Neuroscience

The helpless behavior that is commonly linked to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is preceded by stress-related losses of synapses—microscopic connections between brain cells—in the brain’s hippocampal region, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in Biological Psychiatry.  The team used a six-day treatment with the antidepressant desipramine to reverse helpless behavior and restore hippocampal synapses in rats.  “In clinical practice, the main problem with antidepressants is that they require weeks to exert their effect,” said lead scientist on…

In a study in the latest issue of European Journal of Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary Northwestern research team says they have found biological evidence that musical training enhances an individual's ability to recognize emotion in sound.  The study found that the more years of musical experience musicians possessed and the earlier the age they began their music studies also increased their nervous systems' abilities to process emotion in sound. A doctoral student in the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music, Dana Strait, primary author of the study, does research in the Auditory…

If you're about to invest in a lot of DVDs for your new baby, here's a way to save some money; they won't help.  Of course, there is some correlation/causation data to classical music but it's correlation/causation data because parents who listen to classical music and buy it for their kids tend to be better educated and care about their kids' education, which is reflected in more ways than just music. But the benefits of making classical music into video has still not been found and a longitudinal study of infants from birth to age 3 showed  TV viewing, even of well-meaning music…

A study in the March 1 issue of  SLEEP suggests the presence of an intrinsic sleep problem specific to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and supports the idea that children with ADHD may be chronically sleep deprived and have abnormal REM sleep.  Results show that children with ADHD have a total sleep time that is significantly shorter than that of controls. Children in the ADHD group had an average total sleep time of eight hours, 19 minutes; this was 33 minutes less than the average sleep time of eight hours, 52 minutes, in controls. Children with ADHD also had an…

You are probably addicted right know, it's O.K. everyone else is also. This experiment has been on the American food consumers without prejudice to religion, status, or race. It is a complete success we have managed to slip an undetected drug like caffeine, alcohol, or heroin into the food supply by mislabeling it as a food additive. As a result you have been part of a great experiment and it will continue without your consent. The benefits are healthy lab animals exposed to this additive consume 40% more food. The side effects are obesity. But that's not all bad there are other things also.…

Cancer is a family affair. Protection against this disease is also a family affair. A new idea for protection is not equal in impact as any other. What do you do when there is conflict within and between the available recommendations? I wrote in The team that switched off that cancer about one gene found in fruit flies and mammals, mice and humans in this case, as a trigger. The scientists were able to switch off/on the cancer. This finding promises new simple strategies in the treatment of at least some cancers such as the colon's. Here I will…

People voluntarily pick what information they store in short-term memory. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can see just what information people are holding in memory based only on patterns of activity in the brain. Psychologists from the University of Oregon and the University of California, San Diego, reported their findings in the February issue of Psychological Science. By analyzing blood-flow activity, they were able to identify the specific color or orientation of an object that was intentionally stored by the observer. The experiments, in which…

Without formalized sign language instruction, deaf children in families develop their own language using simple gestures that become more complex over time.     Unless they are gather in large groups, those specific deaf languages can result in thousands of dialects, called 'homesigns' by researchers. There may be thousands of homesigners in a given society.    Marie Coppola, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Illinois, says her work with four Nicaraguan homesigners shows how such individual gesture systems likely provided the raw…

Are you smarter than a pigeon?   We don't mean smarter as in able to figure out why it's $14  a day for lousy internet access in a hotel or $14 to see an old movie in your hotel room or the hospitality industry's general preference for the number 14, we mean practical social smarts, like meeting the opposite sex.    Animals have "social smarts" too, it turns out, with a range of behaviors that can enhance species survival, according to studies being presented here in Chicago at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting.  Evolution…

The Valentine's Day lovefest on this site - who says scientists aren't warm and fuzzy? - is spectacular. You can learn about the chemistry of love with Valentine's Day science for women, easy solutions for the languishing lothario (personal favorites at the moment - "Roses are red, violets are blue. You and me we will stick like clay," and "I wanna be your Viking cleaner breathing in your dust. I wanna be your Ford Cortina I will never rust."), and even a man-o-meter to help you scientifically choose the best date. To add to the hearty mix, I offer up the love circuit (thanks to Drugs Fut…