Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind

Dr. Schooler ( University of California, Santa Barbara.): For creativity you need your mind to wander, but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?

Creativity and schizophrenia use similar brain canals

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that the brains of healthy, highly creative people are similar to that of schizophrenic patients in some aspects: in both cases, the dopamine system is involved.

Neuroscience: Stressed out females

Stress-related psychiatric disorders such as depression affect more women than men, and researchers have discovered a possible molecular basis for this in rats.
Debra Bangasser at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and her colleagues put male and female rats through stressful swim tests. They then looked at changes in signalling by the receptor for corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), which mediates stress responses in the brain. Excessive CRF activity is thought to contribute to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In unstressed females, the team found greater coupling of the receptor to a key protein — an important step in CRF signalling — than in unstressed males. Moreover, female rats' neurons did not internalize these receptors in response to stress — a mechanism for lowering the cells' sensitivity to stress signals — whereas those in males did. These findings, the authors say, are consistent with previous work suggesting that females are more sensitive to low levels of CRF.

Promise Seen for Detection of Alzheimer’s

Five years ago, Dr. Skovronsky, who named his company Avid in part because that is what he is, had taken a big personal and professional gamble. He left academia and formed Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, based in Philadelphia, to develop his radioactive dye and designed a study with hospice patients to prove it worked.
Hospice patients were going to die soon and so, he reasoned, why not ask them to have scans and then brain autopsies afterward to see if the scans showed just what a pathologist would see. Some patients would be demented, others not.
Some predicted his study would be impossible, if not unethical. But the F.D.A. said it wanted proof that the plaque on PET scans was the same as plaque in a brain autopsy.

Avid, tiny start-up company might have overcome one of the biggest obstacles in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. It had found a dye and a brain scan that, he said, can show the hallmark plaque building up in the brains of people with the disease. The findings, which will be presented at an international meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu on July 11, must still be confirmed and approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But if they hold up, it will mean that for the first time doctors would have a reliable way to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer’s in patients with memory problems.

Hallucinations in Hospital Pose Risk to Elderly

...The cause of delirium is unclear, but there are many apparent triggers: infections, surgery, pneumonia, and procedures like catheter insertions, all of which can spur anxiety in frail, vulnerable patients. Some medications, difficult for older people to metabolize, seem associated with delirium...

...Other triggers involve disorienting changes: sleep interrupted for tests, isolation, changing rooms, being without eyeglasses or dentures. Medication triggers can include some antihistamines, sleeping pills, antidepressants and drugs for nausea and ulcers...

...Delirium is sometimes treated with antipsychotics, but doctors urge caution using such drugs.
Delirium can wax and wane, not always causing aggressive agitation...

...People with dementia seem at greater risk for delirium, but many delirious patients have no dementia. For some of them, delirium increases the risk of later dementia. In such cases, it is unclear if delirium caused the dementia, or was simply a signal that the person would develop it later...

...Some hospitals are adopting delirium-prevention programs, including one developed by Dr. Inouye, which adjusts schedules, light and noise to help patients sleep, ensures that patients have their eyeglasses and hearing aids, and has them walk, exercise and do cognitive activities like word games...

Psychologist Bridges Clinic and Lab to Untangle Schizophrenia's Roots

In 2007 NIMH launched Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS), a broad collaboration of neuroscientists aimed at developing standard tools for tracking cognitive deficits in schizophrenia that are sensitive to small changes in a patient's thinking... tests that will serve as markers for the disease's progression, drawing on extensive research on healthy and mentally ill individuals.

Barch and Braver also help run an interdisciplinary program that's training a new generation of brain scientists: the Cognitive, Computational and Systems Neuroscience Pathway

The Space in Your Head

Space, and events associated with places and spaces, are represented in the brain by a circuitry made of place cells, head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells. These cell types form a collective dynamic representation of our position as we move through the environment. How this representation is formed has remained a mystery. Is it acquired, or are we born with the ability to represent external space (see the Perspective by ? investigated the early development of spatial activity in the hippocampal formation and the entorhinal cortex of rat pups when they first began to explore their environment.

Langston et al. Development of the Spatial Representation System in the Rat,  SCIENCE, June 18 2010, 328 (5985),   Wills et al.  Palmer and Lynch)

Rudiments of place cells, head direction cells, and grid cells already existed when the pups made their first movements out of the nest. A neural representation of external space at this early time points to strong innate components for perception of space. These findings provide experimental support for Kant's 200-year-old concept of space as an a priori faculty of the mind.

Advancing Neuroscience: From Stem Cells to Neurodegenerative Disease

As the world population ages, in part due to the development of treatments and cures for many previously fatal diseases, the incidence of neurodegenerative disorders - particularly those related to old age - is bound to increase.  One promising avenue of therapy getting much press involves the use of multipotent or pluripotent stem cells.
In this booklet we bring together a number of recently published Science papers bridging these two topics, neurodegeneration and stem cell therapy, to present the reader with a timely and practical collection.
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Drug shrinks brain

Some antipsychotic drugs cause side effects that include slowed movements and shaking — apparently by temporarily shrinking a part of the brain responsible for motor control.Heike Tost at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda ( Nature 465, 668, 10 June 2010)

Technology for people living with dementia

European researchers are tackling the problem of how people with these diseases can keep their independence and quality of life longer, while safely living in their own homes.

he Rosetta Project is based near Frankfurt, Germany. The goal is to develop assistive and intelligent environments for patients to live in, where irregular changes in their behaviour will raise an alarm. This is the function of one development called Early Detection System. The technology involved is not considered to be an invasion of privacy, since no pictures or sounds are recorded. The system does nothing more than tracking and analysing the persons position in the environment.

Another system, being developed in Holland and tested at a nursing home in Soest, is called Short Term Monitoring. It enables people with dementia to take more responsibility from their daily needs.

A touch screen has also been created to help dementia sufferers remember basic tasks and communicate with others. For example, the screen will sound an alarm when the patient should be having a meal. It is designed in particular to assist the carers of sufferers.

The trial period for these technologies and others continues until 2012. In 2011 testing will commence in three European countries, whereby 30 houses will be set up with sensor systems and assistive technologies.

It is expected that care institutions will be key players in the initial investment of these technologies and getting them into the homes of patients. The institutions will benefit from the reduced labour costs, while the patients benefit from the prolonged period of independent life.

8 Scientists Share $3 Million in Prizes

Scientists competing to build humongous telescopes, elucidate the machinery by which brain cells signal each other and manipulate individual atoms and molecules into submicroscopic structures were among the winners of one of the richest prizes in science.

The neuroscience prize will also be shared three ways, by Thomas Südhof of the Stanford School of Medicine, Richard H. Scheller of Genentech and James E. Rothman of Yale for work on the molecular basis of nervous transmission. In the 1980s, Dr. Südhof and Dr. Scheller decoded the genes that control the functioning of tiny bubbles of fluid called vesicles, which send neurotransmitters across the synapses between cells. In particular, they found that a protein that senses calcium acts as a switch for transmission. Dr. Rothman investigated how the vesicles involved in a wide range of physiological activities are generated and fuse together.

Men Value Sex, Women Value Love?

Men are more likely to be jealous of sexual peccadilloes and women of emotional infidelity, according to past research...

The new data suggest, that...