Word: neural
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...crown of his head. Rezai then threads a wire just 4 microns thick--or four-thousandths of a millimeter--into Stipp's brain. Guided in part by CT scans and in part by real-time readings of electrical activity that the probe encounters as it passes different neural structures, surgeons aim for the subthalamic nucleus (STN), an olive-size clump of tissue deep in the basal ganglia that helps govern motor control. For much of the morning, Stipp's right arm has been shaking violently enough to rock the table...
...Joseph Fins, medical ethicist at Weill Cornell and a principal researcher on the recent study, is untroubled by that, arguing that the very condition that eliminates the ability to consent is the one the surgery seeks to correct. His position is hard to challenge. A patient for whom the neural lights go on for the first time in eight years may react in a lot of ways, but he's unlikely to insist he should have been left in the dark...
...second experiment was conducted at Ecole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne in Switzerland, by a team including neurologist Olaf Blanke, whose work with out-of-body experiences suggests that their neural underpinnings reside in the brain's temporo-parietal junction. Blanke and his colleagues had participants watch their own backs being stroked - either through a video feed coming live to their eyes or through one coming slightly out of synch. Afterward, the participants were blindfolded and asked to return to their original place in the room; on average, those who had had the in-synch physical stimuli - and, thus, the real...
Saxena, who has conducted extensive scanning research, has even come to recognize the neural fingerprint that distinguishes one less common type of OCD behavior--hoarding--from better-known ones. Hoarders who live alone have been known to crowd themselves into small areas of their home, with clear paths left from sofa to kitchen to bathroom, and the rest piled high with debris. When Saxena scanned the brains of these highly particular people, he found that they had equally particular abnormalities. Instead of hyperactivity in any area, they had reduced activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, the part of the brain...
...tics and OCD are probably the result of an autoimmune response, in which the body begins attacking its own healthy tissue. Blood tests of kids with strep-related tics and OCD have turned up antibodies hostile to neural tissue, particularly in the brain's caudate nucleus and putamen, regions associated with reinforcement learning. "There certainly seems to be an epidemiological relationship there," says Dr. Cathy Budman, associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at New York University, "but what it means needs to be further investigated...