Dana Foundation Blog

Financial wisdom as we age

2009-11-20T15:37:41-05:00

“The Peak Age of Financial Reason,” an article appearing today on smartmoney.com, addresses a topic we covered in Cerebrum earlier this year: the idea that our financial decision-making can suffer as we age. In Cerebrum, Natalie Denburg and Lyndsay Harshman outline research that links decision-making deficits to abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex. The authors suggest that such problems often occur in the elderly but that they should be considered neither a part of normal aging nor a sign of Alzheimer’s or other dementia.

The Smart Money article takes a behavioral economics perspective and focuses on a not-yet-published paper by Harvard economist David Laibson and colleagues (including two Federal Reserve employees), who suggest that our ability to make good financial decisions is all downhill after age 53 because of the deterioration of our bodies and brains.

I’m not sure I buy the specificity of this “peak” age, but some of the economists’ guidance for how older people can avoid making mistakes goes hand-in-hand with Denburg and Harshman’s suggestions. For example, the Cerebrum authors note that people may not be aware that their decision-making abilities have diminished. Addressing that possibility, Laibson suggests planning ahead, such as by giving someone—a spouse or grown child, ideally—power of attorney in case of incapacitation. Both articles also suggest that legal protections could help manage the problem.

In my introduction to the Cerebrum article, I wrote about two incidents of poor financial decision-making, related by people close to me, that occurred days apart. I hope that these articles raise awareness and encourage people to prepare well. The fewer such stories we hear, the better.

--Dan Gordon

Alzheimer’s gene therapy trial takes another step

2009-11-20T09:30:50-05:00

Those who take care of someone with Alzheimer’s or follow developments in the field are well aware that there are no good treatments for the disease. The handful of drugs that have been approved for use in patients—such as donepezil, sold under the name Aricept—only manage symptoms; they do not reverse or even slow the loss of nerve cells that ultimately leads to death.

Now scientists are testing a treatment that does show promise for arresting the progression of Alzheimer’s. Twelve sites around the country are recruiting patients for a Phase II trial of CERE-110, a gene therapy treatment. In this approach, doctors perform surgery to implant a virus into the brain; the virus then inserts new genetic material into nerve cells that stimulates them to overproduce nerve growth factor (NGF). This protein promotes nerve growth survival; increased levels of NGF have reversed nerve cell degeneration in monkeys and rats.

Phase I trials, conducted over the past five years, have shown that the gene therapy is safe for people and does not cause side effects such as cancer or immune reactions, which had occurred in prior gene therapy trials. Because Phase I trials test primarily for safety, however, information on how well or if the treatment works is pretty sparse. The Phase II trial will test the effectiveness of the therapy in a total of 50 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s, with half receiving the treatment and the other half serving as controls by getting “sham” surgeries. If the trial were successful, the latter group would be eligible to receive the full treatment.

Directly tackling the underlying causes of Alzheimer’s has proven extremely difficult. Last year, for instance, a highly touted and 1,700-subject Phase III trial of flurizan, a drug that targets the amyloid protein clumps that form in Alzheimer’s, failed to show a significant benefit. Bapineuzumab, an experimental vaccine against amyloid proteins, showed positive effects only in a select group of patients in a recent Phase II trial.

It will be several years before the results of this trial are reported, but scientists and patients have a good reason for optimism, as this has been a breakthrough year for gene therapy. Recently researchers restored color vision in two color-blind monkeys using gene therapy. Earlier this month, scientists also announced that they had halted the progression of a devastating brain disease, X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, in two young boys.

-Aalok Mehta

BrainWeb offers Internet insights

2009-11-13T16:14:27-05:00

As editor of BrainWeb for the past four years, I frequently evaluate health-related Web sites looking for things to add to the compilation of links to sites about brain diseases and disorders. Once I pick possible sites, they then go to our advisory committee, Bernice Grafstein, Ph.D., and Murray Grossman, M.D., Ph.D., for final review and approval. This vetting process helps ensure the quality of the material that BrainWeb recommends to its users.

Finding accurate health information online can be difficult—the sheer volume of information available makes it hard to know what can be trusted. Here are some things I keep in mind when assessing Web sites:

Where is this information coming from? It’s important to notice who sponsors the site: an organization, a pharmaceutical company, a government agency or an individual. The site’s affiliation can color the information presented.
Are there a large number of advertisements or requests for donations? If so, I would be less likely to trust the site. A site from a pharmaceutical company, for instance, functions as one large advertisement, even if it appears to be something else at first glance.
Is there a scientific advisory committee listed somewhere on the site? This committee indicates that experts have looked over the information and approved the content.
When was the site last updated? Health information changes very quickly, and Web sites should be revised accordingly.

And forget Google—there are better places to begin searching for health information. BrainWeb, of course, is one place to go. The National Institutes of Health is another. The search bar on the homepage will connect you information from all of its institutes and centers, in addition to the National Library of Medicine and the fabulous Medline Plus.

-Johanna Goldberg

The DSM debate

2009-11-11T15:46:44-05:00

In the Nov. 9 New York Times, there is an interesting column by autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), including a discussion by its editors about whether to remove Asperger syndrome from the forthcoming fifth edition.

Baron-Cohen touches on some of the same points made in Cerebrum’s recent look at the DSM update. The complementary articles, one by DSM editors, the other by psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh, suggest how the revision might bring more certainty to diagnoses and why looking at disorders’ causes—not just their symptoms, as is the case now—is important.

The DSM update is scheduled for publication in 2012, and many important discussions about it lie ahead. Stay tuned.

-Dan Gordon

To dream, perchance to prepare

2009-11-10T13:52:29-05:00

I was 17 and a month from leaving for college when a friend told her sister and me about her impending divorce from Anderson. But this friend was also 17, about to be a senior in high school and most certainly not married. She was having a conversation in her sleep.

This episode, hilarious at the time, came to mind when I read the Nov. 9 New York Times article “A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain.” It recounts a new hypothesis for why we dream by Harvard psychiatrist and sleep researcher J. Allan Hobson: that the brain is preparing itself for conscious awareness.

According to Hobson’s hypothesis, dreaming is a “parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking.” (New York University neurologist and physiologist Rodolfo Llinás goes further, contending that dreaming represents consciousness itself—and that when we’re awake, our senses “correct” the underlying procession of dreams.)

Hobson, who has written about consciousness and dreaming in Cerebrum, presented his theory in a recent paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The hypothesis stems in part from advances in studying REM sleep, the article notes. Evidence indicates that this dream-laden sleep stage helps neurons wire up, particularly in areas of the brain related to vision. Other research suggests that in lucid dreaming, in which people observe their own dreams, brain-wave activity reflects elements of both REM sleep and waking awareness.

As for the dream my friend was relaying? It would seem to be among the approximately 80 percent of dreams that comprise people and places the dreamer has never encountered—before or since, in my friend’s case.

Anderson, you can rest easy.

-Dan Gordon

Genes and criminals: Italian court makes controversial ruling

2009-11-09T16:37:47-05:00

“Don’t blame me—it was my genes’ fault.” Could this be the plea of future criminals? In Italy, the case of a man who confessed to murder in 2007 may set a precedent.

It’s not that unusual that an Italian court gave Abdelmalek Bayout three years less than it otherwise would have because his lawyer argued Bayout was mentally ill at the time of the crime. What is unprecedented, though, is that at an appeal hearing in September the judge removed an additional year from the defendant’s sentence based on genetic tests. The judge believed Bayout’s genes made him “particularly aggressive in stressful situations,” basing his decision on the tests that revealed Bayout to have low levels of MAOA, a trait which has been linked to criminal behavior.

It was the first time in a European court that behavioral genetics has affected a sentence. In the United States, this type of defense has been used more than 200 times in the past five years and in rare cases has influenced sentencing.

“There’s increasing evidence that some genes together with a particular environmental insult may predispose people to certain behavior,” Pietro Pietrini, a molecular neuroscientist at Italy’s University of Pisa and one of the researchers investigating Bayout’s genetic makeup, said in a Nature news article.

Many people argue that this is true for anyone. It’s certainly a worthwhile question: Isn’t anyone who commits murder at least a little bit mentally ill? While this particular criminal’s sentence was reduced, others have argued that courts could rule the other way—if the person’s genes are “bad,” perhaps the sentencing should be stricter.

Many researchers contacted by Nature also questioned the court’s decisions. Giuseppe Novelli, a forensic scientist and geneticist, said that tests for single genes are “useless.” The judge may not have considered some additional relevant factors when analyzing the results, according to geneticist Terrie Moffitt.

It’s an interesting debate and likely one with too many factors to be settled any time soon.

—Andrew Kahn

When senses combine

2009-11-03T14:50:45-05:00

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter category.

“Some people are born with two or more senses hooked together,” Cytowic told an audience of around 120 people at the Library of Congress on Oct. 30. For example, for the first synesthete he studied, some flavors “were more than a mouthful.”

Synesthesia experts estimate that one in 23 people has some form of this involuntary sense-mixing. Some scientists working with infants theorize that all babies are born synesthetic but lose the trait at around three months, when their sense networks start to firm up.

In 1979, when he was a young researcher, Cytowic said, no one had heard of synesthesia, and if they had they thought it wasn’t real. But he was hooked—“it interested me to explain a subjective experience that seems impossible to prove.”

He and others eventually did prove it, through well-designed experiments and a mass of data from people who started calling and writing to describe their experiences. Now “a new generation in 15 countries” studies the trait, from its individualistic expression in behavior to its possible molecular and genetic components.

“Five groups around the world are working on analyzing for the synesthesia gene,” he said. Researchers currently think the trait is genetic (“hyperconnectivity between disparate brain systems”) but requires early exposure to over-learned groupings. For example, many synesthetes see colors or shapes related to such sequences as days of the week, calendars and other common number forms, including music. (Are you synesthetic? Take a computer-based test at http://www.synesthete.org/.)

Cytowic played two short films to help illustrate the ability. The first paired Chopin’s Valse Brillante with a moving pattern of dashes of color changing in time with the music. The second, a short film by Terri Timely seen below, cleverly captures the idea of living with many forms of synesthesia, Cytowic said. One difference, though, is that instead of the discrete objects such as cats seen in the video, synesthetes are more likely to see general shapes or colors.

Crossing sense pathways can run in families and seems to be more common in artistically creative people, Cytowic said. Examples include writers Douglas Coupland and Vladimir Nabokov (and his family); artists David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky; musicians Olivier Messiaen, Itzak Perlman and Billy Joel; and performer Marilyn Monroe. Stevie Wonder also has a form of sound-color synesthesia. “Synesthesia is very common in blind people because you don’t need your eyes to see—you see with your brain,” Cytowic said.

Their experiences are not always positive, though. One audience member described herself as a mild sound-taste synesthete and her son a stronger one. One year at school, she said, her son found that his new teacher’s voice “brought a bad taste to his mouth” to such an extent that she had to arrange to move him to a new classroom, “and it was ridiculously difficult. Nobody believed it” when he kept saying “her voice makes me sick.”

Sometimes it’s a synesthete’s friends and family who need to close their eyes. Cytowic told of a taste-color synesthete who had to wait until his wife was out of town to eat a favorite, “very blue,” dish: baked chicken Alaska drenched in orange juice and topped with ice cream.

“Synesthetes have taught us that cross-talk is the rule, not the exception,” Cytowik said. “Minds that work differently are not that different at all, and we can learn from them.”

With David Eagleman, Cytowik co-authored Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, which was recently reviewed in Cerebrum. His lecture is part of the “Music and the Brain” series, presented by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event, on music and trance states, is tonight; a lecture on dangerous music takes place Friday, Nov. 6.

—Nicky Penttila

Refunds on the way for Baby Einstein videos

2009-10-30T09:15:00-04:00

On Saturday, Tamar Lewin of the New York Times reported that the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for its popular but controversial Baby Einstein videos.

According to the article, Baby Einstein was founded in 1997; Disney acquired the company in 2001 and expanded it to offer a full line of DVDs, books, toys, flash cards and apparel aimed at infants and toddlers. It’s estimated that Baby Einstein now controls 90 percent of the baby media market, selling $200 million worth of products annually.

The move comes after a heated battle over the marketing claims Disney has used to sell the line. Lewin, for instance, quotes Susan Linn, the director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing Disney and other baby media companies to acknowledge that the videos are not, indeed, educational. “The unusual video refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect,” Lewin writes.

Perhaps this will serve as a death knell to the marketing hype that began when the so-called “Mozart effect” was first reported in a 1993 letter published in the journal Nature. The paper claimed that college students exposed to classical music had better spatial reasoning skills, which are important to success in math and science. Scientists, however, have not reliably replicated the phenomenon. And there is little hard evidence for the effectiveness of any of the products available commercially.

The lack of science-based data, however, is being rectified by scientists doing more quantifiable studies in arts training. In the “Learning, Arts, and the Brain” report, the Dana Foundation’s Arts and Cognition Consortium reported on some of the initial studies looking at the connections between media, education and the brain. Since then researchers have gained a more sophisticated understanding of how young minds develop and learn, including new findings reported this May at a summit in Baltimore. Acknowledging that much more research needs to be done, neuroscientists also recently outlined plans to grow and unify work in the field.

In the meantime, for lack of a better alternative, many parents have gone with their intuition and concluded that the best teaching “device” for brain development is low-tech. Parental involvement with one’s child, whether in the form of conversation, games and book reading, may provide the best stimulation for growing brains and minds.

Neuroscientists and pediatricians back this idea up. Lewin notes that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV time at all for children under age 2. In the Ten Guideposts for Parents chapter in Dana Press book A Good Start in Life, Norbert Herschkowitz and Elinore Chapman Herschkowitz make a similar suggestion.

—Rosemary Shields

Have no fear—not after this research

2009-10-29T16:12:00-04:00

The crowd of scientists was thinner for Elizabeth Phelps’ special lecture, “Changing Fear,” on the final day of the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. But her work was among the most interesting I heard presented, in part because she studies humans as well as other animals.

Phelps’ main point was that the fear response can change, sometimes for the better. “Something that is fearful today may be rewarding tomorrow,” she said in her introduction.

Humans, like other animals, can be conditioned to associate a tone with a mild shock. We will then display a fear response when we hear the tone. In the brain, it’s the amygdala that is responsible for the physical expression (such as sweating, increased blood pressure or a quickening pulse) of a learned fear response.

Humans can also learn a fear via instruction—simply from being told that there may be a shock, for example—or via observation, such as by watching someone else receive a shock after hearing a tone. Understanding this, researchers can develop models of fear learning in complex, uniquely human social environments, Phelps said.

These models will help explain what Phelps called a critical question regarding human fears: how to diminish or extinguish them. For example,exposure therapy, which includes learning that a previously fear-inducing stimulus is safe, is a successful model, she said.

In animal models of what’s called fear extinction, the response in the amygdala decreases because it is inhibited by another region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which Phelps said is necessary for keeping the fear from returning later. One interesting facet of this area of research is that humans were able to decrease their own fear response by thinking of something calming when shown a fear-related stimulus, with corresponding variations in brain activity.

Phelps and her colleagues are now studying how to erase a fear memory altogether, perhaps by disrupting the reconsolidation of such a memory. Their theory is that when we retrieve a memory, it may be “fragile,” offering an opportunity to influence or change it. Studies in humans have offered evidence that extinction training during reconsolidation can prevent the reinstatement of fear.

Still, “there are many things we don’t know at this point,” Phelps said. Among the more intriguing questions are whether such extinction training might affect not just conditioned fear but complex emotional memories, and, if so, whether such approaches might help treat anxiety disorders.

Much more research lies ahead. Look for fascinating insights about emotion and memory along the way.

—Dan Gordon

Grief: a musical case study

2009-10-29T10:32:45-04:00

Grief and depression are distinctly different human experiences, but even experienced psychologists and brain scientists sometimes have trouble teasing the two apart.

Those slivers of contrast were the central theme of “Music and Grief,” a panel discussion held on Tuesday at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The event kicked off the second season of the “Music and the Brain”lecture series (an earlier program on the mystery of Beethoven’s deafness had to be rescheduled for next year).

In keeping with the series’ mission to delve into how brain science gives us insight into the mysteries and benefits of music, the three speakers recounted their personal and professional experiences with music, grief and depression. Live illustrations were provided by the Julliard School graduate string quartet in residence.

Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of its Mood Disorders Center, outlined the rawness of her grief following the 2002 death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, then chief of neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health. Jamison, who was previously written at length about her struggles with bipolar disorder, read from her new memoir, “Nothing Was the Same,” about how her grief was at times overwhelming, even causing her to give away her entire music collection because of unpleasant associations. But, she said, she didn’t suffer from a single day of depression, which she had greatly feared given her history. Unlike grief, in which the comfort and company of others is powerfully helpful, “the capacity for solace does not exist in depression,” she added.

Her colleague J. Raymond DePaulo, chairman of Johns Hopkins’s psychiatry department, expounded on some of her comments based on his experiences treating more than 15,000 patients. Grief generally begins with a period of numbness that is followed by a bout of “profound sadness” that has ups and downs and varies in length from weeks up to years, he said. People slowly re-engage with normal life, though memories of the lost loved one can bubble up suddenly and unexpectedly for decades afterward.

In contrast, while extreme grief can cause depression, only a fraction of depressed people consider themselves sad. Rather, the dominant feeling in depression is one of hopelessness or emptiness, which erodes people’s self-confidence, causes them to pull away from friends and damages their ability to function in daily life. “We must distinguish these conditions, but it can be extremely difficult, and we must be prudent,” DePaulo said. “We don’t want to medicalize a universal human condition [grief], and at the same time we want to give them solace.”

In between those presentations came an interesting case study: the extreme reaction of musical virtuoso Felix Mendelssohn to the death of his beloved sister Fanny. Ara Guzelimian, provost and dean of the Juilliard School, described how Mendelssohn—then at the height of his prowess and celebrity—largely withdrew from the world, writing only a few pieces of music before his death less than six months later. But his prolific correspondence emphasizes the depths of his feelings, as does his last major composition, String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Guzelimian said. Characterized by an unrelenting bleakness and harshly conflicting notes, this is “an extraordinary extreme piece of music” with a “music vocabulary utterly uncharacteristic of Mendelssohn,” he said before the Julliard musicians played its first movement. “Every restraint comes off the music.”

Responding to audience questions, the presenters emphasized that music has shown, at least anecdotally, therapeutic benefits both for grief and depression. Pieces like String Quartet No. 6, for instance, can help listeners purge or come to terms with their negative emotions, Guzelimian said, and the Julliard performers remarked about the emotional exhaustion they feel after playing the entire piece. Guzelimian gave a personal example of how music can serve different roles at different times: A particular piece that he had found comforting when undergoing a major surgery, contemplating his own possible death, was unbearable to him shortly after the death of a close friend.

The Dana Foundation funds the Music and the Brain series. Jamison and DePaulo are members of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.

—Aalok Mehta

A memory for prions

2009-10-22T10:24:17-04:00

A prion is among the simplest of the things that cause disease, and yet it's one of the most terrifying. Consisting of a single misfolded protein, this "mad cow" disease culprit is less invasion factory and more vampire; it has the unusual ability to corrupt other proteins it encounters, causing them to misfold as well, beginning a deadly cascade. In rare cases, such misfolded proteins can form spontaneously in people, but whatever the cause the resulting disease is untreatable and fatal.

A debate has raged among scientists over whether prions play a role in normal cells or whether they are simply an unfortunate aberration. After all, proponents of the former theory argue, evolution would tend to weed out disease-causing proteins unless they served some purpose necessary for survival.

In the final of four presidential lectures delivered here at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Chicago, Nobel laureate Eric Kandel made a compelling argument that prion-like proteins, at the least, contribute to the formation of long-term memories in the brain. "The functional aggregate state [of prion-like proteins] does not kill the cell and is not a dead protein," he said.

Kandel's spirited talk ranged far and wide, outlining dozens of experiments he and his colleagues undertook to understand the molecular basis of memory, or "how one remembers an event for the rest of your life, like your first love." Working on the sea slug Aplysia and in rats, the researchers found that long-term memory formation relies on a chemical cascade that results in formations of new connections between brain cells. The cascade is dependent on the manufacture of new proteins, and that only happens when certain genetic blueprints known as mRNAs receive a molecular "mark" allowing them to make fruitful contact with the protein-making machinery of the cell.

But how does this mark happen, and how does it happen in the right place? The key molecule, Kandel said, seems to be cytoplasmic poly(A) element binding protein, or CPEB, which has some similar components to the prions seen in disease. Kandel's team discovered that CPEB appears to have two forms--including a folded form that, like a prion, can transform the other version of CPEB to resemble it. By studying it in detail over the course of several years, the researchers began to develop a picture of how this might initiate the memory-formation cascade.

According to the theory, the more a neuron is stimulated in response to a sensory stimulus, the more CPEB that cell produces at that particular connection. Some of the protein spontaneously changes into the alternative, folded form, proceeding to convert other CPEB molecules. At low levels of protein, this doesn't do much, but at some critical concentration, CPEB takes over. And this allows mRNAs in the region to be marked, possibly by providing a "scaffold" for them. Of course, if this happens in an uncontrolled fashion, then it could "destroy the cell," Kandel said. Luckily, it seems another molecule affects the CPEB to keep the process in check.

Much remains unclear about this process--including whether it works the same way in humans--and a complete theory of memory remains a far-off dream. But Kandel's speech was a particularly fitting way to end SfN's lecture series, and not just because this was his first presidential lecture despite his illustrious career and his status as a founding member of the society. It also shows just how meticulously and complexly our bodies and brains are crafted--and how nonetheless, with enough hard work and clever insights, we can still unravel those mysteries.

--Aalok Mehta

For neuroscientists, a new way to share

2009-10-21T07:30:00-04:00

Neuroscientists don't talk to each other enough, say the creators of the Whole Brain Catalog.

That may seem like an odd sentiment here at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, where more than 32,000 neuroscientists and their colleagues have converged in Chicago to update each other on recent findings and spark new ideas. But researchers at the University of California, San Diego, aren't concerned about the kinds of information that can be easily pasted into a PowerPoint presentation or a poster--they worry about massive sets of useful data languishing away in laboratory backrooms because brain scientists don't have good ways to deal with them.

"There's a lot of data out there that just sits on people's hard drives, because we don't have a place where people can really get to it right away," says Stephen Larson, who helped create the software tool as part of his Ph.D. thesis work. "The open-source neuroscience community has not been as strong as it could be. We wanted to energize that community."

Larson and his colleagues’ solution took root from an unlikely source: video games. Aiming to create an appealing graphical interface for their program, the team turned to Java Monkey Engine, a 3-D gaming engine. The result is a free, open-source brain visualization program that allows scientists to upload, share and comment on all manners of brain data. "[JME] been used for entertainment up until now," Larson says. "But we thought it could be very useful for science visualization."

UCSD's robust information infrastructure provided another key component to getting the program off the ground. To use the Whole Brain Catalog, scientists upload their data--which can easily exceed tens of gigabtyes--onto a dedicated server set up by the catalog team using seed money from the Wiatt Family Foundation. The visualization software then remaps the data against standard models of the brain and serves it up from UCSD computers in a manner similar to Google Maps.

The application's scope is anything but modest. It is designed to work at all levels, incorporating 2-D photos of large brain slices as easily as it can add individual molecules imaged in three dimensions using electron microscopy. And it's not just static data--it can use sequences of images to render detailed simulations of brain activity. One popular demonstration at the catalog's booth is an animation of new neuron growth in the dentate gyrus, based on data from a recent Neuron paper.

Researchers also have plenty of options for data already in the system. Uploaders can decide whether they want to keep the data private for the time being or make it open for everyone to see. A robust annotation program allows anyone to make comments on noteworthy items and ensures that the data is always tagged with the name of the person who uploaded the data. The database is searchable by keyword, and allows researchers directly overlay other people's data onto their own. Easy ways to pull up gene expression data from the Allen Brain Atlas and direct links to Neurolex, a Wikipedia-like database of brain science terms relevant to researchers, are included.

The developers seem to be on target. Interest in the Whole Brain Catalog, which debuted in a beta form here at the conference, has been pretty high. Despite the hubbub of the meeting, several scientists have been so impressed that they have already taken time out of their schedules to upload their data, Larson says.

"This is not going to be the solution to all our issues with data," he adds. "But making it very graphical, very visual, is going to open up and help us solve many problems in neuroscience."
--Aalok Mehta

In dyslexia, a brain out of tune?

2009-10-20T12:14:50-04:00

Music training might serve as an effective deterrent of or treatment for dyslexia and other language learning disorders, suggests a new study that explores how years of musical experience can boost the brain's hearing abilities.

It's not terribly surprising that musicians are better at processing sounds than the rest of us. What was unexpected, though, was that only certain specific aspects of hearing are affected, said study leader Dana Strait, a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University, speaking at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago on Monday. And those areas, it turns out, are the same ones that seem to go awry to children who have difficulty learning to read and write.

In her experiment, Strait had 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians play a simple video game she had adapted to test various hearing skills. The groups were pretty similar when it came to very basic tasks, such as what range of sounds they could hear or whether they could detect simple musical tones. The veteran musicians, however, showed increased abilities to focus on sounds and enhanced memory of them afterwards, Strait said, as well as improvements on a few more complicated listening tasks. Furthermore, this was directly related to the amount of musical experience; the longer a musician had played, the better his or her scores.

"Those very aspects enhanced in musicians are impaired in people with learning disabilities," Strait added. For instance, children with dyslexia often have trouble teasing out important sounds from background noise and with distinguishing between certain very similar English consonants. This suggests that reading- and language-related cognitive abilities might be boosted in children with musical training, she said.

This isn't the first research to connect music training and possible educational benefits. Several prior studies have hinted that musical training might convey substantial lifelong learning benefits not just for language but also for thinking in general. Michael Posner, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, earlier this year outlined one way this could might happen: Since musical training requires intense time commitments, it may enhance attention, or the ability to focus on one task despite competing demands. And at least one survey has found a rough correlation between SAT scores and prior musical experience, Mark Tramo of Harvard Medical School said at the conference.

But that work, as well as many other studies in the field, do not answer the question of what comes first--better hearing, better attention abilities or an interest in music--Tramo said. Do people born with brains more adept at sound processing or focus naturally decide to become musicians, or did their training boost those abilities? Such questions are vital to figuring out whether music can be employed to combat dyslexia, but because the field is so young, the long, large surveys needed to get answers have not yet been conducted, Tramo said.

Strait echoed those concerns, emphasizing that much more work remains to be done before any recommendations could be made about treatment. She may have some of those answers soon, though; in an interview, she said that this particular study is just one element of a larger project looking at music and the brain. The full plan includes studying not just adults but also children to decipher how precisely the brain processes speech and music, how this changes when people learn to read or write, how learning an instrument might differ from that and what changes the brain shows during the development of musical skill. She even plans to investigate whether the instrument played makes a difference--say, a piano versus a violin versus a set of drums.

--Aalok Mehta

The neuroethics of consciousness

2009-10-20T11:48:05-04:00

The field of coma and consciousness has produced some eye-opening stories in the past few years, most remarkably the case of Terry Wallis, a severely brain-damaged patient who regained the ability to talk. The new findings in this area have led to new ethical questions. Among them: Could doctors be erring in some cases, diagnosing as vegetative patients who are actually minimally conscious—and whose prognosis thus is better? Can people in vegetative or minimally conscious states feel pain, and should they be treated with painkillers?

Steven Laureys of the University of Liege addressed these questions on Monday during the David Kopf Lecture on Neuroethics at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. His lecture was called “Eyes Wide Open, Brain Wide Shut? (Un)consciousness in the vegetative state.”

Regarding diagnosis, Laureys cited a study in which 45 of 103 “post-comatose” patients were clinically diagnosed as vegetative. However, diagnosis using the Coma Recovery Scale showed that only 27 of those patients actually belonged in the “vegetative” category, a misdiagnosis of a vegetative state in 40 percent of these cases. Laureys said clinicians should take the time to carefully assess clinical signs of consciousness and not stop their search for signs of it prematurely.

Insight from brain imaging was a recurring theme in Laureys’ lecture. After noting that different levels of consciousness correspond with levels of overall brain activity, Laureys described how functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can measure activity in a brain at rest—thus providing a gauge by which to test activity in patients in various comatose states and help with diagnosis.

Imaging also can shed light on a patient’s prognosis. “New technologies, especially MRI … will really revolutionize [how] we can predict recovery,” Laureys said. He cited a study in which two of seven patients in a vegetative state showed “high-level” cortical activation. Three months later, only those two had recovered other signs of consciousness.

Clinicians might also adjust treatment based on imaging findings, Laureys said. For example, imaging studies suggest that patients in a vegetative state do not sense pain. But minimally conscious patients show greater brain activity in response to pain, including in an area important in the emotional perception of pain.

“In our view, this should lead to the systematic use of pain-killers and analgesia in patients in a minimally conscious state,” he said.

Laureys concluded by addressing ethical challenges directly, including the need for an overall ethical framework for how physicians deal with impaired consciousness following injury. Such a framework could take into account the quality of life of people living with locked-in syndrome (which is higher than we might expect, surveys indicate) and, as has arisen in Europe, end-of-life decisions such as organ donation from a patient with limited consciousness who sought physician-assisted death.

--Dan Gordon

Feast, but visions of famine, at NIH

2009-10-19T22:12:00-04:00

While the recent deluge of stimulus money to fund science research is very welcome, the chief of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday, the devil is in the details—will the support continue?

“Science is not a 100-yard dash—it’s a marathon,” said Francis Collins during an address at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago. Collins is the first sitting NIH chief director to speak at the annual meeting; his talk attracted several thousand of the more than 30,000 neuroscientists and others who have converged on McCormick Place this week.

There could not be a more important time to reinforce the importance of science than now, as the president and Congress begin the difficult debate over the next fiscal budget, Collins argued. Most experiments started now won’t be completed in the two years covered by the stimulus grants, he pointed out. They “are down payments on results in the future,” and “to take away the fuel midstream would not lead to good outcomes” for the research or the researchers, he said. “Science doesn’t resonate very well with feast-or-famine circumstances."

In the past year, the agency received around 20,000 applications for stimulus challenge grant funding; it had expected several thousand. “We weren’t able to fund but a percentage,” Collins said, “but were inspired by the outpouring of creativity.”

Continued funding in 2011 and after will be its own challenge given the economic downturn, however, and the agency could again find itself in the all-then-nothing cycle it suffered this past decade. Funding doubled between 1998 and 2003 and then was flat for the next five years, letting inflation carve “a deep loss” in money available for grants, he said.

After just receiving $10 billion in stimulus funding for the 2008-2009 budget, funding more 12,000 research projects, “I do think there’s some risk” that the cycle will repeat, Collins said. He urged scientists and science advocates to “make the case that science research really is important to the nation’s health, its economy and to the rest of the world’s health.”

With its current funding, Collins said, NIH is supporting its bedrock, basic science research, but he also is looking to take advantage of five “areas of opportunity”:

Applying “high-throughput technology,” such as imaging, genomics, computational methods and nanotechnology, to answer basic questions. Instead of small projects teasing out one or another component of a biological system, “we want investigators to be able to ask questions with ‘all’ in them,” Collins said, for instance, "what are all the variations in the genome linked to a certain disease?" Researchers didn’t have the tools earlier to ask these wide-ranging questions; now that they do, he said, NIH should encourage them to take advantage.
Encouraging research translating bench research to potential therapies for people. Translating a basic-research discovery into a clinical application is a long and complicated process that used to be mainly funded by private pharmaceutical firms. Collins said NIH will target money for more investigators to tackle the climb toward clinical applications, including the “so-called valley of death,” or first-stage trials in humans, a traditionally difficult stage to get funded.
Contributing to the science of health care reform. The institute will continue to offer policymakers and the public health information that is based on evidence, including research that compares the effectiveness of current therapies. “NIH has been doing these studies for a long time,” Collins said, including reports on treatments for diabetes and schizophrenia.
Encouraging a greater focus on global health. “We’re taking the mandate to use soft power instead of hard power and applying it to scientific research,” he said. For example, he cited a cooperative project by the University of Virginia and Brazil researching the effects of childhood nutrition and cognitive development.
Reinvigorating and empowering the biomedical research community. By stimulating innovation and supporting young investigators, Collins said, the U.S. can retain the bright young and mid-career scientists who might not otherwise stay in the field. “We know there is great interest and pent-up capability,” he said. Yet with funds threatening to dry up in two years, those people may start wondering if they made the right career choice and be tempted to abandon research.

Collins also separately met with groups of postdoctoral students, with reporters and with the board of the neuroscience society. “We are listening,” he said, urging people to e-mail NIH-LISTENS@nih.gov with questions, critiques and suggestions. “We are at a very exciting time scientifically,” he said, and “neuroscience is one of the areas of greatest excitement in science.

“Clearly, our community, after five years of flat budgets, came back to life with this opportunity provided by the recovery act, and put forth some bold and brilliant new ideas.”

-Nicky Penttila

Outreach, education key themes at SfN

2009-10-18T13:20:40-04:00

It was only appropriate that one of the first events of this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago focused on neuroscience education and outreach efforts, particularly those of Brain Awareness Week (BAW). SfN president Tom Carew chose education as the defining theme of his tenure as leader, and BAW is the most prominent annual event promoting the brain sciences to the general public around the globe.

More than 200 students, teachers and scientists packed a session room at McCormick Place to hear from Carew and Nick Spitzer of the University of California, San Diego, on how SfN is helping to promote educational activities and how those efforts might change in the future. "Brain awareness has not only expanded but continues to grow," said Spitzer, citing a record number of groups, 33, who presented posters of their outreach work at the session. Part of that growth, he added, is the wealth of material--much of it in now in convenient digital formats--available from SfN and other groups like the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, which co-sponsored the event.

Carew described his experience speaking at a teacher's conference, which showed him that teachers are hungry for detailed knowledge of the brain. "They were so thrilled not only that I was talking science to them but that I was not talking down to them" by simplifying the material, he said. Teachers can be powerful allies in brain outreach activities by acting as "second messengers," he said. "If you get them involved, then after that the whole school comes on board, and then the school board comes on board."

Last week, SfN released a report from a June summit on neuroeducation, a fledgling field that combines neuroscience, psychology and education research to create better teaching methods. The field faces many challenges, as the different disciplines work in vastly different ways and use different vocabularies, Carew said, but the experts at the summit have outlined definite steps to take to advance the field. He's particularly optimistic about the field's prospects because of SfN's membership, which recently passed 40,000, about one-third are graduate students or postdocs. While many of them will pursue traditional academic careers, other career options are increasing, he said, including neuroeducation.

Also featured at the event were several special attendees, who had received travel stipends to the meeting in reward for their outreach efforts or accomplishments. Two undergraduate students--Allison Batties of Lycoming College and Michael Miller of Binghamton University--received SfN/Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience awards for their education efforts. In an interview after the event, Batties, who organized a series of hands-on activities for middle schoolers called "Brains Are Us," said her first SfN meeting has been an amazing experience so far. "There's a lot to look at--I'm excited to wander around," she said. "Since I attend a small liberal arts college, without this award, there's no way I could have gotten funding to come here."

Michael Reed, head coach of the science olympiad team at Grand Haven High School in Michigan, echoed her sentiments. SfN paid the way for him and two of his students, Kent Brummel and Blake Shultz, to attend the conference as a reward for teens' first-place win in the health sciences category of the national competition. "The focus on education seems appropriate," Reed added. "There is an awful lot of information available for people to learn about the brain. The key is to try to get people to think about it. It's information people need to know about, to be better students or teachers."

-Aalok Mehta

Neuroscientists believe in magic

2009-10-18T02:09:02-04:00

The audience member whom magician Apollo Robbins invited up to the stage appeared to harbor second thoughts—and with good reason. Robbins, “the Gentleman Thief,” specializes in pickpocketing, sleight-of-hand and con games.

Sure enough, despite the audience member’s heightened awareness, Robbins lifted the man’s watch from his wrist (and put it on his own) and swiped his cell phone.

Robbins and fellow magician Eric Mead were the guests of honor at the fifth “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society” lecture, one of the first events at this year’s Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Chicago.

“There’s no better way to find out how our brains work … and by extension how our minds work, than to find out how we can be deceived and how we can be made to believe the impossible,” SfN President Tom Carew said in introducing the pair.

Mead led off with a memory trick, asking an audience member to memorize shapes on a card. He then had her close her eyes and visualize a scene that included only four of the five shapes she had seen. Sure enough, she remembered only those four shapes afterward.

Memory is central to the magician’s craft, Mead said after the trick. “It’s important after the show that people remember certain things and forget certain things,” he said. If an audience member describes a show a week later, he wants them to have forgotten certain revealing details. His methods include distractions that prevent a memory from being encoded in the first place or implanting a benign false memory, such as getting a participant to agree that things happened in a subtly different way than they actually occurred.

Robbins, who has established a counter-theft organization that draws on knowledge from both law enforcement officials and former criminals, cited three tools he uses to deceive: proximity, movement and manipulating another person’s internal dialogue.

The use of personal space can begin to divide a subject’s attention, Robbins noted. Entering someone’s personal space head-on can be uncomfortable, but less so if eye contact breaks or if one person moves to the side of the other.

Certain movements, meanwhile, draw the eye—smooth motion in particular. Moving a coin in this way distracted Robbins’ audience member and helped the magician in his thievery. Robbins also got the man thinking about the coin and where Robbins would make it appear next; in second-guessing what Robbins was doing with the coin, the man stopped paying attention to his watch and cell phone.

“We’re your guides, and our job is to misguide you,” Robbins said. “Albert Einstein said, ‘Reality is an illusion, albeit a very good one.’ If somebody can control where you put your attention, then perhaps they can manipulate your reality.”

After the presentations, the magicians discussed the parallels between magic and brain science with Carew and Susana Martinez-Conde of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, who has studied the neuroscience of magic. In response to a question from the audience, Martinez-Conde noted that susceptibility to being fooled might help diagnose neurological problems.

A disease “might have something to do with the way a subject perceives magic,” she said. Carew added that magic might have therapeutic potential, too, as a means of working with attention.

The ability to use principles of magic to gain insight about the brain, it seems, is no illusion.

-Dan Gordon

Travel a while in Eric Kandel’s shoes

2009-10-18T01:48:21-04:00

For a peek into the life and past of famed neuroscientist Eric Kandel, check out the new documentary "In Search of Memory" (which also happens to be the name of his well-regarded memoir). Here in Chicago, it’s playing through the week of Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, at the Facets Cinémathèque in Lincoln Park.

If you click over to Facets’ page or the main film page (which is partly in German), you can see the first two minutes of the film. It starts as it goes on; director and producer Petra Seeger shows Kandel primarily via his interactions, with family, with her and other interviewers, with colleagues in and outside the lab, with complete strangers and with politicians in Vienna, the city his family had to escape after the Nazis came to power.

Because there is no straight narration and people sometimes aren’t introduced by name, the story can feel fragmented. This impressionistic method works in its own way, though, switching quickly from a family trip to Vienna to research work on why some memories are stronger to a lecture Kandel gives at a synagogue on why he turned from studying human brains to marine mollusks. In its non-linear way, the film travels a pretty straight history of his life.

Kandel has worked to tease out exactly how we remember, including discovering that we have short-term and long-term memories and that they differ in significant ways, findings that led to a Nobel prize. Seeger emphasizes parallels in his life, from his describing leaving Vienna in panic to his return in glory more than 60 years later. Re-enactments of the strong memories he had in Vienna add additional visual parallels, and his interactions with family and lab colleagues now are contrasted with his interactions in his undergraduate days at Harvard.

She also gives Kandel space to describe himself, trademark laugh, a few tears and all. His Jewish faith is a strong current in his life, including “Never forget,” the motto reminding us to remember the Holocaust. “I’ve been investigating the biological basis of that motto,” how memory works in the brain, all his life, he says.

I enjoyed the glimpses of work in the lab--seeing sea creatures in the tank and then under the microscope, translating descriptions on a posterboard, seeing a neuron alight with nerve growth factor. But though the science sections are a good refresher course, they move so fast (and in fragments) that people new to the field will get only the biggest brushstrokes. Even so, we do get a fascinating glimpse into the world of memory and scientific life, given by one of its most successful—and most down-to-earth—practitioners. Do try to see it if you’re in Chicago this week (through Oct. 22), or keep an eye out for it to come near you.

-Nicky Penttila

Society for Neuroscience releases neuroeducation report

2009-10-14T22:34:51-04:00

The Society for Neuroscience today released a white paper calling for unified leadership, a master research plan and better communications to boost the effectiveness of neuroeducation, a still-young field that aims to harness findings from neuroscience and psychology to improve teaching and learning methods.

The white paper is the result of the Neuroscience Research in Education Summit, a closed-door meeting held at the University of California, Irvine, from June 22 to 24. SfN president Thomas Carew organized the meeting, which brought together 40 experts from neuroscience, education and related fields, as part of a special initiative on education. Each leader of SfN customarily chooses one such topic during his or her one-year tenure; Carew says he chose neuroeducation because he has long been interested in the links between learning and brain science.

At the meeting, neuroeducation researchers explored several key issues. In particular, participants discussed three questions at the heart of neuroeducation: How neuroscience research can inform education strategies, what teachers want and need to know about how students think and learn and how teachers’ questions can drive neuroscience research.

The answers, Carew acknowledges in the paper, are “messy.” Participants at the meeting pointed out, for example, that there continues to be a wide gap between the kinds of information scientists provide and the kinds needed to make practical improvements in classrooms. Many educators, meanwhile, have a limited grasp of basic science and continue to believe long-discredited “neuromyths.” In addition, academic institutions have not done enough to train and bring together the multidisciplinary teams necessary to advance the field, despite surveys and other evidence indicating that education is of great interest of many neuroscientists.

The report suggests that neuroeducators take three concrete steps:

Experts in the field should “identify core translational research priorities” in order to create a “master research agenda” and guide future projects;
they should develop “foundational neuro-education messages,” a “shared vocabulary” and “communications tools” to foster collaboration and increase the profile of the field in the media; and
they should form a “Scientific and Educational Neuro-Education Advisory Board” to set and maintain a three- to five-year strategic plan for the field.

It’s not clear in the white paper who would oversee these changes or when, especially since Carew’s presidency will end next week in Chicago during SfN’s annual meeting. One source of leadership might come from the handful of universities that have started establishing programs in the area, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas, Arlington.

The report ends on a high note: “The challenges and opportunities are clear. We know what must be accomplished to build and grow the important emerging field of neuroeducation. We applaud those who have already made significant progress in linking the brain sciences to learning, and invite others to join us all in crafting the next chapter,” Carew says in a concluding remark. “Our collective work must continue — the stakes are very high, for us certainly, but especially for our children.”

—Aalok Mehta

Brain boosters for the healthy? A doctor’s guide

2009-10-14T10:31:12-04:00

What is the difference between a plastic surgeon and a neurologist? No, that’s not the start to some esoteric medical joke—it’s a central issue in one of the first reports to offer brain doctors practical advice on how to deal with healthy patients who ask for neuroenhancing drugs.

The answer, according to the Sept. 23 Neurology article, is that sometimes there isn’t much difference at all. Just as plastic surgeons can provide cosmetic treatments for patients, neurologists are well within their rights to prescribe—or not—stimulants to help patients improve test performance or memory enhancers to stave off normal declines in recall. These treatments, increasingly being sought by busy students and aging workers, are ethically and legally permissible, the authors argue, falling between the “ethically obligatory” treatments that are at the core of medical practice and harmful practices that are outright disallowed.

“Neuroenhancement and cosmetic surgery have a lot in common,” says lead author Dan Larriviere, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Virginia, because off-label use of drugs—that is, employing them for conditions other than those originally tested against—is left up to the discretion of medical providers. “Both [specialties] don’t correct. Both are permissible but not obligatory.”

That’s not to say that neurologists should be giving out neuroenhancing drugs to everyone who asks for them. The first thing doctors must do is ensure “that a patient who requests a neuroenhancer should be treated like a patient,” says Larriviere, who has both a medical and law background. Doctors should take an extensive history and conduct a thorough examination to make sure no underlying condition is prompting the request, he says.

Assuming the patient is indeed alright, a number of additional factors come into play. For instance, a doctor’s primary duty continues to be to ensure that treatment will actually help and not harm the person. In the case of neuroenhancers, that will inevitably require a judgment call, as the drugs’ long-term effects on “normals” have not been studied extensively.

For instance, preliminary data suggests the benefits do not apply equally to everyone or to every mental skill, that the drugs may have only minor effects in healthy people and that they may cause declines instead of improvements in some cases. These complexities, as well as concerns that a patient’s future ability to make medical decisions could become compromised, are legitimate reasons for denying a request, according to the paper. Fears of malpractice suits are another concern—“we just don’t know what kind of analysis courts would engage in if a patient was harmed in these cases,” Larriviere says.

But for a doctor who thinks it’s worth it, there are no universal proscriptions against writing the prescription, as long as the doctor has made the patient aware of the potential consequences, set clear guidelines about when to stop treatment and followed other ethical mandates.

Because these drugs are expensive, some people worry that allowing doctors to prescribe them to healthy people would exacerbate social and economic inequalities. Others foresee patients who get an unwanted answer “doctor-hopping” until they find someone who will prescribe them their drug of choice. But those are issues to be taken up at a societal or government level and should not affect individual medical decision, Larriviere says.

Larriviere acknowledges that the report is likely to be controversial. Even though people have been taking some mild neuroenhancers—such as caffeine—for centuries, the potency of modern versions makes numerous people, including many in the medical community, uncomfortable about their “unnecessary” use. Yet surveys and anecdotal reports suggest that it is becoming commonplace in some schools and workplaces, and doctors have had little practical guidance on how to respond to requests until now.

Whatever their ultimate thoughts on the issue, Larriviere says, many doctors have said they appreciate the new paper, because it both spells out the legal and ethical rules governing the issue and provides specific types of reasoning that doctors can use to justify a decision. “The articles about this have largely been philosophical and ethical pieces,” he says. “They didn’t offer any practical guidance to the physician.”

—Aalok Mehta