caffeinepig

嗯....要趕快建議我爸爸去試試...


Acupressure (applying pressure with the thumbs or fingertips to the same points on the body stimulated in acupuncture) seems to be more effective in reducing low back pain than physical therapy, finds a study published online by the British Medical Journal.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between normal cognition and Alzheimer's disease, exists in two different forms, according to a study published today by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of California, Los Angeles in the Archives of Neurology.

Using a new imaging procedure that creates 3-D maps of the brain, researchers determined specific areas that had degenerated in people with MCI. Depending on the person's symptoms, more tissue was lost in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory and one of the earliest to change in Alzheimer's disease, indicating two different paths of progression to Alzheimer's disease. The finding could lead to better diagnosis and treatment of patients with MCI, perhaps delaying or preventing the onset of dementia.

MCI is categorized into two sub-types -- currently distinguished based solely on symptoms. Those with MCI, amnesic subtype (MCI-A) have memory impairments only, while those with MCI, multiple cognitive domain subtype (MCI-MCD) have other types of mild impairments, such as in judgment or language, but also have either mild or no memory loss. Both sub-types progress to Alzheimer's disease at the same rate. Until now it was not known if the pathologies of the two types of MCI were different, or if MCI-MCD was just a more advanced form of MCI-A.

Researchers found that the hippocampus of the patients with MCI-A was 14 percent smaller than that of the healthy subjects, nearly as great as the 23 percent shrinkage seen in Alzheimer's disease. But, the hippocampus of those with MCI-MCD most resembled that of the controls, showing only 5 percent shrinkage.

Using highly accurate Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data from six patients with MCI-A, 20 with MCI-MCD and 20 with Alzheimer's disease who were seen at the University of Pittsburgh's Alzheimer Disease Research Center and 20 healthy controls, researchers created 3-D mesh reconstructions of each participant's hippocampus that allowed them to see where the hippocampus had deteriorated. This study is the first to use such modeling technology to visualize changes in the brains of people with MCI. Prior studies have only been able to measure the volume of the hippocampus and estimate atrophy through noticeable volume loss.

看到這篇研究的標題，好奇的讀了下去，因為我們實驗室也有在做driving的研究。不過這篇研究只是間接的做了一些行為的研究 （例如：看到紅點按鈕，然後除了看到紅點要按鈕外，看到特定顏色和形狀的東西，也要按鈕）。然後，看他們反應時間來看大腦如何處理、轉移對於這兩個不同的認知工作。用這個結果，來間接討論「開車講電話」對於大腦的負荷有多少。
我們做的比較直接，真得就像是在開車：分成4個部分的實驗，結合了GM， UMTRI （還有一些研究機構和醫院）分別用MEG、MRI、Behavioral experiment、on-road driving test 做how does cell phone distract our coginition during driving 的實驗。是一的非常有趣的研究，有將近5年之久的計畫。雖然這不是我的研究，但是我都參與了全部的過程，像是找受試者、執行實驗、研究分析等等...我學了很多就是了...^^

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Cell Phones, Driving Don't Mix

A team of Spanish and American neuroscientists has discovered neurons in the mammalian brainstem that focus exclusively on new, novel sounds, helping humans and other animals ignore ongoing, predictable sounds.

These "novelty detector neurons" quickly stop firing if a sound or sound pattern is repeated, but will briefly resume firing whenever some aspect of the sound changes, according to Ellen Covey, one of the authors of the study and a psychology professor at the University of Washington. The neurons can detect changes in the pitch, loudness or duration of a single sound and can even detect changes in the pattern of a complex series of sounds, she said.

Covey and her colleagues, Dr. Manuel Malmierca of the University of Salamanca and doctoral student David Perez-Gonzalez, who is currently a visiting scientist in the UW psychology department, report their findings in the early December issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.

The neurons are located under the cortex in a part of the brain called the inferior colliculus. Covey said the research implies that these cells can "remember a frequently occurring pattern and perform relatively sophisticated cognitive tasks such as discriminating a novel pattern from a frequently occurring one."

She said that, contrary to popular belief, the new findings suggest that some cognitive processes for sorting and identifying sounds occur very early in the auditory pathway, and that novelty detector neurons could be involved in directing attention to unexpected sounds, possibly evoking rapid reflex responses.

Researchers from the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found that eating or drinking sweets may decrease the production of the stress-related hormone glucocorticoid--which has been linked to obesity and decreased immune response. 

這不是大家都已經知道了嗎？

"Glucocorticoids are produced when psychological or physical stressors activate a part of the brain called the 'stress axis,'" said Yvonne Ulrich-Lai, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry. "These hormones help an individual survive and recover from stress, but have been linked to increased abdominal obesity and decreased immune function when produced in large amounts.

"Finding another way to affect the body's response to stress and limit glucocorticoid production could alleviate some of these dangerous health effects."

Surprisingly, people with mild depression are actually more tuned into the feelings of others than those who aren’t depressed, a team of Queen’s psychologists has discovered.

“This was quite unexpected because we tend to think that the opposite is true,” says lead researcher Kate Harkness. “For example, people with depression are more likely to have problems in a number of social areas.”

The researchers were so taken aback by the findings, they decided to replicate the study with another group of participants. The second study produced the same results: People with mild symptoms of depression pay more attention to details of their social environment than those who are not depressed.

Primitive structures deep within the brain may have a far greater role in our high-level everyday thinking processes than previously believed, report researchers at the MIT Picower Center for Learning and Memory in the Feb. 24 issue of Nature.

The results of this study led by Earl K. Miller, associate director of the Picower Center at MIT, have implications about how we learn. The new knowledge also may lead to better understanding and treatment for autism and schizophrenia, which could result from an imbalance between primitive and more advanced brain systems.

Our brains have evolved a fast, reliable way to learn rules such as "stop at red" and "go at green." Dogma has it that the "big boss" lobes of the cerebral cortex, responsible for daily and long-term decision-making, learn the rules first and then transfer the knowledge to the more primitive, large forebrain region known as the basal ganglia, buried under the cortex.

Although both regions are known to be involved in learning rules that become automatic enough for us to follow without much thought, no one had ever determined each one's specific role.

In this study, Miller, who is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and postdoctoral associate Anitha Pasupathy found that in monkeys, the striatum (the input structure of the basal ganglia) showed more rapid change in the learning process than the more highly evolved prefrontal cortex. Their results suggest that the basal ganglia first identify the rule, and then "train" the prefrontal cortex, which absorbs the lesson more slowly.

How does the cortex, the brain's executive in charge of high-level thinking and planning, go from a uniform blob of brain matter to well-defined areas with specific sensing, cognition and movement tasks?

A leading neuroscientist at MIT and one from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) report in the Nov. 4 special issue of Science dedicated to the brain that the controversy is over: The "protomap" and "protocortex" theories of brain development are dead.

The cerebral cortex is a sheet of around 10 billion neurons divided into distinctly separate areas that process particular aspects of sensation, movement and cognition. To what extent are these areas predetermined by genes or shaped by the environment? The protomap and protocortex theories developed before 1990 claimed, respectively, that the task-specific regions of the cortex are spawned by a zone of "originator" cells; or that long nerve fibers from the thalamus, a large ovoid mass that relays information to the cortex from other brain regions, are activated by external stimuli to impose identity on the homogeneous blob.

New evidence indicates that the development of cortical areas involves "a rich array of signals," an interwoven cascade of developmental events, some internal and some external, according to co-authors Mriganka Sur, Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and John L. R. Rubenstein of UCSF.

"Recent evidence has altered researchers' understanding of how cortical areas form, connect with other brain regions, develop unique processing networks and adapt to changes in inputs," Sur said. "Understanding basic mechanisms of cortical development is central to understanding disorders of development."

By BLOOMBERG NEWS

New tests in the first trimester¹ of pregnancy are better at identifying fetuses² with Down syndrome³  than standard tests done later in pregnancy, according to a government-financed study.

1. 第一個三個月；2. 胎兒；胚胎(embryo)；3. 唐氏症

The first-trimester tests detected as many as 87 percent of fetuses with the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome, compared with 81 percent found by tests in the second trimester, the authors write in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Down syndrome affects more than two million people worldwide, causing physical and mental disabilities. It occurs about once in 700 to 900 live births.

DURHAM, N.C. -- The brain is a "time machine," assert Duke neuroscientists Catalin Buhusi and Warren Meck. And understanding how the brain tracks time is essential to understanding all its functions. The brain's internal clocks coordinate a vast array of activities from communicating, to orchestrating movement, to getting food, they said.

In a review article in the October 2005 Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Buhusi and Meck discuss the current state of understanding of one of the brain's most important, and mysterious, clocks -- the one governing timing intervals in the seconds to minutes range. Such interval timing occupies the middle neurological ground between two other clocks -- the circadian clock that operates over the 24-hour light-dark cycle, and the millisecond clock that is crucial for such functions as motor control and speech generation and recognition. Meck is a professor and Buhusi is an assistant research professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Interval timing is central to broader coordination of tasks such as walking, manipulating objects, carrying on a conversation and tracking objects in the environment, they said.

"Interval timing is necessary for us to understand temporal order of events, for example when carrying on a conversation," said Meck. "To understand speech, I not only have to process the millisecond intervals involved in voice onset time, but also the duration of vowels and consonants. Also, to respond, I need to process the pacing of speech, to organize my thoughts coherently and to respond back to you in a timely manner. That's all interval timing, and in fact it's hard to find any complex behavioral process that timing isn't involved in."

Deciphering the neural mechanisms of such clocks may be even more fundamental to understanding the brain than figuring out, for example, neural processing of spatial position and movement, they said.

By KEITH ABLOW, M.D.

Almost from the moment he walked into my office, something bothered me about my 18-year-old patient, Mark, sent to see me by his parents after they found marijuana and steroids in his bedroom. 

Color Perception Is Not In The Eye Of The Beholder: It's In The Brain

First-ever images of living human retinas have yielded a surprise about how we perceive our world. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week's journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.

"We were able to precisely image and count the color-receptive cones in a living human eye for the first time, and we were astonished at the results," says David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the Center for Visual Science. "We've shown that color perception goes far beyond the hardware of the eye, and that leads to a lot of interesting questions about how and why we perceive color."

Shift In Brain's Language-control Site Offers Rehab Hope; Language Center Site Becomes More Lateralized Withe Age

這篇文章，很重要！！

CINCINNATI--Scientists have found that the site in the brain that controls language in right-handed people shifts with aging--a discovery that might offer hope in the treatment of speech problems resulting from traumatic brain injury or stroke.

New York Times

Can Brain Scans See Depression? 

They seem almost alive: snapshots of the living human brain.

兩篇英文文章...

The two short articles are somewhat related to the areas of brain activated during  speech-language processing.

Men Do Hear -- But Differently Than Women, Brain Images Show

 By JAMES ESTRIN

''If you drink this, you will die,'' George Eighmey told Karen Janoch, showing her a Pyrex measuring cup that held 90 capsules of Seconal dissolved in water.

''Do not feel coerced or pressured to do this,'' said Mr. Eighmey, the executive director of Compassion in Dying of Oregon. ''You can still change your mind.''  

Ms. Janoch, terminally ill with liver cancer, looked at the beaker and replied, ''I want to do this now.''

I Think, Therefore I Fall

The patient came into the doctor's office in a wheelchair, weighted down by a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, taking medication for the disorder and insisting she was unable to stand or walk. Thirty minutes later, after jogging down the hallway, she strolled out the door.

No Parkinson's patient was she. Rather, she was a perfect example of a person with "fear of falling gait," said neurologist and Parkinson's expert Roger Kurlan, M.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center. Kurlan has seen enough cases of the condition, where a person is so afraid of falling that the mind actually affects the ability to walk, that he wrote about the disorder in the September issue of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology to cue other physicians about the condition.

In the case reported in the journal, Kurlan describes an elderly woman who had an increasingly difficult time walking. The difficulties began shortly after her husband died, when she tripped and fell, breaking a wrist and bruising her leg. Her inability to walk led her doctor to diagnose Parkinson's disease, and she was prescribed the Parkinson's medication levodopa to treat her symptoms. Despite treatment, she ended up in a wheelchair, unable to walk, and she was sent to Kurlan, an expert in movement disorders like Parkinson's.

How The Brain Sorts Babble Into Auditory Streams

Known as "the cocktail party problem," the ability of the brain's auditory processing centers to sort a babble of different sounds, like cocktail party chatter, into identifiable individual voices has long been a mystery.

Now, researchers analyzing how both humans and monkeys perceive sequences of tones have created a model that can predict the central features of this process, offering a new approach to studying its mechanisms.

The research team--Christophe Micheyl, Biao Tian, Robert Carlyon, and Josef Rauschecker--published their findings in the October 6, 2005, issue of Neuron.

Why Females Are Better Off Choosing Unattractive Mates

“Ladies choice” isn’t just a dance routine, it is also a driver of species evolution -- and two UBC researchers may have found a reason why.

In a research paper published in today’s (Oct. 7) edition of the prestigious journal Science, UBC zoology professor Sarah Otto and graduate student Arianne Albert propose a model that explains why males in some species have extravagant displays for attracting females, while males in other species look just like females.

Many groups of animals, including humans, have an “XY” sex-determining system through which the father determines the sex of the offspring -- the offspring is female if it receives an X chromosome from the father, and vice versa. For these species, the chromosome on which flashy displays is coded will determine whether the sons or the daughters inherit the physical trait.

“If the genes coding for flashy displays are on the X, the genes from a sexy dad only appear in his daughters, making them visible to predators without improving their reproductive success, and thus favouring the evolution of preferences for dull males,” says Albert, lead author of the paper.

Decision Makers May Be Blind To The Outcome Of Their Choice

When evaluating facial attractiveness, participants may fail to notice a radical change to the outcome of their choice, according to a study by researchers at Lund University, Sweden, and New York University. Equally surprising, the study shows that participants may produce confabulatory reports when asked to describe the reasons behind their choices. The findings appear in the October 7 issue of Science.

The authors on this paper are Petter Johansson, a graduate student; Lars Hall, a researcher; Sverker Sikstre, an assistant professor; all from Lund University Cognitive Science; and Andreas Olsson, a graduate student in NYU's Department of Psychology.

Researchers showed picture-pairs of female faces to the participants and asked them to choose which face in each pair they found most attractive. In addition, immediately after their choice, they were asked to verbally describe the reasons for choosing the way they did. Unknown to the participants, on certain trials, a card magic trick was used to secretly exchange one face for the other. Thus, on these trials, the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what they intended.