Report on Mobile Phone Radiation and Brain Damage

Greetings, Yes-brainers,

This posting features the article

"Approaching Epidemic: Brain Damage from Mobile Phone Radiation,"

currently online at Mercola.com, a natural health information and health newsletter published by Dr. Joseph Mercola.

We have Diane Whitney to thank for the link.

The article opens as follows:

A collaborative team of international EMF activists has released a report detailing eleven design flaws of the 13-country, Telecom-funded Interphone study.

The exposé discusses research on cell phones and brain tumors, concluding that:

• There is a risk of brain tumors from cell phone use
• Telecom funded studies underestimate the risk of brain tumors
• Children have larger risks than adults for brain tumors

The Interphone study, begun in 1999, was intended to determine the risks of brain tumors, but its full publication has been held up for years. Components of this study published to date reveal what the authors call a ‘systemic-skew’, greatly underestimating brain tumor risk.

To read the complete article, click on the title:

Approaching Epidemic: Brain Damage from Mobile Phone Radiation

Posted by: Dr. Mercola, September 03 2009

Thanks again, Diane.

John

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Animated Graphic: How the Brain Works

Greetings, Yesbrainers,

Your receipt of this message confirms that your email address is currently recorded on our Yes-brainers blog notification list. To newcomers, welcome!

Cindy has plans in the near future to refer again the animated graphic titled "How the human brain works," which you saw (or barely saw) on the wee screen of my laptop yesterday. Plans are in place, I am happy to report, to present graphics at future meetings on a large screen.

In the meantime, if the graphic caught your interest and you'd like to play with it, click on the title directly below:

How the human brain works

Once the program is open, use your mouse to light up the those parts of the brain that interest you. (For me, I will be lighting up those parts of the brain I have difficulty lighting up on my own.)

That's it for now.

Till next month: all the best.

John

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Latest Articles in "New Scientist" on the Human Brain

Instant Expert: The Human Brain

The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, and perhaps the most remarkable. Start finding out how it works with our beginner's guide

LATEST ARTICLES

Minimally conscious patients can learn

18:00 20 September 2009

This might mean that learning new associations could help patients with consciousness disorders recover

Break promises if you like but treat your workers well

16:01 17 September 2009 | 9 comments

Employees care most about the rewards and opportunities they end up getting, regardless of what they were initially promised

Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads

THIS WEEK: 18:00 16 September 2009 | 28 comments

Neuroscience is set to bring fresh insight to teaching – and banish a few myths about the brain

Human brains better tooled up than monkeys

12:55 16 September 2009 | 25 comments

Our brains respond to tools in a way that macaque brains don't, which could explain how human ingenuity suddenly leapt ahead

Icy stares and dirty minds: Hitch-hiking emotions

FEATURE: 10:20 15 September 2009 | 20 comments

Complex emotions may have emerged from basic physical sensations like cold or disgust

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TALENT

The outer limits of the human brain

How do the most gifted and talented brains stand out from the crowd?New Scientist discovers what grey matter is like at the outer limits of human achievement

MORE HUMAN BRAIN

Brain cells slicker than we thought

13:17 11 September 2009 | 5 comments

Signalling in mammalian brains uses much less electrical energy than pioneering experiments on squid cells suggest

Eye movements reveal processing of hidden memories

17:00 09 September 2009 | 8 comments

By relating eye movements to brain activity, researchers have shown that the brain can retrieve memories of past experiences even without conscious recollection

Carrots are better than sticks

19:04 03 September 2009 | 13 comments

Rewarding cooperative behaviour makes for more effective collaboration than punishing freeloaders

Bionic brain chips could overcome paralysis

FEATURE: 10:14 01 September 2009 | 13 comments

Implants that beam brain signals around a break in the spinal cord may let paralysed people walk again

Psoriasis cuts sensitivity to disgust

13:35 28 August 2009 | 10 comments

This adaptation may protect people with the skin disorder from hurtful responses to their appearance

READ MORE

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INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC

How the human brain works

Find out how our brains make us feel fear, remember our lives and make decisions, with our animated graphic

SPECIAL FEATURE

Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

New Scientist's guide to the simple techniques that will uncover the inner workings of your grey matter

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Brain Science to help teachers improve teaching methods

Article in New Scientist, Sept. 16, 2009:

Brain science to help teachers get into kids' heads

• By Nora Schultz, Berlin
• 
  
• New Scientist, 16 September 2009
• For similar stories, visit the Teenagers and
• The Human Brain Topic Guides
• 
  

NEUROSCIENCE could do for schools what biomedical research has done for healthcare. That's the conclusion of the Decade of the Mind (DOM) symposium last week in Berlin, Germany, to discuss how the latest findings could be used to improve education.

"In medicine, we have an excellent system in place to go from basic research to clinical practice, while in neuroscience we have the basic understanding of how the brain learns but still need to figure out how to translate this into the classroom," says Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany, one of the conference organisers. With brain imaging and, increasingly, genetic studies now complementing psychology research, a host of new findings could inform teachers about the conditions in which our brains can be primed to learn best.

One of the main themes emerging at the DOM meeting was that the foundation of successful learning is improving executive function - a collection of cognitive processes important for self-control and focusing on the task at hand. Brain-imaging studies have mapped executive function to several regions, including the anterior cingulate gyrus, which also lights up during error detection and when children learn numeracy and literacy.

Various studies presented at the meeting showed that improving a child's executive function could be achieved with relatively small changes, for example, by altering the timetabling of exercise sessions or encouraging the learning of a musical instrument (see "Stretch and learn" and "The Stephen King effect")

Click here: To read the entire article.

www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327265.800-brain-science-to-help-teachers-get-into-kids-heads.html

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Pink Brain, Blue Brain

A BOOK REVIEW OF

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot

In the Sept. 14, 2009 issue of Newsweek, under the title "Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Claims of sex differences fall apart," Sharon Begley reviews Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

Although there is no specific mention of the current buzz word "tomboy" — which is circling about the the BBC's coverage of the of sex-orientation testing case of South African sprinter Caster Semanya — Begley's review explains how Eliot can make the broad claim that there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

Perhaps — perhaps — it's true, if we use Eliot's argument, that tomboy behavior derives more from the expectations of parents than it does from the dispositions of the kid. But I'm thinking that if a girl-kid waxes tomboy, she hadda be a curious wannabe in the first place! Either way, lets beat the tom-toms — o-boy-o-boy-o-boy! — for all of the tomboys of this Earth ever: then, now, and hereafter!

KEY IDEAS IN BEGLEY'S REVIEW:

• Marching through [her] claims like Sherman through Georgia, [Lise Eliot] explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people.

• Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

• How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them.

•

To read Begley's entire review of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, click here: http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834.

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