2013 – Page 9 – FPR-UCLA Program for Culture, Brain, Development, and Mental Health

BBC News – Mind Mapping: Inside the Brain’s Wiring (Human Connectome Project)

February 17, 2013/in Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research /by connie

We believe that these images [of fiber pathways] will be a rich source of biomarkers for diagnosis and management of mental health issues – Van Wedeen, MD, Human Connectome Project

BBC’s Pallab Ghosh interviewed Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital about Ghosh’s own 3-D diffusion spectrum MRI in BBC News – Mind mapping: Inside the brains (via @daniel_lende for the Neuroanthropology Interest Group).

Child Development and Molecular Genetics: 14 Years Later – Plomin – 2012 – Child Development – Wiley Online Library

February 16, 2013/1 Comment/in Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research, Child Development /by connie

Fourteen years ago, the first article on molecular genetics was published in this journal: Child Development, Molecular Genetics, and What to Do With Genes Once They Are Found (R. Plomin & M. Rutter, 1998). The goal of the article was to outline what developmentalists can do with genes once they are found. These new directions for developmental research are still relevant today. The problem lies with the phrase “once they are found”: It has been much more difficult than expected to identify genes responsible for the heritability of complex traits and common disorders, the so-called missing heritability problem. The present article considers reasons for the missing heritability problem and possible solutions.

from Child Development and Molecular Genetics: 14 Years Later – Plomin – 2012 – Child Development – Wiley Online Library.

Psychiatry | No New Meds | via Science News

February 16, 2013/in Psychopharmacology /by connie

Psychiatry seemed poised on the edge of a breakthrough. In early 2011, after decades of no radically new drugs, a fundamentally different schizophrenia treatment promised relief from the psychotic hallucinations and delusions plaguing people with the disease. The new compound, devised by chemists at Eli Lilly and Co., hit a target in the brain that older medicines had ignored.

from No New Meds | Humans | Science News.

TLS Review of Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations

February 15, 2013/in Hallucinations /by connie

It is evident that [hallucinations] involve a top-down shaping – and sense-making – activity of the mind, which eludes the kinds of understanding available to currently fashionable reductionist accounts of the conscious mind as identical with neural activity, seen ultimately as the effects in a material brain wired into its environment of causative material events impinging on sense endings.

– Oliver Sacks on drugs by Raymond Talllis