The List Blog 10. Charles Bonnet Syndrome Charles Bonnet syndrome is a condition that causes patients with visual lossto have complex visual hallucinations. It was first described by CharlesBonnet in 1760 and was incorporated into English-speaking psychiatry in1982. Most of the people afflicted with Charles Bonnet Syndrome areindividuals who are in the early stages of sight loss, and the hallucinationsusually begin while the person’s vision is slowly diminishing. The mostcommon culprit is macular degeneration, a disease where certain light-sensing cells in the retina malfunction and cause a slowly worsening blindspot in the center of one’s vision.People who have Charles Bonnet syndrome often see vivid yet unrealimages. Sufferers understand that the hallucinations are not real. 9. Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is literally defined as the "fear of thenumber six hundred sixty-six (666).” 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. A similar condition is Fregoli delusion. 3. 2. 1. One More Target Fixation
Gene for Left-Handed Trait Discovered August 1, 2007 The gene most closely linked to left-handedness has been found, experts announced this week. The gene, called LRRTM1, is also associated with a slight increase in developing certain mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Clyde Francks is lead author of a new study on the gene and a visiting fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University. For right-handed people, he said, the right side of the brain usually controls emotion, while the left side of the brain tends to control speech and language. (Related: "First Ever Brain 'Atlas' Completed" [September 26, 2006].) In left-handers—about 10 percent of the world's population—the pattern is usually reversed. "We think that this gene affects the symmetry of the brain," Francks said. Brain asymmetry is also a factor in schizophrenia, a mental disorder that affects about one in a hundred people worldwide and results in impaired perception and severe behavioral changes. Finding Symmetry
Health | Left-handers 'think' more quickly Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows. The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli. Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily. Study leader Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University measured transfer time between the two sides of the brain by measuring reaction times to white dots flashed to the left and right of a fixed cross. He then compared this with how good participants were at carrying out a task to spot matching letters in the left and right visual fields, which would require them to use both sides of the brain at the same time. More efficient "It's certainly very interesting.
Health | Preferred hand 'set in the womb' The hand you prefer to use as a 10-week-old foetus is the hand you will favour for the rest of your life, research suggests. A team from Belfast's Queen's University studied foetuses in the womb, and after birth. Their findings challenge the widely held view that a child does not develop left or right-handedness until it is at least three years old. The research is reported by New Scientist magazine. In one part of their study, the Belfast team identified 60 foetuses who sucked their right thumb in the womb, and 15 who sucked their left thumb. When the babies were examined again between the ages of 10 and 12, the researchers found all 60 of the right thumb suckers were now right-handed. Two-thirds of the left thumb suckers were left handed, the rest apparently having switched their dominant hand. They also produced evidence suggesting foetuses begin to favour one hand over another at an even earlier stage. The Belfast team found the majority tend to wave their right arm more than their left.
Health | Left-handers 'better in fights' If you find yourself in a fight, you'd better hope it's not against a left-hander - scientists have found they often have the upper hand. Opponents simply do not expect a left-hook. The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases. But University of Montpellier experts, writing in Proceedings B, say it could be because they do well in combat. The team saw that left-handers had the advantage in sports such as fencing, tennis and baseball. They said that Western interactive sports such as these can be classed as "special cases of fights - with strict rules, including the "prohibition of killing and intentionally wounding the opponent". This led them to speculate the same advantage may persist in more aggressive contexts, such as war, so societies which are more violent would have a higher frequency of left-handers. Skill range "And I think the answer is 'no it doesn't'.
Our brains are wired so we can better hear ourselves speak, new study shows Like the mute button on the TV remote control, our brains filter out unwanted noise so we can focus on what we’re listening to. But when it comes to following our own speech, a new brain study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that instead of one homogenous mute button, we have a network of volume settings that can selectively silence and amplify the sounds we make and hear. Activity in the auditory cortex when we speak and listen is amplified in some regions of the brain and muted in others. Neuroscientists from UC Berkeley, UCSF and Johns Hopkins University tracked the electrical signals emitted from the brains of hospitalized epilepsy patients. Their findings, published today (Dec. 8, 2010) in the Journal of Neuroscience, offer new clues about how we hear ourselves above the noise of our surroundings and monitor what we say. The auditory cortex is a region of the brain’s temporal lobe that deals with sound.
Is lack of sleep and water giving ecstasy a bad name? - health - 24 February 2011 ALL-NIGHT ravers who take ecstasy might not be harming their brains any more than drug-free party animals. So say John Halpern and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who argue that many studies apparently showing that ecstasy use can lead to memory loss and depression were flawed as they did not take account of the rave culture associated with ecstasy use. Lack of sleep and dehydration resulting from all-night dancing can cause cognitive problems on their own, they say. Halpern's team compared ecstasy users with non-users who had a history of all-night dancing with limited exposure to alcohol and drugs. Both groups completed tests for verbal fluency, memory, depression and other factors. The team found no significant differences in cognitive performance between the two groups, even when they compared non-users with heavy users of the drug (Addiction, DOI: 10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03252). New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist More from the web Recommended by
Diabetics: is it time to bin the insulin? - health - 24 February 2011 A PIONEERING hormone treatment may be the secret to an easy life for diabetics, consigning insulin shots and regular glucose monitoring to the medical history books. Most people associate diabetes with insulin, the pancreatic hormone that dictates how much glucose circulates in blood. Type 1 diabetics have to inject the hormone because they can't make it themselves. Now, the spotlight is turning on insulin's lesser-known pancreatic twin, glucagon, as a treatment that could control blood glucose levels without the need for daily monitoring. Whereas insulin clears surplus glucose from the blood after meals, squirrelling it away in the liver, muscles and elsewhere, glucagon does the opposite when we are hungry, ordering the liver to release stores of glucose "fuel" into the blood or to make more if none is available. To investigate glucagon's role, Roger Unger at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and ...
Body morph illusions: How to become superhuman Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer You may think only aliens could have multiple limbs. But now an experiment conducted by Henrik Ehrsson and his colleagues from Karolinska Institute in Sweden has shown that humans can also feel what it's like to have a third arm and even flinch if it's threatened with a knife (see video above). The illusion is perceived when a person's right arm, and a similar fake arm, are stroked simultaneously when both are in view. The third arm illusion is similar to the rubber hand illusion, where a person feels like a fake hand is their own when their real arm is hidden from view and stroked at the same time. Using a similar technique, the team previously showed that a person can feel like another body, or that of a mannequin, is their own. The team's new work should be useful for helping disabled people accept a prosthetic limb as their own.
Raise alcohol prices to save British livers - health - 25 February 2011 SOARING rates of alcohol abuse and liver disease in the UK can be reversed by copying French and Italian strategies of cutting cheap booze from supermarkets. So say a group of health researchers, whose analysis shows that since 1986, UK death rates from liver disease, 80 per cent of which is alcohol-related, have more than doubled from 4.9 to 11.4 per 100,000 people. In France and Italy, the opposite has occurred, with death rates of 50 per 100,000 in the early 1960s falling to less than 10 per 100,000 today (The Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60022-6). The solution, says lead author Nick Sheron at the University of Southampton, UK, was to take cheap alcohol out of the system. New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Impossibly heavy planet is the first 'mega-Earth' (New Scientist) Mystery Voynich manuscript gets preliminary alphabet (New Scientist) Bacterial explanation for Europa's rosy glow (New Scientist) Reaping the whirlwind of Nazi eugenics (New Scientist)
Mobile phones boost brain activity - health - 23 February 2011 WHAT is your cellphone doing to your brain? The latest study shows that long calls boost brain activity, though whether this is harmful is not known. Nora Volkow, director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues attached cellphones to each ear of 47 volunteers. They used a PET scanner to compare brain activity when both phones were switched off and when one phone was receiving a 50-minute call while the other remained off. The volunteers weren't able to tell which, if either, of the phones was switched on, due to muting. The group found a 7 per cent increase in activity in regions of the brain near the phone's antenna when the phone was receiving a call (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 305, p 808). Volkow says it is too early to tell whether this is good or bad for the brain. More From New Scientist Curious mathematical law is rife in nature (New Scientist) Human sex from the inside out (New Scientist) Promoted Stories Recommended by
Tumours could be the ancestors of animals - health - 11 March 2011 CANCER remains a formidable foe even 40 years after Richard Nixon officially declared war on it. A new and controversial hypothesis now offers hope that the war can ultimately be won. It suggests tumours have a limited ability to evade modern therapies - a consequence of the idea that cancer is our most distant animal ancestor, a "living fossil" from over 600 million years ago. Some cancers evolve resistance to a treatment within a few years. Astrobiologists Charles Lineweaver at the Australian National University in Canberra and Paul Davies at Arizona State University in Tempe have an alternative explanation. Their hypothesis builds on an old idea that suggests a link between cancer and the origin of multicellular animals, sometime before 600 million years ago. Cancer is thought to be triggered by a malfunction of the genes that try to hold back this uncontrolled replication. The hypothesis helps to explain some of the more unusual features of tumours, says Lineweaver. (YouTube)
Half of Germany's doctors prescribe placebos - health - 13 March 2011 PRESCRIPTIONS of placebos are booming in Germany and Switzerland, reveals a report released last week by the German Medical Association (GMA). For example, 53 per cent of the doctors from the Medical University of Hannover said they would prescribe placebos such as vitamin pills and homeopathic remedies. Half the doctors in a national Swiss survey agreed. Their use of such treatments contrasts with the UK, where homeopathic treatments have been rejected by scientists. However, "physicians should be made aware of the value of the placebo effect in the daily treatment of patients", says Christoph Fuchs, chief executive of the GMA. Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get: New Scientist magazine delivered every week Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - a benefit only available to subscribers Great savings from the normal price Subscribe now! More From New Scientist Pop star's cancer prompts surge in screenings (New Scientist) WHO accused of huge HIV blunder (New Scientist)