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These molecules not only rapidly improve symptoms, but remarkably, also appear to renew the underlying brain impairments causing memory loss in preclinical models.

“Currently there are no medications to treat cognitive symptoms such as memory loss that occur in depression, other mental illnesses and aging,” says Dr. Etienne Sibille, Deputy Director of the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH and lead scientist on the study.

What’s unique and promising about these findings, in the face of many failures in drug development for mental illness, is that the compounds are highly targeted to activate the impaired brain receptors that are causing memory loss, he says.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made important progress in designing a drug that could recover brain function in cases of severe brain damage due to injury or diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Circa 2008

“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.” Herman Melville.

Call me Ishmael for making conjectures unflattering to humankind, but could Moby Dick have been smarter than captain Ahab? Melville certainly seemed to think so. Moby clipped off one of the captain’s legs and then, years later, in a brilliant move of cetacean jujitsu, drowned poor Ahab by towing him into the abyss by the harpoon rope tangled around Ahab’s remaining leg. “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!” Gulp. We humans pride ourselves on our big brains. We never seem to tire of bragging about how our supreme intelligence empowers us to lord over all other animals on the planet. Yet the biological facts don’t quite square with Homo sapiens’ arrogance. The fact is, people do not have the largest brains on the planet, either in absolute size or in proportion to body size. Whales, not people, have the biggest brains of any animal on earth.

Continue reading “Are Whales Smarter Than We Are?” »

Lifetime adversity and increased neural processing during a traumatic event combine to increase the frequency of intrusive traumatic memories and the distress they cause, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. The increased neural processing was found in brain regions important for emotion and memory. The involuntary recollection of traumatic events is a core symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the findings could help explain why some people are susceptible to the effects of traumatic experiences and others are resilient.

“Understanding why some people develop intrusive thoughts of a stressful or traumatic event and others do not is an important step towards preventing and treating posttraumatic stress disorder,” said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Due to the nature of real-life trauma, which happens randomly and encompasses many different kinds of adversity, it is impossible to examine how neural processing during natural events contributes to PTSD. Researchers at the University of Salzburg, Austria, have now completed the first study of two well-known risk factors of PTSD, using fMRI to measure brain function during experimental trauma. After watching disturbing films of severe interpersonal violence, the study participants reported how often they experienced intrusive memories of the films, and how distressing the memories were. “This allowed us to study how the brain deals with intensely emotional events,” said lead author Julina Rattel, MSc, a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of senior author Frank Wilhelm, Ph.D.

Where do I sign up!? 🤪.

On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote “The Triumph of Stupidity,” attributing the rise of Adolf Hitler to the organized fervor of stupid and brutal people—two qualities, he noted, that “usually go together.” He went on to make one of his most famous observations, that the “fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Russell’s quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias—the Dunning–Kruger effect—that has been so resonant that it has penetrated popular culture, inspiring, for example, an opera song (from Harvard’s annual Ig Nobel Award Ceremony): “Some people’s own incompetence somehow gives them a stupid sense that anything they do is first rate. They think it’s great.” No surprise, then, that psychologist Joyce Ehrlinger prefaced a 2008 paper she wrote with David Dunning and Justin Kruger, among others, with Russell’s comment—the one he later made in his 1951 book, New Hopes for a Changing World: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” “By now,” Ehrlinger noted in that paper, “this phenomenon has been demonstrated even for everyday tasks, about which individuals have likely received substantial feedback regarding their level of knowledge and skill.” Humans have shown a tendency, in other words, to be a bit thick about even the most mundane things, like how well they drive.

Continue reading “The Case for Professors of Stupidity” »

Researchers from the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center have found that a genetic mutation seen in about half of all brain tumors produces a response that prevents radiation treatment from working. Altering that response using FDA-approved drugs restores tumors’ sensitivity to radiation therapy, extending survival in mice.

The paper, representing more than five years of research, is published in Science Translational Medicine.

“These findings have great potential to impact medical treatment of patients with low-grade glioma, which is critically needed for this terrible disease,” says senior author Maria G. Castro, Ph.D., R. C. Schneider Collegiate Professor of Neurosurgery and a professor of cell and developmental biology at Michigan Medicine.

A new study says lowering blood pressure doesn’t reduce the risk for dementia, but it does lower the impact of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which could be the next best thing in the study of dementia prevention.

Having a muted RSA and an elevated resting heart rate reflects a heightened state of arousal, which is an appropriate response to danger, says Amy Vaughan Van Hecke, associate professor of psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was not involved in the study.

The part of the nervous system that regulates heart rate and breathing is involved in autism, a new study suggests.

Specifically, the changes in heart rate that ordinarily accompany breathing are slow to develop in autistic children.

Continue reading “Nerves that control heart rate may contribute to autism” »