Brain

Confident multitaskers of the world, your attention please. Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while. Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car. These experts have some basic advice.

On the morning of Dec. 10, 1996, I awoke with a pulsing pain behind my left eye. I got up to begin my morning routine and jumped onto my cardio-glider. The exercise, I thought, would get my blood flowing and banish the throbbing inside my head.While I exercised, however, the pain became more intense. Within a few moments I started to feel very peculiar -- confused, yet clearheaded and alert.When I got off the machine, I noticed that I was slightly off balance and feeling strangely detached from my body.

Only a horror writer like Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King could describe the anguish of a person suffering total paralysis -- aware, thinking, feeling, but unable to speak, move a muscle or even blink an eye.Now, however, researchers are developing systems that let helpless victims of accident or disease break out of their isolation and communicate by thought alone.They are harnessing the brain's faint electrical signals to move a cursor -- a bright spot or an arrow -- on a computer screen.

BOSTON -- It is a scene for which the word "fuggedaboutit" was first created. A woman is crossing the room in my direction and I am entering a state of social panic.A mere half-hour ago we had an engaging, friendly and lengthy conversation. Now here comes the pop quiz. I have to introduce her to my husband. By name.Her name is Alice? No, Allison?I am having what we usually call -- with a touch of insouciance -- "a senior moment." Only of course, it isn't a moment. Somewhere between bifocals and Medicare, the moments have linked together into minutes.

In a possible glimpse at the brain surgery of the future, biologists have partly cured mice of a disease resembling multiple sclerosis by injecting restorative cells into their brains.The cells migrated all over the brain and took the correct action to repair the neural disease, in this case a lack of the sheath that covers certain nerve cells and helps speed their conduction of electrical signals.The approach is founded on the use of stem cells, the regenerative cells with which organs renew and repair themselves.

Heavy use of cocaine impairs memory, manual dexterity and decision-making for at least a month after the drug was last taken, according to a new study of Baltimore drug users by researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.The study, led by neurologist Karen I. Bolla of the Johns Hopkins University, adds to the evidence that the powerful high experienced by cocaine users is accompanied by long-lasting harm to brain functioning.The researchers said their work suggests that the brain damage caused by cocaine might set up a devastating spiral by making it harder for the drug user to quit.

Scientists have identified an unusual chemical messenger in the brain that appears to be involved in some key activities that make us human: feeling, thinking and remembering. The work could ultimately lead to treatments for stroke and degenerative diseases.In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reveal the source of this newly identified substance, D-serine, and the novel way it works in the brain.

This past summer, Amber R., 15, of Lincoln, Neb., underwent a radical operation called a hemispherectomy to remove the whole left side of her brain. Sean H., 8, of Gurnee, Ill., had the same surgery six years ago. Today both kids are doing pretty well.Amber had Rasmussen's encephalitis, a rare disease that usually strikes young children. Doctors think it is caused by a virus or an immune response. For six years, she had been plagued with violent seizures that rocked the right side of her body.

You may be asleep, but there's a place in the side of your brain that stays awake. It's listening for a baby's cry, a rattle in the lock or some other sign of trouble.Research by a Johns Hopkins University undergraduate suggests that there is a spot in the front of the brain that also stays up, perhaps deciding which noises are serious enough to demand that you be awakened.Hopkins junior Serena J. Gondek, 21, presented the findings yesterday in Minneapolis in a rare undergraduate talk before neurologists and neuroscience professionals at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.

Ecstasy, a drug popular at all-night dance parties known as "raves," appears to damage brain cells that release a chemical responsible for mood, memory and pain perception, a study has found.RTC Dr. George Ricaurte, a neurologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, conducted brain scans on people who had used the illicit drug an average of 200 times over a five-year period. The destruction was greatest among the most frequent users.The drug damaged cells that release serotonin, a natural chemical that is associated with feelings of well-being.

It probably seems like a simple enough equation. The Ravens have to find a way to stop one of the best running backs of this era and also get sufficient pressure on one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history if they are to go into Minneapolis and score an important road victory over the Minnesota Vikings. Except that nothing is ever exactly as it seems and the real formula for success requires more than just a strong performance by a defensive unit that was vulnerable to the running game and another marquee quarterback a week ago. Of course, the Ravens have to stop Adrian Peterson and force Brett Favre to make some mistakes, but they must go a couple of steps further to re-establish themselves as one of the premier teams in the AFC this season.

Matt Birk knows concussions. The Ravens center has had three confirmed in his life, the most recent of which left him in a fog on the sideline of a home game in Minnesota trying to remember how exactly to leave the field. Birk is not as knowledgeable, however, about the practice thuds and collisions that never register on the concussion meter but jostle the brain nevertheless. Those are the ones that concern him now, the ones that might come back to haunt him 20 years down the road when he suddenly forgets where he left the car keys - or the car. "What worries me," Birk, 33, said last week, "is the repeated trauma every day, the many collisions of playing offensive line.

What happens in a jazz musician's brain during an improv session? Where does all that creativity come from? That's what Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon with a passion for music, wanted to find out. Limb's medical specialty as an otolaryngologist is restoring deaf people's hearing with the use of cochlear implants, electronic devices that translate sounds for people with damaged ears. But in his research, Limb studies the effects of jazz on the brain. In a study published this year in the Public Library of Science ONE, Limb reported results of an experiment in which he had professional jazz pianists improvise riffs as an MRI machine scanned their brain waves.

Two new studies of young adults who grew up in poor, inner-city neighborhoods in Cincinnati have found that childhood exposure to lead is linked to a significant loss of critical brain matter and to an increased risk of criminal behavior. Researchers followed hundreds of children from the womb into their 20s and found an average loss of 1.2 percent in the volume of gray matter in the brain by the time they reached adulthood. That sounds minor, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati said the losses were concentrated in brain regions responsible for critical "executive" functions, such as impulse control, emotional regulation, judgment and the anticipation of consequences.

There are between 1.6 million and 3.8 million sports-related concussions a year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of those injuries are caused by playing football, says Dr. Yvette Rooks, a family medicine physician at the University of Maryland Medical Center and team physician for the University of Maryland, College Park. As the weather warms up and kids stream outside to participate in sports such as lacrosse and bicycling, it makes sense to take precautions against head injuries.

Being a family-life columinist has its perks. During interviews with highly qualified professionals in the field, I am often able to slip in a question I need answered or a problem I need solved. When my grade-school son refused to have anything in his lunch except pepperoni sandwiches with barbecue sauce, I asked a pediatric nutritionist I was interviewing on another topic if she thought this was unhealthy. After an uncomfortable pause, she said, "See if he will go for a cheese sandwich just once a week.

When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price. Using brain scanners to monitor the minds of wine drinkers, scientists found that people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more. The study, reported last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrated for the first time how marketing tactics - such as raising the price of a product - can cause the brain to play tricks on itself. Researchers led by Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at Caltech, asked 20 volunteers to rank their enjoyment of small sips of five differently priced Cabernet Sauvignon wines while a functional MRI machine monitored the brain response.

His brain felt like a ripe melon "ready to blow up." Former Maryland fullback Tim Cesa switched helmets four times during the 2006 season in search of one that would protect his head from additional concussions. None of them helped. After a series of five or six concussions over almost two seasons, Cesa's career ended with a final hit on the first play against Florida State on Oct. 28, 2006. Now, as a manager at R.J. Bentley's Filling Station, Cesa's only tie to the football program is through fans who pack the popular downtown bar. It's the only connection he can handle while he finishes school.

I sit in wonderment at the story of W. Lance Anderson, the president of NovaStar Financial in Kansas City, who while handing out subprime mortgages to any applicant wearing shoes and a shirt managed to sink the company's stock from $40 in June to $1.72. This is a man who earned $1.7 million in salary and bonuses last year, plus $711,386 in deferred compensation, plus more dough in various arrangements that dopes like me can't quite grasp. Meanwhile, all the little investors in NovaStar are cutting back on Christmas gifts and canceling their winter vacations in Daytona Beach.

Right brain or left brain? All her life, Dr. Carin Rennings grappled with the question. Was she a right-brain artist or a left-brain scientist? Only now, having just turned 40, has she come to the comfortable conclusion that she can be both. On the science side, Rennings has built a career in Howard County as a veterinarian who makes house calls. And as an artist, she has nurtured a talent for singing and is looking forward to releasing her first CD, Love and Miracles, by the end of the year.