Scientific American

Childhood ADHD Linked to Obesity in Adulthood

Mon, 20 May 2013 05:00:00 EST

Identification and treatment issues surrounding attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are challenging enough. Now research is shedding light on long-term outcomes for people with ADHD. A May 20 study in Pediatrics reports that men who had ADHD in childhood are twice as likely to be obese in middle age, even if they no longer exhibit symptoms of the disorder.

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Do Electronic Cigarettes Really Help Smokers Quit?

Tue, 07 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

Everyone knows that cigarettes are bad for you. Yet 45 million Americans smoke , a habit that shaves a decade off life expectancy and causes cancer as well as heart and lung diseases. Nearly 70 percent of smokers want to quit , but despite the deadly consequences, the vast majority of them fail.

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Real World

Wed, 01 May 2013 02:00:00 EST

In March 2010 police in South Korea arrested a husband and wife in a tragically ironic case that gained international notoriety: the couple let their three-month-old daughter, Sarang, starve to death in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day nurturing a virtual daughter as part of a 3-D fantasy online role-playing game known as Prius Online. A documentary to be released this month uses the story as the starting point for an examination of a high-tech culture's fascination with the blending of virtual and real worlds.

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Getting to Know Your Inner Charlatan

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:30:00 EST

I slunk into my social studies classroom with my head down. Graded homework assignments sat on the corner of my teacher's desk. As my fellow seventh grade students chatted before class began, I casually slid my late homework into the middle of the pile. When our teacher later distributed the papers, he would see mine was not graded, assume he'd missed it, and I'd be off scot-free. Indeed, my ploy worked like a charm.

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Faulty Sleep Mechanism Might Cause Trauma to Linger

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:00:00 EST

Scientists have long known that once we nod off, certain memories grow stronger. One recent theory suggests that forgetting, too, is an essential function of sleep [see “Sleep's Secret Repairs,” by Jason Castro; Scientific American Mind, May/June 2012]. Researchers now suspect that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may emerge from flaws in sleep's forgetting process. Two studies presented at the 2012 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans indicate that sleep might offer a window of opportunity for weakening memories and providing relief from lingering reminders of trauma.

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Unhealthy Eating Leaves You in a Bad Mood

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:08 EST

The Easter bunny’s gifts of chocolate may taste sweet, but they leave your attitude sour. Because a study finds that if you’re in a crummy mood to begin with, unhealthy eating can leave you feeling even worse.

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Warped Sense of Time Heightens Temptations (preview)

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 07:30:00 EST

Walk into any fast-food restaurant, and you can watch a small crowd of ordinary people doing something that is utterly irrational: eating junky, excess-weight-inviting food likely to leave them feeling bad about their bodies and open to a host of serious ills. We literally line up to trade our health and self-image for a few minutes of pleasant mouth feel and belly comfort--because the latter is right here, right now, whereas the former is months, years and decades away.

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Enhancing the Brain's Flexibility Could Unseat Addiction (preview)

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 08:30:00 EST

Reid had been drinking hard since 1994, when sickness, his father's death and business troubles had him reaching for more alcohol than usual. Eventually he was knocking back 10 or more drinks a day. In 2009 his family leveled an ultimatum. He had to give up alcohol or get out.

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Old Drugs Find New Life as Brain Treatments

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 08:00:00 EST

Developing new drugs is no easy feat. As much as 95 percent of new compounds fail along the path to becoming clinically available. Attrition is especially high for drugs treating the central nervous system. The ones that do succeed rack up an average cost of $1.8 billion. So researchers are increasingly turning to the bottles already on the shelf. Proved safe for human consumption and often understood at a molecular level, today's familiar pills might just be tomorrow's medical discovery. Sometimes one man's side effect is another man's cure.

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Step Inside the Real World of Compulsive Hoarders

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 06:00:00 EST

If you had opened the front door of Lee Shuer's apartment in the early 2000s, you would have encountered a narrow hallway made even narrower by all kinds of random stuff: unnervingly tall stacks of books and papers, cardboard boxes full of assorted knickknacks, and two hot pink salon hair dryer chairs with glass domes suspended from their arched necks. Sidling down the hallway to the right, you would have reached Shuer's bedroom. The door would have opened just wide enough for you to squeeze inside, where you would have seen mounds of stuff three to four feet high on the floor, bed and every available surface. A typical heap might have contained clothes, a violin case, a big box of Magic Markers, record albums, a trumpet, a framed picture, a package of socks, three dictionaries, two thesauruses and a pillow.

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Live Chat on Compulsive Hoarding--Tuesday, February 26 at 4 P.M. EST [Transcript]

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 15:42:00 EST

Scientific American recently published an article about compulsive hoarding , which is defined as the excessive accumulation of stuff and the refusal to discard it, resulting in problematic clutter. This May, the new edition of psychiatry's standard guidebook (the DSM-5 ) will recognize compulsive hoarding as an official disorder, separate from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Research in the last 10 years has shown that hoarding and OCD are distinct, changed the way psychologists think about hoarding, refuted popular assumptions about people with excessive clutter and informed new, promising treatments. Today at 4 P.M. EST, Randy Frost of Smith College--a leading expert on hoarding--and Lee Shuer, who is currently decluttering his home in Massachusetts , join us for a live Web chat.

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Researchers Take a Closer Look at the Most Common and Powerful Triggers of Depression

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 07:30:00 EST

Like a sudden forest fire with no traceable origin, depression often flares up for no apparent reason. Sometimes, though, one can identify a catalyst--the lightning bolt that delivered the spark. On its own no single misfortune can fully explain why and how someone develops depression, and depression sometimes arises and lingers largely irrespective of events or circumstances outside the mind. But some painful experiences--such as the death of a loved one, divorce and abrupt unemployment--can trigger individual episodes of depression, especially the very first incidence. [More]

The Newest Edition of Psychiatry s Bible, the DSM-5, Is Complete

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:00:00 EST

For more than 11 years, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has been laboring to revise the current version of its best-selling guidebook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM ) (see " Psychiatry's Bible Gets an Overhaul ” in Scientific American MIND ). Although the DSM is often called the bible of psychiatry, it is not sacred scripture to all clinicians--many regard it more as a helpful corollary to their own expertise. Still, insurance companies in the U.S. often require an official DSM diagnosis before they help cover the costs of medication or therapy, and researchers find it easier to get funding if they are studying a disorder officially recognized by the manual. This past December the APA announced that it has completed the lengthy revision process and will publish the new edition--the DSM-5 --in May 2013, after some last (presumably minor) rounds of editing and proofreading. Below are the APA's final decisions about some of the most controversial new disorders as well as hotly debated changes to existing ones, including a few surprises not anticipated by close observers of the revision process:

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Can Eye Movements Treat Trauma?

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 08:00:00 EST

Imagine you are trying to put a traumatic event behind you. Your therapist asks you to recall the memory in detail while rapidly moving your eyes back and forth, as if you are watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match. The sensation is strange, but many therapists and patients swear by the technique, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Although skeptics continue to question EMDR's usefulness, recent research supports the idea that the eye movements indeed help to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Pot Smokers Might Not Turn into Dopes after All

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:25:00 EST

Cannabis rots your brain -- or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age . But a study published today -- also in PNAS -- says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect. Nature explores the competing claims.

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New Limb-Lengthening Tech May Reduce Complications for Sufferers of Crippling Deformities [Slide Show]

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:00:00 EST

Screaming woke Lanz Ellingsworth. The piercing cries were loud, they were shrill -- and they were coming from his daughter's bedroom.

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When Old Habits Die Easy

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:00:08 EST

Some say it’s tough to break a habit--a behavior so ingrained in our mental infrastructure that it’s automatic. But new research says maybe it’s not so tough when you shine some light on an alternative.

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Deadly Dancing: Could a Nocebo Effect Explain Medieval Europe's Dancing Plagues? [Excerpt]

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:00:00 EST

Editor's note: Chris Berdik's Mind Over Mind examines the myriad effects of expectations--whether the eager eyes of sports fans on a key player, anticipating a sip of expensive wine or the mysterious medical efficacy of a placebo. In this excerpt, Berdik describes a peculiar contagion that some scientists attribute to the placebo's harmful counterpart, the nocebo effect--in which our expectations cause harm.

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Worrying Trends Confronted in Prescription Drug Abuse

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 07:00:00 EST

The two young men who showed up retching and wild-eyed in an emergency room in Portland, Ore., last summer insisted they had swallowed nothing but an ordinary soft drink before one collapsed. Yet their odd coloring suggested otherwise. Fifteen minutes after they had downed the drink, their lips and skin turned a startling blue. Their blood was as dark as chocolate.

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The Connectome Debate: Is Mapping the Mind of a Worm Worth It?

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:55:00 EST

In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. The goal was to create a wiring diagram--a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections, or synapses, between those neurons. In 1986 the scientists published a near complete draft of the diagram. More than 20 years later, Dmitri Chklovskii of Janelia Farm Research Campus and his collaborators published an even more comprehensive version. Today, scientists call such diagrams "connectomes." [More]