When's the last time you were happy to hear the phrases "some assembly required" or "your call is important to us?" And for that matter, what exactly is an economic adjustment, a broad abstraction or sound science?

According to Dr. Paul Wasserman, professor emeritus and founding dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, these deceptive phrases are good examples of what can be called doublespeak, weasel words, or even gobbledygook.

Wasserman says we are bombarded with examples of doublespeak ranging from the politically correct to the downright annoying from corporations, the media and politicians.

He has parlayed his interest in gobbledygook into a new book co-authored with Don Hausrath, who also has ties to the university as a former adjunct faculty member at the College of Information Studies. Wasserman and Hausrath have translated over 1,200 examples of doublespeak in Weasel Words: The Dictionary of American Doublespeak,(Capital Books) scheduled for release in November (2005).

University of Maryland News
19 October 2005

In a study designed to isolate the root causes of violent behavior, Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers found that young teens who witnessed gun violence were more than twice as likely as non-witnesses to commit violent crime themselves in the following years. The study will appear in the May 27 issue of Science.

"Based on this study's results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease," says Felton Earls, MD, HMS professor of social medicine and principal investigator of the study and of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.

"Preventing one violent crime may prevent a downstream cascade of infections. And the lessons learned in Chicago should be broadly applicable. Generalizing this to any large city should be valid," Earls said.

The study, a five-year project that included interviews of over 1,500 children and teenagers from 78 Chicago neighborhoods, used statistical advances and extremely detailed information about the study subjects to go beyond the correlations and associations typically used by social scientists to determine violent behavior.

"We have a broad range of factors, and a long course of study, so we can tease out the causal mechanisms," said first author Jeffrey Bingenheimer, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan who will be joining the Harvard School of Public Health in September as Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar.

Previous work has shown that a large network of factors pushes or pulls young people away from or into violent crime. Researchers suspected that exposure to violence in the community played a role, but many argued that a common factor, perhaps in family structure or personality, might be the common cause of both exposure to violence and later acts of violence. Demonstrating cause and effect with a controlled experiment, deliberately exposing some children to mayhem, would be ethically impossible.

But by grouping together and comparing teens with similar likelihood of exposure, some of whom were and some of whom were not actually witnesses to violence, the researchers were able to isolate the independent contribution made by seeing gun violence. And it turned out to be large, swamping other single factors like poverty, drug use, or being raised by a single parent.

The researchers studied the subject teens at three points in their adolescence. Initially they and their caregivers were intensively interviewed and data was collected about their families, personalities, neighborhoods, school performance, and many other factors; this allowed the researchers to group the teens by their propensity to witness gun violence. Two years later, the subjects were interviewed to see which of them had actually seen someone being shot, or shot at. Finally, almost three years further on, they were interviewed again to determine who had participated in gang violence or other violent actions.

After finding that witnessing violence more than doubled the risk that teens would violently offend, the team looked at their statistics to check whether an unknown factor could be hiding from them. They found that something significant would have to be at work to change the findings substantially, and it would have to be uncorrelated with the factors they did examine. "And honestly, it's very difficult to think what we might have left out," Earls said, pointing to the 153 variables that were embraced in the study.

There is no shortage of medical ways to view urban violence, but the challenge for social medicine researchers is to choose the best one - is violence a product of families, akin to a hereditary disorder? Or is violence like an environmental contaminant, lurking in some communities and leaving others unscathed? Based this study's results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, Earls feels the best model may be an socially contagious disease.

This study was part of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a major interdisciplinary study aimed at deepening society's understanding of the causes and pathways of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, substance abuse, and violence. The firearm violence study was funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Harvard Medical School News Release
26 May 2005

First-ever images of living human retinas have yielded a surprise about how we perceive our world. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people--by up to 40 times--yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week's journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.

"We were able to precisely image and count the color-receptive cones in a living human eye for the first time, and we were astonished at the results," says David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical Optics and director of the Center for Visual Science. "We've shown that color perception goes far beyond the hardware of the eye, and that leads to a lot of interesting questions about how and why we perceive color."

Williams and his research team, led by postdoctoral student Heidi Hofer, now an assistant professor at the University of Houston, used a laser-based system developed by Williams that maps out the topography of the inner eye in exquisite detail. The technology, known as adaptive optics, was originally used by astronomers in telescopes to compensate for the blurring of starlight caused by the atmosphere.

Williams turned the technique from the heavens back toward the eye to compensate for common aberrations. The technique allows researchers to study the living retina in ways that were never before possible. The pigment that allows each cone in the human eye to react to different colors is very fragile and normal microscope light bleaches it away. This means that looking at the retina from a cadaver yields almost no information on the arrangement of their cones, and there is certainly no ability to test for color perception. Likewise, the amino acids that make up two of the three different-colored cones are so similar that there are no stains that can bind to some and not others, a process often used by researchers to differentiate cell types under a microscope.

Imaging the living retina allowed Williams to shine light directly into the eye to see what wavelengths each cone reflects and absorbs, and thus to which color each is responsive. In addition, the technique allows scientists to image more than a thousand cones at once, giving an unprecedented look at the composition and distribution of color cones in the eyes of living humans with varied retinal structure.

Each subject was asked to tune the color of a disk of light to produce a pure yellow light that was neither reddish yellow nor greenish yellow. Everyone selected nearly the same wavelength of yellow, showing an obvious consensus over what color they perceived yellow to be. Once Williams looked into their eyes, however, he was surprised to see that the number of long- and middle-wavelength cones--the cones that detect red, green, and yellow--were sometimes profusely scattered throughout the retina, and sometimes barely evident. The discrepancy was more than a 40:1 ratio, yet all the volunteers were apparently seeing the same color yellow.

"Those early experiments showed that everyone we tested has the same color experience despite this really profound difference in the front-end of their visual system," says Hofer. "That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism--some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is."

In a related experiment, Williams and a postdoctoral fellow Yasuki Yamauchi, working with other collaborators from the Medical College of Wisconsin, gave several people colored contacts to wear for four hours a day. While wearing the contacts, people tended to eventually feel as if they were not wearing the contacts, just as people who wear colored sunglasses tend to see colors "correctly" after a few minutes with the sunglasses. The volunteers' normal color vision, however, began to shift after several weeks of contact use. Even when not wearing the contacts, they all began to select a pure yellow that was a different wavelength than they had before wearing the contacts.

"Over time, we were able to shift their natural perception of yellow in one direction, and then the other," says Williams. "This is direct evidence for an internal, automatic calibrator of color perception. These experiments show that color is defined by our experience in the world, and since we all share the same world, we arrive at the same definition of colors."

Williams' team is now looking to identify the genetic basis for this large variation between retinas. Early tests on the original volunteers showed no simple connection among certain genes and the number and diversity of color cones, but Williams is continuing to search for the responsible combination of genes.

University of Rochester Press Release
25 October 2005

What difference does it make if a prosecutor describes a defendant as a “murderer” or as “someone who commits murder?” In some cases, those few words could mean the difference between life and death.
   
New research by Vanderbilt University psychologist Jessica Giles reveals that beliefs about people who have committed violent acts are strongly influenced by the words used to describe those people.

“Noun labels have a powerful influence on our thoughts and beliefs about others. In the criminal justice system, potential jurors who repeatedly hear a defendant being called a ‘strangler’ in the press might be more likely to support a death sentence for that defendant,” Giles, assistant professor of psychology in the Vanderbilt Peabody College of Education and Human Development, said. “That these labels might also be used to manipulate, inflame or prejudice the general public is of substantial interest in light of recent political rhetoric concerning ‘terrorists’ and ‘evildoers.’”

Giles’ recent research found that both children and adults are more likely to have a negative, fixed view of people described with a noun, such as “evildoer” or “murderer,” than a person described as “someone who does evil things” or “someone who commits murder.” Giles presented the research at the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society in San Diego Oct. 21.
 
 “We use nouns generally to describe things whose essential nature does not change: brick, house, dog,” Giles said. “We learn at a very early age that nouns are used to describe something’s fundamental character. As a result, when we hear a person being described with a noun—murderer, sex offender, criminal—we tend to automatically infer that that person cannot and will not change.”

Giles has conducted multiple studies examining the impact on adults and children of using nouns to describe violence and aggression. In a recent study, 90 adults were given surveys about what they believe causes violence, their perceptions of the effectiveness of criminal rehabilitation and their attitudes toward legal sanctions. In one version, the survey questions used the word “murderer”; questions in the other version used “people who commit murder.” She found that participants whose surveys used the term  “murderer” were more likely to respond that the person described is inherently violent and will not change, more likely to endorse punitive legal sanctions and less likely to view rehabilitation as effective.

Giles then looked at the impact of noun labels on participants’ attitudes toward Megan’s Law, which mandates that people convicted of certain classes of sex crimes register their whereabouts when released from prison. She found that participants were significantly more likely to endorse the law when questions were posed using the noun label “sex offender” than when using the phrase “commits sex offenses.”

Giles found that the effect of noun labels is also strong in children. In one study, preschoolers who heard a character described as an “evildoer” were more likely to infer stability over time and resistance to intervention than were children who heard a character described as someone who “who does evil things whenever he can.” The same held true in additional work using the label “bully.”

The research strongly suggests that children use nouns as powerful cues for making sense of people and their behavior.

“In addition to demonstrating that noun labels can influence adults’ beliefs and attitudes, this study also indicates that the way we talk to our children about violence and aggression has an early and lasting impact,” Giles said. “We know that the use of labels like “bully” to describe children who have misbehaved can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to focus on changing the behavior and building the child’s strengths as opposed to pigeonholing him or her based on a label.”

Vanderbilt News Service
21 October 2005

A synthetic substance similar to ones found in marijuana stimulates cell growth in regions of the brain associated with anxiety and depression, pointing the way for new treatments for these diseases, according to University of Saskatchewan medical research published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Xia Zhang, an associate professor in the U of S neuropsychiatry research unit, led the team that tested the effects of HU-210, a potent synthetic cannabinoid similar to a group of compounds found in marijuana. The synthetic version is about 100 times as powerful as THC, the compound responsible for the high experienced by recreational users.

The team found that rats treated with HU-210 on a regular basis showed neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. This region of the brain is associated with learning and memory, as well as anxiety and depression.

The effect is the opposite of most legal and illicit drugs such as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine.

“Most ‘drugs of abuse’ suppress neurogenesis,” Zhang says. “Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis.”

Current theory states that depression may be sparked when too few new brain cells are grown in the hippocampus. It is unclear whether anxiety is part of this process, but if true, HU-210 could offer a treatment for both mood disorders by stimulating the growth of new brain cells.

But Zhang cautions that HU-210 is only one of many cannabinoids. His previous work with marijuana shows that while the plant may contain medicinal compounds, they come in the same package as those that cause symptoms such as acute memory impairment, addiction, and withdrawal. Also, the HU-210 used in the study is highly purified.

“This is a very potent cannabinoid oil,” Zhang says. “It’s not something that would be available on the street.”

Marijuana has been used for recreational and medicinal purposes for centuries, evoking public interest and controversy along the way. As a medicine, the plant is used to ease pain in multiple sclerosis patients, combat nausea in cancer patients, and stimulate appetite in people afflicted with AIDS. It has also been used to treat epilepsy and stroke.

Zhang’s work is the latest product of the U of S Neural Systems and Plasticity Research Group (http://www.usask.ca/neuralsystems/group.htm), a multidisciplinary effort by researchers from the Colleges of Arts and Science, Engineering, Kinesiology, Medicine, Pharmacy and Nutrition, and Veterinary Medicine. The group collaborates to study the function of neural systems, from nerves to brain, in living organisms. In particular, they look at how these systems change over time with experience.

Press Release
Univ. of Saskatchewan
13 October 2005

A new Memorial-based study is the first to systematically mark the onset of "childhood amnesia" in children rather than adults. The research shows that by our tenth birthday our early pre-school memories have receded into an inaccessible past.

It's a result, the lead researcher says, that further deepens the mystery around the fate of our earliest autobiographical memories.

"I expected that they would differ, but there's a striking similarity in the age of the earliest memory for adults and ten-year-olds," says Dr. Carole Peterson, a psychologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her study, funded by NSERC, was published in the August issue of the journal Memory.

The results extend what Dr. Peterson calls the paradox of surrounding childhood amnesia – adults’ inability to recall autobiographical events that occurred before the age of four. Four- and three-year-olds can readily recall events from their second year. Yet, by the age of ten these earliest memories have receded behind what's been dubbed the "reminiscence bump."

"We don't have any good models to explain this. The memories were there and had been verbally accessible. So, why aren't they there any more?" says Dr. Peterson, who since the 1970s has explored the dynamics of children's autobiographical memories.

For this study, Dr. Peterson and undergraduate students Valerie Grant and Lesley Boland asked 136 participants ages six to 19 for their earliest memories. It's a sample size that Dr. Peterson says provides statistically significant results.

The researchers found that six- to nine-year-olds recalled earlier events (from when they were about three) than did older children. However, there were no differences in the age of earliest memory among the older groups. Their earliest memories were from about three and a half years of age. Thus, by ten years old, participants’ memories had entered an "adult" state of remembering.

So what are our earliest memories?

While previous researchers have found that a large number of adults' earliest memories are emotion laden, Dr. Peterson's group "found that the majority of the early memories were about relatively mundane experiences." These ranged from the memory of looking at a flower growing out of a crack in the pavement to walking across a narrow bridge over a river. Only teenaged girls 14 to 19 had a preponderance (about 40 per cent) of negative first memories.

"It's not at all clear why some things get into long-term memory and some do not," says Dr. Peterson.

The researchers also found few differences between age groups in how earliest events are remembered. All of the participants recalled events with about the same level of narrative complexity, generally describing a "snapshot of a moment in time."

"Perhaps it’s the level of narrative skill possessed at the age at which the memory was encoded, not the current narrative skill, that determines the structure of a recollection," write the authors.

The research is part of Dr. Peterson's larger, ongoing research on children's autobiographical memories. The present findings have prompted a collaborative study exploring the earliest memories of autistic children to determine the role of self-awareness – one possible factor put forward by some researchers – in determining the onset of childhood amnesia. Autistic children are thought to lack a strong sense of self.

While the bulk of our pre-school memories will surely slip over the memory threshold, Dr. Peterson says that parents can play a role in determining which of their children's memories become lifelong ones. The more parents talk to children about particular experiences, the greater the chance that this verbal reinforcement will extend early memories.

"Talking a lot about your experiences, encoding them in language, has an impact on preserving the memory, there's no doubt about that," says Dr. Peterson. "But this doesn't solve the mystery of why it is that something that you could remember and talk about at one stage, disappears later."

Memorial University of Newfoundland
4 October 2005

Commuting is never fun, and is almost always stressful, in part because we often have no control over what happens to us. But everyday we get in our car, or board the train or bus, and make our way to work, having become accustomed to this stress, not realizing that this stress may have a measurable affect on our brain.

Although we do not yet know if this is the case for humans, new research in rats from the laboratory of Rockefeller University’s Bruce McEwen, Ph.D., shows that chronic, uncontrollable stress of repeated confinement leads to gradual changes in brain structure over weeks. Yet, even a single acute stress of putting a rat in a tube where it cannot move freely also causes a structural change in the brain, not immediately but over days, along with higher levels of anxiety. These results may help scientists understand what is happening in the human brain during post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders and depressive illness.

In earlier studies, McEwen and colleagues had looked at changes in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain that respond to repeated, confinement stress and which are important in memory storage and retrieval. Turning to a different area of the brain called the amygdala, which is thought to play a role in fear and anxiety memories, they wanted to see if it too was involved in processing stressful experiences. Indeed they found that repeated stress increased anxiety as well as a form of aggression.

“Understanding how the whole nervous system functions, how the different areas of the brain interact, is vital to understanding the neurological basis of depressive illness and anxiety disorders,” says McEwen, who is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller. “And we knew of some evidence that the neurons in the amygdala are more active in depression and anxiety disorders.”

“The new paper, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Sumantra Chattarji’s laboratory in Bangalore, India, and MIT, shows that even a single stressful event in these animals can have a measurable and delayed influence on the architecture of their brains, and on their behavior,” adds McEwen. “We would like to think that these findings might become relevant in understanding conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.”

The follow-up of this paper is under investigation in collaborative studies with investigators at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and New York University under a National Institute of Mental Health Conte Center Grant for the Neurobiology of Fear and Anxiety. Further studies in the McEwen lab seek to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms for these changes, including the role of stress hormones.

The research, published in the June 28 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was supported by The Wellcome Trust.

The figure is famous: a deceptively simple line drawing that at first glance resembles a vase and, at the next, a pair of human faces in profile. When you look at this figure, your brain must rapidly decide what the various lines denote. Are they the outlines of the vase or the borders of two faces? How does your brain decide?

It does so in a fraction of a second via special nerve circuits in the brain's visual center that automatically organize information into a "whole" even as an individual's gaze and attention are focused on only one part, according to Johns Hopkins researchers writing in a recent issue of the journal Neuron.

"Our paper answers the century-old question of the basis of subconscious processes in visual perception, specifically, the phenomenon of figure-ground organization," said Rudiger von der Heydt, a professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind-Brain Institute. "Early in the 20th century, the Gestalt psychologists postulated the existence of mechanisms that process visual information automatically and independently of what we know, think or expect. Since then, there has always been the question as to whether these mechanisms actually exist. They do. Our work suggests that the system continuously organizes the whole scene, even though we usually are attending only to a small part of it."

The report, based on recordings of nerve cells in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys, suggests that this automatic processing of images is repeated each time an individual looks at something new, usually three to four times per second. What's more, the brain provides what von der Heydt calls "a sophisticated program" to select and process the information that is relevant at any given moment.

"The result of this organization is an internal data structure, quite similar to a database, that allows the attention mechanism to work efficiently," von der Heydt said. "An image can be compared with a bag of thousands of little Lego blocks in chaotic order. To pay attention to an object in space, the visual system first has to arrange this bag of blocks into useful 'chunks' and provide threads by which one or the other chunk can be pulled out for further processing."

He noted that the research provides the theoretical foundation that might one day lead to better diagnosis and treatment of human brain disorders.

"The last decades have seen rapid progress in the neurosciences at a very broad front, particularly at the molecular and cellular levels, and this progress makes it increasingly clear that we still lack sufficient understanding of brain function at the 'system level,'" he said. "We need to understand the basis of mental processes. Single cell recording in animals is only one approach to this formidable task. It is complemented by new brain imaging techniques, traditional psychophysics, psychology and computational and theoretical neuroscience. ... Understanding the function of the visual cortex will help to interpret neurological symptoms in diseases that produce disorders of vision."

This work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

The paper, "Figure and Ground in Visual Cortex: V2 Combines Stereoscopic Cues with Gestalt Rules" appeared in the July 7, 2005, issue of Neuron (Volume 47).

A research team led by UC Irvine neuroscientists has identified how the brain processes and stores emotional experiences as long-term memories. The research, performed on rats, could help neuroscientists better understand why emotionally arousing events are remembered over longer periods than emotionally neutral events, and may ultimately find application in treatments for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The study shows that emotionally arousing events activate the brain’s amygdala, the almond-shaped portion of the brain involved in emotional learning and memory, which then increases a protein called “Arc” in the neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in processing and enabling the storage of lasting memories. The researchers believe that Arc helps store these memories by strengthening the synapses, the connections between neurons.

The study appears in [26 July 2005] issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Emotionally neutral events generally are not stored as long-term memories,” said Christa McIntyre, the first author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior in UCI’s School of Biological Sciences, working with James L. McGaugh, research professor and a fellow at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. “On the other hand, emotionally arousing events, such as those of September 11, tend to be well-remembered after a single experience because they activate the amygdala.”

In their experiments, the researchers placed a group of rats in a well-lit compartment with access to an adjacent dark compartment. Because rats are nocturnal and prefer dark environments, they tended to enter the dark compartment. Upon doing so, however, they were each given a mild foot-shock – an emotional experience that, by itself, was not strong enough to become a long-lasting memory. Some of the rats then had their amygdala chemically stimulated in order to determine what role it played in forming a memory of the experience.

When they placed the rats that received both the mild foot-shock and the amygdala stimulation back in the well-lit compartment, the researchers found the rats tended to remain there, demonstrating a memory for the foot shock they had received in the dark compartment. These rats, the researchers found, also showed an increase in the amount of the Arc protein in the hippocampus. On the other hand, rats that received only the mild foot-shock and no amygdala stimulation showed no increase in Arc protein. When placed in the well-lit compartment, they tended to enter the dark compartment, suggesting they didn’t remember the foot shock.

“In a separate experiment, we chemically inactivated the amygdala in rats very soon after they received a strong foot-shock,” McIntyre said. “We found the increase in Arc was reduced and these rats showed poor memory for the foot shock despite its high intensity. This also shows that the amygdala is involved in forming a long-term memory.”

The brain is extremely dynamic, McIntyre explained, with some genes in the brain, called “immediate early genes,” changing after every experience. “We know the level of the immediate early gene that makes the Arc protein increases in the brain, simply in response to an exposure to a new environment,” she said. “Our findings show that this gene makes more Arc protein in the hippocampus only if the experience is emotionally arousing or important enough to activate the amygdala and to be remembered days later.”

The researchers were surprised to find no change in the gene that produced the Arc protein when the rat’s amygdala was stimulated. “We weren’t expecting the gene to be uncoupled from the Arc protein,” McIntyre said. “We thought an activation of the amygdala would create more gene activation in the hippocampus. But we saw the same amount of the gene in the rats, regardless of the amygdala treatment. It was the Arc protein, created by the gene, that was different. This gives us new insight into the way lasting memories are stored.”

The research was supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health. In addition to McIntyre and McGaugh, co-authors of the study include Oswald Steward, UCI; Teiko Miyashita, Kristopher D. Marjon and John F. Guzowski, the University of New Mexico Health Science Center; and Barry Setlow, Texas A&M University.

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UCI Press Release
26 July 2005

Scientists have found that the site in the brain that controls language in right-handed people shifts with aging—a discovery that might offer hope in the treatment of speech problems resulting from traumatic brain injury or stroke.

The shift was documented by researchers led by Jerzy Szaflarski, MD, PhD, assistantResearch by Jerzy Szaflarski, MD, PhD, and Scott Holland, PhD, will appear in the February issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping.professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, and Scott Holland, PhD, professor in the UC departments of biomedical engineering, pediatrics and radiology. Dr. Holland also heads the Pediatric Brain Imaging Research Program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Their results will be published in the February 2006 edition of the journal Human Brain Mapping.

While the site of language activity in right-handed people is originally the left side of the brain, the researchers report, starting as early as age 5 language gradually becomes a function shared by both sides. Between the ages of about 25 to 67, the site becomes more evenly distributed, until language activity can be measured in both hemispheres simultaneously.

This, the researchers say, may explain why young children who have had a large portion of one side of the brain surgically removed often recover completely.

“This knowledge may give new hope for rehabilitation of brain function in adults after stroke or traumatic brain injuries,” said Dr. Szaflarski. “The fact that language adaptability is seen even in the older people supports the notion that these patients can be rehabilitated and returned to productive life, possibly even after a devastating stroke.

”Scientists have long thought that the hemisphere or side of the brain that controls language and speech is determined before birth. Most people are right-handed and demonstrate more activity during language or speech in the left hemisphere of the brain. In left-handed people language centers are located more symmetrically.

Drs. Szaflarski and Holland studied brain activity in 177 right-handed children and adults aged 5 to 67 at Cincinnati’s University Hospital and Cincinnati Children’s using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique shows brain activity, in this case language tasks such as reading or speaking, in a specific color.

“Our research revealed that language activity in the brain increases in the dominant hemisphere from age 5 until about 25,” Dr. Szaflarski said, “which may be related to improving linguistic skills and maturation of the central nervous system.

"We observed that the nondominant side of the brain started helping the dominant side during reading or speaking from the age of 25 to 67," Dr. Szaflarski continued. “It’s possible that as cognitive systems began to fail in the dominant side of the brain, the other side or hemisphere needs to compensate. Our study showed that older people have a more balanced capacity for language, with activity on both sides of the brain.

”From around age 5 until about 25, said Dr. Szaflarski, language capacity in right-handers grows stronger in the left hemisphere of the brain. Similarly, fMRI shows increasing brain activity in the right hemisphere of left-handed persons until age 25.

"We were most interested in why this occurs, and the age at which the hemispheric language dominance began to decrease," said Dr. Szaflarski.

Drs. Szaflarski and Holland and their colleagues are also investigating how the brain handles language when it is damaged by a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

In children, Dr. Szaflarski said, the brain seems able to reorganize and shift the work load to the uninjured side. In adults, this doesn’t happen as easily.

With a view to developing better treatment for brain injury in children and adults, the researchers are now trying to learn at what age this transition occurs.

Dr. Szaflarski and Dr. Holland’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Neuroscience Institute of Cincinnati, a center of excellence in neuroscience specialties at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and University Hospital. The Neuroscience Institute, of which Dr. Szaflarski and Dr. Holland are members, is dedicated to patient care, research, education and the development of new medical technologies that may help patients with stroke, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, trauma, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders.

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University of Cincinnati Medical Center
Date: 10/5/2005
Sheryl Hilton

Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. To capture that expectant, fleeting moment with painstaking detail, science illustrator Graham Johnson based his elegant, highly accurate drawing on ultrathin micrographs of sequential brain slices.

Johnson's illustration is the winner of Science Magazine's 2005 Visualization Challenge.

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