Family in for the holidays… Karla is camera shy!!
Here is what we are reading today:
“”Anxiety is incredibly pervasive. People have a very strong intuition that trying to calm down is the best way to cope with their anxiety, but that can be very difficult and ineffective,” said study author Alison Wood Brooks, PhD, of Harvard Business School. “When people feel anxious and try to calm down, they are thinking about all the things that could go badly. When they are excited, they are thinking about how things could go well.””
“Savant behaviors do not occur in all intellectual domains. In other words, we do not seem to see savant skills in the area of poetry writing. Instead, savant skills fall within narrow boundaries.
The most common skill areas are art, music, spatial skills, mathematics, and calendaring (being able to identify the day of the week on which an arbitrary date falls in some future year).”
“Finnish and Danish researchers have developed a new method that performs decoding, or brain-reading, during continuous listening to real music. Based on recorded brain responses, the method predicts how certain features related to tone color and rhythm of the music change over time, and recognizes which piece of music is being listened to. The method also allows pinpointing the areas in the brain that are most crucial for the processing of music. The study was published in the journal NeuroImage.
“This week in The Atavist, writer (and WIRED’s Mr. Know-It-All columnist) Jon Mooallem describes the hippo ranching scheme and the story of two fascinating men behind it: one a modest frontiersman and soldier of fortune, the other a self-aggrandizing con man. Both were spies. Each was sworn to kill the other. But the great cause of hippo ranching brought them together.
Mooallem spoke with WIRED about this odd episode in American history and the future that might have been. An excerpt follows.”
“Some time ago, Rüdiger Klein and his team discovered in the mouse that ephrins and Eph receptors play a key role in the development of the neural networks which control our movements. The neurobiologists have been able to demonstrate that the ephrin/Eph system guides nerve cells which, after birth, send their axons from the brain into thespinal cord and direct voluntary movement in the arms and legs.”
“As we grow older, our brains undergo a major reorganisation reducing the connections in the brain. Studying people up to the age of 40, scientists led by Dr Marcus Kaiser and Ms Sol Lim at Newcastle University found that while overall connections in the brain get streamlined, long-distance connections that are crucial for integrating information are preserved.”
“The swine flu pandemic of late 2009 had a peculiar aftereffect in parts of Europe: a spike in children being diagnosed with narcolepsy, an incurable sleep disorder. Now, scientists have a clue to why—one that points to a new understanding of narcolepsy itself. Patients with the disease have immune cells that are spurred to attack by hypocretin, a hormone that regulates wakefulness. The find is the strongest evidence yet that narcolepsy is caused by an autoimmune reaction in which the immune system goes awry and attacks the body’s own cells.”
“Many diseases of the central nervous system involve the death of neurons—so, theoretically, the replacement of dead cells should improve symptoms of degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Alzheimer’s, as well as stroke and brain tumors. Stem cell therapy may do just that even though evidence of its effectiveness is mixed.”
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