Photo: BRU GARCIA/AFP/Getty Images

 If nothing else, this gives me a chance to run a photo of ONE OF THE GREATEST ROCK AND ROLLERS OF ALL TIME.

 Okay, the serious part: scientists in Finland have found that if stroke patients listened to music for a couple of hours a day, their verbal memory and focused attention recovered better and they had a more positive mood than other patients.

Researchers at the University of Helsinki had 60 stroke patients listen to music for a couple of hours a day, working with them as soon as they were admitted to a hospital. Most had problems with movement, attention and memory as a result of their strokes. All received standard stroke therapy, but some listened to music of their choice, while others listened to no music and others listened to audio books.

Continue reading "Keep on rockin'" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Photo by owenbooth 

Another addition to the list of things unencountered: Chimpanzees working the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

But why? Well, according to a study recently published in the online journal PLoS One, chimps have no talent for bartering commodities.

The trading of one good for another - a few ears of corn, say, for a piece of meat - is an underpinning of human society. The cognitive ability to calculate such exchanges was necessary for human communities to develop into agrarian societies, which require division of labor. Workers with one specialty needed to be able to exchange the goods with workers of another specialty who produced a different type of good.

Somewhere along the evolutionary line, primates must have developed the cognitive skills to make such trades.

Continue reading "Why chimps don’t trade pork bellies" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Photo: Los Angeles Times 

An itchy nose or a case of poison ivy can produce an irresistible urge to scratch. Scratching can in turn produce an irresistible urge to drool.

One reason scratching produces relief: it suppresses activity in part of the brain associated with negative emotions and memories, according to a study by researchers at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, published today in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Using MRI imaging, they found scratching suppressed activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain associated with aversion and unpleasant sensory experience. By reducing activity in that region, the researchers theorized, scratching produces sensations of relief.

So why is it so hard to stop scratching once you've started? The study suggested scratching also stimulates activity in the prefrontal cortex, a portion of the brain associated with compulsive behavior. Scratch and your brain tells you to scratch some more, and on and on.

Posted by Chris Emery at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Sun photo

Years ago, in a famous public service television ad, a hand cracked an egg and dropped it in a heated skillet. A male voice said, “This is your brain” (see the intact egg) and then “This is your brain on drugs” (see the egg frying, hear the skillet sizzle.) It must have been an effective ad because those of us who have reached a certain age all remember it years later, right?

They don’t show that ad anymore but federally-funded research by the University of Pennsylvania published this week made me think of it.

Continue reading "Sex, drugs and the brain" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

Photo: Associated Press

The dismal lot of the naked mole-rat just got worse.

About as ugly as a mammal comes and confined underground with little oxygen to breath, the buck-toothed, hairless creatures had one thing going for them: they felt no pain from acids that irritate the skin of other mammals.

University of Illinois scientists weren't having it. They've figured out a way to "rescue" the mole rats' sense of pain by inserting the gene for the neurotransmitter, Substance P, into their DNA.

In humans and other mammals, Substance P is released by pain sensors that mediate long-lasting pain from irritants or injuries. The pain fibers of naked mole-rats lack the substance.

Continue reading "Naked mole-rats feel the pain" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

A colleague tells me she doesn't sleep well. Five minutes into the conversation, someone else joins in and says he doesn't sleep well either.

It's a topic that seems timely: Saturday at 1:10 a.m. is the winter solstice, a planetary pattern that makes this the time of year when daylight is at its shortest and most precious.

Theoretically, we should sleep more when there's more darkness, go into hibernation. But not everyone does. At least one disruption could be that we're still adjusting to daylight savings.

Researchers say that a quarter of the human population — 1.6 billion people — adjust their clocks for daylight savings, but the effects of the amount of sunlight we get on our sleep cycles and our health are more profound than many people think. As the seasons change, they can represent a signifcant seasonal disruption.

Continue reading "You Sleeping OK?" »

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Time slows to a dreadful crawl in two situations: work-related meetings and brushes with death. Dr. David Eagleman specializes in the latter.

It’s common for people involved in car accidents and other traumatic events to report that actions occurred in slow motion during the experience. Eagleman, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, wanted to test what effect fear has on a person’s sense of time.

First, he asked people to estimate how long a fear-inducing event lasted. When participants rode roller coasters, there was little difference between their time estimate of their own ride and that of other people’s rides which they watched. Eagleman’s conclusion: roller coasters aren’t scary enough.

Continue reading "Fear makes the clock go round" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

No longer just low-hanging fruit for low-budget TV specials, out-of-body experiences are getting serious attention from neuroscientists. A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine finds those temporary vacations from the flesh, often reported after brushes with the Grim Reaper, in fact appear to have a corporeal home in the brain.

Using PET scans, the researchers viewed the brain activity of a man who’d had electrodes inserted into his brain to stop persistent ringing in his ears. The electrodes also gave the man out-of-body experiences.

Continue reading "Out-of-body experiences not so out of body after all" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)