Crime and Punishment?

Crime and Punishment? Infants develop based on the care giver's estimation of their basic survival matters, their developmental needs and the intricate determination of the needed boundaries plus the intensity of boundary enforcement.  Parent's have the sole reign, power & right to note a behavior, to assign levels of intentionality, to measure guilt or innocence, to determine the purpose of the behavior, to weigh the proportion of punishment and to carry out the needed reward and/or consequences for the behavior. Read this article and use your judgement as to how punishment, guilt, consequences and shame can make a significant difference in the life a developing person? Is it being done to me, a parent has to ask? Is the baby just discovering his/her boundaries? discovering the self? I would say that " Done to us personally " is where everything goes array. Parent's biggest mistake is the assignment of intentionality. Food for thought!
“The convergence of findings between second-party and third-party punishment studies suggests that impartial legal decision-making may not be fundamentally different from the reasoning used in deciding to punish those who have harmed us personally,” said Marois.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2008) — In a pioneering, interdisciplinary study combining law and neuroscience, researchers at Vanderbilt University peered inside people’s minds to watch how the brain thinks about crime and punishment.

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When someone is accused of committing a crime, it is the responsibility of impartial third parties, generally jurors and judges, to determine if that person is guilty and, if so, how much he or she should be punished. But how does one’s brain actually make these decisions? The researchers found that two distinct areas of the brain assess guilt and decide penalty.

This work is the joint effort of Owen Jones, professor of law and of biology, and René Marois, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology. Together with neuroscience graduate student Joshua Buckholtz, they scanned the brains of subjects with a highly sensitive technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. Their goal was to see how the brain was activated when a person judged whether or not someone should be punished for a harmful act and how severely the individual should be punished.

During the study, the participant inside the fMRI scanner read scenarios on a computer screen, each describing a person committing an arguably criminal act that varied in harmfulness. With every scenario that appeared, the participant determined how severely to punish the scenario’s protagonist on a scale of 0 (no punishment) to nine (extreme punishment). Sometimes there were extenuating circumstances or background information about why the person acted as he did. Was he coerced? Did he feel threatened? Was he mentally ill?

“We were looking for brain activity reflecting how people reason about the differences in the scenarios,” said Jones.

The researchers found that activity in an analytic part of the brain, known as the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tracked the decision of whether or not a person deserved to be punished but, intriguingly, appeared relatively insensitive to deciding how much to punish. By contrast, the activity in brain regions involved in processing emotions, such as the amygdala, tracked how much subjects decided to punish.

“These results raise the possibility that emotional responses to criminal acts may represent a gauge for assessing deserved punishment,” said Marois.

“There are long-running debates about the proper roles in law of ‘cold’ analysis and ‘hot’ emotion,” said Jones. “Our results suggest that, in normal punishment decisions, the distinct neural circuitries of both processes may be jointly involved, but separately deployed.”

Another intriguing result of the study was that the part of the brain that third-party subjects used to determine guilt in this study was the same brain area that has previously been found to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions.

“The convergence of findings between second-party and third-party punishment studies suggests that impartial legal decision-making may not be fundamentally different from the reasoning used in deciding to punish those who have harmed us personally,” said Marois

Gut Bacteria and happiness!

Early Gut Bacteria Regulate Happiness

ScienceDaily (June 12, 2012) — UCC scientists have shown that brain levels of serotonin, the 'happy hormone' are regulated by the amount of bacteria in the gut during early life. Their research is being published June 12 in the international psychiatry journal, Molecular Psychiatry.

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This research shows that normal adult brain function depends on the presence of gut microbes during development. Serotonin, the major chemical involved in the regulation of mood and emotion, is altered in times of stress, anxiety and depression and most clinically effective antidepressant drugs work by targeting this neurochemical.

Scientists at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in UCC used a germ-free mouse model to show that the absence of bacteria during early life significantly affected serotonin concentrations in the brain in adulthood. The research also highlighted that the influence is sex dependent, with more marked effects in male compared with female animals. Finally, when the scientists colonized the animals with bacteria prior to adulthood, they found that many of the central nervous system changes, especially those related to serotonin, could not be reversed indicating a permanent imprinting of the effects of absence of gut flora on brain function.

This builds on earlier work, from the Cork group and others, showing that a microbiome-gut-brain axis exists that is essential for maintaining normal health which can affect brain and behavior. The research was carried out by Dr Gerard Clarke, Professor Fergus Shanahan, Professor Ted Dinan and Professor John F Cryan and colleagues at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre in UCC.

"As a neuroscientist these findings are fascinating as they highlight the important role that gut bacteria play in the bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain, and opens up the intriguing opportunity of developing unique microbial-based strategies for treatment for brain disorders," said Professor John F Cryan, senior author on the publication and Head of the Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience at UCC.

This research has multiple health implications as it shows that manipulations of the microbiota (e.g. by antibiotics, diet, or infection) can have profound knock-on effects on brain function. "We're really excited by these findings" said lead author Dr Gerard Clarke. "Although we always believed that the microbiota was essential for our general health, our results also highlight how important our tiny friends are for our mental wellbeing."

Overpopulation in our body cavities ! 100 Trillion? Medicine reexamined?

The microbiome project  imposes new dimensions on the world of  diagnostics and treatment. 

 From Asthma to IBS to Autoimmune disorders, to some mental illnesses,  to many infectious diseases. 
 Are diseases driven by Bacteria gone wild? After all they reproduce instantly, our stool is mostly bacteria,
as soon as they exit, they replenish themselves! Are genetic mutations connected to Bacteria? 
Where will treatment of illnesses take us during the next decade as we learn more and more that 
bacteria are not merely passive passengers in our body cavities! 

From the standpoint of our microbiome:

 “we may just serve as packaging.”~Dr. B. Kramer.  Director, Cancer Prevention, NCInstitute.

Examinations of DNA sequences served as the equivalent of an old-time microscope, said Curtis Huttenhower of the Harvard School of Public Health, an investigator for the microbiome project. They allowed investigators to see — through their unique DNA sequences — footprints of otherwise elusive bacteria.

Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria

By GINA KOLATA

Published: June 13, 2012

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For years, bacteria have had a bad name. They are the cause of infections, of diseases. They are something to be scrubbed away, things to be avoided.

But now researchers have taken a detailed look at another set of bacteria that may play even bigger roles in health and disease: the 100 trillion good bacteria that live in or on the human body.

No one really knew much about them. They are essential for human life, needed to digest food, to synthesize certain vitamins, to form a barricade against disease-causing bacteria. But what do they look like in healthy people, and how much do they vary from person to person?

In a new five-year federal endeavor, the Human Microbiome Project, which has been compared to the Human Genome Project, 200 scientists at 80 institutionssequenced the genetic material of bacteria taken from nearly 250 healthy people.

They discovered more strains than they had ever imagined — as many as a thousand bacterial strains on each person. And each person’s collection of microbes, the microbiome, was different from the next person’s. To the scientists’ surprise, they also found genetic signatures of disease-causing bacteria lurking in everyone’s microbiome. But instead of making people ill, or even infectious, these disease-causing microbes simply live peacefully among their neighbors.

The results, published on Wednesday in Nature and three PLoS journals, are expected to change the research landscape.

The work is “fantastic,” said Bonnie Bassler, a Princeton University microbiologist who was not involved with the project. “These papers represent significant steps in our understanding of bacteria in human health.”

Until recently, Dr. Bassler added, the bacteria in the microbiome were thought to be just “passive riders.” They were barely studied, microbiologists explained, because it was hard to know much about them. They are so adapted to living on body surfaces and in bodycavities, surrounded by other bacteria, that many could not be cultured and grown in the lab. Even if they did survive in the lab, they often behaved differently in this alien environment. It was only with the advent of relatively cheap and fast gene sequencing methods that investigators were able to ask what bacteria were present.

The work also helps establish criteria for a healthy microbiome, which can help in studies of how antibiotics perturb a person’s microbiome and how long it takes the microbiome to recover.

In recent years, as investigators began to probe the microbiome in small studies, they began to appreciate its importance. Not only do the bacteria help keep people healthy, but they also are thought to help explain why individuals react differently to various drugs and why some are susceptible to certain infectious diseases while others are impervious. When they go awry they are thought to contribute to chronic diseases and conditions likeirritable bowel syndrome, asthma, even, possibly, obesity.

Humans, said Dr. David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist, are like coral, “an assemblage of life-forms living together.”

Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the division of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute, who was not involved with the research project, had another image. Humans, he said, in some sense are made mostly of microbes. From the standpoint of our microbiome, he added, “we may just serve as packaging.”

The microbiome starts to grow at birth, said Lita Proctor, program director for the Human Microbiome Project. As babies pass through the birth canal, they pick up bacteria from the mother’s vaginal microbiome.

“Babies are microbe magnets,” Dr. Proctor said. Over the next two to three years, the babies’ microbiomes mature and grow while their immune systems develop in concert, learning not to attack the bacteria, recognizing them as friendly.

Babies born by Caesarean section, Dr. Proctor added, start out with different microbiomes, but it is not yet known whether their microbiomes remain different after they mature. In adults, the body carries two to five pounds of bacteria, even though these cells are minuscule — one-tenth to one-hundredth the size of a human cell. The gut, in particular, is stuffed with them.

“The gut is not jam-packed with food; it is jam-packed with microbes,” Dr. Proctor said. “Half of your stool is not leftover food. It is microbial biomass.” But bacteria multiply so quickly that they replenish their numbers as fast as they are excreted.

The bacteria also help the immune system, Dr. Huttenhower said. The best example is in the vagina, where they secrete chemicals that can kill other bacteria and make the environment slightly acidic, which is unappealing to other microbes.

Including the microbiome as part of an individual is, some researchers said, a new way to look at human beings.

It was a daunting task, though, to investigate the normal human microbiome. Previous studies of human microbiomes had been small and had looked mostly at fecal bacteria or bacteria in saliva in healthy people, or had examined things like fecal bacteria in individuals with certain diseases, like inflammatory bowel disease, in which bacteria are thought to play a role.

But, said Barbara B. Methé, an investigator for the microbiome study and a microbiologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute, it was hard to know what to make of those studies.

242 men and women deemed free of disease in the nose, skin, mouth, gastrointestinal tract and, for the women, vagina — the investigators collected stool samples and saliva, and scraped the subjects’ gums and teeth and nostrils and their palates and tonsils and throats. They took samples from the crook of the elbow and the folds of the ear. In all, women were sampled in 18 places, including three sites in the vagina, and men in 15. The investigators resampled subjects three times during the course of the study to see if the bacterial composition of their bodies was stable, generating 11,174 samples.

To catalog the body’s bacteria, researchers searched for DNA with a specific gene, 16S rRNA, that is a marker for bacteria and whose slight sequence variations can reveal different bacterial species. They sequenced the bacterial DNA to find the unique genes in the microbiome. They ended up with a deluge of data, much too much to study with any one computer, Dr. Huttenhower said, creating “a huge computational challenge.”

The next step, he said, is to better understand how the microbiome affects health and disease and to try to improve health by deliberately altering the microbiome. But, Dr. Relman said, “we are scratching at the surface now.” It is, he said, “humbling.”

Ladies: New about Calcium! Watch for Kidney Stones!

Healthy Women Advised Not to Take Calcium and Vitamin D to Prevent Fractures

By GINA KOLATA

Published: June 12, 2012

The United States Preventive Services Task Force, an influential group that recently recommended against routine P.S.A. tests to detect prostate cancer, issued a draft statement on Tuesday recommending that healthy postmenopausal women should not take low doses of calcium or vitamin D supplements to prevent fractures.

The group, an independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, also considered use of the supplements by healthy premenopausal women and men. For those groups, it said, there was insufficient evidence to recommend taking vitamin D with or without calcium to prevent fractures.

The supplements also have been studied to see if they prevent cancer. But, the group said, there is insufficient evidence to say they do or do not. The cancer studies included ones testing the supplements to prevent all cancers as well as ones asking about colorectal cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer.

Their analysis of the effects of the supplements included 137 studies, including randomized controlled trials, the gold standard for clinical evidence.

The low doses that the group referred to, at least for the postmenopausal women, were a typical level of 400 international units or less of vitamin D a day and 1,000 milligrams or less of calcium.

At that dose, said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a member of the task force who is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco, “there is sufficient evidence to say they do not prevent fractures.”

“When you take a vitamin supplement or any therapy for an extended period of time, you have to ask, ‘What is the evidence that it works and what is the evidence of harms?’ ” Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said.

“It is clear that lower doses of calcium and vitamin D do not prevent fractures, and there is a small but measurable risk of kidney stones,” she said. So with no evidence of benefit, there is no reason to risk harm.

Dr. Ethel Siris, who directs Columbia University’s osteoporosis center, said she and other osteoporosis experts already knew the supplements did not prevent fractures.

“That’s why when a patient with osteoporosis says, ‘I will just take calcium and vitamin D,’ we say, ‘That’s not enough,’ ” Dr. Siris said.

But Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said the task force recommendations did not apply to people with osteoporosis.

For most people, she said, there is no need for these supplements and good reason for many not to take them.

“Vitamin D and calcium are part of a healthy diet,” Dr. Bibbins-Domingo said. “Most people can achieve sufficient doses with a healthy diet.
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Checking reality! Being abused by politicians!

Am I the only one who has such trouble accepting the practice of presidential fundraising activities and the associated astronomical expense not to mention the disruption? Why do we pay for someone to raise money to secure their next job while already on the job? Makes no logical sense to me. It is as if we are accepting abuse because it is so. The cost of fundraising for a president is mostly on the taxpayer's shoulder since the campaign fund reimbursement is minuscule. No matter which party, this part of our political system is the abuse of power. Campaign reform is certainly called for. I am astonished that for the 11th time the Los Angeles police department announces to the residents to stay away from the public roads and freeways! What about the life of the average person who does not have the luxury to sit home and to avoid going to work or the doctor or to see their ailing parent? Why do we accept this as a matter of fact? We have allowed too much freedom to all politicians and have paid for it without questioning authority. This is the united states of america, we have to exercise our power as individuals to make changes. Help me understand please. Your thoughts?

The price one pays for money, fame and entertainment. Loss of our greatest asset.

We know too much now to continue sports that damage the brain and the central nervous system.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/07/2000-players-unify-in-suing-nfl-over-head-injuries/

I love Fruit Flies!

New Ways Sleep-Wake Patterns Are Like Clockwork

ScienceDaily (May 23, 2012)

 — Researchers at New York University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered new ways neurons work together to ease the transition between sleep and wakefulness. Their findings, which appear in the journal Neuron, provide additional insights into sleep-wake patterns and offer methods to explore what may disrupt them.

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Their study explored the biological, or circadian, clocks of Drosophila fruit flies, which are commonly used for research in this area. This is because it is relatively easy to find mutants with malfunctioning biological clocks and then to identify the genes underlying the altered behavior. Such studies in fruit flies have allowed the identification of similar "clock genes" in mammals, which function in largely the same manner as they do in a fly's clock.

In the Neuron study, the researchers moved up a level to study how pacemaker clock neurons -- which express clock genes -- interact with each other. Specifically, they looked at the relationship between master pacemaker neurons, which control the overall pace of the circadian system, and non-master pacemaker neurons, whose role in circadian rhythms has been less clear.

To do so, they examined flies with normally functioning master and non-master clock neurons and compared them with mutant flies in which the signaling of these neurons was either increased or decreased. These comparisons allowed the researchers to isolate the individual roles of these neurons and, in particular, to understand how master and non-master pacemaker neurons work together to control circadian rhythms.

Their results revealed a previously unknown role for non-master pacemaker neurons. Specifically, these neurons employ a neurotransmitter, glutamate, which suppresses signaling of the master pacemaker neurons during the evening. Artificially increasing this suppression by the non-master clock neurons in the morning made it much harder for flies to wake up. So in normal flies, these non-master pacemaker neurons have to stand aside at dawn, allowing the master pacemaker neurons to fire to wake up the fly. The authors concluded that the balance between signaling of these two groups of clock neurons helps to set the precise time of the transition between sleep and wakefulness.

"Our work shifts the emphasis away from clock genes and starts to address how clock neurons function in a neural network to regulate behavior," explained Justin Blau, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Biology and one of the study's co-authors. "And it shows the importance of studying individual groups of clock neurons, since different subsets can have opposite effects on animal behavior."

"This work helps to elucidate the neurotransmitters and receptors that facilitate communication between specific groups of nerve cells that regulate circadian rhythm," said co-author Myles Akabas, professor of Physiology & Biophysics and of Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "It demonstrates the power of collaborative interdisciplinary research to address the molecular and cellular basis for behavior."

The study's other co-authors are: Ben Collins, a post-doctoral fellow in NYU's Department of Biology; Elizabeth Kane, an undergraduate in NYU's College of Arts and Science at the time of the study and now a doctoral student at Harvard University's Center for Brain Science; and David Reeves, a post-doctoral researcher at Einstein.

The research was supported by grants from the National 

Institutes of Health.

To medicate or not during pregnancy? A fine line?

It is great news that infant Psychobiological Health is continuously revisited as Neuroscience guides all related fields from Pediatrics to Infant Traumatology.

Fever During Pregnancy More Than Doubles the Risk of Autism or Developmental Delay

 — A team of UC Davis researchers has found that mothers who had fevers during their pregnancies were more than twice as likely to have a child with autism or developmental delay than were mothers of typically developing children, and that taking medication to treat fever countered its effect.

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"Our study provides strong evidence that controlling fevers while pregnant may be effective in modifying the risk of having a child with autism or developmental delay," said Ousseny Zerbo, lead author of the study, who was a Ph.D. candidate with UC Davis when the study was conducted and is now a postdoctoral researcher with the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. "We recommend that pregnant women who develop fever take anti-pyretic medications and seek medical attention if their fever persists."

Published online in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the study is believed to be the first to consider how fever from any cause, including the flu, and its treatment during pregnancy could affect the likelihood of having a child with autism or developmental delay.

The results are based on data from a large, case-control investigation known as the Childhood Autism Risk from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study. Another recent study based on CHARGE data found that mothers who were obese or diabetic had a higher likelihood of having children with autism.

Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and principal investigator of CHARGE, pointed out that fever is produced by acute inflammation -- the short-term, natural immune system reaction to infection or injury -- and that chronic inflammation, which no longer serves a beneficial purpose and can damage healthy tissue, may be present in mothers with metabolic abnormalities like diabetes and obesity.

"Since an inflammatory state in the body accompanies obesity and diabetes as well as fever," said Hertz-Picciotto, "the natural question is: Could inflammatory factors play a role in autism?"

She explained that when people are infected by bacteria or viruses, the body generally reacts by mounting a healing response that involves the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines from white blood cells into the bloodstream. Some cytokines are able to cross the placenta, and therefore could reach the fetal central nervous system, potentially altering levels of neurotransmitters and brain development.

"We definitely think more research is necessary to pinpoint the ways that inflammation could alter brain development," said Hertz-Picciotto.

CHARGE includes an ethnically diverse population of children aged 2 to 5 years born in California and living in Northern California. The current study included 538 children with autism, 163 children with developmental delay but not autism, and 421 typically developing children whose mothers answered standardized questionnaires about whether they had the flu and/or fever during pregnancy and if they took medications to treat their illnesses.

The results showed that flu during pregnancy was not associated with greater risks of having a child with autism or developmental delay. Fever from any cause during pregnancy, however, was far more likely to be reported by mothers of children with autism (2.12 times higher odds) or developmental delay (2.5 times higher odds), as compared with mothers of children who were developing typically. For children of mothers who took anti-fever medication, the risk of autism was not different from the risk in children whose mothers reported no fever.

According to Irva Hertz-Picciotto, results based on CHARGE data are noteworthy because of the study's large population-based sample and detailed information on participants. Other CHARGE evaluations have found that taking prenatal vitamins prior to and during the first month of pregnancy may help prevent autism and that living near a freeway or in areas with high regional air pollution is associated with higher risk of autism in children.

"CHARGE has obtained a wealth of environmental, demographic and medical information on young children and their parents and provides a solid basis for a variety of epidemiologic studies," said Hertz-Picciotto. "Those studies are helping us find ways to protect childhood neurodevelopment."

In addition to Zerbo and Hertz-Picciotto, other UC Davis authors were Robin Hansen of the Department of Pediatrics, Sally Ozonoff of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Cheryl Walker of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Ana-Maria Iosif of the Department of Public Health Sciences. Hertz-Picciotto, Hansen, Ozonoff and Walker are also affiliated with the UC Davis MIND (Medical 

Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders) Institute.ScienceDaily (May 23, 2012)

Try the body weight simulator from the NIDDK

The national institute of Diabetes, Digestive & Kidney Diseases
M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist:  Dr. Chow 
has the latest word on weight loss. 

Any practical advice from your number crunching?

One of the things the numbers have shown us is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year.

People don’t wait long enough to see what they are going to stabilize at. So if you drop weight and return to your old eating habits, the time it takes to crawl back to your old weight is something like three years. To help people understand this better, we’ve posted an interactive version of our model at bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov. People can plug in their information and learn how much they’ll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose. It will also give them a rough sense of how much time it will take to reach the goal. Applied mathematics in action!

Finally, Scientific Proof. Psychophysiological Development and child abuse.

Chronic Child Abuse Strong Indicator 

of Negative Adult Experiences

ScienceDaily (May 15, 2012) — Child abuse or neglect are strong predictors of major health and emotional problems, but little is known about how the chronicity of the maltreatment may increase future harm apart from other risk factors in a child's life.

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In a new study published in the current issue of the journalPediatrics, Melissa Jonson-Reid, PhD, child welfare expert and a professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how chronic maltreatment impacted the future health and behavior of children and adults.

The study tracked children by number of child maltreatment reports (zero to four or more) and followed the children into early adulthood, by which time some of the children had become parents.

The study sought to determine how well the number of child maltreatment reports predicted poor outcomes in adolescence, such as delinquency, substance abuse in the teen years or getting a sexually transmitted disease.

"For every measure studied, a more chronic history of child maltreatment reports was powerfully predictive of worse outcomes," Jonson-Reid says.

"For most outcomes, having a single maltreatment report put children at a 20 percent to 50 percent higher risk than non-maltreated comparison children.

In addition, a series of adult outcomes were tracked to see if the chronicity of maltreatment still mattered after controlling for the poor outcomes in adolescence. Adult outcomes included adult substance abuse or growing up and having children whom they then maltreated.

"In models of adult outcomes, children with four or more reports were about least twice as likely to later abuse their own children and have contact with the mental health system, even when controlling for the negative outcomes during adolescence." Jonson-Reid says that there appears to be good reason to put resources into preventing ongoing maltreatment.

"Successfully interrupting chronic child maltreatment may well reduce risk of a wide range of other costly child and adolescent health and behavioral problems," she says.

Jonson-Reid cites a recently published Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study estimating lifetime costs for a single year's worth of children reported for maltreatment at $242 billion.

"What our study illustrates is that these costs are even more likely to accrue for children who continue to be re-reported," she says.

The study also found that maltreatment predicts a range of negative adolescent outcomes, and those adolescent outcomes then predict poor adult outcomes.

"If the poor outcomes in adolescence can be dealt with effectively, then later adult outcomes may also be forestalled," Jonson-Reid says.

"Our findings could therefore be interpreted as supporting many current evidence-based interventions that seek to improve behavioral and social functioning among children and adolescents who have experienced trauma like abuse or neglect."

Jonson-Reid co-authored the study, "Child and Adult Outcomes of Chronic Child Maltreatment," with fellow Brown School faculty members Patricia L. Kohl, PhD, associate professor, and F. Brett Drake, PhD, 

The Bright Future of Human Memory!

Scientists Identify Neurotranmitters That Lead to Forgetting

ScienceDaily (May 9, 2012) — While we often think of memory as a way of preserving the essential idea of who we are, little thought is given to the importance of forgetting to our wellbeing, whether what we forget belongs in the "horrible memories department" or just reflects the minutia of day-to-day living.

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Despite the fact that forgetting is normal, exactly how we forget -- the molecular, cellular, and brain circuit mechanisms underlying the process -- is poorly understood.

Now, in a study that appears in the May 10, 2012 issue of the journalNeuron, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have pinpointed a mechanism that is essential for forming memories in the first place and, as it turns out, is equally essential for eliminating them after memories have formed.

"This study focuses on the molecular biology of active forgetting," said Ron Davis, chair of the Scripps Research Department of Neuroscience who led the project. "Until now, the basic thought has been that forgetting is mostly a passive process. Our findings make clear that forgetting is an active process that is probably regulated."

The Two Faces of Dopamine

To better understand the mechanisms for forgetting, Davis and his colleagues studied Drosophila or fruit flies, a key model for studying memory that has been found to be highly applicable to humans. The flies were put in situations where they learned that certain smells were associated with either a positive reinforcement like food or a negative one, such as a mild electric shock. The scientists then observed changes in the flies' brains as they remembered or forgot the new information.

The results showed that a small subset of dopamine neurons actively regulate the acquisition of memories and the forgetting of these memories after learning, using a pair of dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in a number of processes including punishment and reward, memory, learning and cognition.

But how can a single neurotransmitter, dopamine, have two seemingly opposite roles in both forming and eliminating memories? And how can these two dopamine receptors serve acquiring memory on the one hand, and forgetting on the other?

The study suggests that when a new memory is first formed, there also exists an active, dopamine-based forgetting mechanism -- ongoing dopamine neuron activity -- that begins to erase those memories unless some importance is attached to them, a process known as consolidation that may shield important memories from the dopamine-driven forgetting process.

The study shows that specific neurons in the brain release dopamine to two different receptors known as dDA1 and DAMB, located on what are called mushroom bodies because of their shape; these densely packed networks of neurons are vital for memory and learning in insects. The study found the dDA1 receptor is responsible for memory acquisition, while DAMB is required for forgetting.

When dopamine neurons begin the signaling process, the dDA1 receptor becomes overstimulated and begins to form memories, an essential part of memory acquisition. Once that memory is acquired, however, these same dopamine neurons continue signaling. Except this time, the signal goes through the DAMB receptor, which triggers forgetting of those recently acquired, but not yet consolidated, memories.

Jacob Berry, a graduate student in the Davis lab who led the experimentation, showed that inhibiting the dopamine signaling after learning enhanced the flies' memory. Hyperactivating those same neurons after learning erased memory. And, a mutation in one of the receptors, dDA1, produced flies unable to learn, while a mutation in the other, DAMB, blocked forgetting.

Intriguing Issues

While Davis was surprised by the mechanisms the study uncovered, he was not surprised that forgetting is an active process. "Biology isn't designed to do things in a passive way," he said. "There are active pathways for constructing things, and active ones for degrading things. Why should forgetting be any different?"

The study also brings into a focus a lot of intriguing issues, Davis said -- savant syndrome, for example.

"Savants have a high capacity for memory in some specialized areas," he said. "But maybe it isn't memory that gives them this capacity, maybe they have a bad forgetting mechanism. This also might be a strategy for developing drugs to promote cognition and memory -- what about drugs that inhibit forgetting as cognitive enhancers?

Anxious/depressed Moms seek comfort from child!

The following study is about infant sleep and Mom's need for comfort.  But sleep is not the only issue with this form of dependency.  I have witnessed hundreds of adult children who were recruited to become the "comforting agent" from early infancy. In other words, becoming their mom's mom.  This role reversal is devastating to the  developing child who 's psychobiological process is purely dependent on the unconditionally consistent & on demand comforting response of their primary attachment figure.

Brain Freeze? Do you know why?

Changes in Brain’s Blood Flow Could Cause ‘Brain Freeze’

Findings may eventually lead to new treatments for other types of headache

"Findings showed that one particular artery, called the anterior cerebral artery, dilated rapidly and flooded the brain with blood in conjunction to when the volunteers felt pain. Soon after this dilation occurred, the same vessel constricted as the volunteers’ pain receded."

SAN DIEGO— ‘Brain freeze’ is a nearly universal experience—almost everyone has felt the near-instantaneous headache brought on by a bite of ice cream or slurp of ice-cold soda on the upper palate. However, scientists are still at a loss to explain this phenomenon. Since migraine sufferers are more likely to experience brain freeze than people who don’t have this often-debilitating condition, brain freeze may share a common mechanism with other types of headaches, including those brought on by the trauma of blast-related combat injuries in soldiers. One possible link between brain freeze and other headache types is local changes in brain blood flow.

In a new study, Melissa Mary Blatt, Michael Falvo, and Jessica Jasien of the Department of Veterans Affairs New Jersey Health Care System, Brian Deegan and Gearold O Laighin of the National University of Ireland Galway, and Jorge Serrador of Harvard Medical School and the War Related Illness and Injury Study Center of the Veterans Affairs New Jersey Health Care System use brain freeze as a proxy for other types of headaches. By bringing on brain freeze in the lab in volunteers and studying blood flow in their brains, the researchers show that the sudden headache seems to be triggered by an abrupt increase in blood flow in the anterior cerebral artery and disappears when this artery constricts. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of different headache types.

An abstract of their study entitled, “Cerebral Vascular Blood Flow Changes During ‘Brain Freeze,’” will be discussed at the meeting Experimental Biology 2012 being held April 21-25 at the San Diego Convention Center. The abstract is sponsored by the American Physiological Society (APS), one of six scientific societies sponsoring the conference, which last year attracted some 14,000 attendees.

Bringing on Brain Freeze

According to study leader Serrador, previous studies meant to assess what physiological changes might prompt headaches have mainly relied on various drugs, or brought in patients already in the throes of a migraine to the lab. However, both methods have their limitations. Pharmacological agents can induce other effects that can make research results misleading, he says, and since researchers can’t wait for migraine sufferers to experience a migraine in the lab, those studies miss the crucial period of headache formation that occurs sometimes hours before scientists were able to study these patients.

To induce headache inside the lab and study it from start to finish, Serrador explains, brain freeze is a perfect fit. It’s easy to bring on and resolves quickly without expensive or complicated equipment or drugs.

In this study, Serrador and his colleague recruited 13 healthy adults. The researchers monitored the volunteers’ blood flow in several brain arteries using transcranial Doppler while they first sipped ice water with the straw pressed against their upper palate—ideal conditions for bringing on brain freeze—and then while sipping the same amount of water at room temperature. The volunteers raised their hand once they felt the pain of a brain freeze, then raised it again once the pain dissipated. Findings showed that one particular artery, called the anterior cerebral artery, dilated rapidly and flooded the brain with blood in conjunction to when the volunteers felt pain. Soon after this dilation occurred, the same vessel constricted as the volunteers’ pain receded.

Changing the Course of Headaches

Serrador and his colleagues speculate that the dilation, then quick constriction, may be a type of self-defense for the brain. “The brain is one of the relatively important organs in the body, and it needs to be working all the time,” he explains. “It’s fairly sensitive to temperature, so vasodilation might be moving warm blood inside tissue to make sure the brain stays warm.” But because the skull is a closed structure, Serrador adds, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induce pain. The following vasoconstriction may be a way to bring pressure down in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels.

He notes that similar alterations in blood flow could be at work in migraines, posttraumatic headaches, and other headache types. If further research confirms these suspicions, then finding ways to control blood flow could offer new treatments for these conditions. Drugs that block sudden vasodilation or target channels involved specifically in the vasodilation of headaches could be one way of changing headaches’ course.   

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