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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When Don Draper takes a long, cool drag of his cigarette on screen and fills his “Mad Men” office with smoke, does it subtly nudge you toward lighting up yourself? If you’re already a smoker, there’s a good chance. A new study forthcoming in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that watching on-screen smoking subtly effects the brains of people who already smoke, as if it were prepping them to light up.
To test the idea, the researchers screened not TV’s smokiest drama “Mad Men,” but rather the first half-hour of Matchstick Men, the 2003 Nicholas Cage film about con artists.
They chose this movie because it features lots of smoking without alcohol use, sex or violence, which could have skewed the results. The volunteers did not know the experiment was about smoking. [LiveScience]
Dylan Wagner’s team peered into the brains of 17 smokers and 17 non-smokers who watched Matchstick Men while inside an fMRI scanner.
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Step 1: Put study subject in MRI machine. Step 2: Show subject video of a huge, hairy tarantula creeping toward their toes. Step 3: Watch panic light up in the brain.
For a study out in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dean Mobbs and colleagues put their subjects through this fright fest to sort out how the brain responds to different parts of a threat. It’s not all about the presence of a creepy crawler, Mobbs found—it’s whether that creepy crawler is creeping closer.
As the spider advanced, MRI scans allowed researchers to see flashes of activity switch from the volunteer’s prefrontal cortex – a region associated with anxiety – to a spot in the midbrain known to involve intense fear. But the neural terror waned when the tarantula retreated, “regardless of the spider’s absolute proximity,” wrote the study’s authors. In other words, as long as the spider was moving away, no matter how close it still was, the volunteers relaxed. [MSNBC]
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If there’s a certain smell or sound that instantly brings back traumatic memories, it could be because those memories are stored—at least in part—in brain regions associated with the input of your senses, according to a study this week in Science.
Neuroscientist Benedetto Sacchetti went looking in rat brains for the neural connections between the senses and intense memories.
Each sense, including sound, smell and vision, has a primary and a secondary sensory cortex area in the brain. The primary cortex sends sensory information to the secondary cortex, which then connects to emotional and memory areas of the brain [Science News].
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You may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar.
That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, researchers Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson say they found that the same parts of the brains showed activation at the same time, suggesting a deep connection between talker and listener.
Graduate student Lauren Silbert was the team’s storytelling guinea pig. She recounted tales of high school, like deciding whom to take to prom, while undergoing an fMRI scan.
As Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says [ScienceNOW].
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It feels good to win. And it feels even better to win at home.
For a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matthew Fuxjager and his colleagues investigated the winner effect, wherein animals (and perhaps humans) build up testosterone in advance of a confrontation, and the fight’s winner maintains that elevated level. By studying male mice fighting one another, Fuxjager was able to see what happens in the brains of winners. Not only did victorious mice experience the “winner effect,” but those who won at home—in their own cages—saw the most activity, and wanted to keep on fighting.
To get these results, Fuxjager’s team essentially created a tournament of mouse fights.
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The weird phenomenon of blindsight—in which people take in visual information about objects without actually “seeing” them—has long intrigued scientists, and with good reason. They’ve watched people navigate obstacle courses and identify colors while being technically blind. This week, in a study in Nature, neuroscientists point to a part of the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) as the neural key that might make blindsight possible.
They used macaques in which the primary visual cortex had been destroyed. The monkeys’ eye-focusing movements revealed that they were “seeing” images shown at the periphery of their visual field, but only if their LGN was intact [New Scientist].
The authors refer to the LGN as the “main relay” between the retina and main visual cortex.
Other work had shown that the LGN also has projections to a number of secondary visual areas, suggesting that it may serve as a major hub in the visual system. To test this suggestion, the authors injected the LGN with a chemical that activates the receptor for a major inhibitory signaling molecule…. When the chemical is present, nerve cells receive a signal telling them to stop signaling, so this this injection has the effect of shutting the LGN down entirely [Ars Technica].
When the scientists shut down the LGN, the primates in the study didn’t experience any blindsight, as it appears no information was reaching any of their brains’ visual centers.
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DISCOVER: What You See Is What You Don’t
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Image: iStockphoto
Show them the money: The winners of the Kavli Prizes have been announced, and the eight scientists will split a total of $3 million in prize money.
No, these aren’t the Nobels. The Kavlis are a relatively new award created to award scientists whose fields don’t get much recognition in Stockholm:
These are only the second ever recipients of Kavli Prizes, the biennial awards launched in 2008 by Fred Kavli. Recipients in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience each receive a scroll, a gold medal and (perhaps most importantly) a share of the $1 million pot for each discipline [Nature].
1. Astrophysics
The prize recognized three men—Jerry Nelson, Roger Angel, and Raymond Wilson—not for finding new phenomena deep in the cosmos, but for engineering the telescopes to make those searches possible. Nelson and Angel are renowned for their prowess in casting the mirrors for the largest telescopes on Earth; Nelson’s work will go into the Thirty Meter Telescope, for which Mauna Kea in Hawaii was just chosen as the preferred location.
Dr. Wilson pioneered the use of a technology known as active optics, in which computer-controlled supports correct the shapes of telescope mirrors to cancel the distortions caused by gravity, wind and temperature, allowing astronomers to build mirrors that are thinner and lighter [The New York Times].
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A federal judge overseeing a case in Tennessee has rejected the use of functional MRI brain scans as evidence of a person’s veracity in court proceedings. As DISCOVER noted before, the Tennessee case follows one in Brooklyn where the judge also said no under New York State law. Together, the two rulings mean it could be a long time before lawyers can admit brain scans as evidence of truth-telling in courts.
Lorne Semrau was seeking to include the results of scans as part of his defense in a Medicare and Medicaid fraud case being heard in a federal court in Tennessee. But while Judge Pham agreed that the technique had been subject to testing and peer review, it flunked on the other two points suggested by the Supreme Court to weigh cases like this one: the test of proven accuracy and general acceptance by scientists [ScienceNOW].
Proponents of fMRI lie detection claim that monitoring a suspect’s brain while he answers questions about his behavior and the allegations against him can reveal whether he’s answering honestly or lying. But while the utility of fMRI brain scans is accepted in many areas of brain research, most neuroscientists say their usefulness as lie detectors is still an open question.
Wide acceptance among scientists is also a part of the New York standard with which Judge Robert H. Miller rejected fMRI as evidence in the Brooklyn case. So while fMRI lie detection experiments continue to undergo peer review, the technique likely won’t become admissible evidence anywhere until the scientific community begins to accept that such scans really could identify honesty at a reasonable level of confidence.
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Eleanor Maguire can’t read your mind. But she’s getting closer.
Two years ago the neuroscientist’s team used functional MRI scans of the brain to predict where in a virtual reality environment a person was “standing” just by looking at their brain activity. And now, in a study for Current Biology, she’s used fMRI scans, interpreted by a computer algorithm, to pick out the patterns of brain activity that indicate whether a person is remembering one movie versus another.
An fMRI scan measures the brain’s blood flow—associated with neuron activity—on the scale of voxels, three-dimensional “pixels” that each include roughly 10,000 neurons. The algorithm then interprets the changes voxel by voxel to learn the brain’s patterns of activity over time [ScienceNOW]. In this experiment, Maguire’s team showed their 10 participants three different movies. Each was short, only about seven seconds, but featured a different actress doing a different simple activity, like mailing a letter or drinking coffee. The scientists then asked the subjects remember the films while the team scanned their brains.
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Late last year, a Belgian man in his mid-forties created a media stir when doctors announced that he had been misdiagnosed as being in a coma for 23 years. Rom Houben, the victim of a horrific car-crash in the eighties, was incorrectly diagnosed as being in a “persistently vegetative state.” But by using new diagnostic tests and brain scans that were unavailable in the eighties, scientists revealed that Houben was actually conscious.
Reports then breathlessly announced that Houben could also finally “communicate,” expressing his thoughts by having his hand supported by his therapist who reportedly helped him tap out his messages on a touch-screen computer. “I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me,” Houben apparently tapped. “It was my second birth. I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead” [The Guardian].
But now one of Houben’s doctors, neuroscientist Steven Laureys, has declared the Belgian hasn’t been communicating after all.
When the story first broke, DISCOVER and other discerning publications noted that this type of communication, called “facilitated communication,” is very controversial, and has repeatedly failed under conditions of rigorous testing. [Psychology Today]. Skeptics argued that the facilitated communication therapist brought in by Houben’s family was really guiding the man’s hand and choosing which letters to press herself. Skeptics who read Houben’s messages were also amazed that someone who was in a minimally-conscious state for more than two decades was so lucid, articulate, and forgiving of the medical staff. Laureys wanted to study the case further to determine if Houben could indeed communicate.
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A few months ago, Belgian man Rom Houben hit the headlines for a misdiagnosis that lasted 23 years. Houben was thought to have lost all brain function in a horrific car accident, and was believed to be in a persistent vegetative state. New evaluations helped determine that Houben actually had normal brain activity, and was yearning to communicate–although the “facilitated communication” his family used to allow Houben to tell his story quickly kicked up a kerfuffle over the validity of the whole tale.
Now, a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine gives credence to the notion that some patients who have been classified as vegetative are actually conscious, and a rare few may be able to communicate.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan patients’ brains, and to record any activity generated in the patients’ brains following verbal prompts and questions from the doctors. They found signs of awareness in four patients, one of whom was able to answer basic yes or no questions by activating different parts of his brain. Experts said Wednesday that the finding could alter the way some severe head injuries were diagnosed — and could raise troubling ethical questions about whether to consult severely disabled patients on their care [The New York Times].
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When people breathe in carbon dioxide, they start to panic. It happens in mice and other animals, too, as the body responds to the threat of suffocation. Now, in a study in Cell, researchers have connected a particular gene to that response in the brain.
The gene, called ASIC1a, is connected to a protein found in abundance in the amygdala, the area scientists believe to be the brain’s fear center. In their new study … the researchers show that mice lacking this gene don’t freeze in place–a commonly used indicator of rodent fear–to the extent that normal mice do when the team pumped CO2 into their enclosure. But when Wemmie and colleagues injected a virus containing the ASIC1a gene into the amygdala of the mice, they acted like normal mice, freezing up when exposed to elevated CO2 [ScienceNOW Daily News].
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From 1983 to 2006, the Belgian man Rom Houben was misdiagnosed as a coma patient. In fact, doctors say, he was conscious for all those years, but incapable of communicating with doctors or family members who leaned over his bedside. But neuroscientist Steven Laureys finally caught the 23-year mistake. Laureys just published a paper on the case in BMC Neurology, spurring wonder at the remarkable case—and skepticism that Houben is truly “communicating” now.
Houben was paralyzed in 1983 after a vicious car crash, and doctors incorrectly diagnosed him as being in a persistent vegetative state until 2006. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it, and unlocked Houben’s mind again [AP]. Houben indeed had an almost normal brain, his PET scan showed, and doctors say they clinched his consciousness by having him move his foot and then spell words on a touchscreen.
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