb that's just coming out into the press.

Slow wave activity (SWA), a stable trait dependent marker of the intensity of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, is lower in young healthy African-Americans compared to Caucasians who were matched for age, gender and body weight, according to recent research.

It would be interesting to see the full report on this, whether subjects were matched on social and economic scales, and whether other health issues played a factor.

Update: Apparently there was a big sleep convention lately. Here were some other findings:

Sleep restriction affects children's speech

Electrical brain waves predict attentional deficits following sleep deprivation


Sleep disorders are highly prevalent among police officers

Sleep deprivation can lead to increased smoking and drinking

Finally:
A good night's sleep improves athletic performance

Antidepressants in children: researchers vs. psychiatrists

A small handful of researchers, and the FDA, are skeptical about prescribing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to children and teenagers. First, the point of view of the researchers.

Gingrich used mice that were genetically altered so that they lacked the ability to mop up serotonin. They were—in effect—born on Prozac. He wanted to see how depression was related to serotonin and norepinephrine, another neurotransmitter. "Our simple-minded idea was these mice would look like mice treated chronically with Prozac," Gingrich says. They should have been free of anything like a mouse's version of depression or anxiety.

Gingrich found quite the opposite. Because he could not chat with them about their feelings, he gave the mice stress tests. (An inability to handle stress is one hallmark of depression.) He put a small electric charge on the floor on one side of their cage. Normal mice will quickly learn to escape the tiny shock by running to the other side. These mice did not. "They have a tendency to freeze," he says. "They stay on the same side where the foot shock is being administered, or they escape much more slowly." The mice—­despite having lived their entire lives as if they were on Prozac—were afflicted with what looked suspiciously like an anxiety disorder.

Now, fair and balanced, the psychiatrists...

Even in the face of this evidence, however, many psychiatrists believe that antidepressants do far more good than harm in children and teens. Like Emslie in Texas, Harold Koplewicz, a professor of psychiatry at New York University and one of the city's top child psychiatrists, has been using SSRIs aggressively in children and teenagers for more than a decade. "I am probably the first person to give these meds to kids clinically," he says. As recently as a few years ago, most psychiatrists thought they should try talk therapy with kids before giving them medication. But that has changed, he declares.

He has seen what happens to teenagers who are not treated. "After they've had one episode of depression, they're 60 percent more likely to have another. If they have two, they're 90 percent more likely to have a third. And subsequent episodes are more difficult to treat.... Every good clinician will tell you the risk of not taking the medication is greater" than the possible risks of taking SSRIs.

Evidence for the inflammation hypothesis of Alzheimer's

The inflammation hypothesis of Alzheimer's, which suggests that inflammation in the brain triggers a cascade of cellular events that over time results in deposits and atrophy, and subsequent cognitive deficits, is still relatively controversial.

A Harvard researcher found a correlation between inflammation and future prevalence of Alzheimer's.

The participants' blood was tested for levels of cytokines, which are protein messengers that trigger inflammation. Those with the highest amount of cytokines in their blood were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's disease as those with the lowest amount of cytokines.

Doogie mice version 2.0

"It's pretty rare when you can make an animal smarter," said Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who led the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

I'll say. These guys deleted a certain gene, Cdk5, which apparently controls the destruction of the NMDA receptor. The NMDA receptor is important for learning new associations and retaining them as memories. Seems pretty legit.

Aggression and mice, an Ohio story

A shout out to my neighbors with the big press release.

"We found that estrogen has totally opposite effects on behavior in these mice depending only on how much light they got each day," said Brian Trainor, co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow in psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University. "It is quite a surprising finding."

Microeconomics and the brain

A pretty cool story on the diminishing marginal utility theory.

The microeconomic law of diminishing marginal utility states that while accumulating a good—pretzels, pencils, nickels, whatever—each successive unit of that good will be less satisfying to acquire than the one before it. Finding a shiny quarter on the street is a real thrill. But, if you are carrying around a bag of coins, acquiring another one does not seem nearly as exciting. In fact, would you even bother to pick it up?

That hesitation is what researchers at the University of Cambridge in England were banking on when they designed a study to see if the haves catch on more slowly than the have-nots when it comes to reward-based learning. Reporting in the current issue of Neuron, the scientists reveal that when a small sum of money is on the line, poorer people learn quickly how to maximize their profits, leaving their wealthier counterparts in the dust.

Of goals and spatial memory

It's spring break time here at OSU and many undergrads are driving down to Daytona and Pensacola etc. As they drive through Kentucky and Tennessee, I'm sure they don't remember much about the drive and the exits once they get to their destination. But, imagine they were driving through Kentucky in search of that glorious elixir, Ale-8-1? Better yet, what if they were assigned to work in Estill county, Kentucky, for a summer selling books door to door? One could imagine that driving through Lexington to get gas would not encode the place as strongly as driving through each of the 6 exits to find the thick green glass bottles of Ale-8-one, the kind that truly insulate that citrusey ginger ale concoction.

Interestingly, the idea that goal representation and motivation play a role in the encoding of spatial memories is still controversial within the neuroscience. I am glad to see scientists rigorously testing the effects of motivation on spatial memory (the hippocampus is the part of the brain that encodes spatial memory, among other things).

The hippocampus contains place cells, which are neurons whose firing frequency increases dramatically when an animal is in a specific location in an environment. This location is known as the place cell's place field. Reporting in the Journal of Neuroscience, Hok and colleagues show that these cells can also fire when a rat is in an area associated with a particular goal, even if this area is outside a cell's place field.

It's probably best to read the whole thing.

Behold the Insula

Interesting news in nature caught my eye:

A study in Science reported that people with damage to the insula, a brain area involved in the assessment of bodily states, found it much easier to give up smoking than people with lesions in other brain areas. Importantly, the insula-lesioned patients had no urge to start smoking again.

I think I can see where this is going: mandatory insulotomies for smokers, once Hillary is elected.

The brain scan that can read people's intentions

Obviously I'm delving into Johnny B's territory here, but I couldn't resist. Do any of you guys think that there is a slippery slope here just waiting for us to slide down without a snowboard?

Minority Report ended like all Stephen Spielberg movies...happily, and at the last minute, with everyone learning their lessons, no worse for wear.

But it typically doesn't work that way in the real world. What are the ethical implications of being able to read people's intentions?

Guardian Unlimited

Marijuana and memory impairment

Now, I'm posting this for two reasons. One, I'm analyzing brain waves like the scientists here (theta, gamma, etc.) Two, I am throwing this out there to demonstrate that marijuana has negative as well as beneficial effects on mental health. Like most of these posts on these science blogs they are far too glib with their conclusions:

Example:
Because theta and gamma oscillations are thought to play a critical role in creating and storing short-term memories--and fast ripple oscillations may allow such short-term memories to be moved into long-term storage--this suppression could mean missing memories for the rats.

In truth we know very little about how theta and gamma work together in creating and storing memories, and much, much less about fast ripple oscillations. We do know that strong theta in the hippocampus is correlated with good working memory, but we know less about how theta is generated in seperate parts of the brain. Basically, these conclusions made by the scientific american blogger tend to gloss over the specific effects of MJ, at which sites. In other words, are MJ's effects localized to the thalamus, cortex, hippocampus, and which generators of these different brain waves are effected and how? Practically any psychoactive drug will cause changes in these brain waves, but this in and of itself tells us little about how the drug works.

New Blogs and Books

Hey guys, hope you don't mind if I mix it up a bit. The link above is a pretty good blog about neuroscience. If it is too deep this one might be better. In addition there are some neat books out there that I recommend

1. Law, Legislation and Liberty F.A. Hayek

2. Land Without Justice Milovan Djilas (a communist apology, i.e. why this Yugoslav became communist)

3. Conversations with Stalin Milovan Djilas (After communism took hold and Djilas saw how the sausage got made in Moscow).

4. The Self and Its Brain By Eccles and Popper, two guys I really admire.

Marijuana and Alzheimers Disease

News from the recent conference. Dr Wenk is a colleague and lab-neighbor. He gets in the news a lot, check out his homepage online and you'll see. He's done research on gingko biloba, chocolate, caffeine and knows a lot about a wide range of issues. He's a nice guy, a good teacher and researcher, a rare trifecta for profs. So don't bombard him with e-mails if he sounds glib here. In his defense he was in the airport and pretty tired when he was interviewed.

Bona-fide

One bona-fide paper to my name, as first author. Behold (click link above)!

The first such paper to demonstrate visual-related activity in the rat parietal cortex. Which is actually pretty cool, because we understand the neurotransmitter systems in rats and can study them, whereas we can't in humans (not without a pretty nasty lawsuit on our hands). Thus study the encoding of these signals in the brain can be more easily studied and manipulated. Boo-yah!

Man uses brain to move cursor

I know a lot of y'all logifans out there wonder what I am doing in graduate school. I am learning, among other things, how figure out this kind of stuff.

Posted at 09:53 am by Johnny B

A nice Alzheimer's site

A great site to explain the brain and what we know about Alzheimer's Dementia, for the novice.

http://www.alz.org/brain/overview.asp

Posted at 09:27 am by Johnny B

Science update: depression

Serotonin receptor protein found to be linked to depression. It is nice to see serotonin get some attention, most everyone is still focused on dopamine these days.

Listen at NPR. I've read some work from these guys and they are good, heavy duty scientists.

Posted at 09:16 pm by Johnny B

Science stuff

One interesting news item came up the other day:

A study about seasonal changes and learning done right here at Ohio State, by a student down the hall (figuratively), Leah Pyter. She showed that during winter, hamsters have smaller hippocampi (kind of like RAM for your brain instead of your computer).

Other science news: At Salon they talk about hacking the neural code. If I only knew what he was talking about.

Alzheimer's begins with attention lapses. This news excites me.

One good way to fend of meat-born diseases, and Alzheimer's Dementia, is to eat curry. In India rates of Alzheimer's are much lower, and in Professor Gary Wenk, a new addition to Ohio State (brought in to replace someone else), has shown that a chemical in curry powder prevents inflammation in the brain, inflammation which is said to lead to neuronal degeneration. Huzzah for curry!

One more. There is a new scanning technique that can find beta-amyloid plaques, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer's. Right now we have to wait for an autopsy to confirm if someone has Alzheimer's. This scan might help predict who will get Alzheimer's so we can treat it earlier.

Menstruation science

One of my least favorite sciences...at any rate, here is an interesting finding: Women's spatial ability improves during menstruation DPA , HAMBURG, GERMANY Tuesday, Oct 18, 2005,Page 6 Through history women have been the butt of smirking male jokes about their alleged inability to give directions or to read road maps. Now, researchers at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, have discovered that a woman's spatial ability, and hence her ability to read maps, actually increases during her menstrual period. During most of her monthly cycle, higher levels of the female hormone estrogen are present and these were linked to lower scores on such things as direction finding and map reading. But when levels of the male hormone testosterone were higher, as during their period, women did better.

Full Story

Posted at 09:08 pm by Johnny B