Word: brained
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...believe in god? Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe you can tell when someone is staring at the back of your head? Religious or not, Bruce Hood believes that this is all a result the way the brain is designed. In Supersense, he describes how adult superstitions and beliefs in a higher power all comes from our inherent need to find patterns and order in the world. Hood talked to TIME about superstitions, shared beliefs and why most people would not want to wear Jeffrey Dahmer's cardigan.(What happens when we die? Read the TIME interview...
...walking dead. Later this year, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin will star in the zom-com Zombieland. Max Brooks' best-selling zombie novel World War Z is being filmed by Marc Forster, the guy who directed Quantum of Solace. In comic books, the Marvel Zombies series features rotting, brain-eating versions of Spider-Man, Iron Man and the Hulk. The zombie video game Resident Evil 5 shipped 4 million copies during its first two weeks on the market. Michael Jackson's zombie video Thriller is coming to Broadway. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time...
...Certainly, many other parts of the brain govern concentration and attention, but the locus coeruleus does one other thing too: it regulates fever. Generations of parents of autistic kids have reported that when their child runs a fever, the symptoms of autism seem to abate. When the fever goes down, the symptoms return. In 2007, a paper in the journal Pediatrics reported on that phenomenon and confirmed that, yes, the parents' observations are right. What no one had done before, at least not formally, was tie it to the locus coeruleus - that is, until Drs. Dominick Purpura and Mark Mehler...
...theory, that blast of stress chemistry could alter the development of the fetal locus coeruleus, though Purpura is quick to point out that the study showing how cortisol can make it through the placenta was conducted in animals, not humans. Nonetheless, one day after their article in Brain Research Reviews was published, the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology published a study linking cortisol imbalance to Asperger's syndrome, a condition along the autism spectrum...
...this be used to help autistic kids? Nobody recommends inducing fevers to kick-start the locus coeruleus, since that could lead to all manner of side effects and other ills. Instead, Mehler and Purpura believe the likeliest answer is in medications that target noradrenaline brain receptors. "First, we should look at the signaling pathways in the region of the brain involved," Purpura says. "Then we could look at treating the receptor sites with some kind of pharmacotherapy." For once, the step that's missing from a proposal is the one that involves shouting about what's to blame...