Dana Foundation Blog

Garbage or roses?

Saturday’s BrainWave program at the Rubin Museum in New York City was an experiential event hosted by Columbia University neurobiologist Stuart Firestein and award-winning French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel (who was integral in the Guggenheim’s recent “scent opera” ). While learning about the basic science behind scent creation and our sense of smell, we in the audience also were invited to sniff different scents that Laudamiel concocted. 

To lead off the conversation, Firestein dispelled a popular notion that humans don’t have a strong sense of smell in comparison with other animals. In fact, we have one of the most discriminating palates. And the reason a dog may pick up an odor before we do is mainly because we walk on two legs and our noses are placed high on our bodies, while most smells emanate from below, he said.

Humans have more than 340 receptors in their nose, which can discriminate thousands of odors. Compared with the other senses, the sense of smell reaches the brain quickly—olfaction is the only major sensory pathway that projects directly to the cortex.

The olfactory receptors are also uniquely hardy—they have a singular ability among neurons to regenerate throughout an animal’s life. In his lab, Firestein and his colleagues found that mice with severed olfactory nerves regenerated these receptors in five to six weeks, regardless of the age of the mouse. This ability has made the olfactory system an important model for the study of neural regeneration.

With our new basic understanding of how the brain processes odors, we were invited to smell several scents, including geranio (one of the 300 molecules that make up the scent of a rose), aldehyde (often used in cleaning products), and Paris 1738. While people stopped to sniff the first two scents a second and third time, Paris 1738, based on the smell of Parisian streets of that year and inspired by the 2006 movie “Perfume,” prompted wrinkled noses and waving program cards. Suddenly a strong sense of smell didn’t seem like a blessing, as the smell of manure, a musty room, and body odor prevailed. Thankfully, the program closed with the delicious scent of cardamom, and I left craving Indian food.

—Ann L. Whitman

Staying Sharp heads for Miami

To celebrate Brain Awareness Week 2010, the first Staying Sharp forum this year will be held this Saturday, March 20, at the Miami Science Museum as part of its Brain Fair 2010, organized by the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Staying Sharp: Current Advances in Brain Research, launched in 1994, has been presented in more than 40 sessions to nearly 30,000 people across the country. The program continues to draw an audience because it delivers what its name promises--positive, understandable tips for leading a brain healthy lifestyle from a trustworthy source.

Staying Sharp forums are dynamic discussions by an expert panel followed by a Q&A session with the audience, covering topics including changes in the brain throughout life, memory loss, brain diseases and disorders, and maintaining cognitive function. The forums are presented by the Dana Alliance in partnership with NRTA: AARP’s Educator Community with a generous grant from the MetLife Foundation.

In Miami, expert panelist and Dana Alliance member Walter Bradley, DM, FRCP, will sign copies of his book Treating the Brain: What the Best Doctors Know.

Staying Sharp was designed for people who are 50 and older, but its message is a good one for all ages. Epidemiological studies in many countries looking at individuals from middle to old age have found four factors that may contribute to the maintenance of cognitive function: 

• increased mental activity, 
• increased physical activity, 
• increased social engagement, and 
• eating well and controlling vascular risk factors. (Vascular risk factors are blood pressure, cholesterol and stress. ) 

The experts on the panel also discuss research into the aging brain that is going on in laboratories around that nation. Topics discussed at recent events have also included stress, neurodegenerative diseases, depression, sleep, memory and learning, and quality of life and the audience also has plenty of opportunity to ask questions of the panelists. In fact, many panelists have said that the Q&A was the most enjoyable part of the program for them. They are interested to hear what people in their community think about brain research and are often impressed with the quality of the questions.

Reservations for Staying Sharp in Miami are not required; seating is available on a first come, first served basis. The forum will run from 11 am to 1 pm at the Miami Science Museum, 3280 South Miami Avenue.

The Staying Sharp program includes a series of live public forums, five educational booklets, and a DVD program that also may be viewed online. If you have questions about Staying Sharp, please contact us a stayingsharp@dana.org.

--Laura Reynolds

Knowing what is not known

    This past weekend I attended the program “What Makes the Mindset of a Radical?” part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s Brainwave series. As described, the event set out to answer the question, “What is it in our brains that makes some of us upend tradition and most of us follow the herd?” But when it came time for neurophilosopher Owen Flanagan to answer the question, he replied, “The brain is the most overrated organ. Nothing is known about it except where it lights up sometimes.”

    Dr. Flanagan went on to cite research by Frank Sulloway on how birth order might affect behavior (something mentioned in Jerome Kagan’s upcoming Dana Press book The Temperamental Thread). Older children have been shown to be more conservative, while younger ones may be more likely to become revolutionaries. But, said Flanagan, this has only a small effect. It has also been shown that people with bipolar disorder are artists and other creative types in a higher percentage than is found in the population at large. But, on the whole, Flanagan emphasized, “Nothing is known about the brain on this topic.”

    During the audience Q&A, I pressed Flanagan on his assertions, asking if the slow development of the prefrontal cortex might play a role in leading someone toward radicalism. Flanagan was firm in his beliefs: Although the decade of the brain has passed, the field of brain science is young. We are just now starting to complete basic mapping of the brain, he added. Every brain is different; there is more we don't know than we do know.

    This made me wonder: How much do we need to know about a neuroscience topic before we are able to take some broader conclusions from it? Clearly, there will always be more questions than answers in the world (which might be what leads someone to upend tradition and create a new school of thought). But how much should we know about the brain before we attempt to start giving some initial answers, even if they are couched in uncertain language?

    --Johanna Goldberg

How can meditation help us cope with long-term stress?

    Feeling stressed? Before you go punch a hole in the wall, why not try chanting and controlling your breathing? It works for Tibetian lama Arjia Rinpoche, who sat down with neuroscientist Bruce McEwen for a public conversation at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City on Wednesday to discuss how stress hormones act on the brain and whether Buddhist practice has anything to teach us about how we can control stress levels. The event was part of the museum’s series called Brainwave, which pairs scientists and thinkers from multiple disciplines to sit down and discuss various topics.

    Rinpoche and McEwen agree that stress in the brain can begin early. Rinpoche, a native of Tibet, said his earliest memory of stress was when he was 8 years old. At the age of two, he was declared a reincarnate of Buddha and taken to a monastery in China to live with monks who groomed him to possibly be the next Dalai Lama. During his training China was turning to communism, and Rinpoche found himself right in the middle of the change. Most of the monks he lived with were beaten and jailed for practicing Buddhism. Rinpoche said he kept calm by remembering the chants and breathing exercises his tutors taught him to keep him at ease. These chants and prayers have helped him throughout life by training his body and mind to perceive potentially stressful events differently either while they were happening or before they took place. They are also a way for him to relieve his stress without lashing out or putting more pressure on his brain.

    McEwen said that early life experience, along with genetics, play a role in stress. Children might feel stressed from many aspects of their environment, including pressure from parents to perform in some way and parents’ taking their anger out on them and their not knowing how to deal with it. On the other side of the spectrum, lack of affection and emotion for a child might cause him or her to act out or to later need therapy.

    McEwen said the brain is plastic in the sense that it changes its circuitry in response to many things, including levels of stress. People who have mental disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can be thought of as having stress they can’t recover from at the time; their brains react to that imbalance of chemicals, hormones, and insulin. If you find the right intervention, medication, or, therapy, then you can change the brain and balance your bodies’ chemicals to react differently to stress, he said.

    Lab studies have shown that the hippocampus, which is involved with making and storing memories, does not fully develop when children are separated from their mother at a young age. Their brains rewire using compensatory strategies (coping mechanisms), which later can lead to long-term stress. Other studies show that meditation can help lower stress and produce more grey matter in the brain, which helps it respond to stimuli. Social interaction and physical activity causes new neurons to be produced, McEwen said, which also can help the brain deal with stress and give it the balance that Rinpoche spoke about.

    Next time you feel like you just can’t deal with the events around you, consider adding a little meditation to your stress-reduction arsenal: Try slowing down your breathing, hanging with friends and family, or chanting. It works for me!

    --Blayne Jeffries

Retired NFL players: We need better health care

I attended a panel discussion at New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies last week called “The Power of Sports in Our Society.” Moderated by NYU professor Arthur Miller, the panel featured 10 people, from lawyers to professors to journalists, all with a particular expertise on sports and culture.

One of the more outspoken panelists was Mike Francesa, a sports talk radio host on WFAN. When the conversation turned to Gene Upshaw, the head of National Football League Players’ Union from 1983 until his death in 2008, Francesa was particularly critical.

In Upshaw’s later years as union head, according to his obituary in The New York Times, he “came under withering criticism from a vocal band of retired players who believed he had not done enough to protect their interests, particularly those of players with health problems.” Francesa and others on the panel shared this criticism and said retired players need a much stronger pension plan.

I have blogged about the NFL and its concussion problem before, noting possible solutions. What I didn’t touch on was what the league could be doing to help past players who are experiencing health problems from a career in football.

Football is a violent game. Panelist Chad Cascadden, a former linebacker for the New York Jets, said that while he is currently in fine health, there is a need for better health benefits for retired players, given the nature of professional football. “We’re putting our lives on the line when we step out on that field,” Cascadden said. “I’ve been in two car accidents in my life and I walked away laughing, like, ‘Are you kidding me? That is a car accident? I’m in 10 of those a day!’”

The “10 car accidents a day” are, of course, the hits he delivered and received during a football game. His statement may seem like hyperbole to some, but he spoke it with complete seriousness and nobody so much as cracked a smile. It speaks volumes about the violence of the game and really illustrates the need for post-career health benefits.

Here’s hoping DeMaurice Smith, Upshaw’s successor, realizes the need for improved health benefits for the league’s retired players and has the power and the will to do something about it.

--Andrew Kahn

Neuromarketing appeals to your senses

There really is no limit to how far companies are willing to go to get inside the heads of consumers—literally. At least, that’s the take-home message I got from a new article in Time about “neuroadvertising,” the business of using new neuroscientific understanding to, well, generate more business.

Among the strategies outlined in the article: better use of the full range of our senses. For years marketing professionals have relied on imagery and colors to sell their products while largely ignoring the impact of sounds, neuromarketing researcher and business consultant Martin Lindstrom says.  “Eighty-three percent of all forms of advertising principally engage only one of our senses: sight.”

But familiar sounds can trigger equally powerful responses, he points out. To find some of the best candidates, he has studied emotional responses to various sounds, by monitoring brain activity, pupil dilation, sweat responses and facial twitches.  The noise with the biggest response? A baby’s laugh.

I’ve noticed in my own life that, while most advertisements focus on jingles and slogans, familiar sounds can elicit a stronger reaction. I have added several songs to my iPod after I heard them in commercials—but, honestly, I end up forgetting the origins of the songs. The sizzling steak in the Outback Steakhouse commercial on the other hand: Not only does it make my mouth water—it always calls to mind the restaurant.

(This idea of consumer sensory manipulation, by the way reminds me of the previous attempts—although possibly on the path to revival—of smell-o-vision.  Used in movie theaters in the 1950s, smells were released during certain sections of the movie to give a more authentic experience. They didn’t work very well—perhaps because no neuromarketers were on hand to guide their development.)

In the article, Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, explains why certain sensory experiences can have such strong effects. “Cultural messages that get into your nervous system are very common and make you behave certain ways,” he says. In commercials that go wrong, he adds, advertisers miscue these messages. Abstract music paired with a visually enticing picture can confuse the brain, for instance, causing the insula and orbital frontal cortex regions to frantically try to make sense of the stimulation.

The fuel for neuromarketing doesn’t just come from dedicated researchers. General studies, such as those looking at the effect of competitive environments and product placement on consumer decision-making, also provide fodder.

As the article notes, switching off your TV is no escape; brick-and-mortar retailers are also catching on to the trend.  A department store in Japan has incorporated individualized soundtracks for each department (I can only wonder what the lingerie department sounds like).

It seems that none of our senses are safe from marketing efforts, so hold onto your wallet and get ready for a very stimulating future.

-Ann Whitman

AAAS: Brain-changing power of music prompts calls for more education, therapy

Growing evidence that music training can enhance certain mental abilities, can alleviate the symptoms of learning disorders, and can restore lost functions in people with neurological damage has prompted calls to increase school music programs and therapeutic treatments.

At a press conference Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nina Kraus, a communications disorder professor at Northwestern University, and Gottfried Schlaug, an associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, summarized recent research outlining the profound ability of music to enhance or restore brain pathways and the implications of those findings for health and education.

Kraus pointed out that music is reflected literally by the brain. After hearing a sound, a person's brain waves come to mirror that melody, she said, playing several pairs of music sequences and brain waves to demonstrate. But music exerts its most profound effects after extensive training, by increasing not just the ability to learn and play music but also facility with memory, attention, and pattern recognition. In fact, she said, her work suggests that intensive music training may be key to treating or ameliorating childhood learning disabilities, as it greatly enhances the abilities that suffer the most in those conditions.

In a recent study, for instance, she found that trained musicians have a much greater ability to discern speech in noisy situations, such as crowded restaurants or bars, than those without any musical experience, a kind of pattern-recognition task some children also have great difficulty with. The finding, which appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal Ear and Hearing, echoes research her group presented at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience meeting showing that trained musicians have enhanced abilities to focus on and memorize sounds, other abilities lacking in people with dyslexia, autism, and related disorders. This suggests, she said, that elementary and secondary schools are making a mistake when they cut out music programs. "The education and remediation possibilities of music training are very encouraging," she said.

Schlaug played several videos showing the power of melodic intonation therapy (MIT) to rewire seriously damaged brains. As we have described previously, MIT is a technique developed for treating nonfluent aphasia, or an inability to speak due to damage, usually from a stroke, to the language-processing regions in the brain's left hemisphere. During the treatment, a music therapist teaches the patient to feel out the melody of specific phrases by tapping his or her hand and then to repeat the phrases aloud in a singsong voice. Typically, the treatment course is intense, consisting of 70 to 80 sessions over several weeks.

The results can be spectacular; most patients, Schlaug said, recover significant amounts of speaking ability, and one patient even felt comfortable enough to make a short public speech. In one particularly compelling video clip, a man went from mumbling nonsense phrases to being able to recite his full mailing address after 75 therapy sessions. "These kinds of music-making therapies are very useful for patients suffering from strokes and other neurological disorders," Schlaug said. "It engages parts of the brain that are not normally engaged and links parts of the brain that are not normally linked."

Although the therapy has shown promising results, it is still in the early stages of testing, Schlaug added. If it pans out, tens of thousands of stroke victims could benefit from the therapy each year in the United States alone. The true challenge then, he said, would be gaining widespread traction for the treatment, by getting therapists to feel comfortable with the oddness of singing with their patients and by ensuring that insurance companies reimburse people for MIT sessions.

Schlaug has been a pioneer in the field of music and the brain studies; some of his research is funded by the Dana Foundation. Mentioned only obliquely in his presentation, for instance, was a four-year study he is helping to conduct that compares the cognitive abilities of children undergoing regular music training with those who are not. Not surprisingly, he and his colleagues have found that, after 15 months, children who practice music showed more improvements in motor skills and melody and rhythm identification tasks related directly to music. But after 30 months, the results seem more in line with those of Kraus and her lab, with the children beginning to show suggestive, though not significant, signs of "far transfer" benefits—increases in most distantly related skills, such as vocabulary and abstract reasoning.

--Aalok Mehta

AAAS: Neuroscience advances pose legal conundrums

"I did it—but it's not my fault." It's one of the more controversial strategies defendants can use: admitting they committed a serious crime but arguing that, because of some mitigating factor such as disease or depression, they should not be held responsible. As new and improved imaging tools allow for more detailed images of the brain and as our understanding of behavior and personality becomes more sophisticated, neuroscientists are increasingly having to come to terms with how their findings and expertise are being used—or misused—in the courtroom.

Experts in law, ethics, and brain science highlighted the complexity of the issue by staging a mock trial yesterday in San Diego, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As the two sides argued for and against the introduction of MRI data in a murder trial, the complexities piled up: how to reconcile previous case law dealing with neuroscientific evidence, how MRI data might bias the jury for or against the defendant, whether brain scans consistently reveal damage or disease, how closely brain scan results reflect the psychological states of mind relevant in criminal cases, and so forth.

Neuroscience and law have had a rocky relationship in recent years; in particular, many researchers have said that functional MRI (fMRI), which looks at patterns of brain activity, has been used prematurely in courtrooms as a form of lie detection service. The mock case, however, revolved around structural MRI, which offers a detailed 3-D image of a person's brain. Such a scan showed a severe frontal lobe lesion in a fictional defendant who was tightly linked to a murder by both forensic evidence and witness testimony.

The scenario played out in two phases. The judge first heard arguments and testimony over whether the MRI data should be admitted into evidence; after he ruled in favor, the participants skipped forward to near the end of the trial, when two expert witness, neuroscientists James Brewer and Michael Rafii of the University of California, San Diego, took the stand, respectively, for the defense and prosecution.

Brewer cited studies that suggest that frontal lobe damage can lead to poor impulse control, difficulty in formulating plans, lack of concern for social conventions, and personality changes. His testimony led the defense attorney, played by Robert Knaier, an associate in the San Diego office of Latham and Watkins, to argue that the defendant "could not have formed the requisite intent" to be held responsible for his crime.

Rafii, on the other hand, pointed out that the link between brain damage and personality change is extremely tenuous—some people exhibit similar shifts in behavior without any sign of brain lesions, and others with much greater levels of damage show no adverse affects at all.

"Frankly, we have a naked brain," said prosecuting attorney Hank Greely, a professor of law at Stanford University, in his closing arguments. "The law doesn't care about brains. It cares about minds." While brains generate minds, he added, the relationship is "not simple and straightforward" and cannot be used in this case to excuse the defendant's actions.

Between the two phases and after the mock-trial, the players broke character to discuss the implications of their arguments and answer questions from the audience. Many of the concerns were similar. Both groups, for instance, worried about whether a series of successful defenses based on neuroscience would erode the concept of personal responsibility and what do about people declared not guilty because of a neurological disorder but who remained a danger to society. But most of the anxiety revolved over whether it was even appropriate to consider using cutting-edge neuroscience in the courtroom. With research findings being revised and refined on the basis of new data and very few solid causal links between features of the brain and any aspect of behavior, many people worried that the law was racing ahead of the science.

If the session's organizers didn't have answers to those hard questions, and acknowledged that missteps are likely as judges and scientists grapple with extremely difficult legal and ethical issues, they did at least suggest that there is still time to change things. Greely said that, despite its high profile, neuroimaging is still used relatively rarely in criminal proceedings. In an ongoing survey of all California criminal cases between July 2006 and July 2010, he has identified only 40 candidate cases in which a brain image of a defendant was offered as evidence; when the work is completed, he expects that number to end up somewhere between 30 and 100, out of tens of thousands of total cases. Rather, MRI scans of crime victims are used more often, he said, to detail the extent of their injuries. When it comes to the more controversial fMRI, cases are even more uncommon. Although employed with some regularity in civil proceedings, Greely said he knows of only one criminal case in which fMRI was used—an Illinois case in which a brain scan was unsuccessfully offered up to help mitigate a capital sentence.

--Aalok Mehta

AAAS: Diabetes "switch" may be key to dolphins' large brains

Dolphins seem to possess a diabetes "on-off switch" that allows them to keep their large brains well fed even during times of fasting, researchers have discovered, in a finding that not only sheds light on our own evolutionary history but may also pave the way for a cure for the human version of the disease.

Of all animals, dolphins come second only to humans in the size of their brains relative to their bodies, a figure known as the encephalization quotient (EQ); in EQ, dolphins outstrip even apes and monkeys. Such large brains consume prodigious amounts of energy, primarily in the form of the sugar glucose; in humans, for instance, the brain uses about one-fifth of the calories we spend despite making up only 2 percent of our body weight.

But dolphins have a problem: They eat only fish, which contain little in the way of carbohydrates. "They basically have no sugar in their diet," said veterinary epidemiologist Stephanie Venn-Watson, director of clinical research at the National Marine Mammal Foundation, speaking yesterday at a press briefing the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement for Science in San Diego.

But in 2007, Venn-Watson and her colleagues found a possible solution to this conundrum. Poring over Navy research archives, the team found blood test records indicating that bottlenose dolphins that fasted overnight showed insulin resistance and other blood changes similar to those seen in people with diabetes. After a meal, however, the dolphins' blood chemistry more closely resembled that of non-diabetic humans.

Since insulin is a hormone that signals the liver and other body tissues to pull glucose out of the blood for long-term storage, this rapid switching in insulin activity may have evolved to allow dolphins to keep their brains supplied with a steady stream of blood glucose, Venn-Watson said. The changes, she added, appear directly related to brain size; seals and other marine mammals with smaller EQs than dolphins show no signs of a similar diabetes-like mechanism.

Venn-Watson and her team have now found indications of diabetic disease in dolphins, adding to the evidence for the switch theory. Dolphins, for instance, can show signs of hemochromatosis, or "iron overload" disease, which also commonly occurs in people with Type II diabetes. Some of these dolphins also show increases in insulin after meals, as human diabetics do. And a few dolphins have kidney stones and related problems that also show up frequently in cases of human diabetes, she added.

According to Venn-Watson, existing animal models of diabetes are flawed, simulating at best only a portion of the disease. The naturally occurring form of diabetes seem in dolphins might serve as a powerful tool for finding ways to control or even cure it, she said. The dolphin genome already has been sequenced, and poring over the results might pinpoint the genes that allow dolphins to switch their insulin resistance off, allowing researchers to search for similar sequences in human DNA.

She added that humans might be prone to diabetes and insulin resistance because of their own evolutionary history. Scientists have proposed that during the most recent ice age, "everything containing carbohydrates froze," forcing people into a high-protein diet similar to what dolphins eat now. This gave people with insulin resistance a competitive edge. Now that carbohydrates and sugars are readily available again, this resistance has led to population-wide problems. Type II diabetes affects hundreds of millions of people, and left untreated, can cause blindness, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, nerve damage, and other ills.

Not all researchers are so ready to accept dolphins as a valid model for studying diabetes or other human diseases, however, citing the significant differences in dolphin and human anatomy. In an interview, Emory University's Lori Marino, who in 1998 first measured dolphin EQ, said that it is "possible but still debatable whether a diabetes-like mechanism in dolphins in related to their large brain size." If it is related, it is unlikely to have many implications for human health, since "dolphin metabolism and physiology is so different from our own that it is unlikely that any diabetes-like process in dolphins would be applicable to humans in any meaningful way."

Marino also expressed concern that researchers might be tempted by such comparisons into conducting experimental research on dolphins despite significant ethical concerns over such research. "The kinds of methods that would need to be used to study diabetes and other neurophysiological diseases in dolphins would be highly invasive and perhaps terminal," she said. "All of the behavioral data on dolphins continues to converge on the conclusion that these are sentient creatures with complex social and emotional lives and even cultural traditions. This is not the time, in my opinion, to begin to think of new ways to exploit them."

--Aalok Mehta

Antidepressant may offer hope for stroke victims

It's probably not too reassuring to learn that scientists don't really understand how antidepressants work. Despite their almost ubiquitous presence in television advertisements and doctor's offices, the drugs remain a cipher, with researchers still unsure whether they work by simply altering concentrations of the neurotransmitters that influence communication between brain cells or by some type of long-term change in the brain.

One popular theory, for instance, is that antidepressants induce neurogenesis, or the growth of new brain cells; this is why, the argument goes, the drugs need two to four weeks to take effect. So far, the evidence for this theory has been inconclusive and even contradictory; studies have shown that antidepressants do seem to lead to neurogenesis but also that this seems irrelevant to their effectiveness, which may have to do more with changes in connections between brain regions.

But there is a benefit to drugs that remain somewhat mysterious—they sometimes end up offering unexpected but useful treatments for seemingly unrelated conditions. A new study, has found that the antidepressant escitalopram seems to help stroke victims recover more of their cognitive function than other treatments.

The study, conducted by Ricardo Jorge and his colleagues at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, involved 129 people treated within three months of their strokes. After 12 weeks of therapy, the 43 patients given escitalopram showed better overall scores on tests of thinking, learning, and visual and verbal memory than 45 patients taking a placebo pill and 41 participating in a problem-solving therapy program designed for patients with depression. Many people who have strokes become depressed after their attack, but further analysis of the data showed that the benefits of the antidepressant were independent of its effect on depression symptoms; it was doing something beyond simply treating depression.

The findings are particularly promising, since they offer treatment options for nearly all newly diagnosed stroke victims. Many other cutting-edge stroke therapies in testing or research can prevent much of the damage from occurring in the first place, but only if applied within a few hours of the stroke. Escitalopram offers hope for modest improvements even for the many people who miss that crucial window. According to the researchers, the drug also was effective regardless of the type of stroke suffered.

The situation is likely to come full circle: Just as the Iowa researchers speculate that structural brain changes attributed to antidepressants may contribute to the stroke recovery, scientists studying drug function may one day point to the stroke results to support their theories about antidepressants. If the stroke findings make anything clear, it's that the debate over the drugs is far from over—and that that's not necessarily a bad thing.

—Aalok Mehta

PTSD in Haiti: Expert warns on post-quake mental health

With efforts in Haiti currently focusing on basic necessities and medical emergencies, the stage is set for a mental health epidemic. Lack of food, water, shelter and medical attention has left little time and effort for grieving or for psychological treatment. David Spiegel, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University, researches post-traumatic stress disorder and in a recent interview shed some light on what we should expect in the coming months in Haiti.

Half of the Haitian population will eventually show some signs of PTSD or depression, expects Spiegel, who has received brain and immuno-imaging grant funding from the Dana Foundation in the past. Witnessing deaths or severe injuries, as well as dealing with disease, hunger, dehydration and violence, are all stressors that lead to PTSD, he points out. The loss of a daily routine that included loved ones, friends, work and school, along with a lack of identification or proper burial for many quake casualties, can contribute to the onset of depression.

Symptoms of PTSD typically begin no less than a month after a trauma, Spiegel says. That means that there is still time for emotional support and organized mental health relief. The National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder lists cognitive and exposure therapy, medication, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and counseling as some potential treatments for PTSD.  According to news reports, thousands of volunteers have shown up in Haiti on their own without clear direction or organization. Although these people have shown compassion to grieving children and adults and are doing their best to offer emotional support, they are not the mental health professionals that many Haitians currently need.

Spiegel points out that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Virginia, trauma symptoms resolved pretty quickly because of an abundance of resources offering emotional and social support to onlookers and victims. The situation in Haiti, on the other hand, more closely resembles the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in which a delayed response by the government increased feelings of despondency and desperation. “I expect plenty of that in Haiti,” Spiegel says, “since the government has all but evaporated.”

-Angie Marin

Campaigning for brain awareness in Sri Lanka

With the help of European Dana Alliance member Ann Kato and her husband, researcher Gabor Kato, Sri Lanka was a late addition to the roster of new countries hosting Brain Awareness Week activities in 2009. The Katos, along with Ranil De Silva of the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Nugegoda, organized a four-hour program in basic neuroscience at the Sri Lanka Medical Association in Colombo on Nov. 8 and a six-hour program on Nov. 10 at the Sri Sumangala Girls’ College in Weligama. The events were such a success that De Silva and the Katos are planning a second BAW event in Sri Lanka this year. (Brain Awareness Week 2010 is March 15–21.)

Gabor Kato at the Sri Sumangala Girls’ College in Weligama

The Sri Lanka Medical Association event included lectures on how the brain works, what happens during brain disease and how to maintain health with food and exercise. Students, teachers, parents, doctors and the general public listened with great interest and asked many questions, especially about maintaining and improving memory, Ann Kato said. Many people also wanted to discuss their sleep problems, and it appeared that everyone had a family member or a friend with a brain disorder such as multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, she added.

At the girls’ college, more than 400 high-school students, teachers, health-care workers and members of the public spent nearly five hours learning about both the healthy and diseased brains. De Silva translated the English lectures into Sinhalese, as this audience did not have the same command of English as did the Colombo group. In addition to lectures, the program included lighting of a traditional oil lamp and two dance sessions by students, according to Ann Kato.

Procession going to the auditorium at the Sri Sumangala Girls’ College

There was room for improvement. While the girls enjoyed the presentations, they asked for more “cartoon-like” clips of how the brain functions. Two boys in the audience wanted reassurance that the brain stays alive following death; perhaps they thought the brain was immortal due to belief in reincarnation, Ann Kato said.

The Katos have been supporting education efforts in Sri Lanka ever since they toured the country after the devastation of the 2004 tsunami. They have repeatedly visited the public girls’ college, which serves 2,700 children from grades 3 to 12, to offer teaching assistance and supplies. The school was severely damaged during the tsunami; thirteen students died and more than half the children lost close members of their families.

While non-governmental organizations helped rebuild most of the school’s buildings, it still lacks basic items such as textbooks, pencils and notepads, as well as computers for the technology lab. The Katos have collected and sent such supplies and offer university scholarships for top students. At first, they paid out of pocket to fill urgent needs; since then, they have received donations from friends and other nonprofit groups and continue to look for sponsors for scholarships and other relief.

—Nicky Penttila

Photos courtesy Ann and Gabor Kato

Task force outlines changes to psychiatry’s “bible”

The American Psychiatric Association task force responsible for creating the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders held a conference call Tuesday to discuss the changes they are planning, as reported in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere. The call is just one step on the long, closely watched process of updating the DSM, which outlines official diagnostic criteria for psychiatric illnesses.

Members of the task force include four co-authors of a 2009 Cerebrum article  that addresses the challenges faced by the editors of the manual, which is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Among the notable changes the task force discussed: Asperger’s syndrome would be folded into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder. Earlier hints of that idea sparked controversy, as I noted in a Nov. 11 post on this blog. One change that had not been discussed previously is the proposed addition of a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, designed to reduce the diagnosis of bipolar disorder in children who do not have it.

Here at home in Arlington, Va., after our second major snowstorm in four days, I can’t help but think that the task force should consider adding cabin fever to the manual, too. (My roommate actually had a strange, short-lived fever this afternoon.) I won’t actually suggest that new entry, but if you want to have your say, comments are welcome at DSM5.org.

—Dan Gordon

Time for the NFL to use its head

In the final game of the 2009-10 National Football League season, the New Orleans Saints captured their first-ever Super Bowl victory by defeating the Indianapolis Colts. Now the offseason has officially begun—and it could be the most important one in the history of the NFL.

That’s because more and more information is coming to light on the dangers of football. In just the latest finding, a Time feature describes research demonstrating that the brains of former NFL players show definitive signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. All 12 brains analyzed by Boston University neuroscientist Ann McKee reveal a protein called tau, a tell-tale sign of CTE, a condition which causes memory loss, depression and other mental troubles during middle age.

No amount of research can change the fact that football is—and will remain—a high-contact sport. A lineman’s job is to use his head, neck, shoulders and whatever else he can to push the defender backwards. A running back often lowers his head to try to gain an extra yard or two. A safety is trying to punish an unsuspecting wide receiver running across the middle of the field.

The Time article includes some suggestions for reducing the violence of the game. Some, such as eliminating the three-point stance for linemen, are better than others, like the idea that a rule-breaking player should have to sit out, hockey-style, for a period of time.

The NFL has not been completely silent on the issue in the past few years, but mostly those actions have been baby steps—it has banned “horse collar” tackles and vicious blows to “defenseless” receivers. And while “helmet-to-helmet” hits draw a penalty flag, these hits go uncalled far too often. Stricter enforcement of these blows—both out in the open field and at the line of scrimmage—would be a good start.

The league has also passed a new rule that any player diagnosed with a concussion is not allowed to return to the field for the rest of the game, something that should have been obvious all along. But in a sport famous for players toughing it out, I’m worried that they will now be even more hesitant to be checked out by a doctor for fear of revealing a head injury.

While it’s certainly a pessimistic view, I think the only way for the sport of football to undergo serious change is for the players to be scared. Current athletes need to hear stories about players whose lives have essentially been ruined by CTE. Media outlets need to talk about the dangers of a violent tackle, not applaud the fearless, physical play. It’s only if the athletes themselves realize the dangers of football that the sport can change for the better.

And we can only hope that any steps the NFL takes to combat this problem will have a trickle-down effect, because the more than three million kids who play youth football and 1.2 million high-school players are also at risk, probably a much greater risk. In a recent Dana briefing paper on young athletes and concussions, neurosurgeon Robert Cantu says that “the developing brain may indeed be more prone to injury than an adult, mature brain because neurons are growing faster and connections are still being made. There is not the redundancy that there is in an adult brain.”

—Andrew Kahn

Study shows brain activity in patients considered “vegetative,” but with caveats

Imaging research suggesting that some patients thought to be in vegetative states are actually at least partially conscious has made headlines the past couple days. Such work is fascinating but comes with many caveats, as Nicholas Schiff and Joseph Fins, two experts who are quoted in some coverage, wrote Dec. 4 in a guest post on this blog, about a similar finding.

In the new study, which appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, European researchers found that five patients out of 54 showed patterns of brain activity in response to commands or questions from doctors.

Earlier work had shown that one patient expressed brain activity in motor regions when told to think of hitting a tennis ball and activity in spatial regions when told to think about being in her house. Now the researchers report taking that remarkable finding a step further: They told a man to associate thoughts of tennis with “yes” and thoughts of being in his house with “no.” Then they asked him a series of yes-or-no questions and looked at images of his brain activity to see if he answered correctly—which, they say, he did.

Articles by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press do a good job of pointing out some of the limitations of the research. For example, all the patients studied had suffered traumatic brain injury. There is no evidence that the finding would translate to different kinds of patients, such as Terri Schiavo, who had long-term damage following a severe lack of oxygen to the brain.

To the Times and the Post, Fins also relays a significant ethical concern about what being able to “communicate” with a patient in a vegetative state might imply. Fins asks: What if the yes/no question presented to the patient were not “Have you ever been to the U.S.,” but rather, “Do you want to die?”

“We know they’re responding, but they may not understand the question,” Fins tells the Times. “Their answer might be ‘Yes, but’—and we haven’t given them the opportunity to say the ‘but.’ ”

Colin Blakemore, a professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick, goes a step further, using this new study as a springboard to discuss, in London’s Telegraph, just what brain imaging can (and cannot) reveal, and what the implications are for individual privacy. (Blakemore is also a member of the executive committee of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.)

Clearly, neuroscientists and neuroethicists have plenty of work ahead of them as they assess and build upon these stirring findings. Stay tuned to the Dana Foundation, too—we are working on assigning a Cerebrum article about the misdiagnosis of minimally conscious states, which we plan to publish later this year.

—Dan Gordon

Kandel film wins Bavarian film award

The director of In Search of Memory, a documentary outlining the life of Eric Kandel, was recently awarded  the Bayerischer Filmpreis, Germany’s equivalent of the Academy Award (see our previous coverage). Petra Seeger accepted the prize, a “porcelain Pierrots gingen am Freitag an „Habermann“ – für Juraj Herz' Regie und Mark Waschkes Gestaltung der TitelrollePierrot,” during the awards ceremony on Jan. 15.

The film has been held over for three weeks at the IFC Center in New York and is scheduled to be shown in Cambridge, Mass. beginning April 23. Keep an eye out for it in your town, too.

Can Tetris shape the brain?

While reading “How to Forget Fear,” a Times Online article by Alice Fishburn and science writer Ed Yong, a study on using Tetris to control fear responses caught my eye.

University of Oxford researcher Emily Holmes asked people to play the block-arranging game while watching a grisly film full of surgery and accidents. “She found that while these volunteers remembered just as many details of the film as those who did not play Tetris, a week later they had fewer flashbacks and were less affected emotionally by what they had seen,” the article says.

This led Holmes to hypothesize that playing the game “hogs the brain’s processing power,” preventing the grisly images in the film from becoming powerful memories. Yong and Fishburn write, “Tetris acts as a mental vaccine that protects against the creation of strong fear memories and removes their emotional burden.”

Several studies have found that multitasking can lead to an inefficient use of brain power, but in this case it had a positive effect and might have potential clinical applications for people dealing with traumatic memories and phobias. This echoes the conclusions of a recent Cerebrum article summarizing work in the area, which argues that video games can have both beneficial and harmful effects but that more research is needed to fully understand these changes.

Although we have been covering the potential influences of various video games on the brain for years, in a bit of a coincidence, Tetris itself is featured in our most recent news article, “Your Brain On . . . line.”

Along with more recent work, the article mentions a 1992 study in which Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine “measured the rate of glucose use in the cerebrum before the volunteers practiced [Tetris] and after four to eight weeks of practice.” As scores rose, glucose use declined, indicating that the brain became more efficient at playing the game over time.

A search for “Tetris and brain” in PubMed returned five additional studies, two from 2009, on topics ranging from amnesia to cortical thickness. The brain-research uses of the game may only be beginning.

-Johanna Goldberg

Magnetic brain scans become more attractive

The first image many of us conjure up when someone mentions brain scanners—whether for medical diagnosis or basic research—is the sterile white isolation and intimidating din of a magnetic resonance imaging device. But for many diseases, the key to better diagnosis may not be looking into brains, as with MRIs, but looking near them.

A new study appearing in the Journal of Neural Engineering suggests that magnetoencephalography (MEG) can identify the vast majority of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In MEG, a helmet surrounding the head measures the tiny magnetic fields generated by the brain’s electrical activity. This offers distinct advantages and disadvantages over other scanning methods. For instance, MEG is noninvasive, unlike positron emission tomography (PET), which requires patients to ingest a mildly radioactive solution. MEG is also very fast—it works in about 10 milliseconds—because it measures neural activity directly; MRIs measure blood flow in the brain instead and take 20 times longer. On the other hand, readings from MEG offer less spatial resolution than many other scanning methods and provide less precise information about regions deep inside the brain.

In the new research, Apostolos Georgopoulos, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and his colleagues found that MEG correctly identified at least 67 of 74 veterans suffering from PTSD, from a group that also included 250 people with no reported neurological or mental health issues. The veterans were a varied group, with participants both from the current Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns as well as from World War II and Vietnam.

The researchers also reported that the strength of their readings corresponded with the severity of symptoms in a PTSD sufferer. In other words, a MEG test might not just identify who has PTSD but also how damaging the disorder is and even what treatments might work best.

MEG has shown potential to diagnose other brain symptoms. In 2007, for instance, Georgopoulos and his team reported that MEG could help detect multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, Sjögren's syndrome, chronic alcoholism and facial pain. And earlier this month, we reported on a small study that used MEG to identify children with autism.

As we mentioned in that post, small tests such as the PTSD study aren’t useful in the clinic until they have been confirmed in more expansive tests with more diverse sets of people. Still, many neurological disorders, including a large percentage of PTSD cases, are difficult and time-consuming to diagnose. Objective detection methods such as brain scans could dramatically shorten that process, as well as reduce uncertainty about the accuracy of a diagnosis or the severity of a particular case.

For soldiers, who are at high risk for PTSD, this is crucial; their final diagnosis can drastically alter what jobs they are expected to do, where they are sent during their next deployment and what kind of benefits they can receive. In the most extreme cases, a doctor’s finding might mean the difference between re-entering a dangerous war zone and safely recovering from trauma on U.S. soil. For those kinds of cases, a fast, efficient way to assess PTSD can’t come fast enough.

—Aalok Mehta

A convergence of science and Supernanny

I admit it: I watch Supernanny. And the British parenting coach now has yet another reason to tell parents to stop spanking and instead have their kids spend some time alone in the naughty chair.

A new article from Scientific American details an American Psychological Association (APA) task force’s recommendations against physical punishment for children.

"Psychologist Sandra A. Graham-Bermann of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who chairs the task force, announced the recom­mendation in August at the APA’s annual meeting,” the article reads. “In a presentation, she explained that the group of 15 experts in child development and psychology found correlations between physical punishment and an increase in childhood anxiety and depression, an increase in behavioral problems, including aggression, and impaired cognitive development—even when the child’s prepunishment behavior and development were taken into consideration.”

The conclusion wasn’t unanimous, and the APA is currently reviewing both sides of the argument before issuing a final recommendation. But Graham-Bermann’s conclusions make sense: Several studies have shown that parenting styles can have a significant impact on the physiology of the brain.

Michael Meaney of McGill University has studied the mothering styles of rats, discovering that pups of rats that frequently licked them were less anxious and more curious. These pups “had higher concentrations of ‘glucocorticoid receptors,’ the molecular locks that trigger a compensatory braking action by the hippocampus. The more of these receptors the rat pups had in the hippocampus, the more efficient was their regulation of the stress response,” we report in a news article on the research.

In humans, too, parental behavior seems to alter genes that impact the brain. A 2008 study led by Cathi Propper of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill found that infants who carry a gene for a dopamine receptor related to risky behaviors later in life showed a showed a typical heart rate increase in stressful situations by the time they were a year old when they had “sensitive mothers.” Those with “insensitive mothers,” however, showed a muted response.

These studies suggest that even something as seemingly temporary as a stinging bottom can have dramatic and long-lasting effects on the brains of infants. What seem like innocuous decisions made by new parents can continue to affect their children for decades.

No wonder parenting is often called “the world’s hardest job.”

-Johanna Goldberg

For NFL’s top QBs, brains over brawn

Why is Drew Brees a stud and Joey Harrington a dud? Why is Peyton Manning a four-time MVP and JaMarcus Russell a benchwarmer? All of these NFL quarterbacks have the physical tools—arm strength, accuracy, footwork—necessary to play professional football, you’d imagine, or else they would have never even made it to the big leagues. But their performance on the field is a different story.

The difference between elite quarterbacks and highly-touted but dismally performing prospects, it turns out, may not be in their muscles, but rather in the organs between their ears.

According to an article in The Times-Picayune, there is a growing interest in studying the brains and cognitive abilities of NFL quarterbacks. Why not? Quarterbacking is the most mentally challenging position in football, and teams would love to know if it is possible to determine which players simply don’t have the thinking skills required to succeed at a high level—before the draft and salary negotiation.

But wait, this is just football, you might say; it’s not like it’s rocket science. Well, on that last point, you may be right—football may be harder, in some ways, mentally speaking.

The article points out all of the things that a quarterback has to process. He must learn all 130 or so of his team’s offensive plays—and not just his role, but those of his 10 teammates (and if these guys are anything like my high school teammates, they’ll often forget where they’re supposed to go). He has to spend about 25 hours a week studying film to prep for the next opponent. And he needs to incorporate and adapt all of this information upon taking the field and gauging the defensive alignment—with only about 30 seconds of huddle time to decide.

Once the ball is snapped, things get even more hectic. Whether a receiver gets bumped, a defensive back shades to a particular side of the field, or a defensive lineman breaks through into the backfield, a QB is left with approximately 3.5 seconds to make a final choice on where and when to release the ball.

According to the article, football experts and neuroscientists have been discussing the possibility that guys like Brees (of the New Orleans Saints) and Manning (of the Indianapolis Colts), who were first and second, respectively, in the league in touchdown passes this season, excel because of exceptional performance in specific regions of their brains.

Some neuroscientists believe that top-notch QBs are particularly adept at “unconscious” thought. Their minds intuitively process things in a split second, without them ever really “thinking” about it, enabling these players to make correct assessments even during a fast-paced game.

If you are a fast typist, you also understand unconscious thought, also known as implicit memory: Study the keys long enough, practice hard, and at some point you can type without looking or actively thinking about what you are doing. But it is far more vital on the football field. Even if you or I studied film obsessively and had a knack for throwing spirals, we probably wouldn’t be able to process the moving defense in a matter of seconds like these top QBs. The same appears to be true for non-performers like Russell, the Oakland Raiders former top draft pick, and Harrington, who the Detroit Lions took with the third pick in 2002.

No doubt the NFL and neuroscientists will continue to team up in hopes of discovering what to look for in quarterbacks’ brains. It’s already been suggested that the orbital frontal cortex handles implicit memory, so further analysis on that region of the brain could provide answers.

For now, fans of the Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets, the respective opponents of the Saints and Colts this Sunday, will have to hope that Brees and Manning are taken down before they even have 3.5 seconds to make a decision. If they are given enough time, however, Super Bowl XLIV may be known as the Braniac Bowl.

—Andrew Kahn