Word: brained
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Neuroscientists were disappointed two years ago when a potential vaccine for Alzheimer's disease ended up causing severe inflammation of the brain. (One woman died several months after being vaccinated. Further study confirmed that her brain was inflamed, though some of her brain plaques, a symptom of Alzheimer's, seem to have shrunk.) Doctors are making progress toward finding ways to avoid the inflammation...
...some of the toxic molecules called free radicals that the body produces during metabolism. Cranberries may pack a one-two punch. They seem to boost levels of HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, which soaks up artery-clogging fat. They may also reduce the amount of damage to the brain that occurs after a stroke. Blueberries appear to lower the risk of heart disease by keeping arteries elastic and making them less prone to wear and tear when the body is under stress...
...madly in love? Thus began the announcement I posted on a bulletin board for psychology students on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York. I had come to believe that romantic love is a universal human feeling, produced by specific chemicals and networks in the brain. But exactly which ones? Determined to shed some light on this magic, I launched a multipart project in 1996 to collect scientific data on the chemistry and brain circuitry of romantic love...
...working hypothesis was that three related chemicals in the brain--dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin--play a role in romantic passion. I speculated that the feelings of euphoria, sleeplessness and loss of appetite as well as the lover's intense energy, focused attention and increased passion in the face of adversity might all be caused in part by heightened levels of dopamine or norepinephrine in the brain. Similarly, I believed that the lover's obsessive thinking about the beloved might be due to decreased brain activity of some type of serotonin. I also knew these three compounds were much more prevalent...
After a conversation with a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, I developed a scheme. I would collect data on brain activity while love-smitten subjects performed two separate tasks: looking at a photograph of his or her beloved and looking at a "neutral" photograph of an acquaintance who generated no positive or negative romantic feelings. Meanwhile, I would use a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to take pictures of the subject's brain. The fMRI machine records blood flow in the brain. It is based in part on a simple principle: brain cells that are active...