What’s the News: One of memory’s big jobs is to keep straight what actually happened versus what we imagined: whether we said something out loud or to ourselves, whether we locked the door behind us or just thought about locking the door. That ability, a new study found, is linked to the presence of a small fold in the front of the brain, which some people have and others don’t—a finding that could help researchers better understand not only healthy memory, but disorders like schizophrenia in which the line between the real and the imagined is blurred.

Scans of a brain with a distinctive paracingulate sulcus (left, marked by arrow) and without one (right)

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What’s the News: A new study suggests that watching brain activity when subjects are shown images of naked children can identify which are pedophiles. But what does this really mean in practical terms?

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What’s the news:  In a study published last week, researchers showed they could reconstruct video clips by watching viewers’ brain activity. The video of the study’s results, below, is pretty amazing, showing the original clips and their reconstructions side by side. How does it work, and does it mean mind-reading is on its way in?

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What’s the News: The best way doctors have to find out how much pain a patient’s in is to ask—but that approach can fall short when someone’s unable to speak, exaggerating or downplaying their condition, or just plain unsure how to rate their pain on a 10-point scale. Because of these problems with self-reporting, scientists have long been looking for an objective, physiological measure to quantify pain. A recent brain scanning study, in which the researchers could pick out painful experiences based on neural activity, brings that goal closer.

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What’s the News: A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.

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Current drugs for conditions from depression to Parkinson’s work by changing levels of chemicals in the brain—an imprecise method that can have a wide range of unintended effects. But a new study suggests it could be possible to make drugs that work by turning off genes instead, getting at, for instance, a specific receptor in a particular part of the brain.

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What’s the News: Trouble sticking to your diet? It may not be entirely your fault. Scientists, reporting in the journal Cell Metabolism, have now learned that when  you starve yourself of calories, your brain cells also starve, causing your neurons to begin eating parts of themselves for energy. The self-cannibalism, in turn, cranks up hunger signals. This mouse study may lead to better treatments for human obesity and diabetes.

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What’s the News: Starting in September 2012, the FDA will require every pack of cigarettes sold in the US to be emblazoned with a large, text-and-image health warning, similar to the labels already seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and several other countries. The FDA unveiled the nine label designs earlier this week; several are quite graphic, including photos of cancerous lungs and lips and a man exhaling smoke through his tracheotomy hole.

These graphic images, however, may not be an effective way to get smokers to quit, or deter new smokers from starting. Several neuroscience and psychology studies show that these fear tactics have little effect—and may at times do more harm than good.

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What’s the News: The left and right halves of the brain have separate stores for working memory, the information we actively keep in mind, suggests a study published online yesterday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. People can, on average, hold only four pieces of information in working memory—say, where four strangers are seated in a room. The current study suggests that, in fact, working memory capacity is two plus two—two items stored in each side of the brain—rather than four items stored anywhere. This understanding could be used to design learning techniques and visual displays that maximize working memory capacity.

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What’s the News: Scientists have built a brain implant that can restore lost memories and reinforce new ones. The implant, tested in a recent study in rats, brings back a memory by recording and replaying the electrical activity of neurons in a part of the hippocampus, the brain’s long-term memory center. While the device is far from ready for use in humans, it’s an important step toward memory-boosting implants that could one day help patients who have developed dementia or suffered a stroke.

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What’s the News: Scientists—and smokers—have long known that nicotine is an appetite suppressant, but just how it kept hunger at bay remained unclear. Now, researchers have uncovered the neural pathway by which nicotine reduces appetite, in a study published today in Science. This discovery could lead to new drugs that help people quit smoking or lose weight.

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Aplysia californica

What’s the News: Researchers have considerably weakened—and perhaps even erased—long-term memories in Aplysia, a type of marine slug, and in neurons in a lab dish, by blocking the activity of a particular enzyme. Understanding how to weaken and erase such memories could one day lead to new treatments for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who are haunted by memories of traumatic events.

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What’s the Context:
What’s the News: Researchers have grown neurons from the cells of people with schizophrenia, in a study published online yesterday in Nature, the first time a complex mental illness has been modeled with living cells in a lab. This approach provides a new way to probe the little-understood biological processes underlying the disease and to test potential drug treatments. In preliminary experiments, the researchers found that the neurons weren’t as interconnected as healthy neurons are, and that individual patients’ neurons differ in their reaction to various drugs used to treat schizophrenia.

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What’s the News: Neuroscientists have found a preliminary answer to a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries: If someone who has always been blind is one day able to see, can they recognize by sight objects they already know by touch? In a new study published online by Nature Neuroscience, patients who had been blind since birth underwent sight-restoring surgeries as children or adolescent. In the day or two following surgery, patients seemed unable to match what they felt with their hands with what they saw, the researchers found, but a week later, they could.

This results suggests that the brain doesn’t have the innate ability (or maybe has limited innate ability) to tie input from different senses to the same concept—but that it can learn, and pretty fast. Just how fast, the researchers wrote, suggests that the neuronal machinery needed to bring together visual and tactile information may already be there; it just has to be started up.

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It’s tough enough to play Dr. House with a living, breathing patient who’s right there in the room. It’s quite another thing to diagnose across distance and time. Yet some scientists find it irresistible to peek into the history books with the benefit of modern medical knowledge and try to crack the cases of historical figures who died too young. Was metal-nosed astronomer Tycho Brahe poisoned, for instance? And what caused Mozart’s demise? (It wasn’t Salieri.)

This week, researchers turn their detective eyes to the famed romantic composer Frederic Chopin, who left behind a wealth of lovely piano compositions when he died at 39 in 1849. Writing in Medical Humanities, a specialized edition of the British Medical Journal, Spanish scientists led by Manuel Varquez Caruncho argue that there’s an explanation for Chopin’s health woes and momentary hallucinations that his 19th century doctors and subsequent investigations overlooked: The composer had a particular type of epilepsy.

Chopin’s tendency to lapse out of consciousness was interpreted by his partner George Sand, pseudonym of the French novelist Aurore Dudevant, as “the manifestation of a genius full of sentiment and expression.” But in the analysis published this week, Spanish doctors say Chopin’s hallucinations may have been due to a temporal lobe epilepsy rather than the result of any sweeping artistic tendencies. [AP]

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