Brain

When the American Academy of Pediatrics announced its first guidelines for diagnosing kids with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or ADD) last month, a primary reason was to help prevent doctors from overprescribing drugs such as Ritalin for treatment. The fear is that too many doctors and parents alike turn to medications as the main option for handling what might be a child's misbehavior problems and not illness. Joel Lubar, for one, isn't surprised about the guidelines, which reportedly were three years in the making and debating.

One night in 1999, a rash of frightening sensations hit Paul Titus all at once. His left arm went numb. His left eye began twitching. He couldn't speak without slurring. Unaware what the symptoms meant, he was slow to call for help. When his ischemic stroke was finally over, he was paralyzed on his left side and for 14 years he needed a leg brace and cane just to stay upright. One morning last week, Titus smiled as he loped along on a treadmill in a makeshift gym. A high-tech, brace-like device wrapped his left ankle, monitoring his gait 200 times per second and supplying energy boosts as needed.

Just when we were getting our heads around the idea that many (if not most) of us will lose brain function as we age, there is news that another one of those physical gifts we take for granted is likely to leave us. Our sense of smell. It is a bit of a blow, if you will excuse the pun. And it joins a growing list: balance, flexibility, muscle mass, strength, vision, hearing and hair, to name just a handful of the things the young take for granted. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that our sense of smell degrades as we age, reducing both pleasure and safety.

My husband and I just spent 10 days in Southern California, and it was a dream vacation. In fact, all our vacations seem to be dream vacations. And not in the way that you might think. Like most working stiffs, we scramble to get to the get-away day. And then we stay up half the night packing and putting the house in shape to leave it behind. But sleep is not what we seek when we land on those ever-downier hotel beds — because we know what the dreaming will be like. These will not be old-fashioned anxiety dreams (I am sitting in the French final without ever having been to class; I can't dial the right phone number no matter how hard I try; I left the baby at the mall; I can't remember the combination on my high school locker)

I n the 1950s, a third of those who worked in the area used their hands to make cars and cans, soap and sugar, tools and spices. But that steel-solid manufacturing core was barely holding on by the dawn of this decade. Bethlehem Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001. General Motors' Broening Highway plant assembled its last van in 2005. At ghostly Sparrows Point, once teeming with 30,000 steelworkers, just a couple of thousand people punch in. The region's economy now centers on the head, not the hands, with workers in the lab rather than on the line.

Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry suffered from a chronic brain injury that may have influenced his mental state and behavior before he died last winter, West Virginia University researchers said Monday. The doctors had done a tissue analysis of Henry's brain that showed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Henry died in December, a day after he came out of the back of a pickup truck his fiancee was driving near their home in Charlotte, N.C. Neurosurgeon Julian Bailes and fellow researchers at West Virginia believe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is caused by multiple head impacts, regardless of whether those blows result in a concussion diagnosis.

My husband and I just spent 10 days in Southern California, and it was a dream vacation. In fact, all our vacations seem to be dream vacations. And not in the way that you might think. Like most working stiffs, we scramble to get to the get-away day. And then we stay up half the night packing and putting the house in shape to leave it behind. But sleep is not what we seek when we land on those ever-downier hotel beds — because we know what the dreaming will be like. These will not be old-fashioned anxiety dreams (I am sitting in the French final without ever having been to class; I can't dial the right phone number no matter how hard I try; I left the baby at the mall; I can't remember the combination on my high school locker)

Lonni Sue Johnson spends every spare moment creating word puzzles superimposed on elaborate grids. The moment she puts one down, she starts on the next. In not quite three years, she has amassed a stack of paper that is 15 feet high. Family member say that's how she pins down time. "In order to grasp the present moment before it vanishes from her memory, Lonni Sue urgently writes and draws," says her sister, Aline Johnson. "As she works on her puzzles, her thoughts — which would otherwise be constantly slipping away — are held on the page, where she can build ideas.

Scientists are still a long way from figuring out what women and men really want, but they are getting a lot closer to understanding what makes their brains so different. That women and men think differently has little to do with whether they are handed dolls or trucks to play with as infants. After all, when infant monkeys are given a choice of human toys, females prefer dolls and males go after cars and trucks. The differences, researchers are beginning to discover, may have a lot more to do with how powerful hormones wire the female and male brain during early development and later in life.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have developed a computer-assisted "magic wand" they say will greatly reduce the risks of brain surgery.The prototype device, tested and developed at Hopkins, "could revolutionize" neurosurgery, Dr. Donlin Long, the neurosurgeon in chief, said yesterday at a science writers' seminar called "Beyond Radiology: All Things Exposed."So far, the wand has been tested on three brain tumor patients "with dramatic results," Long said. "We were able to reduce the size of incisions into the skull and brain and minimize potential brain damage."

Calling all kids interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related activities? The first annual HoCo STEM Festival is June 9, 1 to 4 p.m., at Howard Community College. This free community event is the brainchild of the Committee to Enhance STEM, a group of seven individuals with STEM backgrounds, including Ellicott City resident David Gertler, who want to stimulate and encourage students' interest in the emerging fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

President Barack Obama wants to invest an initial $110 billion in a study of the human brain that could have benefits as great as those achieved by the Human Genome Project. Maybe the first study should be done on the one-track minds of tea party Republicans who will undoubtedly oppose funding for the study because their brains are fixated on the single idea that government can do nothing right. After that, researchers could move on to figuring out Sarah Palin's brain. Perhaps they could answer this question: How can a person with so little knowledge and so little interest in acquiring knowledge imagine she has what it takes to be president of the United States?

The human brain is a marvelous instrument, capable of the subtlest thoughts, feelings and perceptions, and of dreams even the gods might envy. Yet for all our cleverness in other areas, we still know embarrassingly little about how our own brains actually work. That's why President Barack Obama's plan to launch a 10-year research initiative to map the intricate connections in the brain that give rise to everything we think, see and feel is a welcome first step toward enlarging our understanding of this amazing organ.

The White House proposed a sweeping new initiative Tuesday to map the individual cells and circuits that make up the human brain, a project that will give scientists a better understanding of how a healthy brain works and how to devise better treatments for injuries and diseases. "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked," said President Barack Obama of the project unveiled at a White House ceremony packed with scientists. Called the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, the program would be funded with an initial $100 million from the president's fiscal 2014 budget, which the White House is to release next week.

Mutter Museum may leave you shocked and horrified or amazed and fascinated. Either way, its collections of bones, bodies, body parts, plus tumors and other terrors, are unforgettable. The nation's finest and oldest medical museum - celebrating its 150th anniversary this month - bills itself as "disturbingly informative," and that is absolutely true. Specimens lining its wood-and-glass display cases reveal the effects of epidemics and diseases on the body, as well as an amazing array of human curiosities and anomalies.

Your recent article on the scheduling of the high school day notes that several Maryland counties are studying the possibility of later starting times as a way of improving students' academic performance ("Md. school systems study later start for high schools," March 11). Some counties are citing cost savings and convenience as an incentive. But here's the real reason we should change the start times. Simply put, a teenager's brain is not ready to learn at 6 a.m. That's why it is typical for teenagers to sleep late on weekends.

For the first time, scientists have been able to view human thought processes directly, tracing the complex patterns of electrical and chemical reactions to small clusters of brain cells.These unique glimpses of the brain at work are not the result of sophisticated new technologies that employ radioisotopes or X-rays to monitor brain activity.Instead, the researchers used a comparatively simple camera that records subtle differences in reflected light -- too small to be seen with the naked eye -- that flicker.

CHICAGO -- Researchers from Chicago, New York and Florida report the first proof that fetal tissue transplants survived, grew and functioned in the brain of a Parkinson's patient, a milestone that eventually may lead to new therapies for Huntington's, Alzheimer's, strokes and other disorders.The transplant was linked to a significant improvement in the patient's condition, freeing him from the prison of rigidity and immobility, the main symptoms of the disease, and enabling him to enroll in an exercise class.

Bruce Reynolds nearly got away with it — and for a time he did. As the brains behind England's 1963 "Great Train Robbery," Reynolds netted some $7 million in small bills for himself and his confederates. Robbing stagecoaches and, later, trains became a fashionable and lucrative pursuit for such 19th-century outlaws as Jesse James, Bill Miner, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and it once had been part of life in the rugged Old West, where travelers boarding steam cars did so at their own risk.

In a cheery room in Cockeysville, two dozen people sit with their heads down, focused on the papers in front of them. The only sound is the scratching of pencils on paper. The sight triggers memories of school days, but this is no group of middle schoolers eking their way through a math class pop quiz. It's the Brain Aerobics class at Broadmead Senior Living Community. Once a week, speech pathologist Chuck Warnke leads the class through a variety of mental activities, including riddles, word games and history puzzles - one activity challenged class members to remember the prices of products, from a gallon of milk to a pair of women's leather boots, from 1972.