Neuroscience
Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies:
British Medical Journal
08 January 2005
Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by Etminan, Takkouche, Isorna, & Samii.
New England Journal of Medicine
06 January 2005
Neurologic and developmental disability at six years of age after extremely preterm birth by Marlow and colleagues. The issue also has editorial commentary on this research paper.
Limiting stroke-induced damage by targeting an acid channel by Benveniste & Dingledine.
Nature
06 January 2005
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage by Adolphs and colleagues.
- Embodying Another Person's Face Makes It Easier To Recognise Their Fear
An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions. Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute...
- Extreme Fear Experienced Without The Amygdala
There's a female patient, known in the research literature as S.M., who's been dubbed the "woman with no fear". She has severely damaged amygdala on either side of her brain and consequently is left unmoved by snakes, spiders, horror films, haunted...
- Biting On Pen Impairs People's Emotion Recognition
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions? Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional...
- Abnormal Social Cognition
To investigate the neuroscience behind socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome...
- Musing About The Sound Of Amygdala
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Amygdala: Word as Earworm By JAMES GORMAN The New York Times Published: January 11, 2005 My infatuation with the amygdala has led me to wonder where aphasia and amusia overlap, a subject that neurologists have been investigating...
Neuroscience
In The Weeklies
Here are some relevant highlights from this week’s major scientific and medical weeklies:
British Medical Journal
08 January 2005
Risk of ischaemic stroke in people with migraine: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies by Etminan, Takkouche, Isorna, & Samii.
New England Journal of Medicine
06 January 2005
Neurologic and developmental disability at six years of age after extremely preterm birth by Marlow and colleagues. The issue also has editorial commentary on this research paper.
Limiting stroke-induced damage by targeting an acid channel by Benveniste & Dingledine.
Nature
06 January 2005
A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage by Adolphs and colleagues.
Excerpt:
Ten years ago, we reported that SM, a patient with rare bilateral amygdala damage, showed an intriguing impairment in her ability to recognize fear from facial expressions. Since then, the importance of the amygdala in processing information about facial emotions has been borne out by a number of lesion and functional imaging studies. Yet the mechanism by which amygdala damage compromises fear recognition has not been identified. Returning to patient SM, we now show that her impairment stems from an inability to make normal use of information from the eye region of faces when judging emotions, a defect we trace to a lack of spontaneous fixations on the eyes during free viewing of faces. Although SM fails to look normally at the eye region in all facial expressions, her selective impairment in recognizing fear is explained by the fact that the eyes are the most important feature for identifying this emotion. Notably, SM's recognition of fearful faces became entirely normal when she was instructed explicitly to look at the eyes. This finding provides a mechanism to explain the amygdala's role in fear recognition, and points to new approaches for the possible rehabilitation of patients with defective emotion perception.
- Embodying Another Person's Face Makes It Easier To Recognise Their Fear
An illusion that provokes a sense of ownership over another person's face has provided new clues about the way we process other people's emotions. Lara Maister and her colleagues used the "enfacement" illusion, in which a person watches a two-minute...
- Extreme Fear Experienced Without The Amygdala
There's a female patient, known in the research literature as S.M., who's been dubbed the "woman with no fear". She has severely damaged amygdala on either side of her brain and consequently is left unmoved by snakes, spiders, horror films, haunted...
- Biting On Pen Impairs People's Emotion Recognition
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions? Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional...
- Abnormal Social Cognition
To investigate the neuroscience behind socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome...
- Musing About The Sound Of Amygdala
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Amygdala: Word as Earworm By JAMES GORMAN The New York Times Published: January 11, 2005 My infatuation with the amygdala has led me to wonder where aphasia and amusia overlap, a subject that neurologists have been investigating...