“In most patients with acute sinus infections,
antibiotics don’t add value.” — JAMES HUGHES
Brain cells know
how you will bet
By Laura Sanders
When it comes to tough financial decisions, people are often clueless. But
some cash-savvy nerve cells deep in the
brain know what to do. And these cells
know the plan seconds before the person
actually decides on a course of action,
new research shows.
The findings, presented February 25,
may help scientists understand how people make difficult decisions.
Shaun Patel of Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues studied
eight people undergoing an experimental therapy to alleviate severe depression
or obsessive-compulsive disorder that
involved implanting electrodes deep in
the brain.
During surgery, the electrodes eaves-
dropped on the behavior of individual
nerve cells in an otherwise unreach-
able brain structure called the nucleus
accumbens. Other places in the brain
feed lots of diverse signals to the nucleus
accumbens: Information about a per-
son’s emotions and memories as well
as more sophisticated reasoning — key
ingredients for decision making — all
flow into this structure.
Creating a vision
a flash of light shined on brain cells
can make monkeys see something
that’s not there. That finding comes
from a technique called optogenetics,
which so far has been used to influ-
ence behavior in rodents, flies and
worms, but never before in primates.
In a new study presented February 25,
Mehrdad Jazayeri of the University of
Washington in seattle and colleagues
inserted a gene for a light-responsive
molecule into select nerve cells in two
rhesus monkeys’ visual systems. When
a burst of light hit these cells, the
monkeys moved their eyes toward a
particular place on a computer screen,
even though nothing was there. The
ability to precisely manipulate nerve
cells in monkeys will allow scientists to
test more complex theories about how
the brain works. — Laura Sanders
