Brain health is a rapidly expanding field. WHO’s position paper on optimizing brain health across the life course is a technical complement to the recently-adopted Intersectoral global action plan on epilepsy and other neurological disorders 2022–2031. Many determinants are known to affect brain health at different stages of life. The …
Take a look at this scenario: researchers trying to trace the causes of the Bosnian war, in deficiencies in seratonin-reuptake mechanisms, in the brain of the Radovan Karadzic(Bosnian Serb leader), or studying a corrupt politician in a bid to identify the genes that make him corrupt. The emerging synthesis of …
Another viral maniac has claimed 200 lives -- including those of 75 children below the age of 10 -- in the Muzaffarpur district of Bihar. The state's health department officials of suspect that the culprit is viral encephalitis, which leads to inflammation of the brain tissues and subsequent brain damage. …
Try defining consciousness and, like the proverbial 6 blind men trying to describe an elephant, you end up with an embarrassment of choices. Is it a complex symphony created by a neural orchestra, a grand equation arrived at by the logical computations of the brain, a confidential world authored by …
Is consciousness merely a ghost conjured by neurons? During the last decade or so, the idea that inner speech, or the human mind's ability to talk to itself, could fashion consciousness, has made a marked dent on psychologists' perceptions about consciousness. Support for this idea is flowing in from diverse …
Is consciousness unique to us or are animals also conscious of their existence? In her latest book Through Our Eyes Only? Mario Stamp Dawkins, a lecturer at Oxford University, makes a careful case for the conscious chicken, marshalling evidence from years of research into the way chickens behave. Her main …
While neuroscientists look for the secret of consciousness in thinking, a psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has put forward the concept that senses or feelings hold the key to the most elusive of the mind's mysteries. Thinking was considered uniquely human, until the British mathematician Alan Turing's hypothesis that thoughts could be …
EVEN the master organ - the brain - can at times get fooled. Sometimes a person feels that a limb that had been amputated is still there but is paralysed. The patient can actually feel all the parts of the phantom limb but cannot move it and this causes extreme …
There were no cures for degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease. A recent work in the UK offers a way out. A hormone, Interleukin-1 (IL-1), thought to benefit head injuries, is not benign. By administering a receptor antagonistic to IL-1, the neurodegeneration was reduced.
CAN the mind repair and revive a body in the terminal stages of entropy, flying in the face of just about every medical precedent? Peter Hettel was dying irrevocably of cancer of the sinus. He chose to take the road, so far, least taken: he chose to follow the almost …
Deepak Chopra, author of the American bestseller, Quantum Healing, uses the analogy of wave-particle duality in quantum physics to enunciate a theoretical basis of mind-body medicine. Light can behave like a wave A, or a particle B. In Newtonian physics, they are totally different, since waves are nonmaterial and particles …
Traditional Eastern philosophies view mind and body as different manifestations of the same life force. In the West, one of the earliest medical theories held that disease is a result of an imbalance of nonphysical humours. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, originator of the Hippocratic oath, taught that the body …
MEN and women not only think differently -- as Mary Wollestonecraft first said last century -- but also use different parts of their brain to do the same thing, says a group of American researchers. Bennit A Shywitz of the Department of Neurology, Yale University School of Medicine, Connecticut, and …
ALZHEIMER's disease can now be diagnosed much before the accursed. symptoms mature. Gary W Small of the University of California (Los Angeles School of Medicine), Allen D Roses of the Duke University School of Medicine arrived at a new method by ccmparing the results of positron emission tomography - PET …
A sudden migraine attack in a research subject undergoing brainscan has led to a serendipitous proof of a theory of the origin of the throbbing headache. Known as the "spreading depression" theory, it ascribes the excruciating pain to reduced blood supply throughout the brain and not just to the site …
British trade unions are now considering launching "hi-tech" campaigns. Unison, Britain's biggest trade union, spent US $480,000 last year developing a software system called "Local Negotiator" to help negotiators to do longer campaigns. It deals with decentralised bargaining across the public services networks. By using electronic communications and database, the …
Why do human beings and some other species find symmetrical patterns more appealing than asymmetrical ones? Two research teams working independently offer an explanation: the sensory bias towards symmetry is part of the development of the perceptual ability of the brain and nervous system (Nature, Vol 372, No 6502). While …
LONG perplexed by the causes of more than a thousand brain disorders, neuroscientists are now increasingly finding that genes are often the culprits. Delving deep into the brain's molecular structure, scientists have identified the genetic defects that are responsible for 40 disorders of the nervous system and have a good …
Tissue from the gut transplanted into the brain could help repair nerve and brain disorders, and halt the slow degeneration seen in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, says Geoffrey Burnstock of the University College of London (New Scientist, Vol 139, No 1890). Burnstock's work focusses on the 100 million nerve cells …
A COMMON parasitic disease of the human nervous system, neurocysticercosis, is often mistaken for tuberculosis of the brain. And, because doctors are unable to distinguish between the two, the disease claims numerous lives each year. But now, scientists at the Astra Research Centre India and the National Institute for Mental …
HEAVY metal music buffs who are compulsive hand-bangers need beware because jerking the head to the beat could cause severe injury to their necks (New Scientist, Vol 139, No 1887). Marilyn Kassirer, a neurologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, studied 11 girls and six boys who admitted to …
