Word: neuroscientist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...overstimulates nearby NMDA receptors and kills their host cells. Nature may have designed NR2B-based receptors to taper off in adult brains for a reason. Some scientists fear that the altered mice may be prone to strokes. "You might worry about what happens when these animals get old," says neuroscientist Larry Squire of the University of California, San Diego...
...improves memory by increasing the flow of blood to the brain. Leading memory experts, however, are skeptical about ginkgo and other brain boosters. "Most of these products have not been investigated to any significant extent that would warrant the claims that are being made,'' says Dr. Ronald Petersen, a neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Other geriatricians are more blunt. All the hoopla, they say, is merely a case of the placebo effect run amuck: people want their memories to get better, so they do. Give them a sugar pill, and they probably wouldn't know the difference...
Surprisingly, most of his targets agree with Bruer--to a point. "It's quite true," says Dr. Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, "that there aren't any studies looking at brain development in young children." And Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, an educational organization whose advice-laden website is a target of Bruer's ire, acknowledges that "there have been some who have stretched the science...
...remarkable plasticity of the brain has put scientists in hot pursuit of novel ways to treat a host of ailments. "What we are is a product of learning progressions in the brain," says Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-founder of Scientific Learning. "A lot of people are thinking about how to use intensive training to remediate the impairments of mankind...
...detect clear sounds, as Scientific Learning maintains. The company's own studies have "never been done with proper controls" to test its theories, argues psychologist Michael Studdert-Kennedy, chairman of Haskins Laboratories, a leading center for the study of speech and language at Yale University. Replies Paula Tallal, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University's Newark, N.J., campus and a co-founder of Scientific Learning: "What matters in the end is, does it work? Not, do we agree on theory...