Discover Magazine | Alzheimer's

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH...

Image: A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D.

Paranormal Circumstances: One Influential Scientist's Quixotic Mission to Prove ESP Exists

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:40:00 -0400

On a winter afternoon last March, Daryl Bem stepped out of the psychology department building at Cornell University, dressed in a red parka and a woolen hat to fend off the icy wind. As he walked along the pavement, navigating mounds of snow and taking care not to step onto the slushy street, the well-bundled social psychologist looked like a man who might prefer staying safe within the boundaries, a man who might shun risk—proving once again the danger of mistaking surface for substance. The 73-year-old Bem has defied the norm throughout his intellectual life, burning every dogma he’s encountered in the pyre of his logic. Now, in the twilight of his career, he has committed what may be his most daring act of sacrilege: claiming the existence of precognition, the ability to sense future events. Maybe this time, his colleagues say, Daryl Bem has gone too far.

Bem made his mark as a psychologist four decades ago by proposing the then radical idea that people adjust their emotions after observing their own behavior–that we sometimes develop our attitudes about our actions only after the fact. The proposition challenged the prevailing wisdom of the 1960s that things worked the other way around, that attitude was the engine from which behavior emerged. Though counterintuitive, Bem’s theory has held up to scientific scrutiny in dozens of studies and is now enshrined in psychology textbooks.

Over the years, Bem cemented his reputation as a rebel by floating other controversial theories on topics such as personality and sexual orientation. His own personal life was also decidedly unconventional. Despite being married to a woman, Bem never hid from his family the fact that he is gay. A few years ago, he explained this conjugal conundrum in an Internet posting distinguishing between romantic love and sexual attraction, arguing that many individuals—like himself—fall in love with a person of the “wrong” gender.

Even in the context of a career of irreverence, there was little to suggest that Bem would end up defending the possibility of extrasensory perception, or ESP, which most mainstream scientists consider unworthy of serious inquiry. Through most of his career, he was as dubious about telepathy (mind reading) or precognition (seeing the future) as any of his colleagues...

Photograph: Shannon Taggart

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:05:00 -0400

When Ian Lipkin chose a career in infectious diseases, he envisioned hunting for pathogens in daring treks around the world. Though disappointed to learn that modern-day virus hunters work largely from the lab, he still wound up a pioneer. At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, then at the University of California, Irvine, and since 2001 as director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Lipkin has developed groundbreaking techniques that have helped a new generation of disease detectives sleuth out the infectious roots of mystery ills, chronic disease, and neuropsychiatric disorders like autism and OCD. Lipkin’s signature invention is a technology called Mass Tag PCR, which searches through large numbers of known viral and bacterial genomes to identify a culprit in a few hours. He often complements this test with others, including microbial detection microchips (GreeneChips) and gene sequencers that can complete an exhaustive search for known and unknown pathogens within a tissue sample in less than a day.

When DISCOVER features editor Pamela Weintraub interviewed Lipkin last year, he had to cut his workday short because his dog, Koprowski—a gift from Polish virologist Hilary Koprowski—was desperately sick. Lipkin had a treatment plan: not an antiviral drug or chemotherapy, but red meat. “It has antibiotics, it has growth hormone, it has everything. Koprowski’s my best friend in the world,” he explained before descending into the subway and heading home.

You were in the first class of men at Sarah Lawrence, where you studied anthropology, even shamanism. Yet you are known for hunting pathogens. How did that come about?
 I felt that if I went straight into cultural anthropology after college I’d be a parasite. I’d go someplace, take information about myths and ritual, and have nothing to offer. So I decided to become a medical anthropologist and try to bring back traditional medicines. Suddenly I found myself in medical school.

 But you didn’t become a medical anthropologist. Instead you studied neurological disease and infection. Why?
 By 1977 I had gotten a fellowship at the Institute for Neurology in London, where a professor named John Newsom-Davis was working on myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder characterized by weakness often so profound that people lose their ability to breathe. Back then, nobody really understood what the disorder was. John was trying something new, treating it with plasmapheresis...

Gallery | Ink Wants to Form Neurons, and an Artful Scientist Obliges

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:50:00 -0400

Click through to view gallery

The Brain: Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make?

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:50:00 -0400

Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain.

Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Hariri’s graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. “Okay, we’re done,” she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs off on his paperwork.

As he’s about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Ross’s brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. “So, am I sane?”

Hariri laughs noncommitally. “Well, that I can’t tell you.”

True enough: On its own, Ross’s brain can’t tell Hariri much. But a thousand brains? That’s another matter...

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:35:00 -0400

82.5: The percentage of children and young adults who exhibit significant symptoms of mental illness at some point between the ages of 9 and 21. The startling statistic comes from a collaborative study conducted by Duke University and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which surveyed 1,420 children over 12 years beginning in 1993. Investigators checked in up to nine times to test for anxiety, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive  disorder, and more. The results...

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:45:00 -0400

Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”

It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.

One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.

It wasn’t long before it hit him: “I hate my job, I’m sitting here, I’ve got a lab—I can try making some of these things myself. No one will even know what the hell I’m doing.” Arnold added the steroid precursors he would need to the regular list of laboratory chemicals he ordered through the company, and nobody was the wiser...

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:35:00 -0400

Marilyn  Monroe and Jane Russell appeared  outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre  to write their names and leave imprints  of their hands and high heels in the  wet concrete. Down on their knees,  supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen  Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the  events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the  rich recollections of color, smell, and sound?

After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain.

That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past.

“It’s amazing,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva...

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Gallery | Beauty & Brains: The Best of the Art of Neuroscience

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:30:00 -0400

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Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:00:00 -0400

The five-year-old ran into my exam room with his mother trailing behind. He wore a Transformers T-shirt and jeans that each bore signs of a recent encounter with a chocolate bar. Immediately he took a toy train apart and scattered the pieces all over the floor. “The kindergarten teacher said she doesn’t think Jason belongs in the class,” the mother said to me. “But we’re not sure.” Jason’s pediatrician had referred him to me because of his hyperactive behavior. “New patient to me,” her note said. “No old records available. Very hyperactive, difficult to examine, possible  developmental delay: refer to developmental pediatrician.”

Having been a general pediatrician for many years before specializing in developmental pediatrics, I sympathized with her. The 20 minutes allotted for a standard exam wasn’t nearly enough to try to figure out what was going on with this child.

Jason was now busy with a ball, but then quickly moved to a book and began turning the pages and pointing to every picture, labeling each one: “House! Duck! Train!” Then he was off to crash two trucks together.

His mother looked at him uncomfortably, clearly unsure whether she should try to guide him or let him alone. “It’s ok, nothing here is breakable,” I reassured her. “Tell me what he’s like at home.”

“He’s into everything, just like he is here,” she said. “He can’t sit still for a minute. That’s probably why the kindergarten teacher doesn’t think he belongs there. But...” She paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to say something...

Image: Shutterstock

The Brain: The Connections May Be the Key

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:00 -0400

If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains. There are no specimens floating in jars on the shelves. There are no electrodes plugged into the heads of sea slugs. Instead, I see a dozen young men gazing at monitors, some pushing their computer mice, others drawing tethered pens across digital tablets to manipulate 3-D images, each packed with more megabytes than a feature film on a Blu-ray Disc.

And there is Seung himself, gazing over the shoulder of postdoc Daniel Berger, whose monitor looks like a science fiction forest, with branches and trunks colored turquoise and cherry, floating unrooted in space. I almost find myself wondering when Seung’s next game will hit the stores.

But appearances to the contrary, Seung is an expert on the web of neurons that make up the brain. And the images he’s creating are part of an ambitious attempt to understand how the connections between those brain cells give rise to the mind. “How do you put together dumb cells and get something smart?” he asks.

Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion connections. It’s through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now...

Image: Each branch of each neuron is studded with hundreds of little spines. R. Schalek, B. Kasthuri, K. Hayworth, J. Tapia, J. Lichtman/Harvard and D. Berger, S. Seung/MIT

The Brain: The Troublesome Bloom of Autism

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:20:00 -0500

Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldn’t stand or walk. “My mother had to carry me everywhere,” he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength.

Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. “Through their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what you’d expect,” he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings.

When Courchesne wasn’t competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. “I understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children,” he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism...

Impatient Futurist: Good News, Spock—We're Getting Closer to a Universal Translator

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:45:00 -0500

Those of us for whom Star Trek serves as a benchmark for technological progress can only bemoan the fact that hopes for faster-than-light travel to other galaxies seem to be receding at warp speed, given that we no longer even have faster-than-sound travel to France. But I would prefer to focus on the bright side: We’re rapidly closing in on the Universal Translator, which means that when I do finally arrive in France, I’ll be able to communicate as easily as if I were on Earth.

The Universal Translator, of course, was a handheld device that  instantly converted Captain Kirk’s futuristically clipped English into the language of whichever vaguely humanoid alien was offering to buy him a blue drink. It is impossible to overemphasize the potential usefulness of such a device on a visit to France, whose vaguely humanoid populace turns Klingon when confronted by a nonspeaker of their primitive but pretty language. Imagine the delight of the garçon when I mumble into my translator, “Can you bring me a good California chardonnay to drown the stench of this cheese?” and out comes flawless French. And back from the device will come a translation of the waiter’s enthusiastic response.

In fact, I already have something surprisingly close to a Universal Translator in my pocket, courtesy of a growing number of automated spoken-language-translating services that run on smartphones. I’m not counting on getting my favorite blue drink in any bar in the world just yet: “These systems still make mistakes that a 4-year-old wouldn’t make,” says Ashish Venugopal, a researcher at Google who works on the company’s Google Translate service. But unlike most 4-year-olds, Google has about a googol million dollars to throw at the problem, and more computing power, too.

Some of that power is spent prowling the web 24/7 to find examples of text—on websites, in email, or anywhere else—that can be paired with translations of that text into another language. The pairs of documents are digested by Google’s computers in chunks of three or so words, with each chunk analyzed and matched to its best translation. Having built in this way a constantly growing database of millions of translation chunks, Google Translate is armed to take on any sentence, find the set of phrases that most closely matches it, and spit back the translation into any of 64 languages. You can go to www.translate.google.com to try the results. Go ahead, do it now. I’ll wait right here...

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:55:00 -0500

You won’t find more mentally ill mice per square mile anywhere than in Bar Harbor, Maine. Mice who seem anxious or depressed, autistic or schizophrenic—they congregate here. Mice who model learning disabilities or anorexia; mice who hop around as though your hyperactive nephew had contracted into a tiny fur ball; they are here too. Name an affliction of the human mind, and you can probably find its avatar on this sprucy, secluded island.

The imbalanced mice are kept under the strictest security, in locked wards at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical facility internationally renowned for its specially bred deranged rodents. Every day trucks carry away boxes and boxes of them for distribution to psychiatric researchers across the nation.

There are no visiting hours, because strangers fluster the mice and might carry in contagious diseases. The animals are attended only by highly qualified caregivers, people like neuroscientist Elissa Chesler. Sitting in her airy Jackson Lab office, accessible to germy and perturbing strangers, Chesler clicks open a series of photographs from a type of mouse personality test on her computer screen. The first picture shows a mouse sleeping on a nestlet, a stiff, square bed of compressed cotton. Mice typically gnaw vigorously at the cotton, shredding it to make soft igloos for sleeping and staying warm. The second image shows a mouse that has propped his nestlet against a wall, forming a makeshift lean-to. “When I see this guy, I’m thinking anxiety,” says Chesler, whose research delves into the genetics of stress. “This design isn’t trapping a lot of heat, but he’s secure under there.”

She smiles as she clicks open the last photo. “And here we have the ‘I can’t deal with it’ mouse,” she says. The image shows a mouse asleep, with his rigid nestlet balanced on his back. Personality, Chesler maintains, can be read from these nestlet styles more clearly than from a test of forced swimming or bar pressing...

The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:20:00 -0500

The mouse eye captures images via rods and cones in its retina. But behind that
gaze lies a third set of light-sensitive cells that contribute to behavior not to vision.

iStockphoto

There was no way the blind mice could see, yet somehow, they could. The year was 1923, and a Harvard grad student named Clyde Keeler had set out to compare eyes from different animals, starting with mice that he bred in his dorm room. Keeler cut open one mouse’s eye and put it under a microscope. Immediately he realized something was wrong. Missing from the eye was the layer of rods and cones, the photoreceptors that catch light. Turning back to his colony, Keeler realized that half of his animals were blind. Somehow a mutation had arisen, wiping out their rods and cones.

The mutation had blinded those mice with surgical precision, yet for reasons lost to history, Keeler got the strange idea to shine a light in their eyes anyway. Based on everything that scientists knew about mammalian eyes, nothing should have happened. After all, the mice had no way to capture light and relay it to the retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that normally pass visual signals on to the brain. And yet something did happen: The mouse pupils shrank.

Keeler struggled to find an explanation. “We may suppose that a rodless mouse will not see in the ordinary sense,” he wrote in one journal article. But for pupils to shrink, such mice had to have some kind of cell besides rods and cones—one that scientists knew nothing about—that could also capture light and send a signal to the brain.

How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:30:00 -0500

No matter what you do with it, it'll still look like Hogwarts.

Rip open that new LEGO set and your mind races at the possibilities! A simple repertoire of piece types, and yet you can build a ninja boat, a three-wheeled race car, a pineapple pizza, a spotted lion… The possibilities are limited only by your creativity and imagination. “Combine and create!”—that was the implicit war cry for LEGOs.

So how, I wonder, did LEGO so severely lose its way? LEGO now fills the niche that model airplanes once did when I was a kid, an activity whose motto would be better described as “Follow the instructions!” The sets kids receive as gifts today are replete with made-to-order piece types special to each set, useful in one particular spot, and often useless elsewhere. And the sets are designed for constructing some particular thing (a Geonosian Starfighter, a Triceratops Trapper, etc.), and you—the parent—can look forward to spending hours helping them through the thorough yet thoroughly exhausting pages.

LEGO appears to be doing very well for itself, and there’s no shame in helping to revolutionize model-building (and there’s an elegance to snapping together one’s models rather than gluing them together). But one has to wonder whether, at some deep philosophical level, the new LEGOs really are LEGOs at all, as they’re no longer the paragon of creative construction they once were and with which they’re still associated.

In fact, as I was bemoaning my kids’ LEGOs with the Guardian's Roger Highfield (and later with WIRED's Samuel Arbesman), it struck me that I have such data on LEGOs...

Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:00 -0500

This past summer, at an undisclosed location in a northeastern metropolis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to predict the future. There were no psychics or crystal balls, just a battery of sensors designed to determine human intention through the subtlest of changes in heart rate, gaze, and other physiological markers.

Together, the sensors are called Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, a $20 million federal project that aims to highlight airport passengers whose bodies betray hostile intentions. In theory, fast has the potential to detect terrorists in the final minutes before they act, but critics warn that the system may have other consequences, such as flagging innocent travelers through false positives while letting some with ill intent sneak by through false negatives. The DHS, for its part, maintains that fast is merely improving on a far older and more fallible crime predictor: human judgment.

About 3,000 DHS officers already roam the nation’s airports scanning for suspicious behavior and facial expressions in a program called Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques, or SPOT. The automated fast system is intended to supplement SPOT by catching signals that are undetectable to the naked eye. fast is not designed to replace the decision-making of human screeners, but government officials hope it will eventually be able to passively scan airport passengers and single out those worth pulling aside for additional screening...

Impatient Futurist: Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Teaching well is hard. i can cite my direct observations of the hundreds of victims of my occasional efforts over the years as a teacher of physics and writing. As I have stood lecturing brilliantly to a few dozen purportedly eager collegians, it has not escaped my attention that at any one time only three or four seem awake enough to keep up with their text messaging.

Clearly the problem is not the content or presentation style of my lecturing, which, as I may have neglected to mention, is brilliant, or so I was once assured by a student who stayed after class to ask for a sixth extension on an assignment. Then again, from what I recall of my college days, I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat at my professors’ lectures, either. And most of my fellow lecturers don’t report much different. Could the problem be with the nature of lecturing itself?

To find some answers, I posed this question directly to Carl Wieman, associate director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Wieman, to be blunt, knows zero. In fact, he won a Nobel Prize for his extraordinarily low achievement. During the mid-1990s in a University of Colorado physics lab, Wieman enlisted lasers to bring matter as close to absolute zero as anyone is likely to get—a temperature so low that atoms freeze together into quantum-mechanical clouds predicted by Einstein but never before observed. “That was challenging,” Wieman says. “But changing how people teach, that’s really hard.”

Wieman should know. Aside from having captained his share of undergraduate physics-for-poets courses, Wieman is now, in a sense, America’s First Science Teacher, in that President Obama took him on last year with the assignment of improving science education in America.

It’s no secret we’ve got some work to do along those lines. A widely accepted standardized test administered in 2009 to large samplings of high school students in industrialized countries found that U.S. students scored 23rd in science, with students from China scoring highest...

Mind Over Motor: Controlling Robots With Your Thoughts

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:20:00 -0500

Over recent months, in José del R. Millán’s computer science lab in Switzerland, a little round robot, similar to a Roomba with a laptop mounted on it (right), bumped its way through an office space filled with furniture and people. Nothing special, except the robot was being controlled from a clinic more than 60 miles away—and not with a joystick or keyboard, but with the brain waves of a paralyzed patient.

The robot’s journey was an experiment in shared control, a type of brain-machine interface that merges conscious thought and algorithms to give disabled patients finer mental control over devices that help them communicate or retrieve objects. If the user experiences a mental misfire, Millán’s software can step in to help. Instead of crashing down the stairs, for instance, the robot would recalculate to find the door...

Image courtesy of José Millán

The Brain: Sewing Audio to Video, and Rubber Hands Onto People

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:05:00 -0500

I don’t usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the  inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago.  While I was catching an old episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the actors’ voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement  of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didn’t care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they  were about to find a body. I didn’t care that the show’s trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then I’d switch to listening to them, and then I’d watch them speak again. I just couldn’t meld the two streams of information in my head.

Thanks to Netflix, I was confronted with one of the most crucial tricks that the human brain uses to make sense of the world: combining input from all five senses into a single, coherent experience, updated many times a second in virtually real time. Because the techniques our brains use to meld the senses are far from perfect, it turns out, we can fall prey to a variety of illusions—and to maddening confusion when Netflix delivers audio and video out of sync.

One of the most famous such illusions is known as the McGurk Effect, named for its discoverer, Harry McGurk, a developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey in England. In the 1970s he filmed people repeatedly making the sound ga. Then he had a new audio track laid over the film so that ga was replaced with the sound ba. The new audio and video were perfectly in sync. Many people who watched the movie were sure that the speakers were actually saying da, a different syllable entirely. If they closed their eyes, they heard the correct ba. When they opened their eyes, it became da again. (If you don’t know about the McGurk Effect, you may want to experience it via this very impressive video)...

Discover Magazine | Alzheimer's

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Paranormal Circumstances: One Influential Scientist's Quixotic Mission to Prove ESP Exists

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin

Gallery | Ink Wants to Form Neurons, and an Artful Scientist Obliges

The Brain: Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make?

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

Gallery | Beauty & Brains: The Best of the Art of Neuroscience

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

The Brain: The Connections May Be the Key

The Brain: The Troublesome Bloom of Autism

Impatient Futurist: Good News, Spock—We're Getting Closer to a Universal Translator

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors

How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities?

Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens

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