Free Republic

LAGUNA WOODS, Calif. — The ladies in the card room are playing bridge, and at their age the game is no hobby. It is a way of life, a daily comfort and challenge, the last communal campfire before all goes dark. “We play for blood,” says Ruth Cummins, 92, before taking a sip of Red Bull at a recent game. “It’s what keeps us going,” adds Georgia Scott, 99. “It’s where our closest friends are.” In recent years scientists have become intensely interested in what could be called a super memory club — the fewer than one in 200 of...

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper. The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning. “I said no —...

NORTH AMERICANS of my generation grew up with the 1970s children’s record Free to Be...You and Me, on which Rosey Grier, an immense former football star, sang ‘It’s Alright to Cry’. The message: girls could be tough, and boys were allowed not to be. For almost 40 years, that era’s Western feminist critique of rigid sex-role stereotyping has prevailed. In many ways, it has eroded or even eliminated the kind of arbitrary constraints that turned peaceable boys into aggressive men and stuck ambitious girls in low-paying jobs. Feminists understandably have often shied away from scientific evidence that challenges this critique...

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why? The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators...

What Makes You Uniquely "You"? 01.16.2009Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman says your brain is one-of-a-kind in the history of the universe. by Susan Kruglinski Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible. What does it mean to be sentient? What is the self? When issues become imponderable, many researchers demur, but neuro­scientist Gerald Edelman dives right in.A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In...

SAN FRANCISCO — Maybe it’s time to retire the “senior moment.” These lapses of memory during everyday life — losing your keys or your train of thought — are thought to be more common in older people. Not so, researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada report March 21 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Researcher Amanda Clark and her colleagues surveyed 30 adults younger than 25 and 24 people ages 60 to 80 to find out how many slips they make each day. The researchers also devised two lab tests to study attention. One involved...

Anticipatory brain mechanism may be complicating MRI studies. Blood vessel activation in the brain. The dark central area is the response to a visual stimulus.Y. Sirotin & A. Das Popular brain-imaging techniques may be painting a misleading picture of brain activity, according to a new study.Scientists using techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) make the assumption that blood flow into a particular brain region is directly linked to the amount of activity in the cells of that region. This is because active cells need more oxygen, and blood ferries it to them.But a study by Aniruddha Das and...

A Japanese research team has revealed it had created a technology that could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds, such as dreams. Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron. While the team for now has managed to reproduce only simple images from the brain, they said the technology could eventually be used to figure out dreams and other secrets inside people's minds. "It was the first time in the...

He knew his name. That much he could remember. He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s. But he could remember almost nothing after that. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories. For the next 55 years, each time he...

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthDay News) -- British researchers say they've identified a "hate circuit" in the brain. This hate circuit shares part of the brain associated with aggression, but is distinct from areas related to emotions such as fear, threat, and danger, said researchers Professor Semir Zeki and John Romaya, of University College London's laboratory of neurobiology. The study was published online Oct. 29 in the journal PLoS One. "Hate is often considered to be an evil passion that should, in a better world, be tamed, controlled, and eradicated," Zeki said in a journal news release. "Yet to the biologist,...

AS we enter the final week of a seemingly endless election campaign, opinion polls continue to identify a substantial fraction of voters who consider themselves “undecided.” Although their numbers are dwindling, they could still determine the outcome of the race in some states. Comedians and other commentators have portrayed these people as fools, unable to choose even when confronted with the starkest of contrasts. Recent research in neuroscience and psychology, however, suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think. They’re not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates. They may be more willing than...

Researchers in the US found that contrary to the popular view that having children reduces a woman's brainpower, having children actually improves her lifelong mental agility and protects her brain against the neurodegenerative diseases of old age. The research was carried out by Dr Craig Kinsley, professor of neuroscience at the University of Richmond, Virginia, and colleagues, and will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience 2008 conference which is to take place from 15 to 19 November in Washington DC. Kinsley said that while a woman may experience an apparent loss of brain function while she is pregnant, this...

Musicians Use Both Sides Of Their Brains More Frequently Than Average People ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal...

All dyslexics are not alike. According to new research, Chinese- and English-speaking people with the disorder have impairments in different regions of their brains. The findings shed light on the neurological basis of dyslexia and reveal fundamental differences in how brains process the two languages. Dyslexics, about 5% to 10% of the population in both the United States and China, have trouble making the connection between the sight and sound of a word. In English, this results in word distortions or transpositions of letters. "Dyslexia," for example, might be read as "Lysdexia." In Chinese, the problem can affect how a...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests non-verbal math skills are not unique to humans. The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game. Prior studies have found non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. "This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit decisions that were based...

Excerpt - Last Sunday at a San Francisco hotel ballroom, EmSense researchers fitted five volunteers, all undecided Republicans, with battery-powered headsets made of elastic and lined with bits of copper. As they watched the debate on a big screen, the wireless units, which the company calls "EmGear," collected data on their skin temperature, heart rate, eye-blinking and brain activity and beamed them to a bank of computers. The data were run through a formula created by EmSense to identify whether a response was positive or negative. When John McCain ran through a list of Hispanic politicians who had endorsed him,...

Even seniors fortunate enough to avoid the horrors of Alzheimer's disease typically experience some declines in memory and other cognitive abilities. Little is known about why this happens, but a new study suggests that cognitive declines in healthy older adults may result when brain regions that normally work together become out of sync, perhaps because the connections between them break down. A team led by Harvard neuroscientists Jessica Andrews-Hanna and Randy Buckner used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in 38 young adults, mostly 20-somethings, and 55 older adults, age 60 or above. The researchers focused on...

Young chimpanzee can recall number placement better than people can. A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study. The work doesn't mean that chimps are 'smarter' than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their...

Modern brain science is confirming an 18th century philosopher's moral theories"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation," observed British philosopher and economist Adam Smith in the first chapter of his magisterial The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). "Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator." Smith's argument...

For the first time, investigators have identified a way to detect neural progenitor cells (NPCs), which can develop into neurons and other nervous system cells, in the living human brain using a type of imaging called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). The finding may lead to improved diagnosis and treatment for depression, Parkinson's disease, brain tumors, and a host of other disorders. Research has shown that, in select brain regions, NPCs persist into adulthood and may give rise to new neurons. Studies have suggested that the development of new neurons from NPCs, called neurogenesis, is disrupted in disorders ranging from depression...