360 degree brain

This interactive feature gives visitors a chance to get a close-up of the brain’s structure. This brain was removed from a man’s skull shortly after his death and came from the  Parkinson’s UK Brain Bank at Imperial College.

How Driving a Taxi Changes London Cabbies’ Brains

Every black-cab driver in central London has to have “The Knowledge” — a memorized map of the capital, including some 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks, right down to the order of theaters on Shaftesbury Avenue.

It’s a brutal learning process that can take three to four years to complete, with a final test — the Knowledge of London Examination System — that often takes 12 attempts to pass. Even then, ultimately only half of the trainee cabbies ace the exam.

According to a report published in the journal Current Biology, successfully learning this mental atlas of London’s spaghetti streets causes structural changes in the brain, affects memory and creates a greater volume of nerve cells in the brain’s hippocampus.

Music to Your Brain by Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham

New Treatment for ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Syndrome?

Most of us have experienced it: that dull, dragging semi-conscious state of deadened awareness and desperate urge to nap that comes from sleep deprivation. For people with primary hypersomnia, however, this is the way they go through life, constantly feeling only half-awake but never able to get enough good sleep to arise truly refreshed. Also known as “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome,” the condition leaves those with the worst cases languishing in bed in what seems like the opposite of a fairy tale, without a prince’s kiss to cure them.

But a new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggests both a possible cause and a potential treatment for the condition, which may ultimately lead to treatments for other sleep disorders. The origin of primary hypersomnia, which has some genetic components is still unknown, as is the number of people who are affected by it.

One particularly striking form of the disease, Kleine-Levin syndrome, produces such tiredness and sleep-drunkenness that people are unable to attend school or work. In males, it can include hypersexual behavior, compulsive masturbation, a desire for promiscuous sex or making inappropriate sexual advances, all while in a sleepy, semi-conscious state.

In the latest study, researchers led by David Rye of Emory University in Atlanta studied 10 men and 22 women seeking treatment for primary hypersomnia. In the patients’ spinal fluid, the scientists discovered a previously uncharacterized chemical that stimulates the GABA-A receptor. This receptor is best known as the site where sleep-inducing drugs like Valium and Xanax have their effects, since activating GABA-A receptors can result in drowsiness.

The finding suggested a possible treatment. A drug, known as flumanezil can treat Valium and Xanax overdoses or to reverse the effects of related compounds used in anesthesia. Could it block or reverse the effects of the unknown agent that was activating GABA-A receptors in primary hypersomnia?

The authors conducted a brief placebo controlled trial with seven patients—including one with Kleine-Levin symptoms — to find out. Indeed, injections of flumanezil improved the participants’ ability to pay attention and remain alert. One participant has now taken the drug daily for four years. “Although her nightly sleep duration remained at 9 to 10 hours, she nearly always awakened refreshed without an alarm and daytime sleepiness was markedly reduced,” the researchers write.

What makes us intelligent?

… and does Google and Wikipedia make it better or worse? Studies show that other people and tools influence our brain power as much as our own minds.

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Research shows that people don’t tend to rely on their memories for things they can easily access. Things like the world in front of our eyes, for example, can be changed quite radically without people noticing. Experiments have shown that buildings can somehow disappear from pictures we’re looking at, or the people we’re talking to can be switched with someone else, and often we won’t notice – a phenomenon called “change blindness”. This isn’t as an example of human stupidity – far from it, in fact – this is an example of mental efficiency. The mind relies on the world as a better record than memory, and usually that’s a good assumption.

As a result, philosophers have suggested that the mind is designed to spread itself out over the environment. So much so that, they suggest, the thinking is really happening in the environment as much as it is happening in our brains. The philosopher Andy Clark called humans “natural born cyborgs”, beings with minds that naturally incorporate new tools, ideas and abilities. From Clark’s perspective, the route to a solution is not the issue – having the right tools really does mean you know the answers, just as much as already knowing the answer.

The man whose brain ignores one half of his world

Alan Burgess doesn’t need a rhyme to remember the 5th of November. He’ll never forget the day he had his stroke. It left him with a syndrome known as hemispatial neglect and a strange new perspective.

I asked him how he explains this to other people. “I say it’s two different worlds,” says Burgess. “My old world finished on 5 November 2007 and the new world started the same day.”

His stroke damaged the parietal lobe on the right side of his brain, the part that deals with the higher processing of attention. The damage causes him to ignore people, sounds, and objects on his left.

"Hemispatial neglect typically occurs after a stroke," says Dr Paresh Malhotra, senior lecturer in neurology at Imperial College London. "It is not blindness in one eye, and it’s not damage to the primary sensory cortex, it’s a process of ignoring, for want of a better word, one side of space."

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(Image credit: zeably.com)

Why older people struggle to read fine print

Psychologists from the University of Leicester have carried out unique eye tests to examine reading styles in young and old people – and discovered for the first time that the way we read words changes as we grow older.

The team from the School of Psychology used an innovative method of digitally manipulating text combined with precise measures of readers’ eye movements. This provides novel insights into how young and older adults use different visual cues during reading.

Their results have been published in the journal Psychology and Aging.

The researchers conducted experiments that used very precise measures of readers’ eye movements to assess how well they read lines of text that had been digitally manipulated to enhance the salience of different visual information. For instance, sometimes the text was blurred and other times the features of the individual letters were sharply defined.

The results showed that whereas young adults (18-30 years) found it easiest to read lines of text when the fine visual detail was present, this was more difficult for older adults (65+years), who found it easier to read more blurred text. These findings support the view that older adults use a different reading strategy from younger adults and that they rely more than young adults on holistic cues to the identities of words, such as word shape.

The research makes an important contribution to understanding why older people have difficulty in reading. The findings will promote further work to more fully understand this difficulty and already points to ways in which it can be combatted.

Call that a ball? Dogs learn to associate words with objects differently than humans do

Previous studies have shown that humans between the ages of two to three typically learn to associate words with the shapes of objects, rather than their size or texture. For example, toddlers who learn what a ‘ball’ is and are then presented other objects with similar shapes, sizes or textures will identify a similarly-shaped object as ‘ball’, rather than one of the same size or texture.

Earlier research with dogs has shown that they can learn to associate words with categories of objects (such as ‘toy’), but whether their learning process was the same as that of humans was unknown.

In this new study, the scientists presented Gable, a five year old Border Collie, with similar choices to see if this ‘shape bias’ exists in dogs. They found that after a brief training period, Gable learned to associate the name of an object with its size, identifying other objects of similar size by the same name. After a longer period of exposure to both a name and an object, the dog learned to associate a word to other objects of similar textures, but not to objects of similar shape.

According to the authors, these results suggest that dogs (or at least Gable) process and associate words with objects in qualitatively different ways than humans do. They add that this may be due to differences in how evolutionary history has shaped human and dog senses of perceiving shape, texture or size.

Forget All-Night Studying, a Good Night’s Sleep Is Key to Doing Well on Exams

As fall semesters wind down at the country’s colleges and universities, students will be pulling all-night study sessions to prepare for final exams. Ironically, the loss of sleep during these all-nighters could actually work against them performing well, says a Harris Health System sleep specialist.

Dr. Philip Alapat, medical director, Harris Health Sleep Disorders Center, and assistant professor, Baylor College of Medicine, recommends students instead study throughout the semester, set up study sessions in the evening (the optimal time of alertness and concentration) and get at least 8 hours of sleep the night before exams.

“Memory recall and ability to maintain concentration are much improved when an individual is rested,” he says. “By preparing early and being able to better recall what you have studied, your ability to perform well on exams is increased.”

Alapat’s recommendations:
• Get 8-9 hours of sleep nightly (especially before final exams)

• Try to study during periods of optimal brain function (usually around 6-8 p.m.)

• Avoid studying in early afternoons, usually the time of least alertness

• Don’t overuse caffeinated drinks (caffeine remains in one’s system for 6-8 hours)

• Recognize that chronic sleep deprivation may contribute to development of long-term diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease

If suffering from bouts of chronic sleep deprivation or nightly insomnia that lasts for more than a few weeks, Alapat suggests consulting a sleep specialist.