A wandering mind reveals mental processes and priorities

Odds are, you're not going to make it all the way through this article without thinking about something else.

In fact, studies have found that our minds are wandering half the time, drifting off to thoughts unrelated to what we're doing – did I remember to turn off the light? What should I have for dinner?

A new study investigating the mental processes underlying a wandering mind reports a role for working memory, a sort of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously.

Imagine you see your neighbor upon arriving home one day and schedule a lunch date. On your way to add it to your calendar, you stop to turn off the drippy faucet, feed the cat, and add milk to your grocery list. The capacity that allows you to retain the lunch information through those unrelated tasks is working memory.

The new study, published online March 14 in the journal Psychological Science by Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Jonathan Smallwood at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, reports that a person's working memory capacity relates to the tendency of their mind to wander during a routine assignment. Lead author Levinson is a graduate student with Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry, in the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW–Madison Waisman Center.

The researchers asked volunteers to perform one of two simple tasks – either pressing a button in response to the appearance of a certain letter on a screen, or simply tapping in time with one's breath – and compared people's propensity to drift off.

"We intentionally use tasks that will never use all of their attention," Smallwood explains, "and then we ask, how do people use their idle resources?"

Throughout the tasks, the researchers checked in periodically with the participants to ask if their minds were on task or wandering. At the end, they measured each participant's working memory capacity, scored by their ability to remember a series of letters given to them interspersed with easy math questions.

In both tasks, there was a clear correlation. "People with higher working memory capacity reported more mind wandering during these simple tasks," says Levinson, though their performance on the test was not compromised.

The result is the first positive correlation found between working memory and mind wandering and suggests that working memory may actually enable off-topic thoughts.

"What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren't very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they're doing," Smallwood says.

Interestingly, when people were given a comparably simple task but filled with sensory distractors (such as lots of other similarly shaped letters), the link between working memory and mind wandering disappeared.

"Giving your full attention to your perceptual experience actually equalized people, as though it cut off mind wandering at the pass," Levinson says.

Working memory capacity has previously been correlated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ score. The current study underscores how important it is in everyday situations and offers a window into the ubiquitous – but not well-understood – realm of internally driven thoughts.

"Our results suggest that the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life – when they're on the bus, when they're cycling to work, when they're in the shower – are probably supported by working memory," says Smallwood. "Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems."

In essence, working memory can help you stay focused, but if your mind starts to wander those resources get misdirected and you can lose track of your goal. Many people have had the experience of arriving at home with no recollection of the actual trip to get there, or of suddenly realizing that they've turned several pages in a book without comprehending any of the words.

"It's almost like your attention was so absorbed in the mind wandering that there wasn't any left over to remember your goal to read," Levinson says.

Where your mind wanders may be an indication of underlying priorities being held in your working memory, whether conscious or not, he says. But it doesn't mean that people with high working memory capacity are doomed to a straying mind. The bottom line is that working memory is a resource and it's all about how you use it, he says. "If your priority is to keep attention on task, you can use working memory to do that, too."

Levinson is now studying how attentional training to increase working memory will affect wandering thoughts, to better understand the connection and how people can control it. "Mind wandering isn't free – it takes resources," he says. "You get to decide how you want to use your resources."

Provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison

"A wandering mind reveals mental processes and priorities." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-mind-reveals-mental-priorities.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Smartphones can aid people with schizophrenia

Psychiatry is employing smartphone technology as an innovative tool in the assessment and treatment of schizophrenia and other serious mental illness. Prominent in this endeavor is Dror Ben-Zeev, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School and director of the Thresholds-Dartmouth Research Center in Chicago.

Ben-Zeev and his colleagues evaluated a range of approaches, including the use of mobile phones to gather information about patients' symptoms, moods, and medication use. The phones could then be used to deliver real-time, real-world interventions, such as prompts to take medication or engage in healthy behaviors like diet, exercise, or stress-reducing activities.

"We are using the technology that is already in your pocket to create a completely new medium for psychotherapeutic intervention," says Ben-Zeev. "You can have therapy with you and accessible to you whenever and wherever you have the need, potentially anywhere in the world."

As guest editor for a special issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin, Ben-Zeev presents a set of four papers coauthored by a series of international colleagues. The papers are geared toward the increasing numbers of researchers who are leveraging smartphones and cellphones to provide mental health services. The articles are now available online with print publication set for spring 2012.

Ben-Zeev acknowledges that some mental-health practitioners may doubt the ability of the mentally ill to make productive use of this technology. To counter this perception, Ben-Zeev and his associates recently conducted a survey of 1,600 Chicago individuals under treatment for serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder.

"We showed that 70 percent of the people had cellphones and used them for calling, texting, and for accessing the Internet," he remarks. "It's not quite up to the 94 percent of people in the U.S. overall but I think that these results are going to be very surprising to many who expect much less from people with serious mental illness."

The goal of the special issue papers, according to Ben-Zeev, is to stimulate discussion of potential opportunities where mobile technologies can enhance the study of psychotic illnesses and to encourage researchers and clinicians to be creative in employing these technologies.

The first of the four papers is a general review by international experts that includes concrete guidelines and practical suggestions for future studies. Editor Ben-Zeev also alludes to "expert insights and shared collective experiences [that] will undoubtedly be useful to investigators who are unfamiliar with mobile technology study design, hardware and software requirements, and statistical approaches necessary to successfully analyze the rich data that are characteristic of these paradigms."

The remaining three papers in the series are empirical studies that demonstrate the utility of technology in psychiatry, each highlighting the use of three successive generations of technology. The first study report begins with preprogrammed wristwatches that signal people to respond to paper questionnaires. The second had people using personal digital assistants (PDAs) to complete on-screen questionnaires periodically when prompted, and the last employed cellphones that delivered text messages requiring self-monitoring responses.

In addition to the call to action implicit in the special issue papers, Ben-Zeev and his Chicago coworkers are putting "boots on the ground," as he says. He is partnering with community agencies and working with psychiatric rehabilitation centers and people in treatment. As a result, his research is simultaneously providing a clinical service.

"This is not your typical model," states Ben-Zeev. "Usually the research is conducted in an academic medical center, and then there is a transition back to real settings which may take a really long time. We are bypassing that by developing the paradigm here to begin with, getting feedback from both providers and consumers. I think that's the strength of what we are doing."

Provided by Dartmouth College

"Smartphones can aid people with schizophrenia." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-smartphones-aid-people-schizophrenia.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Some people may be more susceptible to alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts

Alcohol's effects on memory range from mild deficits to alcohol-induced blackouts. That said, very little research has been carried out on memory impairments among individuals who have experienced alcohol-induced blackouts. A new study of neural activation during a contextual-memory task among individuals with and without a history of alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts demonstrates individual differences in how alcohol impacts memory.

Results will be published in the June 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Prior research had shown that individuals who experienced alcohol-induced blackouts were more likely than those who had not experienced blackouts to exhibit memory impairments when intoxicated," said Reagan R. Wetherill, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego and corresponding author for the study. "Our study is the first examination of neural activity during a contextual-memory task among individuals with a history of alcohol-induced blackouts."

"Blackouts have been widely regarded as an important warning signal of problem drinking for many decades now," observed Bryan Hartzler, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute. "But some people may mistakenly equate the term 'alcohol blackout' with only a more extreme experience of memory loss where one 'loses time' for a period during which the brain essentially just stops making memories. Fragmentary blackouts are less severe than that, in that just portions of one's experience are forgotten and can be recalled via use of retrieval cues. However, fragmentary blackouts have also been shown to be much more prevalent, at least among young adults. The current study's inclusion of functional magnetic resonance imaging technology provides a direct, powerful means to examine underlying biological correlates of this more common type of alcohol-induced blackout."

Wetherill and her colleagues used data from a larger, longitudinal study of alcohol use and behavioral risks to examine 24 individuals (12 males, 12 females) with (n=12) and without (n=12) a history of fragmentary blackouts. All participants completed a block design contextual memory task across 48 functional magnetic resonance imaging sessions, with and without alcohol, during which task performance and brain hemodynamic activity were measured.

Wetherill explained that the block design contextual memory task involves a study phase and a test phase. During the study phase, images are shown with a cue question such as "living or nonliving?," followed by a brief rest, then different images are shown with a different cue question such as "pleasant or unpleasant?" After several "blocks" of images are shown, the test phase has participants recall the images and cue questions, adding an additional image that was never shown. Wetherill said this task is designed to assess a person's ability to remember contextual information like the cue question when presented with a previous experience like a specific image.

"Our study's findings suggest that some people are more likely to experience alcohol-induced blackouts than others due to the way alcohol affects brain activity in areas involved in self-monitoring, attention, and working memory," said Wetherill.

"Through use of imaging technology, this study has made the really intriguing finding that the unique patterns of blood flow and neural activity seen in persons prone to experience those amnestic phenomena emerged only after they became intoxicated," said Hartzler. "That finding, taken together with results from prior research on fragmentary blackouts, suggests there are salient individual differences in how alcohol impacts memory, and that those differences can be identified by both behavioral and neurophysiological markers."

"Alcohol intoxication attenuated recollection-related brain activity in the right frontopolar cortex, which is a brain region involved in 'multitasking,'" said Wetherill. "Later, when sober, individuals with a history of blackouts showed slightly impaired recollection and attenuated brain activity in prefrontal and posterior parietal brain regions typically involved in attention, inhibitory processing, decision-making, and working memory. Thus, alcohol appears to affect a person's ability to multitask, and also affects some people's ability to engage brain areas required for encoding and remembering previous experiences."

"Irrespective of the specific type of alcohol-related memory loss involved, if one is experiencing blackouts it is an important signal that negative personal and health consequences are more likely to occur," said Hartzler. "Not fully recalling one's life experiences, particularly those that occur while one is intoxicated, creates a state of vulnerability where the chances increase for the individual to incur all kinds of problems."

Wetherill agreed. "Given that approximately 40 percent of college students experience alcohol-induced blackouts and, in some cases, later discover they engaged in unwanted/risky sex, drove, or other complex behaviors, our findings highlight the fact that alcohol impairs brain functioning and some people may be more vulnerable to alcohol's effects than others," she said. "In other words, just because your friend may be able to drink a certain number of drinks and appear to be functioning fine, it does not mean that you or everyone else can."

Provided by Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research

"Some people may be more susceptible to alcohol-induced fragmentary blackouts." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-people-susceptible-alcohol-induced-fragmentary-blackouts.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

A Wonderful Message

Change Your Thinking  It will take just 37 seconds to read this and change your thinking..  Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room.  One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs.  His bed was next to the room's only window.  The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back.  The men talked for hours on end.  They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation..  Every afternoon, when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window.  The man in the other bed began to live for those one hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and colour of the world outside.  The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake  Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every colour and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance.  As the man by the window described all this in exquisite details, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine this picturesque scene.  One warm afternoon, the man by the window described a parade passing by.  Although the other man could not hear the band - he could see it in his mind's eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive words.  Days, weeks and months passed.  One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths only to find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep.  She was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away.  As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone.  0A  Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the real world outside.  He strained to slowly turn to look out the window besides the bed.  It faced a blank wall..  The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate who had described such wonderful things outside this window.  The nurse responded that the man was blind and could not even see the wall.  She said, 'Perhaps he just wanted to encourage you.'  Epilogue:  There is tremendous happiness in making others happy, despite our own situations.  Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled. If you want to feel rich, just count all the things you have that money can't buy.  'Today is a gift, that is why it is called The Present .'  The origin of this letter is unknown, but it brings good luck to everyone who passes it on.  Do not keep this letter.  I hope you will forward it to all your friends to whom you wish blessings.

NYC suicide rate 29 percent higher at economy's nadir vs. peak

New evidence on the link between suicide and the economy shows that the monthly suicide rate in New York City from 1990 to 2006 was 29% higher at the economic low point in 1992 than at the peak of economic growth in 2000.

The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, and Weill Cornell Medical College, appears in the February 22 American Journal of Epidemiology and is available online.

"The reasons behind an individual's decision to take his or her life are often complex and difficult to understand, even for family and friends," observes senior author Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, Gelman Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School. "It is usually a combination of forces with, for example, economic stresses on top of a strained relationship. Economic hardship can hurt a person's self-worth and limit the availability of social resources, including mental health care."

White men under the age of 45 were the driving force of the association between economy activity and suicide, according to the study. Dr. Galea says that while the reasons are not fully understood, this may be because white men are in occupations that are more exposed to economic vagaries than those of nonwhites and women.

While broader economic conditions were shown to affect suicide, Wall Street volatility was not. First author Arijit Nandi, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy and a former student of Dr. Galea's at the Mailman School, says the finding was surprising because it goes against the archetype of the despairing stockbroker on the window ledge. The bigger picture, Dr. Nandi says, is more complex. "The causes of individual cases of suicide, such as losing money in the stock market, may be distinct from the causes of suicide rates, which are defined at the population level and may reflect a multifactorial causal mechanism." Another complicating factor: some investors profit as the market tumbles.

Suicide statistics were sourced from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. The economic picture was provided by the New York State Index of Coincident Economic Indicators (ICEI), which accounts for private sector employment, unemployment, working hours of manufacturing workers, and sales tax collections. Stock market volatility was calculated using prices of stocks on the New York Stock Exchange.

The data, the researchers say, is unusually robust and allowed for a month-to-month analysis; most previous research in this area compared yearly data. This refinement allowed them to account for seasonal variability in suicide (counter-intuitively, more suicides happen in the summer than any other time of year). They also used a statistical technique called generalized additive models (GAMs) to "smooth" other unmeasured confounding factors like changing budgets for mental health.

The monthly rate of suicide ranged from a low of 0.42 per 100,000 residents at the economy's peak in 2000 to a high of 0.54 per 100,000 residents during the economic low in 1992—a difference of 29%.

Future studies will explore how individual or neighborhood socioeconomic status may moderate the effect of an economic downturn. And as more data become available, a picture of the recent economic downturn will emerge.

If there is overall message from the new findings, Dr. Galea says, it is that when governments face budget shortfalls, they should think twice before cutting mental health services. "At times of economic stress, people need help."

Provided by Columbia University

"NYC suicide rate 29 percent higher at economy's nadir vs. peak." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-nyc-suicide-percent-higher-economy.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

"NYC suicide rate 29 percent higher at economy's nadir vs. peak." March 15th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-nyc-suicide-percent-higher-economy.html

The stress of undress: Public change rooms can cause body anxieties for women

Marianne Clark's research examines how the act of undressing in a public change room reveals the complex relationships women have with their bodies. Credit: Bev Betkowski

Sweating in the gym, surrounded by others, and pounding to the beat in group exercise class has become the norm for many women. But when it comes to changing in the locker room, the acts of disrobing, dressing, showering, and being naked in front of others can be very discomfiting. It's a complex experience as women are faced with an awareness of their bodies different from that in any other space.

"I walk into the changing room and pace anxiously up and down the rows of lockers. I look for an empty aisle, hoping for some semblance of privacy. I don't like to change in front of others, it makes me uneasy. Perhaps I'm uptight. Or maybe I have what experts would call 'body issues.' But either way, changing in public causes me stress."

A new study begins looking at women's experiences of changing in public change rooms. Author Marianne Clark, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, says it was her own experience as a dancer and frequent user of fitness facilities and, therefore, of public dressing rooms and change rooms that led her to explore how other women felt. "Using these facilities, I've always felt an unarticulated discomfort," says Clark.

The act of undressing and being naked, particularly where there is the potential to be observed by others, can be daunting. Much of the way we think about ourselves and our self-confidence is wrapped up in our notion of ourselves as fully clothed. Undressing in front of others can, according to Clark, "disrupt" our experience of ourselves because it reveals an intimate self we don't usually freely display.

Clark says in talking to other women about their experiences in these spaces, "They all had a story and it usually involved a time when there was another person involved."

One woman described being pre-occupied walking into the gym, then suddenly becoming aware of the presence of others in the change room and being reluctant to reveal her more intimate self. She said, "I angle my body this way and that as I undress and dress in the locker room. I look down to button my pants, I see my small breasts, my protruding stomach, no longer held in, contained and covered by my control top nylons and stylish skirt. This naked me is almost unfamiliar to me, so different than who I am all day, when I march around and am busy and efficient and in charge. But now, as I stand practically naked in the change room, no one can see that part of me, all there is to see is my body."

Not every woman feels this sense of discomfort. Some found the experience of being surrounded by many other women's bodies together after a workout comforting. "I like the time in the change room after a workout," said one participant. "I like being in a space where my body is just a body among other bodies. I know people might see me naked or partly naked but it doesn't bother me, this is who I am, this is my body, this is how I am in the world. I like being around all these other women of all shapes and sizes, it makes me feel connected to who I am, and somehow close to them."

Clark says she found that while older women expressed the same concerns about dressing and undressing in the change room as younger women, she says, "I think they spoke more reflectively about why we might experience these feelings of self-consciousness or modesty in a gym and they could articulate that. Although one said, 'I can't believe I still feel this way, but I do.'

"Women also talked about their body as an entity over which they have no control – it was sagging or ageing, or it just did not comply with standards of conventional beauty. And while they were OK with that, they didn't want anyone else to see it."

Many women said they first became self-conscious about their bodies while teenagers. "A lot of the women I spoke to, if not every single one of them, could recall feeling painfully self-conscious in phys-ed class and said changing in the fitness centre reminded them of changing after gym class at school," says Clark.

Also, in North American society where the "body beautiful" is celebrated - both dressed and undressed, as something to look at and a reason to be seen - its ideal is young, thin and toned. Clark said she found plenty of social and cultural layers in the women's stories that indicated their awareness of the societal notions of beautiful, healthy bodies influenced their own feelings about the shared undressing experience of the change room. "I think even in the change room, women are carrying with them these knowledges and understandings (of the fit female body) that society has constructed," she says.

Clark says those involved in the design of these facilities need to think about how people feel about changing in public spaces and who might be using them to make them friendlier for different bodies.

"Currently change rooms are designed for efficiency. As our lifestyles continue to change and gyms become a more important part of getting exercise, the change room becomes an increasingly interesting space to consider. So I think it does actually merit some study. There are so many obstacles to going to a gym for the first time, from using the equipment, to knowing how to use the equipment, to navigating your way around the space.

"And then for people who find change rooms a difficult space, that's a barrier too. So I think we can be more thoughtful in general, but also in our approach to these spaces and what they might mean for the way that women understand themselves in relationship to health and fitness."

Provided by University of Alberta

"The stress of undress: Public change rooms can cause body anxieties for women." March 15th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-stress-rooms-body-anxieties-women.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Sex-deprived fruit flies drink more alcohol: New study could uncover answers for human addictions

fruit fly

Sexually deprived male fruit flies exhibit a pattern of behavior that seems ripped from the pages of a sad-sack Raymond Carver story: when female fruit flies reject their sexual advances, the males are driven to excessive alcohol consumption, drinking far more than comparable, sexually satisfied male flies.

Now a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has discovered that a tiny molecule in the fly's brain called neuropeptide F governs this behavior—as the levels of the molecule change in their brains, the flies' behavior changes as well.

The new work may help shed light on the brain mechanisms that make social interaction rewarding for animals and those that underlie human addiction. A similar human molecule, called neuropeptide Y, may likewise connect social triggers to behaviors like excessive drinking and drug abuse. Adjusting the levels of neuropeptide Y in people may alter their addictive behavior—which is exactly what the UCSF team observed in the fruit flies.

"If neuropeptide Y turns out to be the transducer between the state of the psyche and the drive to abuse alcohol and drugs, one could develop therapies to inhibit neuropeptide Y receptors," said Ulrike Heberlein, PhD, a Professor of Anatomy and Neurology at UCSF, who led the research.

Clinical trials are underway, she added, to test whether delivery of neuropeptide Y can alleviate anxiety and other mood disorders as well as obesity.

A Reward Switch in the Brain

The experiments, described this week in the journal Science, started with male fruit flies placed in a container with either virgin female flies or female flies that had already mated. While virgin females readily mate and are receptive toward courting males, once they have mated, females flies lose their interest in sex for a time because of the influence of a substance known as sex peptide, which males inject along with sperm at the culmination of the encounter. This causes them to reject the advances of the male flies.

The rejected males then gave up trying to mate altogether. Even when placed in the same cage as virgin flies, they were not as keen to have sex. Their drinking behavior also changed.

When placed by themselves in a new container and presented with two straws, one containing plain food and the other containing food supplemented with 15 percent alcohol, the sexually rejected flies binged on the alcohol, drinking far more than their sexually satisfied cousins whose advances were never spurned. The difference was not only apparent in their behavior. It was completely predicted by the levels of neuropeptide F in their brains.

"It's a switch that represents the level of reward in the brain and translates it into reward-seeking behavior," said Galit Shohat-Ophir, PhD, the first author of the new study.

A former postdoctoral researcher at UCSF, Shohat-Ophir is now a research specialist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Janelia Farm Research Center in Ashburn, VA. Later this year, Heberlein will also move to Janelia Farm, where she will become scientific program director.

Experiments Began as a "Crazy" Idea

When the work first started a few years ago, Shohat-Ophir said, it was just a crazy idea. The UCSF team suspected there might be a molecular mechanism in the brain linking social experiences like sexual rejection to psychological states such as depression of the brain system that responds to rewards. So they decided to test whether flies that were rejected sexually would be more prone to drinking.

Flies in the laboratory will normally drink to intoxication if given the choice, but this behavior is altered when neuropeptide F levels are altered in their brains because of their sexual experiences. Mated flies are less likely to seek out such rewarding experiences.

The male flies that were paired with receptive virgin females from the start and successfully mated had lots of neuropeptide F in their brains and drank very little alcohol.

Rejected flies, on the other hand, had lower levels of neuropeptide F in their brains, and sought alternative rewards by drinking to intoxication.

In their work, Heberlein, Shohat-Ophir, and their colleagues showed that they could induce the same behaviors by genetically manipulating the neuropeptide F levels in the flies' brains. Activating the production of neuropeptide F in the brains of virgin males flies made them act as if they were sexually satisfied, and they voluntarily curtailed their drinking.

Lowering the levels of the neuropeptide F receptor made flies that were completely sexually satisfied act as if they were rejected, inciting them to drink more.

The finding has great relevance to addressing human addiction, though it may take years to translate this discovery into any new therapies for addicts, given the much greater complexities of the human mind.

The human version of neuropeptide F, called neuropeptide Y, may work similarly, connecting socially rewarding experiences to behaviors like binge drinking. Already, scientists know that levels of neuropeptide Y are reduced in people who suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder—conditions that are also known to predispose people toward excessive alcohol and drug abuse.

Manipulating neuropeptide Y may not be so straightforward, however, since the molecule is distributed all over the human brain—and based on rodent studies, it has roles in feeding, anxiety and sleep, in addition to alcohol consumption.

More information: The article, "Sexual Deprivation Increases Ethanol Intake in Drosophila" by Shohat-Ophir, K. R. Kaun, R. Azanchi and U. Heberlein appears in the March 16 issue of the journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

Provided by University of California, San Francisco

"Sex-deprived fruit flies drink more alcohol: New study could uncover answers for human addictions." March 15th, 2012.http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-sex-deprived-fruit-flies-alcohol-uncover.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Study finds new human species

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Fossils from two caves in south-west China have revealed a previously unknown Stone Age people and give a rare glimpse of a recent stage of human evolution with startling implications for the early peopling of Asia. The fossils are of a people with a highly unusual mix of archaic and modern anatomical features and are the youngest of their kind ever found in mainland East Asia. Dated to just 14,500 to 11,500 years old, these people would have shared the landscape with modern-looking people at a time when China's earliest farming cultures were beginning, says an international team of scientists led by Associate Professor Darren Curnoe, of the University of New South Wales, and Professor Ji Xueping of the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology. Details of the discovery are published in the journal PLoS One. The team has been cautious about classifying the fossils because of their unusual mosaic of features. "These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the Ice Age around 11,000 years ago," says Professor Curnoe. "Alternatively, they might represent a very early and previously unknown migration of modern humans out of Africa, a population who may not have contributed genetically to living people." The remains of at least three individuals were found by Chinese archaeologists at Maludong (or Red Deer Cave), near the city of Mengzi in Yunnan Province during 1989. They remained unstudied until research began in 2008, involving scientists from six Chinese and five Australian institutions. A Chinese geologist found a fourth partial skeleton in 1979 in a cave near the village of Longlin, in neighbouring Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. It stayed encased in a block of rock until 2009 when the international team removed and reconstructed the fossils. The skulls and teeth from Maludong and Longlin are very similar to each other and show an unusual mixture of archaic and modern anatomical features, as well as some previously unseen characters. While Asia today contains more than half of the world's population, scientists still know little about how modern humans evolved there after our ancestors settled Eurasia some 70,000 years ago, notes Professor Curnoe. The scientists are calling them the "Red-deer Cave people" because they hunted extinct red deer and cooked them in the cave at Maludong. The Asian landmass is vast and scientific attention on human origins has focussed largely on Europe and Africa: research efforts have been hampered by a lack of fossils in Asia and a poor understanding of the age of those already found. Until now, no fossils younger than 100,000 years old have been found in mainland East Asia resembling any species other than our own (Homo sapiens). This indicated the region had been empty of our evolutionary cousins when the first modern humans appeared. The new discovery suggests this might not have been the case after all and throws the spotlight once more on Asia. "Because of the geographical diversity caused by the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, south-west China is well known as a biodiversity hotspot and for its great cultural diversity. That diversity extends well back in time" says Professor Ji. In the last decade, Asia has produced the 17,000-year-old and highly enigmatic Indonesian Homo floresiensis ("The Hobbit") and evidence for modern human interbreeding with the ancient Denisovans from Siberia. "The discovery of the red-deer people opens the next chapter in the human evolutionary story – the Asian chapter – and it's a story that's just beginning to be told," says Professor Curnoe. Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.

Data Migration Programmer/Trainee – 15 Positions

We have job openings for the below mentioned position. Request all to provide references based on the below eligibility criteria. 

Please forward all the CVs to  internalreferral@utopiainc.com and CC Vignesh Rajan at vrajan@utopiainc.com.

  

Data Migration Programmer/Trainee – 15 Positions

Location: Bangalore  

Job Description

·         Utopia University is a Three months Internship program for DMP – Trainee

·         DMP trainees - Would undergo an 8 weeks classroom training on SQL, SAP, AIO and Business Objects

·         After completion of Classroom training, DMP - Trainee would work along with delivery centre to gain hands on experience working on actual projects during the 3rd month

·         Post completion of the On-job training, DMPs work Offsite on client projects. They are ready to get deployed on client locations globally on onsite projects (If client shortlist)

Education & Skills

·         BE in Computer Sciences, Information Technology, MCA with 70% and above. (2009, 2010 and 2011 Pass outs only)

·         Strong communicators both written and verbal, client facing skills, and ability to analyze data

Note:

For 2009 and 2010 Pass out, 6 Months to 1 year of experience in IT background with knowledge on SQL server is mandatory