A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors.

The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90% accurate at detecting deception, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences.

That compares with polygraphs that range from 80% to "no better than chance" at finding the truth, George said.

His results are to be published this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Implicit-memory tests are stronger predictors than the common Mini Mental exam; Alzheimer's may hurt attention well before obvious memory loss.

Two recent studies may help clinicians and researchers better predict and understand dementia of the Alzheimer's type early in its history. Both studies appear in the September issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Psychologists focus on early detection in part because current medications are useful only when given very early in the course of the disease.

In the first study, psychologists Pauline Spaan, PhD, and Jeroen Raaijmakers, PhD, from the University of Amsterdam in collaboration with neurologist Cees Jonker, MD, PhD, from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam analyzed the data on 119 participants in the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam, a large, population-based study of older people. The researchers visited older people in their homes and gave them memory tests loaded on laptop computers. Two years later, they compared the test scores of people who went on to develop Alzheimer's with the scores of those who stayed healthy.

The researchers analyzed memory components that included episodic (what happened; what did you hear or read); semantic (vocabulary, facts); and implicit (learning without awareness of learning, "priming"). Three tests were very good at predicting who would develop Alzheimer's by two years later. Participants for whom "priming" information didn't aid memory or whose learning wasn't aided by semantic knowledge -- were significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer's.

Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.

It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.

"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."

Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my lifetime," said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another one, and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite honest."

Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.

Dr. Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who are investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations experienced by Mr. King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that normally allow us to perceive music.

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

After I wrote about research showing that women have less appetite for competition than men do, a number of women wrote to inform me that they're just as competitive as any guy. If the tone of their letters is any indication, I have no doubt they are.

Nor do researchers doubt that such women exist. As Danica Patrick showed in the Indianapolis 500, some women can successfully compete with men at the highest level. But why aren't there more of them?

Discrimination is one big reason, because men have traditionally made the rules to suit themselves and keep out women. But if you think that leveling the playing field would eliminate gender disparities, consider an unintentional experiment conducted in the Scrabble world, which is hardly a hostile environment for women.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the top-ranked 50 players, typically about 45 are men.

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

If you walk into the office of a scientist, chances are you'll see a white board hanging on the wall covered in scrawls. A molecular biologist's white board might be covered by hideous tangles of protein chains. A geophysicist might doodle India crashing into southern Asia.

The scribbles of Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, are more metaphysical. Arrows travel from a pair of eyes into a cartoon brain, finally ending at the word "Apple." Another picture bluntly sums up the modern debate over free will, with a stick figure's head labeled "Brain," and two bubbles point toward it - one labeled "Judge" and the other "Neu" - short for neuroscience. Floating uncertainly off to one side is a third bubble that asks, "Mind?"

Big questions are Dr. Gazzaniga's stock in trade. In the 1980's he helped found cognitive neuroscience, a discipline designed to find out how the mind emerges from the brain. Today, at age 65, he continues to oversee a busy lab where brain scans offer clues to how we unconsciously create theories to explain the outer world and our inner lives.

A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week.

A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep.

The study was carried out by Julia Boyle at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues on behalf of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Irvine, California, US.

What Is Thought?

By Eric Baum

Copyright May, 2005

ISBN: 3540221395

By decoding signals coming from neurons, scientists at the California Institute of Technology have confirmed that an area of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPF) is involved in the planning stages of movement, that instantaneous flicker of time when we contemplate moving a hand or other limb. The work has implications for the development of a neural prosthesis, a brain-machine interface that will give paralyzed people the ability to move and communicate simply by thinking.

By piggybacking on therapeutic work being conducted on epileptic patients, Daniel Rizzuto, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Richard Andersen, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, was able to predict where a target the patient was looking at was located, and also where the patient was going to move his hand. The work currently appears in the online version of Nature Neuroscience.

Project Implicit represents a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington. While the particular purposes of each study vary considerably, most studies available at Project Implicit examine thoughts and feelings that exist either outside of conscious awareness or outside of conscious control. The range of studies should provide you with a great variety of experiences and an opportunity to think about topics that are very important to you, or unique issues that you have not had the occasion to think about before.

A leading expert in artificial intelligence and neural networks argues that cognition in humans and many animals occurs in a very different, non-algorithmic and less complex way than has been widely assumed until now.
Robert Hecht-Nielsen, an adjunct professor in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering, has also been a vice president of R&D at Fair Isaac Corporation since the company acquired a software firm he co-founded, HNC Software. He outlined his theory of the fundamental mechanism of cognition in a seminar on the UCSD campus yesterday, and details appear in the February issue of the journal Neural Networks, in an article titled “Cogent Confabulation.”

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

"I was quite focused," said Stenger. "It was also kind of fun."

The age of smart drugs is dawning. Modafinil is just one in an array of brain-boosting medications — some already on pharmacy shelves and others in development — that promise an era of sharper thinking through chemistry.

These drugs may change the way we think. And by doing so, they may change who we are.

Long-haul truckers and Air Force pilots have long popped amphetamines to ward off drowsiness. Generations of college students have swallowed over-the-counter caffeine tablets to get through all-nighters. But such stimulants provide only a temporary edge, and their effect is broad and blunt — they boost the brain by juicing the entire nervous system.

The new mind-enhancing drugs, in contrast, hold the potential for more powerful, more targeted and more lasting improvements in mental acuity. Some of the most promising have reached the stage of testing in human subjects and could become available in the next decade, brain scientists say.

A few months ago, as I trudged down the stairs of my office building, deep in my thoughts, I noticed a dark-haired woman waving to me from the window of her car. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her. Like quite a few others, she had slipped out of my mental Rolodex. In my brain, the synaptic traces that connected us had frayed. Yet again, I had misplaced an entire human being.

''So wonderful to see you,'' she said, inquiring by name after every member of my family, including the two dogs. Apparently she was not a casual acquaintance. Fending off panic, I proceeded through a mental list: Work? School? Synagogue? I couldn't visualize her in these places. I was about to cut and run with a quick ''nice to see you, too'' when the rear window slid down, revealing a toothy grin.

''We've been to the orthodontist,'' she said. The minute I saw Sam's freckled face, the mystery was solved. Our sons were best pals in nursery school and kindergarten. I had sat in her kitchen, discussing birthday parties. I remembered her backyard dotted with Little Tikes plastic play furniture. I knew what she did for work, and the name of her Portuguese nanny.

''Lisa,'' I said, as if her identity had never eluded me, ''it's terrific to see you.''

Why, as I edge toward the end of my 40's, has so much of what I know become impossible to access on demand? Where are the thoughts that spring forth in the shower but evanesce before they can be recorded, the mental lists that shed items on the way to the supermarket? The names of books and movies, actors and authors, le mot juste, the memory of social plans agreed upon in some calendarless situation -- what have become of these?